Till Death Do Us Part

There are lilies at the bedside. 

I smell them before I see them. The sweet lingering perfume wafts around the room, determined to mask that retched hospital stench. They stand aimlessly in a crude hospital vase, which is little more than a jam jar filled with not enough water. 

I used to love lilies.

You would bring them to me every Valentine’s Day and on my birthday, knowing that I much preferred them to roses. They would be wrapped in brightly coloured crepe paper and attached would be a card with your name; your signature a spindly scrawl making an indent on the otherwise plain card. There would be no message. You were never one for words. I was the chattier half of our union. Yet toward the end it seemed that our marriage had run out of any meaningful vocabulary. We ambled through daily life, with conversations based entirely on dietary preference and utterances about the weather. 

The scent and sight of the lilies remind me of the funeral. I wonder with sinister amusement if they are left over from the occasion; a way of trying to bind us together once again. 

I try to touch them, but I’m restricted. I imagine the feel of their rubbery green leaves beneath my fingers and the velvet cream tips of the blooms. I recognise now that they are an apt funeral flower. They suit wreaths and bouquets tied with raven black ribbon. They droop with some unknown misery and their colour is the ghostly pallor of death. 

I dislike lilies now I realise; they bring with them unwelcome recollections. 

"A scent can trigger a memory."

You told me that, and you shared that the smell of freshly cut grass reminded you of mowing neighbours’ lawns as a boy in a bid to earn extra pocket money to put toward your fund for a Chopper.

The hospital machines hum and occasionally beep. A nurse checks in every ten minutes and initials the chart hanging at the end of the bed. There are wires and tubes attached to every piece of revealed flesh. They protrude through the skin without grace. No doubt in their wake there’ll be aubergine bruises blotched on milky skin. 

I would not have thought that it was possible to attach this many wires and cables to a single body. I am sure that they each have a purpose, a lifesaving mission, but I’ve always been squeamish, so I revert my attention to the door. 

I wait, certain that Macy will come. 

Our beautiful daughter, who will never know the truth of what happened in those final moments. 

Our Macy, who views it all as a tragic accident in which one parent was killed and the other seriously injured. 

She will be alarmed by the wires, but perhaps she has seen them already and I have missed her visit. 

She feigns maturity but I know that she’s a little girl underneath. I think that we are all children behind the wrinkles of time. Every one of us secretly scared of the unknown but determined to conquer it. 

Macy needs both of us but now she is left with only one parent, and not even the better half. 

She will never know the truth of the matter was murder. I certainly will never tell her, and you are not in a position to confide. 

We were both meant to die. 

One of us should not be left loitering in this world. 

They call it murder/suicide do they not? 

Those are the cases that you see on the nine o’clock news and you wonder if both parties were involved or did someone ‘flip’? You sit with a digestive biscuit in one hand and a cup of sweet tea in the other and discuss the horror of it all with whoever happens to sit beside you on the sofa. You both gasp in revulsion and discuss the absurdity of the world, until the next news report flashes and the conversation flutters onto that – an abducted child, a war, a lottery winner or a lost pet that travelled across three States to get home. 

We never thought that we would become one of those tales; then again, I suppose we’re not, at least not in everyone else’s eyes. Only you and I will ever know the whole truth. 

We are just the tragic victims of a late-night crash – a black Ford that swerved to avoid a fox, a deer or a badger and hit a factory wall. 

I need to stop considering my life as ‘we’ and ‘us’. There is a strangeness to no longer living in the plural. It is bizarre to think that it is now just ‘Mallory’ and no longer ‘Mallory and Nigel’ or ‘Nigel and Mallory’.  

I am alone. 

I’ve not been single since I was twenty-one years old. The same age that Macy is now. 

Funny that. 

I always imagine her as so young, yet I was a married woman at her age. 

Times were different then or perhaps every son or daughter remains an innocent in their mother’s eyes. In my world Macy is not yet a woman, she is still a bright-eyed little girl who is blissfully unaware of that there is evil in the world. 

She’ll have so much to cope with. The grief mingled with what will be a slow recovery. There will be a litany of trips to specialists’, physiotherapists and other rehabilitation appointments. 

It isn’t fair on her. She doesn’t deserve this. 

She’ll search for answers. 

I don’t want to contemplate her questions. She’ll be persistent, like when she was a toddler. 

Macy can be unyielding – this trait she undoubtedly takes from me. 

She will not be the only one making enquiries, I realise with a shudder. The police will have questions too. By the lack of an officer stationed at the door and absence of handcuffs, I can deduce that at this moment they assume that nothing is askew.

The night of the crash we were arguing. 

I was irking you. I was doing it on purpose. 

Everything that you’ve done recently annoys me from your general untidiness to your inability to find another job. I know that things are hard and that it wasn’t your fault that you lost your position at the sugar factory, but what really annoys…I mean annoyed me… was your self-pity. 

There is injustice in the world, but Nigel you were not the only one suffering it. 

I know my temper gets the better of me at times. 

I admit that I’m not always the nicest of people. 

I’ve done things that you didn’t deserve. 

I hit you once, do you remember? 

You forgot to bring the bins out. 

I was having a bad day. 

Macy had thrown a tantrum at the supermarket, the dog had gone AWOL, and I’d burnt dinner to a cinder. Up until that crack I would not have thought of myself as a violent person. You looked so startled. 

I really hurt you; I knew from the spidery red marks that crawled along both your cheek and my palm. 

