Eight months after my divorce from Dominic, I saw a woman he had led me to believe was dead. Her name was Kayla Kimrey, and she had worked as a cleaner at Dominic’s firm until – so he had told me – she had overdosed on fentanyl sometime towards the end of 2018. I knew nothing else about her life, and if I asked any further questions about the circumstances of her death, then either Dominic didn’t have the answers, or I’ve since forgotten what they were. I am sure I would have said that I was sorry – she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five – and I expect that Dominic probably quoted some statistic off his phone about chemical withdrawal or per-capita prescription volumes or the relative potency of fentanyl to other drugs; nothing about the conversation struck me as peculiar, at any rate, and after it, I scarcely thought of Kayla Kimrey until the day I saw her lining up to board the boat to Doubtful Sound.
She looked oddly younger than when I’d seen her last. Her hair was up in a high ponytail, seeming straighter and blonder than I remembered, and showing off multiple piercings in each ear. Had her ears been pierced like that when she had worked at Marbus? No matter: there was no question in my mind that it was her. She was wearing a hard-shell jacket that was zipped up past her chin, and as she shuffled forward in the queue, she kept ducking her face into her collar and pressing her mouth tight against the windproof panel, extending and then retracting her jaw in a compulsive motion I had seen her make before. I was on board already, standing at the shoreside railing with a mug of milky coffee in my hand, and I had a sudden urge to throw it at her – not to hurt her, not even to provoke her, really; just to do something that no one would be able to predict. I imagined it exploding at her feet, imagined people shrieking, shouting, leaping back, imagined Kayla whipping round in shock and disbelief until she raised her head and noticed me above her, empty-handed, looking down.
Instead, I turned around and shut my eyes and tried to regulate my breathing. I felt a strange exhilaration: a sense of inward precipice, a rush of air. Since my divorce I have discovered that it is very difficult to explain to people that your ex-husband is a pathological narcissist without coming off like a pathological narcissist yourself; but here was proof, concrete proof, at last, that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t paranoid, or sick, or playing games, that it was him, that he was the liar, that he was the manipulator, that he was the one who’d gaslit me, for years, through deceptions and petty cruelties purposely designed to be so trivial, and so obscure, and so inconsequential to anybody’s happiness but mine, that I would seem hysterical even to perceive them. Like telling me a cleaner at his firm was dead – for no reason, probably, beyond the expectation that I’d repeat the lie at some workplace barbecue in months or years to come, and nobody would have any idea what I was talking about, and I’d appeal to him to back me up, and he would feign bewilderment, assuring me that Kayla Kimrey was very much alive and well, and asking me how much I’d had to drink, and denying any memory of ever mentioning her name to me except in passing, and soon everybody would be laughing nervously, and I’d be feeling every bit the raving lunatic that he was painting me to be, and later we would fight, for hours, over whether he’d embarrassed me or I’d embarrassed him, and he’d be stony cold, and I’d be sobbing, and he’d be saying I had sabotaged his self-esteem, and did I realise how insane I’d sounded and how utterly humiliated he had been, in front of his workmates, in front of his boss, and steadily my confidence would weaken to the point that I’d apologise for contradicting him in public, whereupon he’d tell me that I wasn’t sorry, I was only playing yet another game, drawing attention to his insecurities, making him feel like a child, mocking him, bringing him down, and by now it would be long past midnight, and I’d be visibly exhausted, but he’d refuse to let me go to bed until our disagreement was resolved, which of course it never would be, because he’d lied, because he always lied, because he was a liar, and every time I yawned or closed my eyes he’d pinch my leg and say that I was only acting, that I was only pretending to be tired as a way to hurt him even more, that I was phoney, that I was twisted, that I was pathetic, that I had no backbone, that I sickened him, until finally, maligned, belittled, enervated, trembling mad, I’d snap – which of course was what he’d planned for all along. In fights with Dominic, I was always first to hit below the belt. He knew it, and he counted on it. Whatever nasty things I said or did to him, he could then hold over me forever after, demanding ransom in whatever form of payment that he chose.
But I was in New Zealand to put all of this behind me.
My eyes were still shut tight. I breathed. I gripped the mug. I felt the deck beneath my feet. I told myself what I should do. I should wait till the last of Kayla’s group had boarded, then slip off the boat before she noticed me, muttering quietly that I had taken ill. I should return to the ticket office, where I should tell the staff that I wanted to exchange my ticket for a different day when I was feeling better, and as soon as the replacement ticket had been sorted out, I should ask if somebody would drive me back to my hotel. Then, without further ado, I should leave, not watching as the boat cast off and motored down the river and towards the lake, not wondering what on earth she was doing here, in New Zealand, on a package tour, not permitting any further thought of her at all.
I opened my eyes again. I knew that Dominic had cheated on me. I couldn’t tell you when, or with whom, or how many times, but I was certain that he had. At the top of every list of narcissistic traits is the fact that narcissists tend to be promiscuous, and I couldn’t count how many times he’d come home late, and sometimes very late, never saying where he’d been, but always showering before he came to bed. It killed me that I had never caught him, especially since he fitted the profile in every other way. When I’d first started joining support groups and discussion boards for people trapped in bad relationships, I’d been astonished by how much of other victims’ testimonials I recognised. Isolate, confuse, self-alienate, deprive of sleep and other basic liberties, assault, incite to violence, disproportionately punish, withhold affection and reward: had it not been for these online communities, I might never have understood that these are very common methods of control. And it wasn’t just the patterns that I recognised. It wasn’t just the fights, the silence in between the fights, the debilitating vigilance, the shame, the misery, the period of helpless dread, and then the fight again; it was the actual lines of dialogue. Sometimes, reading these accounts online, it was as though I was reading an exact transcription of a fight I’d had with Dominic. It was as though there’d been another person in the room.
I turned again to get a second look at her. She was halfway up the gangway now, eyes still cast down, mouth and chin still buried in her collar. From the space around her, I guessed that she was travelling alone: there was an Asian family in the line ahead of her, and a couple in their sixties immediately behind. What was she doing here – a night-shift service worker from Grand Rapids, Michigan, vacationing halfway across the planet, day-tripping out to see a fjord? Doubtful Sound was one of the remotest corners of the country. It was miles from any major settlement, disconnected from any major road. To get there, as I knew already from the tour brochure, you had to cross Lake Manapouri, then disembark to where a fleet of coaches had been shipped into the wilderness to ferry you across a mountain pass. On the other side, a second boat was waiting to take you out into the silent fjord and back again. All up, the trip would take you seven hours. After you had left the wharf and crossed the lake and traversed the distant pass, after you had reached the sound itself, that was it. You were committed. There was nowhere else to go.
There was nowhere else for her to go.
She slid an arm out of her backpack and pulled it round to take a pair of sunglasses out of the front pocket. I watched her put them on. It had never even crossed my mind before that he had slept with her, and God knows I’d suspected almost everybody else; the first few times I’d laid eyes on her, in fact, were from the Marbus parking lot, parked up in the shadows, trying to glimpse him at his office window, or at any other window – while Kayla went from room to room, emptying wastebaskets, wiping down computer screens, dusting blinds, periodically dipping her chin and pressing her mouth into the drawstring of her hoodie in just the way that she was doing now.
She stepped on board, and the couple behind her followed. I didn’t move. She passed into the cabin and out of my line of sight. The crew pulled up the gangway and cast off the mooring ropes. The engine juddered, and we were on our way.
Photograph © Alice Zoo
