Three months ago he got injured on the job. Getting the call from the hospital was the worst day of my life. I don’t think I understood how much I still loved him until I spent a 20 minute drive imagining the ways he could have died. All those stupid fights about how much time he’d been spending at work, the money, not spending enough time with the kids, they all washed away. All I could think was to pray. Please, God, I can’t do this alone.
What bothers me the most is I don’t know what happened to him that afternoon. He won’t say a word about his work. He never has. But I knew that coming in. He told me on the first date that he couldn’t tell me about it, and I accepted it. It’s hard to accept on the days he comes home stressed. The most I’ve gotten out of him is that he makes deals with programming machines for some sector of the government that commissions his company for… something. Whatever it is earns a good payday. I guess it buys his silence.
“It’s not that different from other jobs. A desk, a computer, obnoxious buzzing lights, soul sucking cubicles. It’s just like The Office. Only difference is none of my co-workers are funny.” That’s what Hank said the last time we fought about him spending so much time at his job.
“So that’s why I’ve never met any of them, then?” I winced as soon as the words left my mouth. We’ve fought more than once about my tendency to want to pry information about his job.
“I spend 50 hours a week with them. Every spare second belongs to you.” He said it with a wink, kissed me on the forehead, and popped open a bottle of beer from the fridge. His usual routine when he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“60.”
“What’s that?” he asked as he flopped into his chair and flicked on the TV.
“You work 60 hours a week.”
“Don’t remind me.” He said everything with a smirk. He carried an easiness in his voice, like he always did, but I’d known him long enough to tell that something was bothering him.
Whatever ate at him got worse towards the day of the accident. Our intimacy plummeted to zero. I didn’t let it get to me. I know couples ebb and flow. But we didn’t even spend time together anymore. I missed his touch. Any touch. But I gave him space. I knew stress was a problem for him, even if I didn’t understand why. All he ever wanted to do was sit in his den and watch TV. I ended up spending most of my nights alone. I’d feed the kids, put them to bed, then read for a couple hours in bed. After a few months of this, wine became involved. But it didn’t dull how lonely I’d become. Every night I fell asleep alone. When I woke, he’d already be gone.
The night before the accident, I woke up sick at two in the morning. At least I know I’m not pregnant. I flushed the contents of my stomach and glanced back towards my bed, double checking what I already knew. I was alone. Again. A fleeting thought that told me he didn’t love me anymore flickered into my throat. I pushed it down, composed myself, and threw on some pajamas to go hunt him down.
The dull glow of TV light shone against the bottom few stairs as I made my way into the basement. Empty beer bottles and stained, wet carpet surrounded his chair, which sat not ten feet from the blaring TV, which wasn’t playing anything, just static. The top of Hank’s head poked over his recliner. Thinking he was sleeping, I straddled onto his lap as smoothly as I could manage, settled my knees around his legs, and looked up into his face. To my shock, he was staring right at me, his red, bloodshot eyes wide open.
It startled me, but I tried not to show it. I stroked his hair and kissed his ear, but he didn’t move. “Hi, Hank,” I whispered. Still no response. I leaned back up a little quicker than I wanted, showing my frustration. His eyes were still wide open, but he didn’t react to me at all, like he was staring right through me. The TV static blared in my ears. I grabbed the remote and turned it off. The very second the TV went black, Hank jolted upright.
I yelped and jumped back off his chair.
“Turn that back on right now.” I was too stunned to react.
“Turn it back on! I was watching that!” He wasn’t just yelling, he was screaming. I fumbled with the remote in my shaking hands, but he ripped it out of my grasp before I could steady myself and flicked the TV back onto the same static. As soon as the static was back on the screen, Hank eased back into his chair and reformed his face into the same blank, unblinking expression.
I cried myself back to sleep that night, harboring thoughts of divorce for the first time in eleven years of marriage.
The weeks after the accident were even harder. The hospital discharged him after three days, and his extensive care routine had become my job, on top of caring for the house and kids. For reasons that none of the countless specialists Hank’s company brought in and all their extensive testing could explain, the accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. The doctors wired his jaw shut, so every three hours I had to feed him by shoving a straw through his lips that lead to some brown, blended mixture the hospital had supplied me with.
On top of it all, he couldn’t speak. I haven’t heard a single word come out of my husband’s mouth in three months. Nothing but irritated groans when he’s awake, and snores when he’s asleep.
It wasn’t long after he came home the paintings started. The first was when I came home from parent-teacher conferences. When I came home, Hank was sitting, staring with blank, red eyes at the living room wall. It’s what I expected. Ever since he came home, he seemed to have abandoned all interest in anything except that damn wall. Each morning he would wake up, I’d place him in his chair, and he’d wheel himself right to that spot and stare at it all day. I had long since given up hope he would interact with our children.
What I didn’t expect was that he had dug out a spare can of blank paint from the garage and planted a huge, single black streak across the wall in the living room. He still had the brush in his hand when I came home. I was livid, but I didn’t fight it. I didn’t have enough energy for an argument, anyway. So I let him paint, and he became obsessive. Every time I walked into the room, I found a new black streak slashed onto the wall.
I got him some rudimentary supplies. A few canvases, an easel, and a basic set of paints, which deviated his attention from our walls. He never stopped painting. I couldn’t even convince him to sleep, so I gave up on that, too. All day, all night, sitting in the living room, painting away.
