The Real

She scoffed. “I’m not in denial. It’s you who needs a reality check.”

“I want my goddamn life back, Kat. It’s time you sobered up.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she hissed. “And what was that back there, huh? How do you know Abbie?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to,” I warned. “I’m moving on and I’m not going to come the next time you call or any other time after for that matter. The only reason I picked you up tonight was to watch you sign those papers.”

Kat was still inching toward the back seat when I scared her with the aggression in my voice. Slowing to a stop at the light, I studied her hostile profile. “Look at me, damn it.”

Her blue eyes snapped to mine and then narrowed.

“Kat, I’m done.”

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you need to get your shit together.”

I couldn’t muster an ironic laugh as I smashed the gas and took off like a shot. She was the perfect picture of denial, hauntingly beautiful without a soul to sell.

“You will grant my divorce today. Write in whatever contingency you want, Kat. Rob me blind. Take it all, you have the house, take the rest. Take half my stores. T

ake everything you think you’re entitled to, but you don’t get the rest of my life.”

Her eyes clouded with anger, not fear, or regret, feelings I’d hoped and prayed to manifest in the endless months I tried to save my wife and my marriage. “You don’t mean that. You’re just . . . tense.”

For the first time in years, I exploded. “I’M FUCKING DONE WITH YOU! You’re a drug addict and you’ve emasculated me at every turn since the night you got hurt. I don’t love you anymore. Our marriage is over. You’ve turned us into something too riddled to fucking figure out. I can’t do this anymore. I won’t.”

“Oh, I did this?” She said with an accusing tone. “Me?”

“Jesus Christ, not the blame game again.”

“You are the one who jarred my back!”

“Fine it’s my fault, but your career was already over. You had therapy and a multitude of ways to get healthier since I jarred your back. But you are the one who denied recovery and turned yourself into this fucking mess.”

My words had barely made the air between us as her fist connected with my jaw and I jerked back in my seat scanning the road to get my bearings. I was halfway aware of where we were on the road when she landed her second blow.

“Kat, I’m driving. Stop!” But she didn’t.

The hits just kept coming and I had to force us off the busy street cutting off two cars in an attempt to get her under control. Throwing the car in park, I was blindsided when she connected with my temple.

“Jesus, Kat stop!” I growled as she came at me full force. All of her anger front and center. She struck a few more times before I gripped her hard and shook her. “Goddammit stop! It’s over just . . . stop!” She glared at me, her eyes full of hate.

It was never me she was angry at. It was never me she wanted to hurt, but it was me who dealt with both after she lost the last of her hopes to age and addiction rather than injury which had turned into the perfect excuse.

When I met Kat, she was full of vitality even at thirty-four and had the world at her fingertips. She was a retired gymnast with big dreams of opening a chain of gyms. She wore her future in her smile. We had similar dreams and insatiable appetites for life and more than enough lust between the two of us.

Two years into our marriage she injured her back after she got sloppy drunk and claimed I dropped her while we were having sex on Max’s boat. The truth was she’d lost all mobility by the time she got to me half naked and I wasn’t sober or alert enough to catch her when she flew at me. I shouldered the blame, giving her an out to shield her from embarrassment. We’d even made a joke about it in the hospital, while she waited connected to a morphine drip before she got the news the surgery was inevitable.

She’d blamed me ever since for the agony she endured afterward. In a year of unimaginable hell, I helped her through it all, the surgery, the pain she dealt with daily and the rehab, but the rehab she truly needed never came.

Kat barely let me touch her after the ‘accident’, surgery and recovery. And once her anger surfaced, it was over for us. She’d taken to pills to numb herself and I’d tried to be there until self-preservation kicked in.

The therapist I kept appointments with—that Kat never bothered to show for—said she was in a mental state of paralysis. That her mind couldn’t accept her body’s limitations, so she abused the pills to make herself feel capable again without the pain. Months after her surgery, Kat gave up on her life-long dream of mentoring other gymnasts due to those limitations. She turned up her nose at my every solution.

And still she blamed me, and I let her, but nothing helped. Her misplaced anger only grew, and my resentment began.

All she saw when she looked at me was someone to guilt and all I saw when I looked at her was a woman who had to get off on narcotics to function. And the scary part was that she was functioning, picture perfect to anyone who didn’t get close enough to see the cracks. But those cracks only got magnified by her wrath and I was the chosen one on the receiving end of it all.

I was finished pretending that our marriage hadn’t ended the first time she took one of those pills to get high and escape the reality of her life with me. I was done pretending I wanted things to stay the same, to sink into her pit of despair with her and stop living. I selfishly let myself live while she drowned, hoping I could do it for both of us. But I was empty. So utterly empty.