Dick gets out of the taxi. He is unremarkable, very tired. In fact, he always looks tired. You see men like him on the subway, and you don't even give them a second glance. Their faces reflect all the pain and exhaustion of the world. His eyes were weary, with dark circles that neither glasses nor an expression of all-consuming apathy could hide.
He pulls a child's car seat from the backseat, with a sleeping child inside, around 4-5 years old, and heads towards the house. The house is too luxurious to belong to him. As he walks along the stone-paved path to the house, his shoulders are hunched under the invisible weight of the past. The house didn't belong to him; he was just house-sitting for a week. You could say he was going to work.
His medical career had ended a long time ago, and since then, he's tried not to stay in one place for too long.
Jane, after giving birth to their child, started getting sick. At first, everyone attributed it to postpartum depression. She constantly found new ailments in herself. Sometimes it was lumps in her breasts, other times it was neck pain, which led her to quit her job because she couldn't sit at the computer for long. But it wasn't a big deal—she was a young mother, and any whims were allowed, and Dick's salary was enough. But due to his inexperience, the young doctor couldn't recognize the signs of the onset of madness in his beautiful but tired wife.
One day she began hearing voices in her head. Naturally, no one knew about it then. But one day, Dick was late at work—he really was just delayed because Austin, his assistant, couldn't figure out how to handle the rules for managing electronic patient records.
But the voice in Jane's head linked this delay to infidelity. Jane was in another stage of her neurosis at the time and diagnosed herself with Lyme disease, which made her unable to walk. Tests and various specialists couldn't confirm the illness. But they couldn't convince Jane she was wrong either. But the fact remained: Jane couldn't walk and moved around the house only in a wheelchair.
After dropping an ashtray, she ran over it with her wheelchair, shattering it into tiny pieces. Meticulously gathering each shard, she added them to a salad. Not only had her legs given out because of Dick's foolish desire to have a child, but he was also cheating on her.
At that time, nothing happened, but this desire for revenge—revenge for the child she bore, revenge for the cheating, which she was certain of—gave her life new meaning. After the evening with the ashtray shards, she no longer needed the wheelchair. She seemed to be reborn, like a phoenix.
Dick's life turned into daily interrogations and various attempts at sabotage. For instance, within a few months, Dick lost almost all his female patients. But he still tried to help Jane and at least maintain the facade of their family life. Why did he do this? He didn't have an answer to that question. All he ever wanted was a strong family—not like his parents'. He felt obliged to help Jane because it was he who wanted the child, whose pregnancy drove her mad.
However, pretending that everything was fine became increasingly difficult over time, as Jane became more aggressive. One day, during another bout of jealousy, she pushed him down the stairs. Dick spent a month in a cast. He distinctly remembered thinking during the fall that his life no longer belonged to him. And that entire month, Jane was happy because he was completely under her control. And Dick thought everything would soon get better.
A routine check in his office revealed a shortage of narcotics in the safe. Jane had been visiting his office more often, and only now did he realize it wasn't just about ensuring he had no female clients or employees. Naturally, he lost his medical license.
It seemed like the time had come to stop enduring it, but for some reason, he stayed with her. The last straw, however, was her cruelty towards their child. He was too young to understand why his mother hated him. But he already knew that while Daddy was at work, it was best to stay out of Mommy's sight. One day, while playing in the yard, he dirtied his new overalls. Rage clouded Jane's vision, and she grabbed a charging cable and beat him with such fury that she broke two of his fingers.
They divorced, and the divorce consumed almost 70% of his assets, but the most brutal and costly battle was over the custody of their son, Mark. The court didn't want to leave the child with an unemployed and practically homeless father. Dick had never called the police before, believing he could fix everything himself. And at the trial, Jane appeared as an angel, as if she wasn't the one who, after Mark's birth, declared she didn't want him and, when Mark was only six months old, tried to iron him because she didn't like his infant puffiness. But a couple hundred thousand and some sharp-toothed lawyers managed to keep the child with his father.
If you think the divorce eradicated Jane's sense of ownership and she left Dick alone, you are mistaken. Whenever Dick tried to find a job, have coffee with a new acquaintance, or simply register on social media, Jane would track him down and turn his life into hell. No restraining order could help him. Changing his name, addresses, cutting ties with relatives—nothing worked, and nothing could deter Jane from her desire to completely own him.
He became a man who didn't make friends and constantly moved. The authorities did nothing; they found it amusing that a man couldn't handle a woman. A woman who left dead animals on his doorstep as proof of her love.
And that's how we find him: exhausted and unsure of how he lost everything. Or almost everything.
