When she came to, Dr. Mutua was leaning over her with a bottle of a foul-smelling substance. He was telling her something about how the shock of seeing her beloved husband finally pass away must have caused her to faint. He would think that, wouldn’t he? To the doctor and the rest of the world Mark and Marie’s marriage had been as close to perfect as they came. However, beloved wasn’t a word Marie would use on Mark… but there was a time when she had loved him with all her being.
Funny the way a woman’s first love is always so very special, so very right. But most women don’t marry their Mr. Right… they break up with him, meet Mr. Right-Now, Mr. Almost Right and his best friend Mr. Wolf-in-Sheep-Clothing…and at the end of it all, they get married to Mr. Responsible (someone they can trust to be the father of their children).
But Marie had cheated fate, hadn’t she? She had met and married her Mr. Right within a year of their first meeting. And for a while she was happy…ignorance is indeed bliss. Marie cursed the day that she had accidentally walked in on Mark’s business meeting in the study of their home. She did not think to knock on the door as she usually did, but instead pushed the door open only to come face to face with a scene that would change her life forever. Mark had a pistol shoved literally half way down a man’s mouth and had this devilish glint in his eye. When their eyes met, Marie came face to face with a complete stranger. She couldn’t speak, but her eyes spoke volumes to him. It must have hurt Mark a little to see his fall from the pedestal Marie had placed him on, but if he was in pain, he must have had some form of relief from it, because he did not even flinch when he flatly asked her to shut the door behind her.
That very evening, Mark summoned her into his study for with all intents and purposes could have been a boss-employee discussion. Mark was the boss, and it was slowly dawning on Marie that she had unwittingly become his employee. It took just one hour for Mark to explain his family’s involvement in the drug-smuggling and distribution industry, but at the end of it all Marie had aged drastically. She had so many questions to ask him, but all she could manage was a feeble “Why?” Mark countered her question with a rhetorical one of his own: “Would you still have married me if you knew then what you know now?”
From that point on, Marie lived through the agony of watching her perfect life fall to pieces. Her husband no longer had to bother himself in trying to shield her from the horrors that his line of business entailed. She never questioned the late-night meetings in his study, the sudden business trips to undisclosed locations or even the suspicious briefcases Mark was always carrying in and out of the house. They lived in the same house for a year without ever really speaking to each other. Even when they passed by each other in the hallways or staircases of their massive home, not even a simple greeting was exchanged between the two of them.
What she hated the most was having to maintain the charade of their “perfect marriage” to the outside world. She smiled at the camera men at all the public functions her husband dragged her to but anyone who had known her before her marriage could see that her smile had become rather shallow…her eyes no longer lit up as they used to. Her smile was perfectly rehearsed for the camera.
She had toyed with the idea of running away from Mark, escaping to some unknown island in the middle of nowhere, but deep down she always knew that would remain her personal escapist fantasy. Mark had assigned two body guards to her in the day that she had moved into his house. At the time he had insisted that she needed to be looked after because of how rich they were and because of all those poorer people who might want to hurt her. But in retrospect, Marie now understood that her bodyguards also watched her every move. They were well paid to spy on her, to be sure that she wouldn’t want to run off to the police or the media to tell them of his family’s illegal dealings.
At times Marie would sit by a window overlooking the city and watch people as they passed by. With time, she became acquainted with a few of the regular passers-by. There was an elderly woman who would pass by at around 8.00 am every morning with a toddler in tow. One morning she happened to catch a few phrases of their conversation: “Grandma, who lives in that big house over there? Is that a castle? Does a queen live there?” The young girl was assailing her grandmother with a tirade of questions. Obviously she was asking about Mark’s house.
“Yes, little girl. A queen does live here. A sad queen who has everything she could ever want, but nothing that she needs. She is very sad and very lonely, but nobody can ever know about it. Yes, a queen lives in this castle. But how she wishes she could be a pauper again if only to be truly free again.” Marie mouthed her answer to the toddler as she wiped away the single tear that ran down her perfectly powdered cheek. Since then, Marie never looked out of that window again. She did not need any more painful reminders about the prison she lived in. Instead she spent endless hours wandering through the garden, baking in the kitchen or reading in the library. She made herself forget about the pulsating world beyond the walls that surrounded their house.
