The Malisons of Men

 

Ok, we’re meeting in 40 minutes. I start to wash dishes to stay calm. Washing the dishes and worrying. Would he kill me? He wouldn’t. Or, maybe just our child, or himself? I’m spinning out.

It will be fine.

But, it’s good to be ready. Statistically he *is* the most likely to harm us. Of course, we have already harmed each other.

The hot water is almost burning my hands. If he did try to kill us, how would he do it? He wouldn’t shoot us. I pick up a knife and run the sponge over the blade. Would he stab me? I'm being crazy. Would he throw acid on me, or gasoline? Of course not.

We already know he’d strike me. Try to damage me. He has always aimed to take me down. His boot on my neck. His hand on my head while I’m drowning.

This is the most dangerous time. The time when we try to get away. And I’m taking everything, the kid, the cat, the nice rugs. His chance to be a dad and partner and have his family. But he hasn’t made a stake to these claims in 7 years.

My lawyers tell me not to leave him alone with our son. I’ll have them tracking our location live during the meeting. My aunt flew halfway across the world to assist in the extraction. Operation Repatriation I call it. She’ll be there too, across the way with a hat pulled low and “reading a book.” She is keeping an eye on us. She’ll be ready to…what? Call for help if he shoots me. It sounds dramatic, but I can’t help it.

I have been to the funeral of a murdered child. I saw the sky open and the whole world weep and I have never been the same. A tiny white casket. The shell of her mother, my friend, being escorted out because she can’t bring herself to leave the gravesite of her only child.

The meeting is short. When he realizes that I won’t leave, he leaves. Angry without saying goodbye to me or our son. I’m sad for our kid. Annoyingly, I’m sad for my ex. I'm sad that our family never worked out. I text my lawyers who are watching us on a tiny map on their phones, “He is gone” I say. We’re headed home.

My aunt gives me a nod and heads off, too. We don’t meet up in case he is watching from somewhere. Nothing happened. Proof that I have been overreacting.

But when something does happen, it’s “HOW didn’t she KNOW?! WhY dId ShE StAy?! Why did she let him see the child?"

But I know a woman who did not know. Who did not stay. Who was forced by the courts to let him see the child. The same woman went to those same courts for help when he did not produce the child on the given day. The court told her, a frantic mother with a growing pit in her gut, that he would not be compelled to produce the child. Instead, he would be fined $50 per day, as if the child was a fucking rental car and not a blur of blond hair, blue eyes and beating heart. This same mother called the police the following day and demanded a wellness check. It was those reluctant officers, the ones who were so sure she was overreacting, who found the bodies. The father and the child. The child who should be 8 today but is forever 3. It was an unspeakable violence. The type of injury that fractures the imagination and changes everything that comes after.

I know this mother and I knew her child. I think of them often. I think of them as I wash dishes in the sink and try not to overreact.