Ashley was lying in a puddle of blood. Her hair was soaked, the beach blonde dyed vermillion. His pulse ceased. For a minute, he imagined the worst. She was gone.
The breeze from the half-open window rippled her hair. She lay with her spine curved like a fetus. Her eyelids were closed. But her chest didn’t move.
Her fist was frozen with a knife in the puddle of blood near it. The slashes on her wrist were still visible beneath the layer of blood over it. It was a gruesome thing to watch her spilling flesh mingling with blood.
The soles of his oxfords slid against the blood. Tiptoeing closer to her, he speed-dialed 911. He was afraid to touch her. To confirm the facts. He would rather live in a bubble of ignorance than confront her death.
Fear snatched away the even hum of his heartbeat. He prayed he wasn’t too late. Because if he was…
Before he could take that line of thought any further, someone at the other end picked up his call.
“Hello.” His voice was unsteady. He chewed on his fingernails, trying to tranquilize his frayed nerves. It didn’t help.
“Hello, sir, what’s your emergency?” the phone operator asked. A female voice.
“Can you please send an ambulance down to…” He gave the operator his address. “My wife. I think she’s dead.” His voice was so disconnected from his emotions that the person saying those words could have been a pedestrian down the street.
“Okay, sir. I will have one dispatched to your address as soon as possible.”
Andrew’s throat clenched when he focused on a drop of blood trickling over her forehead. If he was capable of reaching out and wiping it away, he’d have done that. But having her blood on his hands, literally, made him squeamish.
The inverted crescent moon of her lips, now a permanent angry pout, bore the burden of a relationship gone wrong. How could one year have brought her to this?
Something rustled on the kitchen counter. It was a thin cardboard-bound notebook. It flew to the sofa when the breeze from the window pushed it, and landed face up. The double-curled ‘s’ and slanting ‘l’—her handwriting. Andrew knelt down to pick it up and started reading.
I wish I had never loved him. It’s too painful. He is toxic to my wellbeing, but I can’t find the strength to leave him. He’s imprisoned me in this miserable life, drugged me with his lies and false promises. The only way I will ever leave him, the only way I’ll ever get him out of my life, is if I leave altogether…
It was the last entry, the last page of the notebook. Andrew turned to the front page, steeling himself for another dose of anguish.
May 5th
I spend the evenings watching romantic comedies on TV. I can’t laugh at the jokes anymore. The people on screen make me painfully aware of everything missing in me. Why can’t my life be a romantic fairytale too? Why can’t I have a high-profile career and a loving husband? Why did the funny, spontaneous guy I married turn into a distant workaholic whom I am unable to share my distress with?
The psychiatrist I was referred to by my counselor asked me to continue therapy and prescribed me some meds. He says there is something chemically wrong in my brain; that’s why I feel like this.
But I don’t agree with that.
I think the problem is outside, not inside my brain.
May 6th
I let myself down every day. I imagined that I would grow up to be someone important—not another face on the counter of a Walgreens pharmacy with all the value of a barcode scanner. It’s not much better at home. Andrew hardly looks at me, and his mind is elsewhere, even when he is kissing me.
I promised myself I’d look for a new job, but when I try to, I realize how under-qualified I am for every position. I feel like what I want keeps getting out of reach. Am I always going to be someone with no accomplishments? Someone with no identity other than being the backdrop of other people’s lives?
May 7th
Andrew postponed our dinner again. He has to go to Arizona to fix an issue that came up. Every week, he has a new excuse.
I smiled like a good, supportive wife and pretended to understand him. He is the only thing I have in this world, after all.
My psychologist tells me that the cause of my depression is my low self-esteem, but how is an underemployed, neglected wife supposed to have self-esteem? I don’t even know who I am. I don’t know if that matters to him. I don’t know if it matters to me.
Andrew sensed the burn in his throat as tears begged to be released. He closed the book. He couldn’t read any more.
Had he been so oblivious to her suffering? In his limited mind, he had trusted that she was happy and content. Her tone had been optimistic in their phone conversations. Had all that been a facade to keep him from worrying? Had she been crying when he had imagined her to be laughing?
Her flare-up last night and her threat to file for divorce had plagued his mind all day today at work. It must have been an irrational reaction caused by frustration, he had told himself.
He didn’t want to admit that it had been building up—that he had been ignoring the signs all along. She had stopped going on girls’ nights out with Bella, she had stopped talking about herself or her parents, she had started growing thinner and quieter.
He hadn’t seen her this morning and had assumed that she had left for Greenport.
Had she gone to work instead?
That she would sacrifice her health in order to do what was required of her imbued him with more self-hatred. The reason she was working was so that they could run the house while he continued to pour any money he had into the company’s expansion. So he could continue spending more time away from her. Continue being selfish and irresponsible.
Her graceful fingers were splayed on the laminate. He picked up the flawless hand and kissed it one last time, blood staining his lips.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for letting you down.”
His control blew out and a deluge of spasms contracted his chest as he sobbed. The capability to talk dissolved into the deep sadness circling in his lungs.
How could he ever say everything he wanted to? How could she hear when she was gone? Where should he begin? Should he start with ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you’ or was what he needed to say beyond the capacity of those words? She was the reason he was able to get up every morning, survive the ordeals and crises at Dracosys and still live to see the next day.
The warm words she put into his ears and the warm food she put into his belly, those were the two things that made his day. They were the small, unnoticed, mundane things he had never given her credit for, taking them for granted.
The honeymoon… it had all gone south from there. The company’s ambitious expansion plans, brought on in part by his father’s taunt on his wedding day, had consumed him in a vortex of endless work.