Another year went by in this slow and mundane manner, but then out of nowhere, Mark informed her that they were to make a trip to Europe. He had asked her to pack everything she valued, and from the tone of his voice it sounded as if they were leaving the country for good. It was at this point that Marie’s brave front cracked. She wept at his feet, begging him not to force her to leave her family and friends behind. He had turned his back on her and was heading towards his study when in one desperate moment she had lunged at him and hit him with a glass vase on his head. No sooner had the vase shattered than the man she hated as passionately as she had once loved fell to the ground in a pool of his own blood.
Her screams had alerted the household staff of the incident or was it accident? (Well that depends on whose version of the story you heard thereafter.) Everything after that was one big blur. What with the ambulance and its wailing siren, her being bundled into a police saloon, the detective’s insinuative line of questioning, she had just about had it when Dr. Mutua had rescued her from this vicious mob to run some tests on her because he suspected that she was suffering from a severe case of post-traumatic stress.
There was a huge media frenzy once details of Marie’s attack on her husband became public knowledge. Reporters followed her to the court room, to her house and everywhere she went. Marie learned to utter the words “No Comment” into the microphones and tape recorders that were thrust in her face with the same relative ease as she had previously smiled for photographers. She withdrew further into a life of seclusion at her mansion to avoid all the pressure and callous insinuations by press and public alike.
Weeks went by and everyday Mark’s condition remained the same. He had slipped into a comma, and although his doctors had hoped he would recover, his odds for survival got worse with ever passing day. When his body could no longer function without the aid of various life-support devices, Dr. Mutua had called Marie into his office to ask her to make what he thought would be a very difficult decision for a young loving wife.
“Marie, we have done everything that we could for Mark, but now we have to accept the fact that he may never get better. Even if he does regain consciousness, you must understand that he may never regain control of all his body functions. It would be humiliating for a man who was used to being in control of his own life to have to depend on a nurse to feed, bathe and change him. Marie, I know you still love him a lot, but surely you must see that he has lost all his humanity at this point. The best thing that we can do for him is to just let him go.” And with this Dr. Mutua had ended his passionate appeal to Marie. Euthanasia was still illegal in their country, but for a family that had thrived on bending laws, it came as no surprise that Mark had written up a clause in his will which would allow for him to be “put out of his misery” if the need arose.
“Do it”, was all Marie said. She gave him permission to do that which she herself had failed to do; kill Mark. And so early that August morning she had gone with Dr. Mutua into Mark’s room and in an instant ended the life of her ‘beloved’ husband.
Now Dr. Mutua was standing beside her looking very grim indeed. All of a sudden, Marie got this sinking feeling in her stomach. She tried to brush it aside by appealing to her sense of logic and reason. “He is dead now, so there is nothing to worry about now. Now I can try to put my life back together. Thank God he can’t hurt me any more…”
Her line of thought was interrupted when Dr. Mutua spoke again. “But to be honest, Marie, I was worried that it was a bit more than stress affecting you, so I ran some tests on you.” He paused for a while and sighed heavily before continuing: “There is no easy way to say this Marie. I know this will only compound the sense of loss you must be feeling now that Mark is dead…it’s just sad that he won’t get a chance to be a father to the child you are carrying now.”
Marie did not hear any of the other things that Dr. Mutua was rambling about after that. The only thoughts that resounded in her head were: “It will never really be over. He made sure that there would always be a constant reminder of him with me. I won’t ever be free!”
As a single tear slowly streamed down her face, Dr. Mutua again mistook her emotions for grief and held her hand as if to comfort her. But at that very instant in time, it dawned upon Marie that there was nothing anyone could ever say or do to make her feel better. And then out of nowhere, an idea popped in to her head. Why not just end it all? To die must be better than to go through life feeling half-dead, mustn’t it?
THE END
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