What would you do?

Her and the kids had gone skiing that weekend. He was on-call at the hospital of course, and so yet again he wouldn’t be able to attend his own family vacation. Her youngest had caught a cold and so they decided to return home to sunny California a few days early to finally get away from the snow. The earliest flight out of Colorado got them in LA way past the kids’ bedtime so off to bed they went once they all arrived. He wasn’t home yet. “He’s probably at the hospital,” she thought to herself. He was head of neurosurgery after all. And in an instant, her whole life fell apart. There they were in their bedroom. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Her mind no longer had the ability to control her actions. She wanted to lash out, to throw things, to yell, something to demonstrate the excruciating internal pain a so-called healer had inflicted upon her. But nothing came. The two of them began to fumble out of bed and put their clothes on. He was trying to say something to her, was it an explanation? It felt as though she no longer understood any words or any language. He reached out to her, and then it happened, with all of her might something inside of her, within the deepest depths of her soul, came some sort of reserve of unfounded strength. She pulled her right arm back, and swung at his face. She hit him. He stumbled and almost fell. The girl rushed to his side to aid him, apologizing, crying, displaying so many guilty emotions. She hit the girl too, and she began to bleed. Then somehow she managed the words, “Get out.” The two picked up their clothes off of the floor and wearily rushed out of the house. She knew she should call someone, anyone, but she couldn’t. Everyone thought they had the perfect life. College sweethearts, two beautiful children, the perfect house, the perfect jobs, of course they had to have the perfect marriage. Even she had thought up until about thirty seconds before that she was living in a dream. Which is exactly what it seemed to her now, nothing but a dream. She walked downstairs into their perfect living room, lay on their perfect couch, with the perfect blanket his mother knit for the children on her Australian cruise and willed herself to sleep. Because maybe, if she just rested, this wouldn’t have really happened. Maybe she was still inside her dream of the perfect life. So she lied, because it was the only choice she had in this instance, and told herself “It will all be okay in the morning. Everything will be okay.”