The scenes were nonsense at first — streaks of random color splattered across various canvases to match our wall — until a month ago. Overnight, his skill level skyrocketed. He went from broad, shaky strokes of color made by unsteady hands to intricate pieces full of detailed, beautiful designs worthy of Rembrandt. And they evoked genuine emotion from me. The figures in the painting were so real, so encapsulating. And their faces. Each one filled with pain. I couldn’t look away.
And Hank didn’t even seem to care. The moment he would finish one, he would discard it and start on another. I had no idea Hank had this in him. He had never asked about anything artistic before. It was hard enough getting him to go to the movies with me, yet alone a museum. It scared me. Did I know my husband at all?
A few weeks ago, his paintings changed. They became personal. Pictures of our children eating, or playing, or me lounging in the living room reading a book with my leg draped over the edge of the couch. It was nice. At least Hank had remembered my existence.
One morning, I woke up to see he had painted a scene where Jason, my oldest, hit his first home run. Charming, but optimistic. Jason is a pretty scrawny kid, and while he loved the sport, he hadn’t even got a hit all season.
Yet the next week, sure enough, Jason hit a home run right over the left field fence. The ping rang out so loud it echoed against the cement stadium walls behind me. I don’t think it was until Jason rounded third that I remembered to cheer. What I didn’t forget was Hank’s painting. I wanted to chalk it up to coincidence. It wasn’t impossible. But when I checked the painting later that night, the ball in the painting was right over the left field fence. The coincidences piled up.
It went on like for a while. His paintings would predict many mundane things. The vacuum cleaner smoking from breaking, the dog chewing one of Hank’s old shoes, even the meals I was planning to cook. That one bothered me a little. I wondered if I was choosing to cook those things because of the paintings. Without fail, every scene, down to each detail, would happen a few days later. It was remarkable. Frightening. Unbelievable. I had even come to grow excited about the paintings, to see what lies in my future.
Things shifted once more one morning. I remember feeling good that morning. I got a few solid hours of sleep and was relieved enough to wake up to a house that hadn’t burned down during my indulgence. It was the closest I had been to being in a good mood in longer than I could remember. I sauntered down the stairs and saw my husband finishing up the last strokes of his latest painting.
I almost felt guilty when I realized that, for the first time in weeks, he wasn’t the first thing on my mind that day. In fact, I hadn’t thought of him at all. And if I’m honest, it was a relief. So when I saw him sitting in his chair, his back turned towards me, swiping away on a canvas, a genuine smile creased my lips, and I wandered over with some mild interest and even a little excitement to see what new future awaited me.
All of that dissolved when I was close enough to make sense of the image. It was me, standing above him with an arm raised and an expression that showed an intent to be violent. It shocked me. The scene should have made me sad, to think something like that could be in our future, but it didn’t. It made me angry.
How could he think I would do this? I’ve never been violent before, not once. And after all I’d done for him, washing him, feeding him, single-handedly taking care of the house. He had become like another child, a man-child. He doesn’t contribute to anything. He can’t even do chores. I take care of everything while he sits and paints. The bills. The kids. The chores. All of it. And he won’t even acknowledge me except through these fucking paintings. He won’t even talk to me.
It was at this moment that I realized I had raised my hand to strike to him. I caught myself a moment before I would have crashed the palm of my hand onto his cheek. And that was what scared me most of all. Just that fast, his painting had come true. Not days, not weeks, but an instant after he had finished it had the scene come true. Except for when I had to feed him, I spent the rest of the evening away from him, wishing I could run away. I’d never needed a vacation more. A single thought swirled through my mind all day. I never would have been in that position if he hadn’t of painted it.
The next days, all of his paintings depicted darker things. All the happiness and whimsy from his paintings were gone. One showed Jason getting into a fight at school and coming home with a black eye. Another showed the train crash in Ohio. And the predictions were becoming true faster and faster, sometimes coming true, like the slap, on the same day.
This morning I decided I had enough. The paintings had ruined my marriage, ruined my family. Daylight hadn’t even cracked the horizon by the time I had dug out the rope from the garage. I walked into the family room to find Hank sitting in the same spot I expected him to be. I took the rope and tied his arms to his chair. I made it tighter than it needed to be, but he didn’t wake. He didn’t even drop the brush that dangled between his fingers. Then I turned my attention to my real enemy.
I started with the canvases strewn around the room. I took each one — the baseball game, the fight, the slap, all of them — and broke it. I even destroyed the older ones. The ones that were scenes of people I didn’t know, and the ones that were just lines of color of nonsense. I took down every painting that adorned the walls of my house. And I made it violent. I didn’t know how much I needed to break something, but it felt good. I tore the canvas and snapped the thin wood pieces over my legs. Each crack, each rip, flooded my veins with catharsis. I didn’t know if Hank had woken up and watched me do this. Maybe he already knew I would do this. But I didn’t care. He couldn’t stop me.
Once each painting in the house was gone, I turned my attention to the last one in the house. The one that sat on Hank’s easel. His most recent, and his last, creation. When I saw it, my blood ran cold. It was a picture of me. I’m wearing the same yellow dress with flowers on it I put on before I even came down the stairs. Broken paintings are strewn about the floor. Rope binds Hank to his chair, holding a brush in his hand. None of that even surprised me anymore. I was glad he knew what I had done until I ran my eyes across the rest of the image. Blood stains the bottom of my dress, and I’m holding a knife in my hand that I’m running across Hank’s throat.