Ashley had gone from being the centerpiece in his life to a sleepy snore he encountered in bed at night for the final few breaths before he fell asleep.
He had been so swallowed up in proving his father wrong that he had actually proved Carl right by making Ashley want to divorce him.
No woman sticks with men like us, Carl had said on his wedding day. Unwittingly Andrew had become a clone of his own work-obsessed, ambitious, heartless father, aiming for success at the cost of his personal life.
The blaring of the ambulance siren carried all the way up to the apartment through the window. His downward-spiraling thoughts were relegated to the back of his mind.
The paramedics burst in through the open door and carried her out on a stretcher. Their hushed voices and frantic expressions reinforced his pounding anxiety. He seized the shoulder of one of the paramedics to steady himself.
“Will she be okay? Is she alive?” He was an emotional wreck, and the guy was right trying to ignore him.
Andrew held on to her fragile, lifeless hand until they fed her into the ambulance and put her on support with an oxygen mask.
“What’s her blood type?” the paramedic asked.
“B positive.”
“And you are…?”
“A positive.”
“No, how are you related to her?”
“I’m her husband.” Technically speaking.
“Will you be accompanying her?”
“Yes, of course.”
The medic gave Ashley’s body a lengthy glance. “This is quite a serious case. She’s lost a lot of blood and…” He put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder, his face painted with a sorry expression. “You should prepare yourself for the worst. Do you know how this happened? How long ago?”
Questions spun around in Andrew’s muddled head. When had this happened? He scrambled for something, anything, that could help him place her act.
He usually called her at eleven every day and then again at five, when she got off her shift. But today, there had been no phone calls—only brooding resentment at her for having sprung a sudden tantrum on him yesterday. If he had been able to see beyond his own hurt ego, maybe he could have prevented this.
“I don’t know. She was on the floor like this when I returned from work.”
“Has she attempted suicide before?”
So it was suicide. He had expected to hear the word, but to have it laid out before him so plainly was disturbing.
“No, never. I had no idea that she was thinking of taking her life… although she told me that she was depressed and seeing a therapist. I didn’t think it had become so bad.”
“I take it that she did not share much about her illness with you?”
“She only told me about it yesterday night. She said she was leaving to go to Greenport to her parents’ house to recover. I thought she had left in the morning, but when I entered the apartment… she was…” His voice broke.
“I understand. It must be a huge shock for you.”
“Please save her. She’s everything to me.” As he was the only one she had in this world, she was also the only one he had.
The medic’s pitying glance made his optimism dive even lower. “We will try our best.”
He lost count of time after that. Events occurred in a blurry sequence. Ashley was taken into the emergency department at Bellevue Hospital Center. Then fifteen minutes later, he was greeted by a doctor.
“You’re Ashley’s husband?” the old man asked. His white coat had some drops of red on it.
“Yes.” Andrew said, his throat dry.
“Her condition is very poor. She cut an artery and as a result a lot of blood has been lost. She needs blood transfusion, and depending on the results of the diagnostic tests, emergency surgery could be required. The surgery carries many risks.” The doctor relayed the words like he was describing the features of an automatic washing machine. “I’ll brief you on the risks of the procedure in my office. We need your consent to proceed.”
“You have it.” Andrew didn’t need to know anything. If Ashley needed surgery, she was going to get surgery.
“It is my duty as a medical doctor to give you a run-down of the procedure and its possible complications.”
“Don’t waste time.”
Sensing his desperation, the doctor hastily informed him of all the relevant medical details, most of which passed through Andrew’s ears like scrambled code.
“Dr. Krishnamurthy, the emergency surgeon, is one of the best in this hospital. Your wife is in good hands. Don’t worry.”
When the doctor left, Andrew stepped out. It was too tense inside.
He glanced up at the overcast sky outside Bellevue Hospital Center, waiting.
For news. Any news.
Minutes snowballed into hours. As he recalled the sentences he had read in her diary and repeated the words to himself over and over again, something withered inside him.
He had messed up at every step. From ignoring her, to stripping her of her confidence and importance, to taking her for granted.
I wish I had never loved him. He is toxic…
He didn’t deserve her. He had hurt her.
In those lengthy, torturous hours, he made his decision.
He would divorce her. Immediately. Free her from his grip forever.
He couldn’t make up for the past, but he could give her a future where she could start over again.
It was a momentous decision, but at this point it was almost as requisite as the procedure she was about to undergo. In just one year, she had become this. If she stayed with him any longer, there was no telling what would happen.
Letting go of her would leave a hole in his heart. He still loved her deeply. But for her sake, he could sacrifice his desire to stay with her.
Sterilizing his emotions, Andrew tapped his phone to download the forms for divorce from New York courts’ website. Running through them, reading the black print, made his decision seem like a reality.
Once he printed out and filled the forms, it would be done. She would have her freedom and he would have a long, lonely, loveless life.
He didn’t kid himself by thinking that he could fall in love with someone else. He couldn’t.
Like Carl, he’d have to immerse himself in his career and business. For the first time, he understood how Carl must have felt all his life, not that it excused any of his father’s actions.
You will realize that it is my blood that runs through your veins a year down the line when you’re filling out papers for separation.
Carl could open up a fortune-telling business.
After an eternity, a doctor departed from the emergency operating room through the glass doors that partitioned the interior and exterior of the hospital. Andrew scurried back in, impatient to hear the news.
“She’s okay now.”
The mixture of joy, relief and gratitude that washed through him was unbelievable. The emotion made every cell in his body vibrate. He hugged the doctor, causing the old man to laugh.
Ashley was okay. She was going to be healthy again. She was going to move again. She was going to breathe, talk and laugh again.
But he wasn’t going to be able to see all that.
