Caption from "Surrender" a Novel by Rebecca Easton

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I heard shouting like I’d never known before. Not even in the blood curdling screams of my maternal parent just before she’d inflict her blow when I was a young girl. My ears pounded with the frightening tone that bellowed through our house. I did not recognize the noise as coming from any adult I knew, but I suspected it was from my husband. I searched the house feverishly trying to find out what had happened.

I saw him standing there in a small secondary bedroom. His face was turned away from me. He looked out of a window that seemed so bright with sunshine that my eyes hurt. I stood there in the doorway watching for a moment wondering what had taken place. I whispered, “Are you alright?”

He spun so furiously that his arms knocked against the blinds covering the window and all of the sudden the room had partial shade. I could barely see his eyes but I knew they met mine when he stopped, because his whole body went taunt and rigid. I’d seen this maneuver before. It usually meant that whomever the human was in front of me, I was about to sustain their unleashed fury. I stepped back.

To my amazement he didn’t move. He whispered, “I cannot do this anymore.” His head didn’t lower. His body did not shift. He remained a cold lifeless statue.

We stood our ground for what seemed a lifetime, but in mere seconds his arms raised with fists clenched tightly up into the air. “Why!” He screamed. “I cannot do this anymore!” The words did not seem to have any calming effect whatsoever, nor was the burst of the scream attached to them.

He lowered his hands as he stared at the fists he made. His head rose to look in my direction. His fists dropped to the side of his body and he came at me with the most brisk of walk crossing the gap between us in an instant. I hadn’t any time to step backwards. I held my breath and closed my eyes as I felt a powerful surge of air past by me. When I opened them back up he wasn’t anywhere within the vicinity.

Cautiously I walked around corners and through all my other secondary bedrooms in search of him. I went to the den, and the dining room and then into the kitchen. There he was with his arms stretched out and both his hands firmly gripping the kitchen counter tops as he stood beside them. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there partially behind the wall looking at him. My presence seemed to give him the authority to engage further in the fury that was obviously brewing deep inside. This time, however, he did not look in my direction nor did he validate my presence. In a moment of time he’d slammed both his fists into the granite counter tops. Again the next moment repeated over and over until the soft skin that covered the knuckles began to bleed.

He began to shout but the blood rage had taken over and between his rage and my fear I couldn’t understand what could have happened that was so bad? I knew my children to be sleeping soundly in their beds. It was late in the afternoon and I hadn’t heard of any tragedy when he arrived home early from work. Even though I was fearful of whatever this pain was doing to him I was confused as to what had brought it upon us that evening. I wanted desperately to help him stop hurting his hands, but I knew that if I walked one step in the midst of all that pounding, I would end up the body bleeding. So I watched.

He became weary with his furious punching and within minutes his legs gave way allowing him to kneel on the tiles of the kitchen floor. His enraged fury seemed to be calming more into anger. My lips pursed as I wondered what my next move should be. Still I did not move.

His bloody arms and fists wrapped around his stomach as though the pain of his torment lie deep within the depths of his body. Then he looked at me with wide frightened eyes. Our eyes locked and his filled with tears. In an instant the tears had blocked his site and flowed uncontrollably down his cheek. Upon doing so they broke our stare. He looked up at the bloody counter and hit the cabinets below because the blood had drizzled down staining them too. He got up, walked in the den and sat down on the floor in a calm quiet fashion. Almost too surreal to know that moments ago he possessed a rage so powerful that he’d hurt his livelihood.

Again, I peered around the corner after following him to watch and make sure he was calm enough to approach. When he looked up at me from the floor his calmness was not reassuring. I’d seen the coldness of that stare before. I had not given him the release he so desperately craved by keeping my distance, and I knew deep in the pit of my soul that I was the reason. Yet I had no idea what I had done that could have been so profoundly wounding. I said “What is it. What have I done?”

He whispered through tightly controlled lips, “What? You don’t know?”

My eyes blinked confused, my mind raced for anything that could explain his rage, but none of my actions could remotely be accused of this cause. I answered softly, “No. I have no idea.”

He fell backwards furiously and then tossed side to side like a demon had possessed his body. He was crying so loudly that I could barely hear the faint calls of my daughter. Terrified for her safety and well being my maternal instincts kicked in. I shouted to him, “You’ve woken her! Stop this and I mean now!”

He stopped. He calmed and he looked up at me. In the blink of one of his tear stained eyes, he was on his feet. The gap between us was crossed and he was standing over me with a fury I’d only ever seen in my mother’s eyes. I should have been afraid. I should have been warned, but all I felt was the rage of my own welling up inside me. “You need to stop.” I firmly stated.

“Stop what? You did this? How do you like me now? Is this what you wanted?” He said while waving his bloody hands everywhere.

“You’re getting your blood everywhere. Come on, sit down and let’s talk about it.” I insisted. I walked to the couch and sat down as a measure of good faith to calm him further.

It worked exactly the opposite. His rage exploded and before I knew it I was up off the couch and we were nose to nose again. In that instant I knew that if I did not say something to him to get him to realize his blood rage had completely taken over him I knew I wouldn’t be able to. I knew that my life was about to change in an instant and I understood deep in the pit of my despair that I would kill him if he struck me. I screamed, “You want a piece of me? You think you’re tough? You son of a bitch, men who are bigger than you have stuck me. You’d better make damn sure that if you pull that trigger, I better be unconscious because you have to sleep sometime. And the authorities will never find your body!” I looked dead into his ice cold eyes and I whispered, “I mean it.”

He shook. His eyes jolted from mine. He stepped back. He backed up. He composed what was left of his mind and his eyes softened. He blinked over and over and then said, “Whoa, calm down.”

I shook my head dazed and confused. I tried desperately to calm my own rage as he seemed to be getting a handle on his own. He paced around the coffee table while I stood shaking uncontrollably. Then he walked over to me and put his hands firmly on my face. “I’m sorry.” He whispered.

My eyes were wild with fear and shock from what had just happened. I pushed his hands away, and walked to the hallway where I needed to check on my crying daughter. I kept one eye over my shoulder out for him, because that night I learned he couldn’t be trusted.
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