Last Night’s Goodbye, Chapter 1

Raindrops collected on the open window, sliding in fits and starts, seeming so content in their random and brief lives. Yellow street lamp mingled with blinking green 3:45 on the clock beside our marriage bed, the only light across his face. My husband, Lysander, the love of my life, breathing long and slow. The man who had convinced me to move across the country, to leave behind all my friends, to take our children away from their grandparents, and me away from my mom. The man who I would have followed to the moon if he told me we could live there happily ever after. He said the summers in Seattle are beautiful. And it’s a lot easier to make a living than Dallas. He said it really doesn’t rain as much as people say. I guess that was the first time he lied to me.

The room was musty and cold. This place smelled wet even on an August afternoon. His clothes were piled on top of the dresser. Pillows lay on the floor at my feet cast in the same grayish yellow as the sheets and the shirts and the peeling floral wall paper. A delivery truck rumbled past, it’s unmuffled old engine cuttingly loud. Loud enough to muffle a gunshot perhaps. Lysan turned over, pulling the sheets about him, unaware of the silver barrel pointed at his peaceful face, the .40 caliber Sig Sauer that his dad gave him preening in the blinking green LED lights and the yellow streaks cast through rainy window panes.

I didn’t cry when he told me. The mashed potatoes I’d whipped and whipped until not a single lump remained slowly turned to acid in my throat as I realized he wasn’t joking. I listened in silence to the whole story. How he felt disconnected from me. How we’d both been growing apart. How I’d changed. How he didn’t even recognize me anymore. How he didn’t mean to fall in love with someone else.

He touched my hand. “Adela, what are you thinking? Talk to me.”

I flinched. The first time I’d flinched at the touch of this man. I would never feel his hands on me again without thinking of where else they had been. I wanted to do something dramatic. To throw the bowl of mashed potatoes at the wall. To slap him. Throw water in his face. Something. But all I did was push my chair in and put my dishes in the sink. I went to the front door. He sat at the table, calling after me. He didn’t even get up. Something about how sorry he was. Something about please come back.

I killed his pleas with the slam of our apartment door. In the courtyard of our Capital Hill turn of the century building, I passed two women who seemed pleased to have something new to gossip about. I was soaked by the time I walked the three blocks to Madison Pub, the gay dive bar where we used to order whiskey and ginger or manhattan’s with some kind of slushy coke on top or some local IPA with a hipster name, where we would drink until we both seemed to realize at the same time that our bodies were lonely for each other’s skin. I’d make him wait until he got desperate enough to slip his hand up my dress while we sat at the bar, his fingers exploring the edge of my panties. Then I’d kiss him hard, and pull him out the door. Take him to this bed. This same bed he fucked her on. This same bed where he now sleeps with a gun pointed at his slow breathing face.

The clock turned to 3:52, reflecting through a wine glass left over from a few nights earlier. A framed picture hogged the rest of the bedside stand. I’d given him the frame for christmas, a kit I bought on Etsy and painted myself. I learned calligraphy so I could write a poem around the edge, the one he wrote when our twin daughters were born five years ago. The picture was of Lysan helping the girls lift a huge pumpkin into a wheel barrow. Their squealing and laughing rang in my ears again as if it were happening for the first time.

I looked down the gun at the man who betrayed me, his twitching closed eyes clear at the end of the blurred barrel. The gun grew heavy in my hand. I tensed, my finger on the trigger, willing the weapon to keep focused on the task at hand. He murdered our marriage. He deserved this.

Or maybe I was indulging the four whiskey shots and two pints of stout still hot in my belly. I was a good wife. I followed him to this city where I had no friends. Where people are colder than an endless rainy winter. I let him buy an Audi while I drove a Dodge minivan. I let him chase his career no matter how many hours it took away from us, while I stayed home with the kids. I let him stay out late with his friends and never complained once. I let him buy that signed Seahawks jersey and hang it in our room. I let him do whatever he wanted to me in bed. I even learned to like it. I started drinking whiskey for him. And I hate whiskey.

If I did this, I would go to jail. Obviously. Probably turn myself in. Call 911 and confess it all to the operator while sirens blared outside our building. But I’m not a victim. I’m not going to let him get away with this.

I sighted down the gun at his shoulder. Then his hand. Then his leg. I could tell the police it was an accident. “The gun went off on its own, officer,” paired with my best impression of a dumb blonde. It might work. And the buzz was telling me it didn’t matter. Make him pay.

But what to shoot? What would hurt the most? I began to squeeze the trigger. I felt the hammer move. How far do I have to pull before the bullet fires? Would it kick back. Would it hurt my ears? Cringing, I squeezed harder.

The gun fired. But just before, I’d swung my arm up. An explosion, a burst of flame and my ears rang. Glass shattered. And a brand new black gash marred Russell Wilson’s sharpie signature in the middle of a big white number three.

I am so fucking pathetic.

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Complete list of chapters here: Last Night’s Farewell

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