Chapter 5
Lucy
April 8, 2014 – 1:45 PM
“Fisher, please, don’t do this!” I beg through my tears as I stand in the doorway of our bedroom with my arms wrapped around my waist and watch him stalk around the room.
He yanks my clothes from the hangers in the closet and rips them out of the drawers of my dresser, shoving everything into the two open suitcases he has lying on top of the bed.
For two months he’s barely said more than a few words to me and now he’s done a complete one-eighty, saying more than I ever wanted to hear.
“We’re done. This is over. I’m packing your shit and you’re leaving!” he barks, grabbing my books and reading glasses off the nightstand and tossing them on top of the clothes.
I race across the room and grab onto his arm, determined to make him see reason, but he jerks out of my grasp and goes back to the closet, snatching up my shoes and piling them in his arms.
“Will you stop and just talk to me?” I yell, coming up behind him and reaching for the shoes in his hand.
He side-steps me, never even glancing in my direction.
“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s perfectly clear what’s going on here. Everything is fucked up, don’t you get that? It’s ruined, all of it is ruined and you need to fucking leave!” he yells as he slams the armful of shoes into the suitcase.
My body shakes with fear and the sobs that I’m trying so hard to contain. I’ve done everything I could. I’ve tried talking, I’ve tried ignoring things, I’ve tried reading books and speaking to other wives whose husbands have been deployed and nothing has worked. No suggestion was good enough and nothing I’ve done has broken through whatever walls Fisher has put up in his mind to keep me out. I made the mistake of casually suggesting over breakfast that maybe it was time for him to talk to a counselor and that’s when my world came to a screeching halt.
“It’s not ruined, Fisher, it’s just a little broken,” I whisper through my tears. “After all these years, after everything we’ve been through together, you can’t just shut me out. I only want to help you, I want to see you smile and laugh again, I want to make you happy.”
He laughs cynically, finally turning to face me. He crosses his arms over his chest and stares at me. The look in his eyes makes my skin crawl. I don’t recognize this man scowling at me with so much animosity and hatred.
“You can’t help me and honestly, I think it’s pretty pathetic that you keep trying. Jesus, you really need to get a life. You’ve spent how many years now, sitting on this shitty island just waiting around for me? All your life, just sitting here like a good little girl, waiting and waiting while life passed you by.”
My lip trembles with the tears I’m trying to hold back. I want to scream and argue with him, but a part of me knows that he’s right. I have just sat around here, waiting for Fisher. My life has been spent waiting for this man to come back to me. I know I should just walk away and give him time to calm down. He’s been drinking and I know on top of the nightmares and the memories that always haunt him, the alcohol is only making things worse. I should step back and let him decompress, but I can’t. I’ve never been able to walk away from him, and there’s no way I can do it now when he’s broken and hurting. Regardless of what he says, I know he needs me. He’s always told me I’m the only one who can take it all away when he’s at his lowest. He’s lower than low right now and I refuse to leave him, even though he’s doing everything in his power to make that happen.
“You don’t mean that,” I mumble, worrying at the hard look in his eyes that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this time he really does mean all the nasty things he’s saying.
He laughs cruelly, dropping his arms to his sides and stalking across the room towards me. I back away from him, stopping only when I feel the bedroom wall behind me. I’m not afraid of Fisher, I could never be afraid of Fisher, but this isn’t Fisher right now. This is a stranger, a man intent on breaking my heart in the worst possible way.
“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe and experienced things you couldn’t even imagine while you were rotting away on this Godforsaken island, wasting your time writing me all those fucking letters, week after week. All those sad, pathetic letters about how you missed me, you needed me, you loved me.”
He laughs again and shakes his head like he pities me. I hate him for bringing up those letters. Years and years worth of letters that I never stopped writing and sending to him, even when the internet and email would have made things easier. I took the time to write him real letters so he could get a piece of home to touch and hold onto when he was so far away. Week after week, year after year, I poured my heart and soul into those letters. When I asked him why he never wrote me back, he told me that he didn’t have time, but that I shouldn’t stop writing them because they gave him the strength to do his job and come home to me.
“Do you want to know why I never wrote you?” he asks, almost like he’s looking right through my eyes and into my soul, knowing exactly what I was thinking. “It wasn’t because I didn’t have time. Plenty of guys over there write to their wives or their girlfriends. The problem was, I just didn’t want to.”
I shake my head back and forth and swipe angrily at the tears falling steadily down my cheeks.
