The relief is instant. I slide down the painted block wall to the sidewalk and stretch my leg out before me, popping three aspirin and drinking half the water in one long gulp. The sun glares off the shiny green paint of the dumpster behind the store. I want to sit here for the next several hours, a nobody behind a nameless grocery store, close my eyes, and bask in the lightheadedness that comes with total anonymity. As if the last two years of my abusive marriage are just a bad hangover I need to sleep off. But I can’t rest yet. The more physical distance I create, the safer I become. I took the thing Henry valued most with me over that bridge. Not my life, but my death. I stole his moment. He’ll hunt my corpse, but there won’t be one. And that will leave him restless.
There’s a boutique hotel a few blocks away on the other side of Highway 17. I stayed there for a friend’s bachelorette party before Henry and I met. I remember the posh, private restrooms with wide pedestal sinks and doors that lock, and I need a place to dye my hair. Maybe I can catch a ride with someone leaving town. Pulling out the nineteen dollars I have rubber-banded together—what’s left after paying for the post office and Goodwill clothes, weeks of bus fare, the fake IDs, the life vest, and the drugstore items—I realize I’ll have to. I couldn’t risk Henry seeing these purchases, couldn’t pay for them with one of our many credit or debit cards. Without the benefit of my career, my own money and accounts—all things Henry saw fit to talk me out of over our time together—I could no longer buy things without them being watched or questioned.
That cash—four hundred fifty-eight dollars—was all that was in my mother’s bank account when she died, the tiny apartment she’d been renting bare except for two folding chairs, a glass frying pan and some basic utensils, a closet of old clothes, and a twin mattress neatly made up on the floor. Where the rest of her life had gone, I couldn’t say. Though I suspected Gerald had a role in it.
I didn’t need the money then. So I stashed it in the pocket ofher favorite cardigan, the one she always used to wear when I was growing up—green with little lily of the valley flowers embroidered on the front. I would take it out from time to time and press the soft fibers of the sweater to my nose, smell her there, thick like woodsmoke, roll the dollars between my palms, and wonder where it had all gone wrong. After I left at eighteen? When I first ate the berries at five? Before I was born? Were we always destined for this—a long disappointing road winding toward fallout? If I retraced my steps, could I piece us back together, keep her here, understand? I would always put the money, the sweater, back with a shake of the head and the heavy knowing that whatever power had been required to repair our relationship, or even give us one in the first place, I didn’t possess it. But I could never bring myself to spend the money. Until now.
I push up and limp over to the dumpster, tossing the trash bag of wet clothes inside. The city is waking up, and it’s time to go. Returning to my pack, I take stock of my worldly possessions. A second compression sock. A bottle of aspirin. A toothbrush. A tube of Colgate. A plastic comb. An army-green bucket hat. A Rhode Island ID and its duplicate.
I pick up one of the IDs and stare at it. The face looking back at me is a woman I don’t recognize. She is a free woman. A lone woman. She has no past, no future. She exists only in this moment. I am her now.Acacia… I check the ID. AcaciaLee.I remember choosing it for the meaning ascribed by the website I was on—clearing in the woods.
Sighing, I drop the ID next to the wad of money and zip up my backpack. Until today, when I ate a jarful of deadly berries and threw myself over a bridge,thiswas the riskiest part of my escape plan.
Two months ago, the paper ran an article about university students overrunning the local bars with fake IDs bought from China. I read it on my phone in the passenger seat of Henry’s Jaguar on our way to the Dock Street Theatre. They were putting on a production of Tennessee Williams’sThe Glass Menagerie.Henry favors stories that feature fragile women.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“Something about Bitcoin,” I said, taking my cue from the article, which indicated that’s how some students were paying for the IDs. “I don’t really understand it.” I killed the screen and laid the phone in my lap.
His eyes slid to mine. “You shouldn’t read things over your head,” he told me. “Let me handle the investments.”
It was a quiet warning. He didn’t like me straying into subjects more strenuous than fashion or diet trends, anything that could lead to independent thought.
“Of course,” I replied. But I read the article again that night in the bathroom, and once more the next day while he was at work. It was like a toxic seed that once ingested burrowed deep inside, sprouting against my will. I had thought about leaving before. One hundred thousand times I’d fantasized about it. But Henry controlled our life together, and if I left, he would find me. Not to mention the women, the ones I saw percolating in the dark folds of his mind, the ones he would kill once I was out of the way, once he stopped fighting his urges and gave over to the monster within. As long as I was here and breathing, so were they. It wasn’t enough to leave Henry. I needed to stop him.
