Page 12 of Close Her Eyes

“Bly,” Anya said. “It’s about an hour from here. Like I said, it’s a very small town. That’s where I’m from. Vance and I were high school sweethearts. He was supposed to take over the farm. I was going to become a doctor. We actually broke up when I went away to college, but he kept showing up at my dorm. Even when I moved on to medical school, he was just always there. I’m not even sure I really loved him anymore. It just became comfortable. He wasn’t abusive then.”

Gretchen sighed. “They’re never abusive in the beginning, at least not in obvious ways. It starts out with mind games, gaslighting, emotional coercion.”

Anya nodded along with her words. One of her hands emerged from a pocket, holding the crumpled paper towel again. She used it to dab at a rogue tear that slid down her cheek. “Yes. Vance did all of those things. I didn’t even want to get married or move back to Bly after medical school. I wanted to go to New York City and work in Emergency medicine. But he made me feel terrible for wanting that life. He implied that I thought I was too good for Bly, too good for this life he had planned out for us—without any input from me, mind you—and if I said I just want to explore this other avenue, it was, ‘you don’t love me.’ There was no middle ground. No reasoning with him. Somehow, everything I said, no matter how reasonable it sounded, got twisted into me not loving him as much as he loved me or not prioritizing our relationship. I was never enough. Nothing was ever enough.”

“Sounds like he was a master manipulator,” Josie said.

Anya gave a dry laugh. “That, and the fact that I was just not prepared for it. I didn’t see it. Not until it was too late. My parents died in a car accident when I was twelve. My uncle raised me. He was good to me—gave me a roof over my head, food in my belly, everything I needed—but it wasn’t a close relationship. I was more like a boarder in his home. To say I was starved for love when Vance and I started going out together is an understatement. He was so sweet and fun in high school. Adventurous. He made me feel like anything was possible, and he had these eyes that looked like starbursts. I know that sounds ridiculous but it’s a real thing. I found out when I went to med school. It’s called central heterochromia.”

Josie said, “Is that where each eye is a different color?”

Anya shook her head. Talking medicine, no matter how minor, seemed to put her on firmer emotional ground. “No, you’re thinking of heterochromia iridium. Vance’s eyes were the same but within each of his irises were several different colors. Brown closest to the pupil and then spikes of green and blue going outward. As a lonely high school girl, I was completely captivated by him. So yeah, later on, as an adult, I was not really aware of what was happening between us until I was in so deep that it felt impossible to get out.”

“Did you go into Emergency medicine?” asked Gretchen.

Anya twisted the paper towel again. “I did, and as a compromise, I moved back to Bly and worked at a hospital an hour away near Philadelphia for a few days a week. Long shifts. But I was home there with him. Then he would schedule things for when he knew I’d be working and when I missed them, I was the bad guy. He felt like he never saw me at all. It didn’t matter that I was doing what I loved or that I was the one making all the money. At that time, he hadn’t even started running the farm. I didn’t know it then, but he was having problems with his dad. Anyway, he wore me down over time with this idea that I didn’t love him as much as I loved my job, and what kind of woman didn’t love her husband more than her job?”

“You left the job near Philadelphia?” asked Josie.

Anya smiled weakly. “What do you think?”

Gretchen said, “But you kept practicing medicine.”

She nodded. “There was a position open in the county for a pathologist. The current ME there, Garrick Wolfe, was willing to mentor someone with little to no experience. I had done a rotation in med school and enjoyed it. The pay was good. It was much closer to Bly than Philadelphia, and the hours were regular. Vance asked his father to talk with Garrick about hiring me. It almost seemed as though the decision had been made without my input at all.”

Gretchen said, “Because it was.”

“Yes. I know that now but at the time, Vance made it sound like good fortune, like it was meant to be. A sign that I should be home with him and not gallivanting off to the big city. ‘Gallivanting.’ That’s what he called my work. I saved lives on those shifts but in his mind, I was just out having a good time with my doctor friends. It was a party as far as he was concerned.”

“And he wasn’t invited,” Josie said.

“It was something he did not have control over,” Gretchen pointed out.

Anya sighed. “Exactly. I didn’t realize it then but he was slowly beginning to control every aspect of my life. It only got worse.”

EIGHT

Anya let out a shuddering breath. She walked over to the stainless-steel counter lining the wall at the back of the room and deposited the balled-up paper towel into a waste bin beneath it. Leaning both hands against the countertop, she took several deep breaths. Josie and Gretchen said nothing, allowing her time to compose herself. After a long moment, she turned back to them. “My work was the one thing I had that was mine. It was the one place I felt truly free and like myself. Vance excised that independence right from my life.”

“When did things become physical?” asked Josie.

“A few months after I started the ME job. We were fighting and he pushed me. I thought it was my fault because I made him so angry. I can’t even remember what the stupid fight was about, and even having learned about domestic violence in school and having seen it in the ER, I didn’t understand what was happening. It never even occurred to me that the push was bad. I just thought, ‘we were arguing. It was the heat of the moment.’ It didn’t mean anything. The first time he pulled my hair or pinched me, I still didn’t take it seriously. He was my husband. My high school sweetheart. We loved each other. We’d built a life together. For all the fights, there were twice as many good times when he was caring and kind and tender. Then one day he twisted my wrist. I thought he was going to break it. My first thought was, how will I work?”

“That’s when it hit you,” Josie murmured.

Anya’s hands were back in her pockets as if searching for something. They came up empty. “Weird, right? I never saw the escalation. Never. Until it was too late. There I was, completely enmeshed in this horrible situation. Getting out did not seem like an option at all. It wasn’t even that I felt afraid to leave him at that point. It was that I had changed my entire life around for him—my career. His father had helped me get the position with the ME’s office. His family had paid for our wedding. Our lives were so intertwined. Was I really going to blow it up over a sprained wrist?”

“It’s very common, unfortunately,” Gretchen said. “I’m sorry, Anya.”

She got another paper towel from the dispenser and pressed it to her eyes, staunching the tears before they could come. “Me too. So yeah, it went from the sprained wrist to slaps to closed fists.”

“Did he ever strangle you?” asked Josie.

“No. With Vance it was mostly pushing, pulling hair, punches. Like I said, the escalation seemed so slow and subtle that I barely registered that there was an escalation of sorts. I know that sounds unbelievable.”

“No,” Gretchen said quickly. “It doesn’t sound unbelievable at all. Anya, that’s how so many domestic abuse situations begin. It wasn’t your fault.”

Anya continued, “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to involve the police. I still didn’t really get it—that he was abusing me. It just seemed like a private matter. When he gave me my first black eye, I went to his father. Dermot was abrasive, gruff, and hard to read sometimes, but he had always been very fair. He always put Vance in his place. In fact, the reason Vance hadn’t yet taken over the farm was because he hadn’t been going along with Dermot or following the plan for the farm. The truth is that Vance was lazy. He wanted the status of running the farm without doing any of the work. The reality was that he didn’t even need the farm. He and his sister had a trust from their mother’s family that paid out once they turned thirty. I didn’t find that out until the divorce. It was never about the farm—it was about control. Dermot knew that. He’d never had a trust. He had to work to keep that farm going. Learn the business. Put in the time and labor. He and Vance were so different that way, but even when they were at odds, Vance listened to his father. For a while, things were better. Vance was furious with me for involving Dermot, but he didn’t dare touch me.”

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