A Different Kind of Gone

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“I figure nobody ever changes anybody else’s mind about anything. Why get invested? Tell an idiot they’re an idiot and they don’t straighten up and fly right. They just keep being an idiot. I figure I’ll just live my life and stay out of their way.”

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“Do you think I’m right to be afraid of him?” “Yeah,” Norma said. “Probably so.” That seemed to surprise the girl. “Because . . .” “Because there are a lot of men who hurt women. Especially the women they’re supposed to love. Not most men, but enough that probably every day somebody dies at the hands of someone who promised to love her. And if a woman tries to tell us she’s in danger, and we just pass that off as a woman being emotional, or see her as an unreliable narrator, then that makes the way awful damn easy for those men. Besides. I know he twisted your arm behind your back and forced you into your tent.”

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was just going to say that sometimes he just becomes this whole different person.” “No he doesn’t,” Norma said. Norma looked over to see the girl staring back at her with her mouth open. “I thought you were the one who only says what you know, not what you think.” “Right. And this I know. He’s one person, right?” “Well, yeah.” “Is he one person, or do you have two boyfriends named Jake?” “One, but—” “Then this ‘whole different person’ is part of him. It’s also him. You may not see it all the time, but it’s still him. People only say otherwise when they want to make excuses for somebody.

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Most of us have had some kind of experience loving somebody we shouldn’t have, so I’m not judging.

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“He’s not an animal,” Norma said. “How can you say that?” “Because he’s not. Were his parents both four-legged beings of some kind? Or were they humans? Then he’s human. People love to do that. Revoke other people’s humanity. Before we give people the death penalty, we do that. Get up in court and say he’s not even human. He’s a monster or an animal. Because if we admit he’s a human then it’s a lot harder to say ‘Yeah, go ahead and kill him now.’ In your case I can understand how it might be comforting to want to think there’s no such thing as a human being who would do something as terrible as murder your daughter. But human beings do terrible things all the time, and we just have to deal with that.

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Maybe he really would kill her for leaving him. Does that make him somebody who should be locked up so nobody gets hurt? Probably. Does it make him a terrible human being? Definitely. Does it make him nonhuman? Sorry. No.”

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Everybody thought he was the nicest guy, my husband. And he was, a lot of the time. But he had another side to him.”

“He was one of those guys who didn’t handle anger well, but I was the only one who saw it. I don’t know exactly why that was. Maybe his feelings were more overwhelming around me because there was love there. Maybe because I was his wife he felt entitled. I really don’t understand that mindset and I really don’t want to. Anyway, for most of the time it was little things, though they didn’t seem little at the time. He’d grab me by my upper arms and shake me, and it would leave the nastiest bruises. One time he knocked me down and then picked me up by my hair. Not to say that’s not bad enough, but for a long time it didn’t progress beyond that. And then one day he tried to strangle me.”

“They didn’t believe what he did. They’d never seen that side of him. He’d made sure they never did. He told them it was a lie. That I was seeing another man and that’s why I lied about it. They believed him. They were thirteen and fifteen. That was the last I saw of them for almost ten years. They didn’t want to see me and God only knows what he was telling them about me behind my back.”

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“I just hate the idea of them looking at me and seeing what bad judgment I had.” “Everybody has bad judgment starting out as a grown-up. We’re not born with good or bad judgment. It’s something we have to develop. We learn it by the hard knocks of experience.

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“That’s an upsetting thought.” “It’s true, though.” “Maybe that’s why it’s upsetting.”

No matter what a woman does and no matter how you feel about that woman, there is no moment when you have the right to overpower her. Never. That is never your right. That is always abuse.”

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You don’t even see how wrong that is. A reporter’s not supposed to say what someone believes, because they can’t know that. Nobody knows what someone else believes. We only know what they say they believe. And if you don’t know the difference between a fact and what someone says is a fact, then you’re everything that’s wrong with the world

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know exactly what you mean. Even when I asked the question I realized it was wrong, what I was asking. When I said ‘What did you say to set him off?’ I realized that’s what they do to you. That’s what an abuser does, and it’s what people do after the fact when they’re victim-blaming and not wanting to understand. They put it off on you. They make it about what you said right before they strangled you and not about the fact that they strangled you. Not that I was trying to do that, I didn’t mean it that way, but even just the question felt wrong.”

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This is the problem with being an adult, Norma thought. You’re always having to make a decision that someone will like and someone else will hate. You’re always having to betray someone. Decide one thing, betray one party. Turn around and decide the other thing, and get ready to be told you just burned the people on the other side. Because people’s needs are always in conflict. There’s no such thing as everybody happy all at once.

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Here’s what you do. You love that little girl like crazy. But you don’t just love her. You tell her and show her how much you love her, both. You make sure she feels it. And you teach her to love herself and to treat herself well. People who treat themselves well expect others to treat them well, too. Self-abuse is just an open field for an abuser to walk right into. Help her value herself. Nothing is inevitable. People break those patterns all the time.”

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See? she thought. This is the problem with pushing everybody away all your life. Telling them to keep moving because you don’t need or want anybody. Sooner or later people are going to take you at your word and give you what you say you want.

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“I’m sorry,” Teresa said. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that. We should never be happy when somebody dies. But . . . the thing is . . . I’m not saying I’m not. Happy, I mean. I really do feel that way. I just know I shouldn’t.”

Like when PR jumped

But he was a normal guy to hook up with. Or he seemed like it anyway. And I keep hearing and reading people talking like it was our fault for being with a guy like that.” “People like to do that to the victim,” Norma said, “because it makes them feel safe. If they can wrap it up neatly as you doing something they would know better than to do, then they never have to feel like the world is a dangerous place where bad things can happen to them too.”

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“Nobody’s just a monster,” Norma said. “The worst person has something good about them. The best person has something bad. People just won’t frame it that way in their own minds because they like their reality in nice clean blacks and whites.”

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