Remain
The completion of a short story I've shared a few times on Facebook about a the wife of a driven writer who wanted to be Stephen King.
He wanted to be Stephen King. I watched him try. He sat hunched over his computer or tomes and volumes and dictionaries of eldritch horror more hours than he ever cared to look me in the eye. I won’t bore you with the romantic stuff that brought us together. Because there was a LOT of it. There was a courtship. A full bacchanalia of love and lust and dreams and desire between us. To say it’s dry, desolate now? That’s like trying to describe a desert in the height of heat. Sand. Grit. Dust. Wind. The glaring and overwhelming drought in the midst of unrelenting sunlight. The friction alone was unbearable but I saw what he could be and I stayed. I stayed. I knew what we could be if he realized what he needed, got his relief, and I stayed.
Maybe I shouldn’t have.
Dreams are beautiful things unless you follow them to the ends of the earth at the expense of those who love you. But that’s a story for another time.
He wanted to be Stephen King and I think maybe he had it in him to surpass that master. As much as I respect Mr. King because he entertained my mind with horror and thought in the most creative and fascinating ways. I think that he would have gone to the summit of Everest and sought to strive higher. Higher than is safe. Higher than anyone else can match. Above and away from… well my bitterness is showing. I’m sorry. I’ll stop.
He left me in the dust as we tried to make that place our home. Literal dust. He went to work on his dreams and I comforted him with his nightmares. And I cleaned and I unpacked and I made it home. I made it safe. But it was never safe for me and I felt it from the moment we moved in. The dark wood was oppressive and mis-matched as if a reminder of the way it felt like we didn’t fit together anymore. It threatened to break me but sometimes he’d let me rub his shoulders. Sometimes he let me kiss his neck while he focused on other things. It was enough in the moment. And then I’d move away to create distance. Distance always seemed to draw him back eventually. In the best of ways. Distance made him turn his eyes from that dream he couldn’t quite catch and claw after me. Run after me. He would need and want and crave and he’d come to me finally.
Is that really a marriage though? I don’t know. It’s not substantial. After a while it feels false. Like a game. He did what he wanted and I withdrew to get him to see that he was poorer for my absence. He was not. After a while I wondered if I had ever understood what had made us work. And we were in that apartment. He would go without wanting to be close or even speak more than a few words for up to 15 days. Fifteen days. I was glad we didn’t have children. If Daddy was right there, yet he didn’t want to be with his kids the way he didn’t want to be with me? I would have grieved. I actually did though. But I was glad there were no soft, little minds who had no idea how to process. There was just a disarray of two minds that used to be the most incredible, most beautiful connection.
He wanted to be Stephen King and he created a situation in that apartment where I thought maybe I’d discover I had telekinesis or some other defense mechanism to stop the pain. And I’d be long gone before he chopped a hole in a door with an ax because all work and no play made him a dull boy. Well, I often wished I had gone.
Remain. That was his mantra. Remain.
So I remained. I remained in the shadows, his shadows, haunting dark corners that he claimed probably had more ghosts than we both did in our pasts.
I'd always find myself remembering, as I stood at the kitchen sink, my hands pruning in the quickly cooling dishwater, as I lost myself in watching the rain, the days when we watched clouds and stars, tickling each other with dandelions and wit, and he called me his firefly. That light in his darkness which eventually became eclipsed with my growing sorrow and his refusal to notice it.
I was always waiting for something. Even if it was a catastrophic event. Waiting. Remaining. Considering what it might be like to leave the apartment and walk through the rain, back through my past, to the life I lived before I ever met him. Where would I go with muddy, rain-soaked boots and only $5 cash in my pocket though? I’d go nowhere, just as daily I did inside the apartment, and when I returned, defeated, my hair would be in disarray, rain on my face thankfully hiding my tears from his critical eyes. Because oh, he would notice that. He would notice his wife, who was too beautiful to be so disheveled, looking like a drowned rat and what had I thought I’d ever accomplish anyway so far from any neighbor or town. Where was his dinner… He was a prison more than either the apartment or distance to family or friends ever could've been. My chosen cage from which I'd forgotten how to sing.
The day it happened? The day he went missing. That day was the day I felt the apartment around me breathe in deeply. I felt it all around me like the walls expanding slowly, a soft draft through the halls where no doors or windows were open. The walls felt expectant, like they were about to exhale a sigh of relief but they never did. And something in me knew exactly what had happened. Some small kernel of truth glimmered in the darkness beneath my chest that was all but inconceivable. Something in me sighed in relief. Something in me keened in grief.
Eventually my heart settled. I walked through the apartment. Fingers trailing the walls where our voices, raised in anger or passion or laughter, had once echoed. It wasn’t large. An apartment on the top floor, inherited from some distant family member at the opportune moment for our escape. His escape. He needed both the emptiness and fullness of memories. None of ours, ghosts from the past. They fed his drive.
One day, long before he disappeared, I gave in to deep curiosity. I knew I should not, was sworn into obedience not to, could never read an unfinished manuscript. But when he walked out the door, a promise to be back after he’d procured his bottle of gin for the night, I saw my chance. Twenty minutes and I could perhaps discover my husband’s heart again on the pages he poured himself over.
