When my eyes became focused, and my breathing slowed, there was broken glass and furniture littered all over the room. The curtains were torn off the windows and my extremely large couch had been thrown right through it. Giant shards of glass were sticking out of the leather, and a cold wind drifted in from the other side. My desk chair was dangling by a wire in my flat screen television that had a brilliant desk-chair-sized-hole in the middle of it. The chair twirled and swayed in the breeze. I don’t think I’ll be stopping my therapy anytime soon.
Opening the door, I stumbled out into the hallway, and fell into the kitchen. My hands were a bloody mess and my throat was scorched dry. It was three o’clock in the morning and Jen was in the kitchen, holding one of my steak knives, shaking and crying. The blade of the knife glimmered and trembled harshly with the vibrations of her fear. “If you touched her, hurt her in any way, I will gut you,” she warned.
“With a fucking steak knife?” I laughed, dryly.
Violently trembling hands held the knife out threateningly. “Where is Samantha?”
Before I could answer, Dylan rushed through the door with a crowbar and a baseball bat. “I got the crowbar, come on!” When he saw me standing there, he froze, and held the bat out towards me, another person, threatening me, this time with a blunt object. They’re acting like this from what they heard, imagine what they’ll do when they see the fucking den. I don’t care; it’s my damn house.
“Sam is taking a bath. I got a bit self-destructive, but I’m sorted out now and did a bit of redecorating in the den, and…” I looked directly at Jen and tried to give her some sort of reassuring smile while climbing to my feet, “I would never lay a hand on her in violence, not in the way that David did. So put your weapons down, and really, Dylan? A baseball bat? I have five different licensed firearms in this house and you went for the bat? Seriously, if you thought I was hurting her, you bloody call 911!”
Jen dropped the steak knife into the sink and slumped down onto the floor, Dylan was next to her instantly, pulling her into his arms. Oh, get a freaking room.
“You were screaming and there was glass breaking and I thought…” Jen stammered, tears falling down her face.
I raked my hands through my hair. They came back drenched with my own sweat, and I shivered. “Look…Sam told me about…about…losing the baby, about David putting a gun to her head, knocking her out and the branding. I just ran her a bath, closed the door behind me, and lost it. That man does not deserve to breathe,” I said, with an eerie calmness as I began pulling paper towels off the roll and patting at my mangled hands.
Dylan rubbed his hands over his face, “Wait, what? She had a miscarriage and her husband got angry with her?”
Wiping the tears away with the sleeves of her shirt, Jen stood up slowly and leaned against the counter for support, “No, Dylan. Samantha didn’t have a miscarriage. That bastard gave her an injection of a combination of Digoxin and Potassium Chloride. When you inject it into the heart of a fetus, it assures no chance of a live birth, and the death of the fetus is immediate. It’s how they administer late term abortions due to fetal anomaly.” Streams of tears poured down her face, and she gave up on wiping them away. “Kade, that was just the beginning. He had her tied down to their bed. He gained control of everything after her mock miscarriage. She wasn’t dealing with a normal man. He was a psychopath, precise, and vicious. He put on a brilliant show for everyone and she was the starring puppet.”
“Bloody hell,” Dylan whispered.
Me. I said nothing.
Because there were no bloody fucking words.
My heart was just ripping right out of my chest. My Sammy didn’t just lose her child; it was taken from her, from her body. And I could see it. I could see her in my head, blood between her shaking thighs, and him viciously laughing, standing over her. I can’t not imagine it. I can’t stop the imagery. It clenches at my throat and doesn’t let go.
