Kill Fridays

I've been happily divorced for years and still I sometimes get nightmares, not so much about my ex-husband but about some of the things he did.

We killed the shelter animals on Fridays. Young and old, puppies and kittens, full grown dogs and cats, sick and healthy, stray and owner surrendered. Some were injured or maimed, all were unclaimed or unwanted. They were too much trouble, barked too much, kept having litters, wouldn't housebreak, were destructive, demanded too much time or attention, didn't get along with the other pets, were too small or had grown too large. It was wholesale slaughter.

I watched my husband inject them without the slightest hesitation, without the slightest hint of any emotion at all – no pity, no regret, no anger or sadness – and then toss the bodies into a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow was emptied into a truck and the truck was emptied into a landfill. It tore my heart out. Thinking about it still does. What was almost as bad was that the man I'd married was unmoved, cold as ice, before, during and after. I didn't wonder that he got knee-walking drunk on Fridays, I thought in his place I might very well drink my own self blind, but then I remembered there were six other days of the week when he didn't kill animals and still drank himself sloppy and stupid.

We left Florida under a cloud - a considerable amount of cash had gone missing from the shelter and the man I married was the only suspect - I defended him blindly and violently but in my heart, I knew.  I don't remember how I made restitution but  I did and we fled.  In those days, I still believed in the idea of a geographic cure - mixed with a fatal fear and a powerful dose of denial - and I told myself another fresh start was all we needed.  What I knew in my heart was slowly making its way to the surface but it would take several more years before I came to face to face with it.  I flinched at what it looked like fully grown, at what I had allowed it to become.

In unguarded moments, I think back to those killing days.  The wheelbarrow, the bulging truck, the landfill and the casual, blank and unmoved expression on my husband's face.  It was a long time before I understood that I was thinking about death and he was thinking about his next drink.

Beware of the temptation to look into the dark corners of your soul, I remind myself. Sometimes something looks back.

And then here I was all these years later, half heartedly looking for an old friend from New England, playing with the idea of maybe reconnecting and catching up, when I came across the name of my second ex-husband.  Curiosity, a troublesome little gremlin in the best of times, reared it's seductive head and before I could change my mind, I'd tapped the search button. Happenstance, I told myself, nothing more, just an unfortunate misstep on the keyboard.

There weren't any details, sordid or otherwise, just a five year old death notice with the dates of his beginning and end and the name of a small Kentucky town I'd never heard of. To be sure, it made me wonder and for a fractious second or three, I even considered shelling out a fee to dig a little deeper. Had he gone back to his first wife? Did he finally drink himself to death? Had he managed to reconcile with his children? Did he suffer? Was he, at the end, sorry for the pain he'd caused or the endless broken promises? Had he been forgiven? Did I care enough to want to know?

It turned out I didn't. The bad years are still fresher in my mind and sometimes I think that the good ones were an illusion.

I haven't seen or heard from since the day in the courthouse when the divorce decree was granted. He passed me in the corridor and for just an uncomfortable second or two, our eyes locked then he turned away. I wasn't so full of hate that I didn't notice how shockingly thin he had become, how there was so much more grey in his hair and how his face was hollow, his eyes sunken and sad. My first thought was he was ill, grievously so. My second was he still had no more affect than a corpse. I shuddered at the thought and left the courthouse. Neither mercy nor forgiveness were in my vocabulary that particular day.

Then, just as now when I tapped the delete button, I wasn't in the mood to celebrate exactly. But I wasn't in the mood to mourn either.