He wanted to be Stephen King but I am pretty sure Stephen knows the incantations to reverse the spells he casts to open doors into worlds we’re not meant to traverse. To tell his stories. Then leave himself safe and sound to do it again and again. He didn’t know those curses could be permanent. It’s apparent on the pages of his manuscript. Which I, half expecting to find Jack Torrance’s mantra covering all the white space, read with horror when it was finally true in my soul that he was not coming back.
Before me, in my mind’s eye, unfurled a painting of macabre dread so anchored in reality that I felt the trigger of adrenaline through my veins in a deep need to run. I stood still. Transfixed as I read what my husband had invited into his life and then mine. The shadows of a million demons filled the spaces around me as I read. They stood, merrily reading over my shoulder, re-experiencing the demise of my husband, my marriage, my life. For there was no chance I would survive. Every door was still open to the darkness he had tried and failed to harness on the page.
For every moment he left me alone, there was a corresponding entry about how he’d brought another demon through. Another dark essence he had paid a wicked sacrifice to for the idea of renown. I could chart our timeline in this apartment on the pages of the manuscript and tears streamed my cheeks, burning my eyes with salty bitterness. He was too intelligent not to be self-aware. We’d had too many conversations for me to be unaware of his delusions.
He wanted to be Stephen King and I knew he hadn’t even read Mr. King’s books. He was arrogant and careless and I had remained. Quietly biding my time. Quietly whispering to the demons (I say this figuratively as I have no proof of their existence; they may have been dreams, wishful moments, memories of my own former strength) in the dark after he had fallen, drunkenly like Poe, to sleep. Quietly making my escape in increments going unseen in his dashes toward greatness behind a computer screen.
I made it a habit to put little blue sleeping pills into his last drink. To read the day’s progress. To make peace with it as best I could. To plan one more step in making my escape. I did my wifely duties the following day. Leaving him to sleep late, knowing he would be furious with me and I would endure the worst of silences. Or insults. How else could I keep him from suspecting me? Slowly I began to smile more. In private. Slowly I began to spend more time out of the apartment when I took the garbage bags to the chute into the incinerator. People began to recognize me by sight. Start conversations with me. Laugh. Enjoy me for me. I didn’t have to be tied to him and his computer and the walls of the apartment that just seemed to close in every single day.
He wanted to be Stephen King and so I let him try. I left him to his own devices and only gave him feedback and encouragement when he directly asked. Which he did, less and less. It might have made my heart another time. Not anymore. I saw what he was. I saw the dark presence he had married after me, standing at his back, guiding his fingers. His eyes glittering in the reflection of the computer screen as he drank the sleeping pills unknowingly.
She would smile at me over his head. Our thoughts and plans so similar. She had no resentment toward him but she often told me that I wore mine like a sexy little black dress. Every girl needs one of those, right? Every girl needs a friend who encourages her, right? We agreed to let him finish the bright orange bit of fiction he had been writing, thinking it was deep and dark black. We agreed to give him up like a bad habit after he was done. We agreed to go get drinks together, wearing our best dresses, when all was said and done.
The day the final key was tapped, the last word birthed, he decided to find me again. Run for me. His appetites dark and deep and full of teeth. I knew it would happen. I was prepared. Lace, deep sighs, fingernails against his skin. A fitting response to an accomplishment of such greatness from a man who had given so much of himself to create the most perfect murder of the most perfect wife in the most perfect apartment set atop the most perfect building. I knew he had covered all his tracks, imagined all of the most deranged details of removing me from his life. Her name wasn’t mine but we looked alike and had the same ideas about music, Poe, and the color purple. I knew he hated me. I knew I didn’t deserve to be hated. I knew he was never going to be Stephen King.
He disappeared shortly after, the apartment swallowing him whole. Every dark door was open. Every dark element he’d invited in sat down to dine with me and celebrate. They consumed my anger, my hatred, his blood from every surface it splattered onto as I set about dismantling him. There was nothing left should anyone come to look for him. I was seen regularly at the chute to the incinerator. Why would I give up such a habit? Mr. Jenkins remembered to bring me that Farmer’s Almanac. Amanda Lane baked me some banana bread because she knew it was his favorite and he was still so busy writing. Tyson and Nicole accidentally bumped into me and each other for the one hundredth time and we all giggled together about kismet and the weather before heading our separate ways.
There was nothing left of him by the time I called the police to tell them he had been missing for 48 hours. Which I assumed was the amount of time they needed before they would take me serious about him being missing. He was an adult after all. I thought back to the beginning. To who we had almost been. To who we could have been. To all the times that I had taken the backseat unwillingly. And I could cry convincingly. A lot. They never did find a body. They did find some very strange evidence of activity on his credit card linking him to some very dark content in dark corners of the internet. No doubt for research purposes.
No one wanted his manuscript. It was never (and never will be) published. Not a living soul, other than I, even knows it exists. If you’re reading this now, I’ve surpassed him. Clearly. And I wear my sexy little black dress of resentment well to the parties where I am applauded.