“Stop it. Just stop it. I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to be cruel to get me to walk away and it’s not going to work. You can say whatever you want, throw whatever hurtful words at me you think will hit the right mark to make me hate you, but it’s not going to work.”
Pushing myself off of the wall, I press my palms to either side of his face and force his head down so he’s looking me in the eyes.
“You and me against the world, Fisher. It’s always been you and me, and it always will be. I shouldn’t have brought up counseling out of the blue like I did. Whatever you want to do, however you need me to help, I will do it. I will always do anything for you. Let’s just calm down and forget about this for right now. We can go for a walk to the lighthouse, we can do whatever you want. We don’t have to talk about this right now.”
I don’t want to come right out and say that we shouldn’t do this when he’s been drinking, but it’s definitely implied. He’s so quick to anger lately and I never know what’s going to set him off. All I can do is apologize afterwards and pray that he’ll get better, that it won’t always be like this and eventually he WILL get better.
Fisher brings his hands up and rests them on top of both of mine against his cheeks. He leans forward and presses his forehead against mine and I’m able to take a breath for the first time since I came up to the bedroom and saw him packing my things.
I move my hands from his face to the hem of his shirt, sliding my palms underneath the material to feel the hard, warm skin of his abs and chest. Kissing my way down the side of his face, I lightly nip at the skin of his neck, doing whatever I can to bring him back to me, to see me, to feel me. I miss making love to him. I miss the closeness we always share when we connect on that level. All of our problems go away and nothing matters but the two of us. Maybe it’s wrong to try and seduce him now, but I’m out of ideas on how to break through to him. My hands slide over his chest underneath his shirt and my thumbs graze over his nipples as I move my body closer to him.
I should have known better than to let my guard down.
“Oh, Lucy. Sweet, innocent, pathetic Lucy. It’s really cute how you honestly think you’ve been the only one all these years. You were a virgin when we met and sorry, but I prefer a woman with a little more experience to get me through the nights away from home.”
I jerk my hands out from under his shirt, take a step back and stare at him in shock and horror. I’ve always, ALWAYS lived with the insecurities that I’ve never been enough for him physically and sexually, but he’s never made me feel like I was anything but absolutely perfect for him. Is he honestly telling me right now that he hasn’t been faithful? That some other woman warmed his bed and gave him things I couldn’t give while he was away from me? Sure, he had a lot more experience than I did when we met and I hated it. He’s right, I was a virgin, but he helped me lose some of my insecurities by teaching me all the ways to please him and make things feel good for myself. Over the years, we learned each other’s bodies and our sex life has always been good, but I never quite learned how to ask for more, never really understood what more meant. It wasn’t until that night in the kitchen two months ago, the night when he took me with all-consuming passion, that I realized what I truly needed from him. Maybe that’s what he’s always wanted and he hated that I didn’t give it to him. I would have given it to him. I wanted to give it to him more than he even knows, and it kills me to think that he shared that with another woman.
“Congratulations. You did it. You made me hate you,” I tell him as the tears fall silently down my face and he goes back to the bed, closing the lid on the suitcases and zipping them shut.
“Took you long enough,” he says with a sarcastic laugh. “Jesus, how much more shit were you going to put up with before you realized that? You just thought we could live happily ever after on this shithole island, grow old and die here? This place is eating me alive. Every time I come back here, I want to burn the entire fucking place down. It doesn’t get better when I come home to you, it gets fucking worse. You and your positivity and always trying to ‘fix’ me. This is it, babe. What you see is what you get, and every time I have to come home it gets darker and darker and I hate this life more and more.”
He lifts up the suitcases, walks them to the doorway next to me and tosses them out into the hallway.
“Get out so I can finally fucking breathe without you always trying to ‘help’ me. I don’t want or need your help. You better be gone by the time I get back.”
He walks past me and out the door, stepping over the suitcases as he goes. I hear his shoes pounding against the hardwood floor and then seconds later, the slamming of the front door.
I sink to my knees and then crumble to my side on the carpet, curling my body into the tightest ball I can. If I make myself small enough, maybe it won’t hurt as bad. Maybe I won’t feel like my heart has been ripped from my chest and stomped to pieces. Maybe if I’m small enough, this won’t feel like the biggest betrayal and most soul crushing moment of my entire life.
If I’m small enough, maybe I won’t want to die from the enormity of the pain.
If I’m small enough, maybe I won’t feel like such a failure.