Kathia sat at the dining room table. Just sat, looking at the morning paper on the floor and the empty chair across from her. She would have to make a move soon. The hospital had called over an hour ago to tell her David had passed away. On the one hand, she was relieved it was over. She would not have to face a future filled with betrayal and doubt, but on the other, she already missed him.
Phone calls had been made already. His sister in Phoenix knew. His brother would be told as soon as they could locate him. Freddy was next door with Sally. She would take care of him for the afternoon. He had already asked Kathia more than once if Daddy wouldn’t be coming home. Sometimes seven-year-olds couldn’t articulate their feelings but they could perceive when things were not right. David had been in the hospital for six weeks.
Six long weeks, during which Kathia had gone through torment wondering what came next in a situation like this. She knew there was no going back, but it didn’t seem there was any going forward either.
The day he had had the heart attack she’d been out of her mind. When she’d found the pictures on his computer, at first, she was afraid. She was looking into the mind of someone she’d lived with for so long but had never really known. It seemed like hundreds of files – all without descriptive names but numbered sequentially. All of young boys engaged in sex acts.
David had done a paper on Internet pornography for the school, but that was two years ago! He couldn’t explain it as research material – not the way the files were so carefully disguised with numbers and stored in a misleadingly named folder. She was scared.
Then she was angry when she thought of Freddy upstairs.
In the murk of her reactions, she recalled how David had asked her to cut her hair very short in a boyish way and how their sex life had improved a bit. He was taking Viagra – he claimed. But it didn’t last very long.
Then he came home unexpectedly early and found her in the den.
“What’s up?” he asked, all innocence.
She glared into his eyes and said nothing.
The screen saver was playing the melody of the theme from Friends. He glanced at the computer and then looked back at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“How could you?” she asked, “What is wrong with you? You have a child of your own. What if someone had pictures of Freddy like that?”
“That will never happen. I don’t know why, I…” but before he could finish, she picked up a paperweight and threw it at him. It missed and shattered against the wall.
She ran past him, shoving him as she did, and he fell in front of a chair. She was all anger and confusion as she raced into the kitchen. Once there, she quickly surveyed her options and then took a large knife from the drainboard.
When he followed her and with outstretched arms, tried to say something, his words were more excuse than explanation.
She held the knife threateningly and said through her tears, “If you ever touch Freddy, in any way…”
It was then that David clutched his chest and fell to the floor.
She’d only visited him once a week. The difference in their ages had never seemed so vast until the fourth week when she realized he wasn’t going to recover. At fifty-six, he looked like a man of seventy. The enormity of her anger had dissipated on seeing him like that and confusion had filled the space. She knew only that she could never sleep next to him again. She would never kiss him again while he was conscious, and what she felt most acutely was that there would be no vindication. He was escaping retribution. She never told him that she had formatted the hard drive, blindly wiping out all his work, and hers, everything.
At the table, she realized she had probably sentenced him to self-annihilation with the hatred in her eyes that day in the kitchen. A thought crossed her mind. She couldn’t remember now what she’d been searching for when she discovered the pictures.
