“I’m willing to consider it,” he said, chewing his plump bottom lip in consideration. “This was good. I think my social skills needed some airing out. My agent says she can tell when I’ve been alone too long, I start responding to her e-mails within five minutes. Did you maybe want to do it again sometime?”
“Mmm, let’s not start making plans, or developing routines, just yet,” I said, in an exaggerated aloof tone. “I’d hate to wake up one morning to find that you’d had to move in the middle of the night.”
Monroe grimaced. “SO, uh, how long will you be holding that against me?”
“For a while,” I admitted as we walked to the door. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head. As I carefully negotiated Monroe’s wet steps, he called out, “I meant what I said, Lacey. Start writing. It doesn’t matter what you write or whether it’s any good on your first try. Just start writing.”
And since I was already awake and my laptop had a full charge, I did just that. After throwing my stiff, air-dried clothes into the washer and changing into some PJs, I fired up my computer and stared at the screen expectantly.
Nothing.
The problem was I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to write now that I’d finished my divorce book report. I’d had daydreams, but most of them centered on Christian Bale in the Batman suit or revenge fantasies involving putting Mike’s precious golf clubs in one of those machines that cubes cars.
Something that Monroe said came back to me. He’d killed Mr. Feldman in many horrible ways before choosing how to kill his character in Karma Collects. I didn’t have any ideas for a book, but I did have several ideas for horrible fates I wished on Mike. I could kill him over and over again… in a totally hypothetical, nonbinding, legal manner. Of course, I would destroy said document so it wouldn’t be used against me in court should anything happen to Mike. But not before I found the most painful, humiliating way to bump him off.
“Let’s start with death by syphilis…” I said, opening a Word document and typing: Mike stumbled into his tiny, mildew-ridden bathroom, clutching at the elastic of his worn boxers. He gasped at his reflection, carefully prodding the itchy pulsating sores that had sprouted from his lips while he was sleeping…
Repeatedly killing Mike on the page was incredibly therapeutic. I hit him with a gas tanker truck while smoking. I let him fall into an abandoned septic tank and drown. And I wrote about him being crushed by a falling pallet of Tampax while wandering through a Sam’s Club. It was like writing a prolonged Mr. Bill sketch.
I read back over the “Mike gets blinded by rabid squirrels” scenario and giggled until I had tears running down my face. I sighed, “I must be very tired.”
I rested my head against my arms, sure that I should just turn off the computer and go to sleep. While cruelly ironic and cathartic, none of these little exercises really got at the root of why I was so pissed at my soon-to-be ex-husband.
Mike had replaced me. Moved another woman into my territory and expected me to just take it with that quiet dignity I used to cover up when I was really pissed off. He’d moved another woman into our home and hadn’t expected me to make a fuss over it. Beebee was sleeping in my bed, using my shower, applying her makeup at my vanity table. I thought maybe I could have handled it if he’d given me some warning, some choice. If he’d come to me and said, “I want someone else,” I would have been hurt, but I would have eventually accepted it. But feeling disposable, like an afterthought, was too cruel. And when I struck back, I was the bad guy. I was the one who humiliated Mike. I went too far. If I was smart, I would have found a way to hurt him by proxy.
And suddenly, the right words sprang to mind. I sat up, my eyes open and my mind cleared. I opened a new document and typed:
Greg had always loved the house, with its vaulted ceilings, the sun nook, the gently sloping staircase that led to the second floor.
He’d fought tooth and nail for it in the divorce. So it made a certain poetic sense when the house opened up and swallowed him.
I stopped, read the words on the screen, and ran with it.
Laurie had been packing all night after Greg served her papers at work. Somehow, he’d managed to convince the judge that she was dangerous, a threat to his safety, and should be removed from their marital home. Laurie had, in Greg’s words, “twentyfour hours to get your shit and leave.” Of course, the real reason he wanted her gone was that his girlfriend, Patricia’s, lease was up at the end of the week, and he wanted her to move in.
Laurie tore through the house, gathering clothes, pictures, books, anything she could get her hands on, and tossing them into garbage bags. Greg dogged every step she took, snatching things he’d decided were “marital property” out of her hands and generally being a pain in the ass. If he’d shown this much effort around the house when they were married… well, he wouldn’t have had so much time to devote to banging the manicurist he was moving into their home.
Laurie snarled at him when he took back a little china bulldog that had been a wedding present from her grandmother. “Stop it, Greg. Just go into another room. I’ll be done in a minute and then I’ll be out of your way.”
Greg sneered. “I don’t want you running off with anything you’re not entitled to in the settlement.”