Jen rubbed the back of her neck and took a shaky breath through the tears. “He told everyone she had suffered a miscarriage and set her up with sick leave from the hospital. Then he told everyone she was depressed and didn’t want visitors. No one knew where she was, and no one saw her for weeks,” Jen whimpered and hiccupped. “No one thought anything of it, because, my God, she was so happy to be pregnant, everyone assumed she was just in mourning. Even her father said she was just taking some time away from everyone because of what happened. But after two weeks, I tried to visit her and no one answered the door. Then it struck me as strange, because Sam was the type of person to throw herself into work when she was upset, not hide from the world. She worked constantly, always on call, pre-call, post call, being a trauma surgeon was her entire existence. She wasn’t a regular person-her life-everything was just trauma. When reality was that he had held her captive the entire time, breaking her day by day. He was a genius really; his whole plan was just pure genius.” A loud sob exploded through her lips and she hung her face into her hands, “She’s going to kill me for telling you, Kade.”
Dylan turned on the coffee pot and reached up to find some cups in the cabinets. Pushing myself off the counter, I moved towards the table and awkwardly collapsed onto one of the chairs and sat still, listening to the sound of the coffee maker hiss to life. I needed to focus on the sound, because I couldn’t explode in front of Sam any more than I had. I had to be better for her than what he was. The water heated and hissed. My knuckles flexed and clenched.
Jen whimpered again, inhaled a long deep breath, and sat across from me at the table. She hung her head in her hands for a moment and then fixed her eyes on mine. “You know what you did in your den, is the reason why you don’t know shit about what happened to her, right? She’s terrified of how you will react. She’s terrified that everything you’ve been working through with your PTSD, will get all messed up and she’d make your recovery worse.”
“I will never hurt her, Jen. Never.”
“But you want to hurt David. You look ready to drive for seven hours, meet him in the hospital, and blow his brains out. I can see it in your eyes,” she said.
“Yeah, and? You don’t think he deserves to die? Because he’s living the same life and she’s hiding here. She was a surgeon. A bloody surgeon, and somehow, he took that away from her, which I still don’t bloody understand. Because the both of you are keeping secrets, he should die, and I SHOULD BE THE ONE TO DO IT. Who bloody better equipped than me? I wouldn’t take a car there; I’d take a plane. I’d get there faster and I wouldn’t blow his brains out. I would torture him for a very, very long time. Now tell me what else happened, or else, I’ll start bloody redecorating in here too!” I slammed my bloody fists on the table repeatedly until she started to talk again.
“Okay, okay…damn it, Kade! I’m doing this for HER, not you! Not you! Okay… so little by little, he gave her tea each morning, it was laced with something, something really bad. Like a good husband, David completely played the part of being married to someone who’d become mentally incompetent from a grief driven breakdown. After three weeks, he let people visit her. We all saw that she was depressed and sick, lethargic. She couldn’t even stay awake long enough to speak. She just lost her baby. Kade, she was about five months pregnant, and she had to give birth to a baby that she knew had died inside her. We all thought she’d broken.” Jen shifted in her seat as if she was uncomfortable with what she was about to say, and let out a low puff of breath. “Then I got a call from one of the nurses in emergency, saying that they just brought someone who looked a lot like Sam in. David said she tried to commit suicide by taking a handful of sleeping pills. When they got her to the hospital, they had to resuscitate her, twice. She left a note on the side of her bed. All it said was she couldn’t live with the grief. David was adamant about the hospital doing an extensive autopsy if she died, but she didn’t, so he ordered toxicity reports of everything in her blood.”
Dylan handed us mugs of steaming black coffee and slid a half-gallon of mil
k across the tabletop. “I don’t understand, wasn’t he lacing her tea? Why would he want people to find anything? Oh, wait, was he lacing it with the sleeping pills?”
“No, he wanted the doctors and lab staff to find exactly what had gotten her sick. See…in the regular spectrum of toxicity tests, they don’t usually screen for certain things any longer, like cyanide. Cyanide poisoning is uncommon because it’s a regulated substance. You can’t get it unless you work in chemicals or pharmaceuticals. The lab was content with the show of sleeping pills, even though there were too few in her system to do the damage she was showing, but David pressed for the cyanide screening as soon as her tests came back with an unusually high level of acid in her blood stream.”
Dylan knocked on the table with his knuckles and shrugged, “I still don’t get it. Am I just a bloody idiot? Why did the bloody wanker want everyone to know she had cyanide poisoning, if he was the one who was bloody giving her the poison?”