But for a month now, there's been no news of Jane. Distant mutual acquaintances say she was convicted, either for drunk driving or for assaulting a police officer. But what difference does it make? He has time to catch his breath. Maybe in prison, she'll get help and finally leave him and Mark alone forever.
Now he approaches the house, opens the front door, and for some reason, a shiver runs down his spine. As he walks down the hallway, he feels someone's gaze on the back of his head. Pausing for a moment, he turns around. No one's there. Funny. I'm scared of ghosts now… It's just this empty, enormous house affecting me. I used to have one just like it.
These internal dialogues became his constant companions. After all, he had no friends or acquaintances to talk to. It's funny to imagine, but sometimes he even argued with himself. Sometimes he thought he was going crazy, just like Jane once did. Everything was so good until Mark was born; maybe Dick was to blame for all the troubles. But now is not the time for inner turmoil.
He has to take care of the child. He needs to move him from the car seat to the bed. Mark never asked his father about his mother. And Dick never insisted.
Before bed, he decides to have a beer and watch TV. House-sitting isn't a very demanding job. The top story on the evening news is breaking news: three women have escaped from the city jail, killing a guard. Two were caught almost immediately, but the third is still at large. None of the escapees are named, but Dick, sitting in the empty house, knows without a shadow of a doubt that one of them is Jane. He knows because he recognized the scent that chilled him to the bone when he entered. It was a faint, disappearing smell of Tom Ford perfume mixed with her body's scent. Jane's perfume. Once, he adored that perfume; the scent seemed the most alluring to him—just a whiff was enough to create a certain sweet tension just below his belt. But over time, it came to be associated only with danger, hopelessness, and primal fear. Dick sits in the chair, unable to move—his muscles have failed him. He is paralyzed by fear. And, hearing Jane's footsteps descending the stairs, he thinks: "I should have left Mark at his friend's house."
He needs to jump up, run, but he can't move.
"Hello, darling, you're back already?"—there's a terrifying gleam in her eyes.—"I've been waiting for you all day, how was work?"
"Jane, please stop. I don't have a job, and you know that perfectly well." A quick thought: where is Mark? Aloud: "How did you find me?"
"Darling, what kind of joke is that? You're sitting on the couch in front of the TV, it wasn't hard, silly."
"Where is Mark?"—this time aloud.
"What Mark?"
Dick springs up. "Our child, my son, what did you do to him?"
"There you go again; you know I never wanted a child."
Dick's gaze falls to the floor—why are the soles of her boots leaving red marks on the light parquet of the living room?
In a fraction of a second, he's at the top of the stairs, looking into the open door of the blood-soaked nursery. This is more than he can bear.
"What would you like for dinner, dear?"
Now he'll gather his strength and fight back against this madwoman. Now he'll forget that stupid rule about "not hitting girls." Who even made up that rule? Why is he sitting on the floor in the hallway, drenched in tears, remembering his mother punishing him for pushing a girl in the schoolyard? What was that girl's name? Sophie? Marcela? Who the hell cares?Â
His gaze falls again on the doorway of the nursery. It's impossible; he can't bring himself to go in. He will get his revenge.
She's making noise downstairs, washing dishes and humming to herself.
The homeowner was a golfer. How cliché, owners of such mansions are expected to play golf. He used to play too.
He grabs a wood driver from the golf club basket. Woods used to be made of wood. Now they're made from titanium alloy. This type of club is designed for long-distance shots. With this club, you can drive the ball the farthest distance (over 250 yards).
The grip feels good in his hand, and the weight of the club gives him confidence. Today, now, it all ends. Should he have called the police? An ambulance? He's already on the last rung of the ladder.Â
He hasn't noticed how long her humming has stopped. She's not in the kitchen, nor in the living room. Now his shoes are leaving almost the same bloody footprints. But Jane is nowhere to be found. He goes out into the garden. Distraught, disheveled, in a not-so-fresh shirt, he wanders around the garden with the club in hand, shouting her name. It's not the most typical sight for this neighborhood. Probably why the neighbors called the police.
The police arrive quickly in such areas; these are wealthy white people who don't make a fuss or call the police for trivial matters. At least because local issues can't be trivial.
"Put the club down and step away. We've got a crazy person covered in blood here," says the young inspector over the radio.
Dick drops the club, Jane has won; she has taken everything from him. He steps back, raising his hands. And, with surprise, he realizes his hands and shirt are covered in blood. Already at the police station, he remembers reflecting on whether it was permissible to hit "girls" and recalling his mother punishing him for pushing a girl in the schoolyard while holding the small body in his arms.
The police were quite polite to someone found covered in blood, near a child's body with a crushed skull, and listened to his version of events. But they found no sign of his wife in the house. Perhaps it really was all his fault.