Read The Burning Point Online

Authors: Mary Jo Putney

Tags: #Fiction, #Wrecking, #Family Violence, #Contemporary, #General, #Romance, #Family & Relationships, #Abuse

The Burning Point (33 page)

BOOK: The Burning Point
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Neither of them spoke again until they reached their carport. She climbed out without waiting for him and headed into the house. Donovan caught up with her as she was digging in her purse for keys.

"I'll do that." He opened the door, then stood aside for her.

She brushed past him and into the kitchen. After a numb moment, she pulled a block of cheese from the refrigerator and took a slicing knife from the silverware drawer. She hadn't eaten since breakfast, and knew from experience that if she didn't get her blood sugar up right away, her temper would snap. God only knew what might happen then.

Donovan followed her into the kitchen. "Sam won't have anything to do with Tom, and I want your promise that you won't, either. Your father has enough to upset him without having your disloyalty thrown in his face."

"Disloyalty!" Outraged, Kate slapped the knife on the counter. "Sam is the one that's disloyal! How can he disown his own son over something that isn't Tom's fault?"

"If Tom can't help himself, he should have had the decency to stay in the closet! I sure as hell was happier not knowing what turned him on."

"No one should have to live that kind of lie." Kate took a deep breath, trying to slow her hammering pulse. "I'm not going to turn my back on Tom, and my mother won't, either. Frankly, I expected Sam to take the news badly, but I thought better of you. How could you be so rotten?"

Canisters jumped as Donovan banged his fist onto the counter. "You're no one to talk about behavior! Christ, Kate, how could you lie to me? What else have you been hiding?"

"There's a big difference between a lie and keeping someone else's secret!" she retorted. "I couldn't tell you about Tom when he'd specifically asked me not to. He obviously knew better than I what a jerk you'd be."

Donovan exploded across the kitchen, tall and broad and furious. "Don't you talk to me that way! You're my wife, and I won't allow you to hurt Sam, or hang out with a bunch of queers."

Her control shattered. "Why? Do you think that homosexuality is contagious?" she snapped, searching for words that would hurt him as much as he'd hurt her. "Are you secretly afraid you're really a Patsy, not a Patrick?"

His fist smashed into her jaw, flinging her backward. She slammed into the edge of the counter. Head spinning, she clung to the cabinet, dazed and hurting but too furious to feel fear.

After an appalled instant, Donovan moved toward her. "Jesus, Kate, you shouldn't make me do things like that!"

His words struck her harder than his fist had. "You bastard! Don't you
dare
try to make this my fault! I've bent over backwards to be understanding about your rotten temper, to make allowances, but I've had enough! The problem is
you
, not me, and I'm not going to stay here to get hit again."

Donovan froze, his expression horrified. "No. Kate, you can't leave me."

She touched her numbed jaw, and knew with absolute certainty that if she didn't leave now, their marriage was doomed to a downward spiral of violence and fear. Gradually he had undermined her confidence, cut her off from her friends, isolated her more and more. If she stayed any longer, it would be as a broken woman.

"I have to leave," she said unsteadily. "Maybe counseling will help, but I'm not staying in this house while we find out."

She reached for her purse, but before she could get it, Donovan said desperately, "You can't go! You're the best thing that ever happened to me. I swear to God I'll never hurt you again!"

Jerking her arm from his grip, she said bitterly, "You've said that before. And you know what? I don't believe you anymore."

"We have so much! Don't throw it away in a moment of anger." He caught her shoulders, pleading, "I...I can't live without you."

She could see his terror of losing her, but this time she was desperate, too. "Let me go!"

Lost in his own private hell, he didn't hear her entreaty. Knotting his hand in her hair, he pulled her head back and locked his arm around her waist to hold her close as he kissed her with suffocating intensity.

They had come together in passion and love a thousand times before. More than once, conflict had been healed by intimacy.

This time she felt revulsion, and rising panic. God help her, she was at his mercy, helpless against his size and strength. Near hysteria, she twisted her face away, weeping. "Don't do this! Oh, God,
please
don't do this."

As easily as if she were a child, he pushed her back against the counter. "You're mine, Kate,
mine
. I love you so much. I can't let anyone else have you."

His hands trapping her in a bruising grip, he kissed her again. Her frantic hand swept across the counter, seeking a weapon. Found a familiar long, narrow shape. Clutched. Raised.

Stabbed.

He cried out and let her go, staggering back against the refrigerator as blood spilled from a slash that ran from his left shoulder to his elbow. With shaking fingers he touched the wound, then stared at the crimson stains.

She almost vomited at the sight of his blood. Dear God in heaven, she might have killed him!

He raised his gaze and the expression on his face would haunt her forever. For an eternal moment they stared at each other as the fabric of their marriage, the last threads of intimacy and commitment and trust, ripped asunder.

Trying to deny the shattering truth, Donovan said in a voice of eerie calm, "Don't worry, Kate, it's not deep. I've been hurt worse working on my car. I'll be fine. Let's just...sit down and give ourselves a chance to unwind."

Numbly she stared at the stained knife still in her hand. "It's too late, Patrick," she whispered.

"No! It can't be too late!" he said, agonized.

She shook her head wordlessly. Wishing she were dead.

A terrible resignation came over him, like a man who had been mortally wounded and knew that further struggle for life would be futile. He sagged back against the refrigerator and slowly slid to the floor. "It's all my fault. I'm sorry, Kate. So...damned...sorry."

She gazed at him for one last time, the handsome face that she loved, the strong body that had given her such joy.

The blood that seeped between his fingers.

This was the man she had thought would be beside her as long as they both should live. How could she bear to leave him?

In a voice laced with anguish, he whispered, "If you're going to go, do it quickly, Kate. For both our sakes."

