WIDOW'S MIGHT

by M.C. Neuda

He's afraid now whenever I approach the bed. Sometimes I do nothing. I just lift the bedclothes away, look him all over, rest my finger on some body part, watch his eyes widen and his mouth fall open, twisting his lips around the word “Please.”

Sometimes I go away without doing anything . . . only to come back to watch his head start to shake, the terror creep into his eyes. I can almost see his heart jumping through his ribs.

No one guesses. That's the kicker. After all, everyone knows how devoted a wife I've been, feeding him, sitting and reading to him aloud from a favorite book, and refusing to put him in a nursing home, though there's money enough to do so.

It isn't hard, the torture, either to do or to hide. I tape his mouth closed, for example, before threading his catheter. I take my sweet time and make oh, just an awful mess of the job. Or I twist his arm something short of a spiral fracture. Or simplest of all, I leave a heating pad, a little too hot, a little too long next to a tender spot. Nothing spectacular. Things, if it came to it, I could always blame on the aide. I never worry about that really, because I pay her plenty to look the other way.

Although . . . At the beginning, once, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pick up his wrist, look at it carefully, then look at me. I took a moment and then turned swiftly and brightly to her and said, “What is it, Nina?”

She didn't know how to broach it, and I continued, “Are you unhappy?  Don't I pay you enough?”

“Oh yes, no no, I'm not unhappy.”

“Good. I wouldn't be happy if you weren't.” I went on, “Don't you have some grocery shopping to do?”

“Yes, right away.” She dropped the wrist and hurried off.

And that was the end of that.

In any case, Nina would have plenty of reason to doubt her suspicions, since friends that come over say to her, pointing at me, “She's a saint, you know that, don't you?” And I demur and shush them quietly. Of course, the more I do that, the more they protest how good I am to him.

Some of them, I know, suspect what happened in the house before he got ill.  I always denied it, because there's nothing worse than friends pitying you. I'd invent plausible excuses for the black eyes where he'd punched them closed or the bruises where he'd slammed my body into the wall or the breaks that occurred when he'd send me flying onto the cement basement floor. “A walking disaster,” he'd say about me in explanation to his friends. Once, when I came to, in the hospital, I wished I hadn't.

How plausible can excuses be, though, when “accidents” keep occurring?  Of course, my friends suspected, how could they not? 

Which made them think the more that I was a saint—or maybe just a sap—when I insisted on keeping him at home after, ironically, his real accident.  It never occurred to them that I might want him right where I could do the same to him.

The thing is, I understand it now, the pleasure in seeing the pain. Yes, I do.  Oh yes, I do.

And yet . . . I've come to the point of diminishing returns. Too much work for the satisfaction and, hard to believe, I’m tiring of the thrill. Maybe I could arrange for him to fall and hit his head and end it all for him.

It dawns on me then how maybe that last “accident” he was trying to arrange when I dropped to my knees out of sheer desperation and he fell over me down the stairs, breaking his neck and paralyzing his body, wasn't in truth supposed to end it all for me.