​SEVEN

Elena

I’m in love with a man who doesn't love me, not like he did when we were kids. When we were kids, love was an easy drug to take when you couldn't find it anywhere else. Mitch's mother would beat him with a spoon, and the first time he told me he loved me, he showed me the welts on his ribs. I jumped my fingers against them like skipping rocks in a river. And then I showed him what I liked to do against the back of my thighs with my mother's razor.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes. Thankfully,” I had said when we were thirteen and his finger explored where the blood had braided into thin red lines.

That's sick, right? What's even sicker is knowing that my husband just doesn't love me that way anymore, but I still keep wishing I can change his heart just by loving him. At the very least, I know I can change his mind about AA.

I smell like my body splash, sickly sweet vanilla, and I've soaked my raw hands in lotion, glossed my lips. Sela is asleep so I slide under the covers, and I wait until he stumbles into the bedroom because I need to seal this deal. I need to get clean.

After he falls asleep, I'm jailed in his arms. I think about the woman he's cheating on me with and want to stab him in the eye with the nail file I keep in my nightstand. But I don't. I stay there. I stay jailed. I think about my TV and how the colors will feel flashing on my face as Mitch snores and his breath invades my brain.

I pretend all the pieces fit.

I break free from the breath and the snores and walk to the bathroom. I lay down on the floor, press my nose against the grout and smell the tile.

The cutting came before the bleach, and I still think about it, the thin strips of pain on the back of my thighs. I'd lay on my belly on my bed while my brothers blasted Remote Control in the living room of our doublewide and stroke my legs with a blade I'd remove from my mother's razor with her sewing scissors. Or sometimes I'd use the blade from a pencil sharpener I'd pick up at the Five and Dime when my mother was having one of her “spells” and wouldn't leave her bedroom, which was unfortunately situated across from our only bathroom.

But I stopped when I knew Mitch loved me because he made it feel like forever. But forever can easily be a nanosecond when the only person who loves you forgets to do exactly that.

I think about the woman he loves now, taking that love while I soak my worries with lungs full of bleach.

#

Church is suffocating. I always plan two bathroom breaks with Sela so she doesn't have an accident, and so I can stand up on the heater and put my mouth at the cracked open window near the ceiling in the women’s restroom.

She used to ask what I was doing, but she doesn't anymore. “Bird watching,” is what I said the first time.

Our church is ornate, and Mary watches you from a number of different niches. She's beautiful, Mary, or at least the artist's rendering of her is beautiful. I wonder what she looked like in real life. I wonder if her face was as perfectly sculpted or if she had to tug on stray hairs sprouting out near her eyebrows like I do...

My arm is jolted, and it's Mitch stabbing me with the offering basket. Sela drops a dollar in it, the bill folded so no one can tell it's just a buck. The homily was about loving thy neighbor, and I think of loving my husband last night and how I tried to hold on to that moment and shape it into to something that felt like real love. But this morning, when I woke up, he chose the Christmas tree polo, and I chose another pair of wedges—black this time but just as scuffed up—and I remembered all the moves to our usual dance.

After Mass, I hold my breath. We stand tight-circled with the Gibsons and talk BMWs. Mitch tries to make a crack, but I think it's fortunately lost on Luke who can't seem to find it in himself to be offended by people who drive a hand-me-down Dodge Dakota. But I'm sure Ronnie caught it.

I choke on Donna Karen because Ronnie and the gang have to head out to Little Rock to visit with Luke's parents, and when she hugs me, I pretend we're changing bodies so I don't have to stay here. And that's when I say the stupid thing when Ronnie asks what we have planned.

“Oh, probably just grab brunch at New Hampton. I love the omelets.” Everyone pretends this is the truth, and it goes quiet until Ronnie saves the day and savages the church parking lot with her Prada heels. Then the Gibsons are off in their BMW because they can afford a BMW and enough omelets to kill a small elephant.

I look at them, my little family: my cheating husband and my daughter who really is beautiful despite resembling her father’s trashy sister. She’s digging her thumb into the penny in the post, and I suffer a little knowing the only plans we have today involve leftover pot roast.