A small shuffling by the door stopped our conversation. Sam stood halfway in the doorway, while tiny drips of bathwater crawled down her face and neck, dropping onto the kitchen floor from her still wet hair. The strong aroma of her apple cinnamon soap stained the air, flooding my mouth with saliva.
“Because he wanted to pin me for the pharmaceutical fraud he was part of. He knew I was moral and righteous when it came to medicine, so he planned that if anyone were to look into anything that was going wrong with his little façade, all fingers would point to me. I had gone through his papers, and found that my father and my husband had created a fake company with me as the president. The company was a counterfeit pharmaceutical company, one that made shitty generic drugs in third world countries,” she took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. Bloody hell, she couldn’t even look at me. “The hospital and various other non-profit entities, were billed for billions of dollars in counterfeit medicine; all okayed with my signature. Charities and private philanthropists donated to my foundation for years, without me even knowing it existed.” Her eyes reddened. Glazed over from the memories. “My father and David built themselves an empire while I was deployed. I was so used. My own father,” her voice cracked. “I would never knowingly agree to any of that stuff. Do you even know the risks that are associated by taking counterfeit medicines? What if you’re a patient in my hospital and you’re being treated for cancer? You trust me, your surgeon, to give you the correct and best medicine that I can to shrink your tumor. However, the medicine I really give you is not potent enough with the right drug, and contains too many other dangerous contaminants, like fucking arsenic or cyanide. Which were their go-to shitty fillers. Why? Because they can make a patient look like they died from natural causes, or some underlying shit, and not from the treatment the surgeon was providing. I think my father thought I would die overseas and I wouldn’t ever find out, but when I came home, he needed to watch over me carefully, so he got me a husband, the only person he trusted, his partner in crime.”
“And this is what he was giving you?” Dylan asked.
“In very small doses, both arsenic and cyanide, among other things, but they were the most lethal and did the most damage to me.”
“What the fuck did it do?” Dylan asked.
I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t speak a damn word. Held it in. Held it in, grinding my teeth, nostrils flaring, eyes stinging so she wouldn’t get hurt any more. No more. Never again.
“The lovely cyanide will starve the body of its oxygen. It destroys the enzyme that is crucial for cellular metabolism. The death of the cells will result in the death of the victim being poisoned. As you can see, I didn’t die, but I came away from the situation with a nice bag full of neurological issues, and limbs that tremor. The majority of people who are poisoned this way die.”
“Huh?” Dylan questioned.
“Didn’t you ever go to high school chemistry? It messed with the things I needed to make my body function correctly, to keep the oxygen flowing in me, and to keep me breathing correctly. It’s like messing with a car’s fuel system. A car won’t run on mud instead of gasoline; the mud only plugs up the car’s fuel system.”
“I was poisoned with mixture of a bunch of their filler medications, so with the suicide note I supposedly left, it just compounded the idea that I knew these medicines would kill people, since I used it to try to commit suicide, and my company was using them. David held it above my head. Leave him, and he tells authorities, and I’d be the one in trouble, not him,” she whispered.
“There was only one thing wrong with his plan,” Jen said, quietly.
“What was that?” Dylan asked.
“He underestimated me. As soon as I was strong enough and woke up, I slipped out of the hospital. I packed my bags and Jen was going to drive me to the airport. I was going to by a ticket to one place, and disappear to another. But he caught me leaving, just before Jen got there. This time, I wasn’t pregnant, and I fought back. I should have checked his pulse. Jen was so scared when she found us, and he even got a punch right into her face. She dragged me off him, and I didn’t think he was alive. Not until that night in the bar when he sent that guy to kill me.”
I sat silently. What could I have said? This was the first time in weeks she opened up; I wanted to absorb everything. And yes, I was happily planning his death. He bloody well deserved it, don’t you agree?
