All the Dangerous Things

by Stacy Willingham

Sleep, those little slices of death. How I loathe them. –ANONYMOUS

I understand what it’s like now, how maddening, lying awake in the middle of the night with nothing but your thoughts for company.

He leans down and pets Roscoe, whispering good boy over and over again. I watch their interaction, natural and calm, and wish Roscoe would curl back his lip, bare his teeth. Give my husband a menacing snarl for leaving him, leaving us.

understand that there’s something even more unsettling than being alone in the dark. It’s realizing that you’re not really alone at all.

Cooking feels like a chore when it’s done out of necessity—not for the taste or presentation, but for survival alone—but when you throw another person into the mix, it turns into an activity, a pastime. Enjoyable, even. An intimacy in the mundane.

It made him seem like a good man, a noble man. The kind of man who, if I could just have him, would always treat me right. The irony, of course, was lost on me then: that he wasn’t being a good man to Allison, leading me on like that. He wasn’t treating her right. But in my mind, that was different. She was different. They didn’t have what we had. They weren’t us.

Nobody ever warns you about the spite that comes in the night when you’re operating on two hours of sleep. Nobody ever tells you about how resentful you begin to feel toward a person you created. A person who relies on you for everything. A person who never asked for any of this.

I learned fairly quickly that when people asked how I was doing, how I was holding up, they didn’t actually want an answer—not a real one, anyway—so I simply ignored that little needle prick that stuck in my jaw, the threat of impending tears, and plastered on a smile, giving them the answer I knew they expected: that everything was good, everything was fine. In fact, no. Everything was perfect.

She shakes her head, her gaze cast down to the floor like she’s still so ashamed. It’s always so easy to blame the mother. A bad mother. A neglectful mother.

“We’re not supposed to talk about that.” Because we weren’t. We never talked about anything. Even to this day, my parents prefer secrets and silence to uncomfortable conversation.

I never consciously stopped working, really, it just seemed to happen without me even realizing. Ben took the news of my pregnancy well—he was surprised but excited, the way I said I was, too—but still, he was busy. The work never eased up, his schedule never thinned, so it was my identity that had to shift, a slow, gradual, seemingly inevitable progression, like aging, that I didn’t really notice was happening until I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and hardly recognized the face staring back.

Ben was always good at making himself the most well-liked person in the room—the way he always knew just what to say and when to say it, moseying through a crowd with an easy confidence and perfectly placed hand that seemed to pull people toward him like gravity. Kids don’t fall for that kind of thing, though. They always seem to sense something the rest of us can’t.

I remember that night, when I had decided to go back to work. The touch of unease as I had brought it up, like I knew I was flirting with fire. The way Ben had taken Mason from me afterward, like a punishment. A warning of what was to come. “Whatever makes you happy.”

“It is, though,” I say. “I knew he was married—” “You were young,” he says. “You can’t help the way someone makes you feel. And he’s good, Isabelle. He makes everyone feel like that.”

After all, I had given up so much for him. Losing him, too, would have felt like losing everything.

“He was done with her, Isabelle. She wasn’t the same girl she was when he proposed—and how could he expect her to be? He had taken everything from her that made her her.”

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if someone had warned me then about who Ben was, what he was capable of, before I had gotten too involved. If someone had explained to me the way men like that work: how we’re just pawns in their game, their gentle hands steering us in the direction that’s most beneficial for them. Using us, sacrificing us, a strategic power play masked as romance.

He’s always known how to suffocate someone from the inside out; how to starve them, drown them, push them so close to the edge that when they look down and see nothing but empty air beneath them—when they dangle their foot off the ledge and feel themselves starting to fall—the idea of it might actually feel good.

What would it feel like to be trapped inside the mind of a sleep-deprived mother who, deep down, believed that the disappearance of her child was somehow her fault? When I started wondering why she would believe that, it hit me like a truck: It’s because mothers—and, honestly, women in general—are conditioned from birth to feel guilty about something. We always think things are our fault. We always feel the need to apologize: For being too much or too little. Too loud or too quiet. Too driven or too content. For wanting children more than anything or for not even wanting them at all.