Page 25 of Breakdown
They sat there for a moment, the question hanging loaded and unanswered between them. And the longer they waited, the more the back of Cynthia’s throat itched, her palms sweating. Her mind was frantically pulling her back to the missing coke. She needed to get straight.
“Never mind, kiddo. Sorry,” she added, and she meant it. God, she was sorry that he couldn’t tell her whatever it was, sorry that she didn’t have it in her to push harder, just so fucking sorry that she wasn’t a better mother to him. “We’ll look into getting you glasses tomorrow. You head on back to bed now, okay? You’ve got school in the morning.”
“Sure,” he agreed flatly.
She gave him a hug and he stood there stiffly, barely raising his arms. She didn’t blame him. As soon as she released him, Peter darted up the stairs after Liv without a backwards glance, quick and frightened as a rabbit.
Cynthia let out a long sigh. The demands of parenting made her skin crawl with pent-up inadequacy. It was just too heavy, and the drugs were barely taking the edge off these days. Her everyday life was a plastic bag over her head, claustrophobic and choking.
It’d almost be easier if Erik lost his temper every time. If he just came home piss-drunk and swinging at her. Her father had given her enough practice on that front. But Erik was like a cobra, quiet and focused, striking without warning. Seeing what she could get over on her psychopath of a husband was the last thrill she had left. He expected her to thank him for the cage. There wasn’t much she valued enough to worry he’d take from her, and that included her life.
Erik claimed to not like hitting her. He could even feign a version of contriteness that Dad could never make convincing. He’d promise her the good times were just around the corner. One more job. A little more money. One more step up the rungs of power. He’d promised her the perfect fucking life she’d never once experienced in Iowa and so desperately wanted. Everything designed to pull her a little bit deeper and make her believe until the next time he snapped and they did this dance all over again.
She was as much to blame as he was. You’d think it’d be harder to con a con-artist like herself, but Cynthia had fallen for it every time. A decade and a half of it and she was just so goddamn exhausted. She laughed harshly at her shambles of a kitchen, with its empty drawers and its desperately stacked piles of dishes and cooking implements. At the pathetic tableau and at herself for believing that her choices had been leading her anywhere but here.
“What’s so funny, Cyn?”
Her spine went rigid at the sound of his voice, her hands coming up automatically to protect her face. In the process, she dropped the mug she’d been holding. It landed on the tile with a resounding crack and the handle snapped clean off.
Erik’s expression was unreadable. How long had he been watching her?
“Nothing.” She tried to keep her voice light even as her insides vibrated with barely concealed alarm.
“You’re right. There is absolutely nothing funny about this, is there?” He moved toward her slowly and deliberately.
She backed up until she was pressed against the counter top. The granite dug into her spine.
He placed his hands on either side of her, his corded forearms trapping her in place. “If you’re looking for your cocaine, I washed it down the sink.”
“You can’t do that!” Something hot and defiant and fueled mostly by addiction flared in her chest, and she shoved him as hard as she could backwards. “That was mine.”
He barely moved, his voice hard and even. “Bought withmymoney. Brought intomyhouse—”
“Oh, fuck your house.” She wasn’t going to die in this fucking place she hated. “I don’t have to stay here, Erik; I don’t need you. I’m leaving. I’m taking the kids and I’m leaving.” The words that had been building inside her like a thunderstorm crashed out of her traitorous mouth before she could stop them.
The right way to go about it would have been to plan carefully, wait until he was at work, and be gone without a trace before he even realized what was happening. Because he would retaliate hard if he knew she was trying to get away from him. It wasn’t even that he wanted her around; she’d long outlived her usefulness to him. He just didn’t like to think he had lost at anything. She trembled, closing her eyes, feeling his hot breath on her face, and waited for the inevitable.
The moment stretched. “Well, I suppose I was wrong. Thatisfunny, Cynthia.” It was like he was tasting her words as he repeated them back to her. “You don’t need me and you’re going to leave.”
She opened her eyes.
The smirk on his face was so cruel she almost wished he’d hit her instead. “And who is going to help you? Where do you think you’re going to go, Cyn? Back to your sister in Iowa? You think she’s going to welcome you home after you left her behind? Or do you think you—a selfish, lazy, weak addict—” His smile grew wider and colder. “—is able to go it alone? Is that the plan? Run away again, get magically clean somehow and start the life you think you deserve? Didn’t work out the first time, did it?” With a violent sweep, he cleared the counter, dishes crashing around her to the ground.
He crowded in on her. “You are ungrateful. You always have been. You’ll never have it as good out there as you do here and you’ve still managed to fuck it up, haven’t you?” Like punctuation on his point, he drove his fist so heavily into her stomach that it took her breath away.
She doubled over, making herself a smaller target, but he wasn’t finished. He slapped her open handed across her face. It made her ears ring, his words going in and out like a badly tuned radio.
“And Olivia and Peter? You can’t just lock them in their room when you don’t want to deal with them like you did when they were babies. You’re not the mothering type, Cyn. You drop things the minute they get hard. How long do you think you’re going to last as a junkie single mother?”
She was crying now. Crying because she was hurt and exhausted and scared and weak. Crying because he was right. “They’re my children, Erik. I love them.”
“They are mine, Cynthia,” he said, his voice rising for the first time. “You love them? I own them. What meaningful thing have you contributed to their lives since you popped them out of the womb? What good is your love to them when they find you dead on the floor from an overdose? I’m not going to let you make them as weak as you.”
She sunk to her knees, sharp fragments of ceramic pushing into her skin. “I hate you.” It was so quiet she wasn’t sure she’d actually spoken it out loud.
“You hate yourself. The only thing you hate about me is that I see you for what you really are.” The white-hot fury in his eyes had passed, replaced with something cold and calculated. He seemed to be evaluating her and she shrunk a little more under his gaze.
With surprising tenderness, Erik offered his hand and pulled her gently to her feet. “Do us all a favor and keep your promise for once. Get out of here and don’t come back. If I see you again, you’ll thank me for the bullet I put in your head when I’m done with you.”
