Husband by Choice
“Are you okay, dear?” Jenna jumped in her seat at the sound of a voice just over her shoulder.
“Yes!” she said, quickly minimizing the screen. “I’m fine, why?” Still lost in the story she’d been reading, she wasn’t sure if the sixtyish woman was the same one who’d been behind the desk when she came in, if she even worked there at all, or was a resident like herself.
“You were trembling so hard I could feel you,” she said, pointing to an adjoining cubicle perpendicular to the one at which she sat.
The woman had presumably been on a computer as well, and since the computers were reserved for residents, that would make her one.
“I’m sorry,” Jenna said now. “I guess I’m a little cold. They’ve got the air conditioner blowing pretty hard in here.”
It was. But she hadn’t noticed that either, not until then.
“I’m Renee,” the woman said, nodding.
“I’m Jenna.”
“I know. I saw you at dinner last night. You hardly touched a thing.”
“I wasn’t very hungry.”
“You also don’t act like this is your first dance. You aren’t looking lost, or trying to figure out the way things work.”
She shrugged.
“It’s not mine, either.”
If the woman needed to talk, she’d listen. There were others milling around. A woman a few tables over, with an opened encyclopedia and a pad of paper and pen in front of her. Another sitting in an armchair reading a magazine. And someone else reading from a tablet. There were a couple of women huddled together across the room, too.
Women seeking solace through conversation with other women was part of the healing process.
“You’ve been here before?” she asked Renee, as the other woman pulled her chair around and sat down.
“A few years ago. I’d just put my husband of forty years, Gary, in the hospital with a shove that ended up paralyzing him.”
Renee couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. “You hurt him?”
“The police said it was self-defense. So actually did Gary when he realized that he could lose me if he lied about it. He’d been about to throw me down the stairs. I shoved against him, purely a terrified reaction on my part, and it caught him off guard at just the right moment and he went down instead.”
It wasn’t a story she’d heard before. She could only imagine the guilt mixed with fear and confusion that one would carry in such a situation. She’d gone through years where she’d believed Steve’s anger was her fault. If she didn’t nag as much, ask so many questions, if she didn’t need so badly to be loved, if she hadn’t pissed him off at just the wrong moment, if she’d been more understanding of the very real pressures of his dangerous job....
Renee shifted and it dawned on her that she wasn’t meeting the woman on the “outside.” Renee was back in a shelter for abused women.
“You said your husband was paralyzed. Was it only temporary, then?”
“No.”
“But he hurt you again?” They were sisters, in a place where secrets were safe.
“No, he didn’t. He went through counseling, and once he saw what he’d been, he was truly sorry. He met with his group every week, long after he’d completed the program, just to make sur
e he never slipped back. He said that since he hadn’t seen the abusiveness in himself to begin with—you know the lies they tell you, they sometimes believe them, too—he wasn’t going to take a chance on having that happen again. He really did love me....”
Renee’s eyes filled with tears. And Jenna was at a loss. Hearing about an abuser who was also one’s true love wasn’t...something she’d ever been privy to before. Or even considered.
“But...you’re here....”
“Gary died last year, just after Christmas. Our son, Brian, who’d gone through a divorce shortly before his father was hurt, had moved home to help me take care of Gary these last few years. He... It was hard for him, to see his father so helpless....”
Uh-oh. Jenna’s heart lurched.