Still Waters

Chapter 53

                                       ** STRONG LANGUAGE AND VIOLENCE AHEAD **

Collin came home a few weeks later. We were cool for a while. He stopped trippin' with the baby, he stopped trippin' with me. He really did love us. He was just...crazy. Random things would set him off, and you never knew what they would be, so I just gave him his space. Of course, that only worked for a little while. Jasmine was right. Things didn't get any better. They actually got worse. I started researching ways out of situations like mine, but then saw something that said be sure to cover your tracks and delete those type of websites from your search history...in case. I didn't need any "in case" type shit to jump off, so I just pulled back on that, too. The crazy thing is that after that day with Jasmine, I did memorize their numbers. All of their numbers. It just never even occurred to me to use them. I mean, they were all just regular people, like me, and Collin was... something else. At that point, I figured nobody could help me. I would just have to help myself.

I just didn't know how...other than to kill him.

And that plan had gone the exact wrong way last time.

He started hitting me every day. Every single day. Something was always wrong. I hated him. And I loved him. It only took a few weeks for me to want to jump off of that roller coaster, too. I didn't know what to do. I bought one of those burner phones and hid it under the carpet in the back corner of the baby's closet. It took me a really long time to get on board with technology, obviously. Collin was totally against using anything that could get him caught up. I'm surprised we had a computer, but I guess he did have to work. I would have hid the phone in my closet, like I used to do when I was...getting high on the supply...but Collin was so random, there was no promise that he wouldn't all of a sudden decide that he needed to do a surprise search. He almost never went in the baby's room, though, much less her closet.

We fought so much by then that I would instinctively move the baby out of the way and brace myself every time he came into the room. He never went at the baby, thankfully, he would only come straight at me. Every day. Several times a day. Like he had rabies. It was like we had a wild dog living in the house, and we never knew which way he was going to jump.

I never slept. I would listen for the baby all night long. If she woke up crying, I would spring out of bed before she woke Collin up. He hated the sound of anybody crying. If Collin woke up in the middle of the night and paced around the room or watched TV, went to the bathroom, went to the phone, whatever, I would watch him in the dark until he got back in the bed and went back to sleep. This was no way to live, and I had to get us out of there.

Or I had to kill him.

It would have to be one or the other, and the time quickly came to decide.

I was in the kitchen cooking dinner and the baby just kept crying. I mean, she wouldn't stop. I had her in the kitchen with me, in the high chair, and Collin was all the way on the other side of the house, but all of a sudden he came storming in and snatched the baby up out of her high chair. It was the first time that he had ever been rough with her in any way. I mean he had snatched her toys, sure, but it was the first time that he had ever touched her roughly, and my snap decision was that he had to go. I didn't see any other way out that wouldn't just end up right back there again. Just that quick I decided that the boy that I had loved almost my whole life would have to die. And I was ok with that.

This is what we had come to.

There wasn't even any type of deciding about it. I just grabbed the knife that I had been slicing the steaks with and went for broke. I ran at him, before he could start shaking her - which is what I thought he was about to do - and swung the knife, slicing right through his arm. I probably should have just stabbed him, but I wasn't thinking. I also didn't really want to kill him. I just wanted to get him off of her. He looked over at me like he couldn't believe what I had just done, and then he put the baby back in the high chair.