Rocío Grimaldo

Narrative embedding exercise

"Unsafe"

I draw circles on his chest as my eyelids start to close. He shakes me. I growl and bury my nose in his skin inhaling his scent, like it was my last breath, taking in as much as I could. He kisses the top of my head.

---

I remember the first time he did that.

We were walking through marshes, cutting across fields to get to a beach. We had stopped to look at the view. He suddenly grabbed me by the waist and swung me around in circles while I screamed and laughed. He stopped and kissed my head.

“You like?” he asked.

I nodded.

He turned me around to face him.

“I’m going to make you fall in love with me,” he said.

I blushed.

As we marched down towards the turquoise sea I thought I couldn’t be happier. We spent a week alone with the bare minimums. He had thought about every detail. I thought I could love him forever.

---

“I can’t believe this happened to us”, he says now.

I try to keep my expression neutral as I look up at him. “Yes, thank God she’s fine.”

It is the first time we slept in the same bed after I’d spent a week sleeping by our 12-year-old daughter’s bed. Paranoia is a chronic disease.

---

Three weeks ago Claudia was kidnapped walking home from school. She is not the same. She is withdrawn and doesn’t want to leave the house. She sleeps in the guest room. Her therapist says she needs time to heal. I am not the same either, but it’s not only because of Claudia’s kidnapping. He is having an affair and I learned about it while Claudia was taken. Those days we couldn’t sleep, we talked to the police every day, we met with the private investigator we hired. My mother stayed with us for a while. A roller coaster of hope and despair.

We were on the edge and snappy with each other. But our only child was taken, we couldn’t feel otherwise, could we?

One of those nights, I said I would go to my friend Anna’s. After leaving the house I realised I forgot my key. So I returned to get it and was about to close the backdoor when the phone rang.For some reason I knew it wasn’t about Claudia. He picked it up upstairs and I heard him come down the stairs, talking in a low voice.Why would he not speak normally?

“Yeah, no word..This is hell..Ahhh, I miss you.”

A cold paralysis infused my body and an ache started to form in my chest. I pretended to make a sandwich but tried to not make noise.

”No, no, I can’t. This is too complicated right now. I know you mean well but I can’t think about that…”

He walked into the kitchen and saw me. He hid his surprise and aha’ed his way out of the call.

“That was John, he wanted to know if we had any news,” he explained.

“Okay”, I said and lowered my gaze.

I wrapped the sandwich, put it in a bag and went out with it, but not to Anna’s.

I walked for hours.

The ache inside my chest pulsated and grew, while tears flowed and abated and flowed. My daughter was probably dead and my husband was no longer mine.I got home. And slept. From that day on he started sleeping in the living room. I didn’t ask him why.

The next morning I knew what to do. Everything was broken.

While I sipped coffee I watched him sleep on the couch. His puffy face, his crow’s feet, his shallow breathing. I don’t know who you are, I thought.

He opened his eyes.

The phone rang. I ran and picked it up.

They found my daughter. In a warehouse. In her underwear. Alive. We ran out of the house, jumped in the car and drove to the site.

She was crying, we hugged her and tried to help her mend her life. But can Claudia ever trust again? Feel safe again? If you lose that, could you ever regain it? Did I want to even try? Can I pretend I am not in pieces? I didn’t know what to do.

---

I get up, put a robe on and sit in front of the bed. He looks at me, waiting.

“I know you are cheating on me,” I say point-blank.

“No, I left her and it’s over,” he said without blinking.

“I cannot live with you anymore.”

I stand up.

“Wait,” he says and grabs my hand.

“Ter…That is over. It was a mistake.”

“Look, the man I married wouldn’t have betrayed me. I don’t know you.”

“I am the man you married. I haven’t changed.”

“Then I’ve been fooled for 13 years.”

“I love you and only you.”

“Sleeping with another woman is not love, Jack. I’m going to talk to Claudia.”

“You can’t leave now after what Claudia has gone through.”

“I can. It is worse for her to see how her father has stopped loving her mother.”