Sam walked over to me and slowly unwrapped the bloody paper towels I had wrapped my knuckles with. Her lips pressed tightly together and she swallowed hard when she saw the damage. My stomach knotted from her expression. I deserved pain like this, not Samantha. Yet, all I did was add to hers. I didn’t even think I could hate myself any more if I tried. Yes, may I have a little more self-loathing with my coffee?
I stared up into her eyes as she washed out my cuts. I felt nothing but her soft warm hands, no pain, nothing but her calming touch. Her eyes were red-rimmed as if she was holding back tears, yet her features were smooth and expressionless. Her fingers moved slowly and meticulously over the broken flesh, pulling out small fragments of glass and plastic. At some point, Jen had brought down Sam’s aid-pack, and ointment was slathered onto the mess of my hands, and gauze was covered over my skin.
The moment, Jen and Dylan left the room to get some sleep, Sam walked to the door to leave, and then glanced back towards me. Her eyes were bright red, then surrendered to their tears, unfocused, and deadpanned. “Don’t ever do that to yourself again. You need to promise me that whatever happened to me, or whatever happens to us, you will never take it out on yourself again.”
“I wish I could, Doc, but, I will never promise you anything that I can’t make good on. You deserve better than that.”
Her chin trembled and she pinched her lips to hold back a sob. One broke through anyway, and shaking her head, she walked away. That look and those tears tore at my heart, but I could never promise her that. And I knew. I knew it was only a matter of time before that woman walked the fuck out of my life, because I was fucked up beyond repair. How was I supposed to stop it? How do I stop being how I am?
This is who I am.
Chapter 4
I heard them talking in the kitchen as I walked downstairs looking for Kade, wrapped in one of his dark terrycloth robes. Hushed whispers, fists slamming, Jen sniffling, of course, they must have been speaking of me. Passing the den, I stopped in complete shock. Unease rolled deep in my belly. Oh my God, he had lost control. Please let it have been a bat he took to the room and not his hands.
Jen’s voice hissed out, taking my attention off the wreckage of the den. Then like uncontrollable projectile word vomit, she was telling them about the torture David dragged me through. What the hell was she thinking? This is going to kill Kade and push him into the monster that he fears lies dormant in his soul. Anger bubbled up in my throat, choking me. I knew she meant well. Jen was just trying to help him understand, but even she didn’t know everything. No one ever will. There are things, words that just won’t pass my lips, emot
ions and fears I won’t let myself remember. I can’t. I have to be stronger than them. I have to be, or they will consume me.
Do you understand that?
I leaned against the outside of the door, listening. My terror warped into a few worthless insignificant bunch of spoken words. They didn’t hold the weight of my experience. No, the weight of it was safely tucked away in my heart, so as not to hurt the ones I loved.
Oh, my God. Your warped curiosity wants to know anyway, doesn’t it? Fuck it. As long as it’s not you, right? As long as the story is about someone else and you can get to feel bad, get to be part of the experience a bit, and then walk away without all the years of anger and fear that really comes with it. I get it; it’s human nature. It’s okay, I’ll be your spokesperson for domestic abuse. I’ll be the face of victimization, and you can live vicariously through me. Go ahead, I’ve signed the release forms, and made sure no one else but me will be hurt in the making of the dramatization.
There is a reason why I’m a strong person. There is a reason for my inability to filter the things I say when I see an underdog, or feel oppressed in any way, or when someone tells me I can’t do something. I fucking earned it. I earned respect when I put myself through medical school, and chose to use my talents to help save people who were fighting for my freedoms, and I can’t even begin to tell you about the hell that was in Afghanistan or Kuwait. I earned my strength when a sick psychotic man took the perfect world I built for myself, shook it like a snow globe, and smashed it up against a wall. I have earned every breath I’ve ever took, while being choked at the hands of that madman. Can you even begin to understand what it would feel like, if the person you chose to spend the rest of your life with was trying to kill you? Torture you? You probably couldn’t even fathom what it would feel like, if you found out your husband had another secret life, well hidden from the one you knew. You probably think it’s impossible.