But if I became someone else entirely. If I didn’t just leave but was dead already… Suddenly, the world was colored with possibility. I couldn’t savethislife, but I could find my way to a new life altogether. And in the process, I could hold him accountable, put him where he belonged. I could save the others. The cogs of my mind whirred day and night, plotting. I memorized the name of the website listed in the article, but I was too afraid to use it. Instead, I rolled it over and over in my brain when I lay next to him at night, a private affair I was having with an idea. If he hadn’t driven me to the woods, I might never have used it.
It was a warm night in June. He didn’t come home after work. I waited up, like he wanted. I made dinner but didn’t eat it. Henry never liked for me to eat without him in the evenings. If he was late, I was to wait. I decanted the wine and sat beside the fireplacewatching the flames flicker across the leaded crystal, orange on burgundy. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite place. Eventually, I dozed off and dreamed of pokeweed berries.
When I woke, it was dark, the fire was out, and Henry was standing over me. “Get up,” he said with bared teeth.
I did as he asked, the wine still sitting in its open decanter, dark like dried blood. Maybe it was that he didn’t find me waiting. Maybe I had been snoring. Maybe something went wrong at work. Maybe the men in the break room made him feel inferior. I would never know. In the end, he didn’t really need a reason beyond that he liked it.
He led me by the hair to the car and told me to get in. We drove for hours, until the houses and stores and lights grew thin and there was nothing but trees and night. It was well after midnight when he pulled off down a dirt path, stopping before a chained swing barrier. “Get out.”
I didn’t have any shoes on, but I knew better than to argue. He walked me up the road and had me turn onto a narrow game trail. We followed it deep into the woods to a small meadow with a stand of pines on the other side. He pointed to the ground between the trees. “Here,” he said.
I stared at him. Tears striped my cheeks despite my efforts to hold them in, but I bit back any sound. I didn’t know this place or how he knew it.
“This is where I will bury you,” he told me. “Your body will rot here, and no one will ever find you.”
I looked down at my future grave, a patch of quiet earth. If he had picked a place and dared to show it to me, we were close, much closer than I realized. I might not make the drive home. I could only hope he’d want to torture me with the knowledge first, like a cat toying with a mouse.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what I was apologizing for, but knowing better than to say anything else. Correcting me was Henry’s favorite hobby—the way I dressed, the way I spoke—but what he really loved was hurting me for no reason. When hiscontrol slipped and the monster slunk out of its cage and my humiliation had no bearing, that was what he lived for.
He caressed my face, then pinched my bottom lip until I cried out. “Of course, you are. Because you are a foolish, bovine woman and a sorry fuck. Now lie down.”
He raped me there, on my future grave,twohands on my throat. The last thing I saw before blacking out were the red stems of a pokeweed bush nearby.
I was surprised to wake the next morning, back under the crisp sheets in our bed, the house silent around me. Henry had already gone to work. My mouth and neck were badly bruised, and it hurt to swallow. He was getting careless.
The next week, I used the computer at our local FedEx to place my order for a Rhode Island ID. Taking the picture should have been hard, but it wasn’t. The side of the building was white as a sheet. I asked the young man behind the counter to come out with me and snap my photo with my phone. He didn’t even question what it was for. I had to wire the cash through a Western Union in a nearby bank.
I watched the mailbox for weeks. Henry liked to bring the mail in when he came home from work, but packages were left at our door. Because he didn’t want them stolen, he’d have me set them in the foyer until he could open them. A month after my trip to FedEx, we got a small box wrapped in brown paper. I brought it in and opened it in my closet. The IDs were tucked neatly behind a set of decorated chopsticks. I pulled up the carpet in the back corner and slid them underneath. When Henry came home later, he asked about the package. He’d seen it on the door camera he had installed the year before. I showed him the chopsticks. “They’re a gift,” I said. “I thought you’d like your own for when we go to Izakaya.” We ate sushi regularly. Henry called it “civilized food.”
He backhanded me and the chopsticks went flying. “They’re beautiful,” he said. “Never open my mail again.”
The slam of the dumpster lid jars me from the memory. I spinto see a young man in the grocery store uniform brushing his hands off. “You need help or something?” he asks.