“You hate this stuff!” she yelled, waving at the little glass knickknacks, the dust-catchers and special touches she’d added to their bedroom over the years. “You used to spend hours bitching about what I paid for it and now you’re going to take a damn throw-pillow inventory?”
He followed her out onto the landing, stepping around and stopping at the top of the stairs to keep her in her place. “Because it was my job that paid for everything. Your measly little salary wouldn’t keep the heat on in this place. I worked for everything here. It all belongs to me. You’re not walking away with anything that’s mine.”
“Well, I hope you and your things and your whore are very happy here,” she shot back, screaming, “Now get out of my way!”
Greg’s eyes widened in alarm as some unseen force shoved his shoulders, sending him reeling off the top of the stairs. The staircase seemed to flex, tossing him through the air. He flopped, boneless, as he thudded against the wall opposite the staircase. Laurie blinked furiously as the steps rippled back into place, sure she was imagining the old varnished wood moving as sinuously as snake scales.
“Greg!” she shouted. His shoulders were stuck to the wall, holding him on his fret like a fly caught in a web, even as his body sagged. He shook his head, dazed.
“What the hell did you do, you crazy bitch?” he demanded as she scrambled toward him.
“Nothing!”
“Help me up,” he growled, pushing against the wall.
“You are up,” she retorted, grabbing his hands. He wouldn’t budge away from the wall. Laurie pulled harder.
“Stop kidding around, Greg.”
“I’m not. I can’t move.” His voice was getting fainter, higher.
His back looked… wrong. The drywall behind him wasn’t cracked, but somehow the fall had pushed him inside of it. He’d been absorbed into the wall, Laurie thought, staring at him, a particularly rotten piece of fruit suspended in a Jell-O mold.
She had to bite her lip to keep down a hysterical giggle. There was always room for Jell-O.
“I think I should call an ambulance,” she said, backing away.
“No, don’t let go of me,” he pleaded. “Laurie, I -”
“Just hold on, okay?” Laurie ran into the next room, hoping maybe she could shove him back through the wall from the other side. But there was nothing to push. There was no damage on the other side of the wall.
From the hail, there was a dull, cracking sound, stalks of celery snapping. She heard Greg scream. She scrambled back to the hall to find him doubled over and sucked back into the wall, his face folded against his shins. She yelped and fell back against the stairs.
“Help me,” he wheezed, his lips wet with blood. “Laurie, help me!”
She reached out to take the arm stretched so unnaturally over his head, and then hesitated. She tilted her head and asked, “Why?”
Comprehension skittered across Greg’s features. “You fucking bitch!” he screamed and was pulled farther in. His head twisted at an odd angle and the rage drained from his blue eyes. There was a series of crunching noises, like chewing, that twisted her stomach. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut. The hungry snapping stopped.
Laurie opened her eyes. And saw nothing. There was no damage to the wall. No blood. No trace of anything that had just happened. She fell back against the steps and convinced herself for half a second that she’d imagined the whole thing. That she was going crazy…
And for the next few hours, I just wrote. I didn’t know whether it was a dark fantasy or an extended plea for counseling. I just knew I liked it. Of course, I could have been completely nuts.
Given that I’d just made a house eat a thinly disguised version of my husband, I was going with nuts.
They say you should write what you know. And at the moment, I knew what it was like to have your whole life turned upside-down by a man who couldn’t control his urges. Some strange part of me wanted to share that with people, to show them how it felt - the dizzying tumble of humiliation and hurt, the soul-sucking effort it takes to pick yourself up and keep going. Maybe a woman who had been through the same thing would read what I’d written and feel some sort of justice had been done.
Sam’s notes for my divorce case could have translated very easily into a hyperbolic comedy. But something made me want to stick with this new dark direction. It felt a little hypocritical, considering I couldn’t sit through most of the horror movies Emmett had given me. But divorce was a scary thing. And losing control, losing your options, those were elements in any horror story. This was what I knew.
There would be no shocking first-chapter revelation for my poor protagonist. Well aware of her husband’s “extracurricular activities,” Laurie had chosen to ignore the affairs, to hold her head up and pretend she was fine. She couldn’t bring herself to admit she married the wrong man. The fact that he was cheating wasn’t nearly as shocking as the fact that Greg expected Laurie to step aside. She’d been trapped, by pride, by embarrassment, by mortgage payments she wouldn’t be able to make without Greg’s income. But when she was replaced, kicked out of her home, her home fought back.
I wondered if it would be too much of a stretch to make the house eat Greg’s girlfriend, too.