Saturated with pain beyond anything she had ever imagined, she carefully laid the stained knife on the counter. Then she lifted her purse and walked out of the house that had known her greatest happiness and her blackest sorrow.

She didn't see the man she had married for ten long years.

 

Chapter 30

∗ ∗ ∗

"Kate, you still with us?" Val's voice broke Kate's reverie. Pulling herself back to the present, she said, "Trying to decide between peach cobbler and Death of a Thousand Chocolates cake is serious business and requires concentration."

"Get the peach cobbler," Laurel advised. "I'm doing the chocolate cake. We can share. That way, we'll both survive."

When they finally ended their three-hour lunch, Laurel said, "Kate, Rachel, do you want to come with Val and me to the crafts expo?"

"I was there yesterday, buying the place out," Kate answered. "There won't be anything left for you today."

"Would you like to go for a walk, Kate?" Rachel said. "I could use some fresh air."

Kate knew that more than a walk was being offered. "That would be nice. We can look for crocuses."

"Croci," Val said. "Remember your Latin declensions, girls."

On a wave of laughter and hugs, they settled the bill with a tip that would double the waitress's income for the day, then went into the pale spring sunshine. Laurel climbed into Val's old Toyota, and the two of them headed for downtown.

As Kate and Rachel crossed the small lot to the street, Kate said idly, "A silver Honda just like mine is parked next to my car."

"The burgundy one is yours? The silver car is mine."

"We always did have similar tastes. When my Honda arrived in Baltimore, courtesy of a couple of east-bound grad students, Donovan told me I was a lemming with no automotive imagination."

"Men. What did you say?"

"That if it's lemming-like to appreciate a reliable, well-designed car, then lead me to the nearest cliff. Donovan, naturally, prefers vehicles with attitude, like his Harley and classic Corvette."

Rachel turned left along Roland Avenue, the tree-lined residential boulevard that ran through Roland Park. "You were off in Never-Never land there for a while."

"If only it had been Never-Never land. I went somewhere very real."

"I thought as much. Were you thinking of the day you left Donovan?"

Kate had driven around in a daze, ending at Rachel's apartment. Her shocked friend had put aside her textbooks and tended Kate's hurts. She wanted to see Donovan arrested and thrown into jail immediately, but Kate had flatly refused to allow Rachel to call anyone but Tom. Instinctively she'd known it was essential to think through what had happened before setting into motion events beyond her control.

"Yes. I still think silence was best. My father was devastated at Tom's coming out, and my insistence on divorce was almost as bad. Donovan was the son he'd always wanted, the most satisfactory of his children. It would have broken Sam's heart to know that Donovan was abusing me. Besides, maybe the police would have arrested
me
. Donovan was the one who got knifed."

"If you'd told your father the whole story, he might have lost Donovan, but he'd still have had you. And you were the apple of his eye."

"I needed to leave Maryland, so he'd have lost me anyhow. This way, he still had Donovan, and I think they were each other's salvation." Kate believed that to her very marrow. Tom had rushed to Kate after Rachel called him. Unable to persuade Kate to call the police, he suggested she join him in California. There, safe from Donovan, she could start a new life. She had seized on the idea. More than anything else, it was her brother's kindness and understanding that had pulled her through.

The next morning, Kate had called her parents and announced she was filing for divorce. All hell broke loose. Sam had become enraged all over again. The only thing he might have accepted as legitimate grounds for divorce was the truth, and Kate would not reveal it. Julia had attempted to mediate, but Kate wouldn't talk to her, either. Within twenty-four hours of leaving her husband, she was estranged from her father in a breach that was never fully healed. Later Kate realized that Sam had blamed Tom for the divorce, deepening the family schism still further.

Rachel broke into her thoughts. "Does Donovan know how lucky he was that you let him off the hook?"

"He knows. Frankly, he might have been happier if I'd crucified him. But what good would it have done to destroy his life?" Kate kicked a pebble along the sidewalk. "Incidentally, Donovan recently told me that his father was an abusive alcoholic. In earlier days he couldn't bear to talk about it."

"That explains a lot--abusers were often abused themselves when they were children. Donovan's family may have been caught in a cycle of violence for generations," Rachel said. "But I gather you two are getting along well now."

"Surprisingly so. As housemates, we're quite compatible. We stay out of each other's way."

"Not a bad recipe for marriage, actually."

"This is nothing like marriage." The thought made the chocolate cake Kate had eaten coagulate in her stomach like lead.

"Sounds as if the scars are still tender."

Kate sighed. "Why do men batter their wives, Doc?"

"Some men like inflicting pain, but usually abuse is a way of establishing control, showing who's boss," Rachel said thoughtfully. "Some abusers must control everything. Others are losers who can control very little in their lives except their own household, so they keep the wife and kids in line with anger and ridicule and violence.

"Then there are motives such as fear of losing the partner. Control your wife, don't let her have normal relationships with others, keep her dependent so she won't slip her leash."

Donovan had always been horrified by his own violence. And, while he was precise and well-organized in his work and personal life, he wasn't a full-spectrum control freak. Apparently he was the sort who had battered and controlled from fear of losing his wife. Kate quoted, "Each man kills the thing he loves best."

"Not always, but too damned often. If you doubt it, spend Saturday night in an emergency room some time. With a family history of alcoholism, drinking was probably the trigger that set Donovan off."

"He told me that himself. I never caught on, because most of the time his drinking didn't seem to affect him," Kate said. "Lord, but I was stupid. I thought that love was enough, but it isn't. Do batterers ever change?"

"Sometimes, if they're motivated enough," Rachel said. "But more often they just find another woman to abuse. Maybe that's what Donovan has been doing."

BOOK: The Burning Point
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