Dara is chewing on her knuckle, pacing. She grasps her hair in herfist and then flails, as though the violence of this night is a cobweb she can shake herself free of.
“I didn’t want to,” she says. “I swear I didn’t want to.”
“Yes, you did,” I say. Nobody stabs someone in the chest unless they mean it. “If you lie to yourself, this will be a lot harder than it needs to be.”
She presses her palms to her eyes. “God.”
“Hey.” My voice is gentle, the way I would speak to my child if I could ever hold it in my arms. I take her elbows with careful hands, but she still flinches. She looks at me. “You have a choice to make.”
Even in her grief, Dara is too strong to succumb to hysteria. She’s in her right mind. He’s come for her a hundred times before, and she’s subsisted on the promises and apology gifts. He buys her designer purses and shows her real estate listings for homes they’ll be able to afford one day. But somewhere in there, he started to push her too far. She started to think about where the weapons were, how she would do it if she really had to.
Tim might be a goner no matter what. The blood in his mouth means that he’s bleeding internally, and if he could have been saved, it would have been sometime in the last hour while Dara was calling me instead. But if Dara regrets this later, and she didn’t try, I know that it will only haunt her. She’ll make a saint of him and forget what he did to make her stab him. “We can call an ambulance and tell the police it was self-defense,” I say. “They’ll take photos of you. They’ll see what he did to you and we’ll get you a good lawyer. You might go away. It might be really, really bad. But maybe the hospital can save him if we act now.”
She takes a shuddering breath and looks at him.
“Or we can make all of this go away, you and me together,” I tell her. “But it has to be your decision. Do you understand?”
“I want to call the ambulance,” she whispers.
“You’re sure?”
She nods, swallows hard. I grab her phone from where it’s sitting on the counter smeared with blood. I place it in her trembling hands. “Say it just happened,” I instruct her. “Act like you called them right away.”
She unlocks her phone, and Tim gurgles and spits. After hanging on for nearly an hour, he’s finally starting to lose consciousness. “Move—” he rasps. “Move faster, you fucking—psycho.”
Dara studies him anew, this man she vowed to honor and love. This man who puts on a suit and tie in the morning and kisses her at the door. This man who breaks her over and over, until she can’t believe there’s anyone out there who would love her like she deserves.
She locks her phone and sets it back on the counter.
18
It takes thirty more minutes for Tim to die. By the time his chest stops heaving, Dara is completely drained. Her skin is ashen and her leg is shaking, knee bobbing furiously up and down.
I sit on the adjacent barstool facing her, and I wait for her to understand that Tim isn’t going to draw another breath. The realization comes when she squeezes her eyes shut and bows her head.
“What the fuck?” she whispers.
I don’t tell her what I’m thinking, which is that she made the right choice. When she answered that door, coated in blood, my heart about stopped. I don’t tell her that I’ve never had a friend who could scare me like this except for Colin, who flatlined once between rehab stints. I don’t tell her that she couldn’t have done a more beautiful thing to free herself if I’d given her written instructions.
“What the fuck,” she says again. “I just killed my husband—I—”
“Dara.” At the firmness of my voice, she snaps out of it and looksat me. Her brow furrows; she’s just noticing my own bruises and the bandage on my forehead. Now that the adrenaline has worn down and the world hasn’t ended, little details are starting to make sense to her again. “Take your clothes off and leave them on the kitchen floor. Then get in the shower and scrub every last inch. Don’t touch the railing or the doorknobs. Don’t even get a towel until you’ve cleaned off all the blood.”
If my instructions are strange to her, she doesn’t let on. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“I’ll take care of him,” I say. For the first time, skepticism mars her features. And then incredulity that I can be so calm.
But she does as I say. I look away as she slides out of the pink tank top and shorts she was wearing—pajamas she had put on expecting to go to sleep before Tim balled his fists for the last time. She leaves them in a pile on the floor. We wear almost the same size and her clothes can pass easily for mine. I’ll wash the blood out with dish soap first. Then I’ll clean them with my own laundry. I’ll fold them and put them in a trash bag with some other clothes and dump them in a donation bin. They’ll be on their way overseas just as soon as the next pickup arrives.
Water runs through the pipes as Dara showers upstairs. A wave of dizziness and fatigue overtakes me when I kneel beside the ill-fated Tim. The dull ache in my head has become a persistent throb. My muscles are begging for rest. But I must move quickly. Rigor mortis can begin as soon as an hour after death, and once his body goes stiff, it will become a lot harder to manipulate.
Dara and Tim order weekly meal kits that are left in a temperature-controlled box by their door. Filet mignon, seared ahi tuna, braised organic vegetables. And because they’re such avid chefs, they have a full supply of cutlery, including a hefty butcher knife stuck to amagnetic strip above the stove. I’m grateful Dara didn’t use this one to kill him. It would have done the job, but it also would have left a considerable mess. As it is, she stabbed him once and it’s a clean wound. Right through the chest with a serrated knife from the block. I’m amazed that he lasted as long as he did.
Her bloody handprints are all over his bare chest. She knelt down to help him, cupped his cheek. She had tried to stop the bleeding, and she’d gripped the hilt of the knife with her bloody fingers, but then thought better of pulling it out.
Dara. She’s strong. She’ll survive this. But the shock will wear off in the coming days and I’ll have to keep her close to make sure she doesn’t have a crisis of conscience and go to the police. I’m not dismembering her piece-of-shit husband only for her to throw her life away in a federal prison.
As I get to work, I make a mental checklist of instructions for her: Call your parents just to ask how they’re doing. Email your brother like normal. Don’t touch your bank accounts. Don’t report him missing. Don’t impersonate him by using his phone or checking his email. Don’t go out on the balcony until that black eye and split lip are healed, and if anyone asks where you’ve been, say you’ve had a stomach flu. Tim isn’t dead. Tim just left, and you’re sure he’ll be back.