I’d wanted to hurt you. 

That truth makes me such a terrible person. 

I waited for you to yell at me, but you didn’t. You simply turned and put the bins out. I felt guilty after. Even my sincere apology did not spurn a reaction. You merely nodded at my words and flicked the channel on the television, muttering something about there being nothing decent on.  

Death rose as a macabre fog. 

I’m being somewhat melodramatic.

But despite expecting it and even summoning it in those final moments, it pounced with the stealth of a panther. We were entrapped in it until one had succumbed and sacrificed their final breath. 

I’d never experienced a death before; both my parents are still living, and my grandparents died when I was too young to remember. It was natural and unnatural all at once. Something inside still wonders if this is all a weird dream and that we are not truly separated. 

Perhaps this reality that I now find myself in is a figment of my overactive imagination. 

The hums, drones and beeps of the paraphernalia around me persist. 

Could this entire existence be a surrealist experience? 

Could my life have the absurdity of a painting by Dalí or Magritte?  

I ponder if those final moments of argument and anger ever happened. 

It was a blistering rage that erupted. I’d nobly suppressed it for years. It could not be contained for a moment longer, it's froth bubbling into what became the final moments of our marriage. I no longer remember now what was the stimulus to that untamed fury. 

It may have been the way that you had slurped your soup at the dinner party, or the fact that you told me that I had had enough wine when I reached to refill my glass. 

In isolation it was a mere irritation, but a collection of irritations led to an earthquake of fatal magnitude. 

It seems ironic to admit that death followed, and I have no recollection of what began this journey. 

Is death a journey or a journey’s end? 

Perhaps it’s both.

I’m harshly aware of my mistakes but we’ve both erred. Not only on that night but throughout our marriage. It is an enigma to try and locate the point at which we began to want different things and to see things from polar prospectives. Both of us have been aware of the chasm between us for a while now but I never thought that we would become once again united through a bloody mistake. 

One can hardly define murder as a mistake. 

While the act itself may have been an impassioned moment of madness, I am inclined to think that causing the death of another cannot be summarised as ‘a mere mistake’. 

Mistakes are when you forget to buy the milk on the way home from work or when you accidently bump against another on the street – not when you erase a person from the world by sheer force. 

Tears are self-serving. They are simply a plea that one is still human. A salty appeal to not define one as a monster because of a single brutal act.

I’m shrouded by such dark thoughts of late. 

How have I become this person? 

How has Mallory, the woman who worked part-time in a local newsagent and whose biggest concern was whether to cook chicken or lamb stew for dinner, become someone who contemplates the twisted nature of the human psyche?  

It has been a slow journey and we have travelled it together perhaps without knowledge of what we were becoming. I have been moulded by the years and by both of our actions. I married you because you were stable and made me feel safe. I had not realised that that steadiness would grow into a rut. I began to long for excitement, but you were in a constant stagnant state. The shine of being your wife tarnished as quickly as cheap jewellery.

There has been one spark of excitement during the years. Your indiscretion.  

I know how you dismiss me when I talk about it. It is as close to irritation as you come. 

I can see you now, how you would sigh “For goodness sake Mallory that was fifteen years ago.” 

It may have been fifteen years ago, but the sting of betrayal never leaves.

You had an affair and I had not suspected a thing. I would not have defined you as the affair type. You are not particularly attractive - neither of us are. We are not ugly, but we are not Hollywood beautiful either. The closest to Hollywood looks you could ever be described as is a vague resemblance to Danny DeVito, but you lack both his wit and talent. 

I think I said that to you once. I had wanted to hurt you on that occasion too. I do not feel sorry for that. 

She was your secretary. 

The cliché hurt as much as the duplicity. 

My pain was not all for me; most of it was for Macy. 

You’ve pleaded with me not to ever tell her what you did. 

You’re a coward, Nigel.  

I swore to bury your secret. It was not that I was ever trying to protect you, but I would not hurt her like that. You were her Daddy; in some ways you still are her hero. I could not bring myself to ever shatter that illusion. I did not want to steal the magic.  

I am so distracted with my maudlin that I almost miss your eyes flickering open. You look hopelessly confused; an expression to which I am accustomed. The nurse reappears on one of her routine check-ins. 

“Mr Christianson,” she says gently, brisk professionalism trims her words. She sweeps to the bedside and presses the red call button. 

“Mr Christianson. Nigel. How are you feeling? The doctor will be here in a moment.” 

You don’t respond. You probably could not speak anyway with that oxygen mask strapped to your face. Your flinty grey eyes are not focused on the nurse - they centre on me. 

I know that you can see me. 

I stand a little straighter. 

There is alarm in your drugged expression. 

You lift a quivering finger to point but the nurse doesn’t notice. She is writing a note in the chart. 

You know that I should not be here. 

I hold your gaze, not speaking but smiling. 

It is a slow contemptuous smile; one of the ones that I know really irritates you. 

I can be cruel. 

I can be a horrible person. 

Only you and I know what happened that night. 

The argument.

My screams. 

You driving and purposely not braking as we went toward that disused factory wall. 

“This is over!”

Your voice was low and held your usual blasé calmness. 

I could not speak. 

I could not plead.  

I believed it to be the end.

I was petrified. 

I can see by your terror that you now realise that this will never be over, that this, whatever it is, is just beginning. 

I may be a ghost, or a phantom of a shared memory but one thing is for certain and that is that I am dead.

I intend to remain at your side Nigel.

Till death do us part - your death.