You Accidentally Left Your Wedding Ring

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You Accidentally Left Your Wedding Ring

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I’m going to bash her face in. I’m going to rub her nose in the carpet. I’m going to make her clean up the mess she made.

I stop, frozen between entering her house, half of my body leaning inside and the other half caught outside. I feel a bit dizzy. It must be nerves—I’m so damn excited to see Celia again—but I go ahead and set my vodka bottle down anyways.

I grip the window sill with one hand to keep steady, swinging my left leg inside. Standing up, I swear I can hear her calling to me from inside this shack. She whispers how sorry she is for leaving. She says she shouldn’t have ran away and made me chase her and find her and have to force her to come back home with me where everything will be all right again. And we will live happily as we had before.

I pick up the bottle and take a drink.

Through the pale moonlight coming in through the open window, I can see a small kitchen table and a single chair. I can smell the faint smell of what she ate for dinner. The room is small and lifeless with hardly any personal belongings anywhere.

She’ll be small and lifeless because she’ll be my personal belonging.

I can’t wait to take her back home and show her that I left the house just as it was the day she left. The plates are still on the table from our last dinner. I can still smell her skin in our room, though it’s a bit overwhelmed by the smell of alcohol. I’ll rub her face in it.

I walk through the kitchen. I try keeping my balance as best I can. I hope the floor creaking is just a part of my imagination; I don’t want to wake her up. She’ll be so surprised to see me. I slowly make my way out to her living room where there is a lone couch and coffee table. I cock my head to the side, listening. I put my hand along the wall, trailing it as I go into the hallway. Our hallway is adorned with photographs of dates and our wedding. I don’t know why she would have chosen this place over our house. My shirt feels wet with sweat, all the way down my back. I hope she doesn’t mind.

I finally reach a door. I slowly grip the door handle and twist. I poke my head inside.

Goddamn bathroom. I’m about to shut the door when I see someone in the mirror, looking straight at me. I flinch, raise the glass bottle in my hand, then realize that the man in the mirror is me: damp black hair, a fading snarl on pale lips, stubble outlining a sharp jaw. I blink, shut the door.

After taking another drink I move down the hallway again. There’s only one more door and by the time I reach it I think I’m shaking. I open it.

I see a bed inside, sheet and blankets twisted and contorted like she hasn’t had a day of sleep since she left—but she isn’t there. There’s an empty space where she should be laying.

“Son of a—“

My face slams into the floor. My skull feels like someone smashed a beer bottle over the top of it. It’s hard to catch my breath. I turn my head and see HER standing in the doorway, gripping a pickle jar above her head. Did she hit me?

“Hey, baby,” I drawl, rolling over and trying to get up, “I’ve missed you. Need me to open that?”

“Don’t move! Don’t you dare move!”

“You colored your hair? You look good brunette.” I get to my feet, the scent of alcohol so strong on me and my shirt all wet from spilled vodka and perspiration. She backs away. She looks repulsed. I point my finger, shout, “You better wipe that look off your face. I’M HERE, GODDAMN IT!” Be happy. Be sorry.

“Get out or I’ll call the police,” she threatens, but her voice wavers. She could never raise her voice to me; she’s just too delicate and soft dressed in her nightgown to sound intimidating. Intimidation is my job.

“God, I’ve missed you, babe. You know how hard it was to find you?” I step towards her and she steps back against the wall and lets out a sob, clutching that pickle jar like it’s her damn savior. “It’s time to come home now, Celia!” I wipe spit off the corners of my lips.

“Please,” she whispers, “just leave me alone.”

I slam my hand against the wall beside her face. Her beautiful heart-shaped face. She flinches, tries to move away, but I capture her chin in the palm of my hand and force her to look at me. “Celia,” I whisper, loosening my grip because I don’t want to hurt her too much. “Celia, I’m sorry for what I did, but that was months ago. I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t.”

She puts her hand against my chest, pushing me away. I let her.

“Get out, Michael! You’re crazy. You almost killed me.”

Tears well up in my eyes and I shrug my shoulders helplessly. I try to smile, to show her that I can handle this, my lips twitching and frowning instead. “We can work this out. I know we can.” The words hardly make it out of my mouth, my voice is so distraught. I wave my hands around, not knowing what to do with them when I don’t have a drink, then deciding to reach out to her. “I know I did bad things but it’s not all my fault. If you wouldn’t have threatened to leave I wouldn’t have hurt you. But love is supposed to be forgiving, right?”

She moves my hands away and goes quiet, her eyes flicking over my face. I don’t know what she’s searching for; I’ve given her my everything. “You know what, Michael? I once thought ‘Maybe we could have a family’,” she says, sounding brittle. “I thought ‘I always wanted a baby girl, but since he wants a boy by God we will try until we have one.’”

She shakes her head, her foreign brown hair so different from the beautiful blonde she had been. “But I began to feel numb around you, especially when you drank. I married you and put up with this— “she gestures to all of me—“in hopes that you would get help like you said you would, Michael!”

I blink to get the tears out of my vision but they seem to flood it. “I tried—“

“Bullshit!” She brings back one arm and hurtles the pickle jar, straight at my face. I move out of the way and it smashes through the thin, wood-eaten wall and gets stuck somewhere in the framework.

That’s when I just snap. I lunge forward and grab her hair, a good chunk of it, and slam her back against the wall. She screams. She struggles. I wrap my other hand around her throat.

“My love has pushed through,” I hiss. “I looked everywhere for you so we could start a family. Do you know how many people I showed your photo to only to find out that you don’t even look the same? HUH? But I don’t care,” I whisper, my mouth right next to her ear, “because I have you now.”

I pick her up, wrapping my arms around her waist and throwing her over my shoulder. She tries to push off my back but I’m not about to lose her a second time. I am not about to relive the night she left me; the night she finally decided to pack up; the night when the wounds on her body were fresh and the ones on her heart deep.

I wipe my eyes, shift her, and head to the front door. I unlock it and head down the steps to my Honda, which shines like a grey beacon in the night. It’s so dark out here, and I can’t even begin to imagine how she moved all the way from our home in Colorado to the grassy foothills of California. But thank God I’m here to take her home. And make her pay. I nearly lose balance, Celia’s thrashing around so hard. I stumble a bit, my foot stepping on something.

I hear a clink of metal, then pain. PAIN, white hot in my ankle, spreading up my leg and into my chest. My lungs seize. I drop Celia and she scrambles away and to her feet. I look down and can’t believe that she set a bear trap. I can’t believe that my foot is able to twist in that kind of position. I can’t believe she’s leaving me again.

I look up, nearly blinded by the pain. The pain and the tears. “CELIA!”

She chokes on a sob, my keys in her hand. Then she sobers up and takes a deep breath.

“CELIA, HOW COULD YOU?”

“I’m going to get the police and have them come pick you up, Michael.”

She turns around, turning away from the man who has loved her so much, from the man who was going to make her clean the moldy dishes and rub her face in the carpet.

She walks over to the driver’s side and opens the door, getting in without me. She turns on the ignition.

I yell that I love her and that I’m sorry and that I still have her wedding ring she accidentally left on our nightstand when she left in the middle of the night. But I don’t think she hears me over the sound of her driving away.