I am called Lisa Fanning.  Some of you despise me for my weakness, but look at me closely.  I am your sister.  I am your co-worker in the next cubicle.  Except for fate, I could be you.

        I was young when I met David, not quite eighteen.  I had been a victim of abuse by my father and of neglect by my mother.  I was never quite pretty enough to suit her.  All my short life I had tried to be inconspicuous, in order to escape their notice; but as I matured physically, it became impossible.  I ran straight from my father’s advances to the arms of the first man who seemed to care, David.

        I had very few friends, but even one as ugly and unworthy of notice as I was, I did have a couple of girl friends, Sophia and Céline.  Our friendship had been forged in shared experiences of pain.  How we found each other was a mysterious working of fate, and not the object of the story I tell now.  Suffice it to say, we were friends, loners and susceptible to any demonstration of kindness.

        My family was wealthy, and it had not been deemed necessary or fit that I have a part-time job.  My mother did not approve of my only two friends.  My parents did allow me to indulge my one whim--painting.  On Saturdays, I was allowed to attend a community art center oil painting class.  How I loved that class!  The sharp smell of the turpentine as I entered the center would set my heart racing and set it free.  For the time I was there, I was not Lisa the loser, I was simply Lisa, the artist, one among many in a class of people who cared not about conformity, wealth or my unconventional looks.  It’s not that I was very good, because truthfully, I lack the ability to analyze my own work.   It was the freedom.

        For four fleeting hours, I was free to imagine and create a world of my own design in oils on canvas.  There was a darkness to my work, but I had been told to explore it, and I did.  I reveled in it.  The demons and darkness of my life were conquered, at least on Saturdays.

        It was one such Saturday that I met David.  That I now understand the reason for his being in the park that day does not lessen the miracle I felt as his gaze centered on me.
Sophie shared my painting class, and we always took an extra half hour to walk and enjoy whatever the season had to offer.  It was late spring, and the flowers were abundant.  We chatted gaily about our work and our future, as we walked along the curving lanes of the park.  Mothers pushing their babies talked to one another.  Sometimes, Sophie and I would stop and admire one of the babies.  We would giggle at the thought that someday we, too, would have children to usher around the park in colorful clothes and strollers.

        It was our attention to one particularly beautiful toddler that caused our inattention to events in our immediate surroundings.  As I walked backward, still chatting with the pretty mother that I bumped into a jogger.  We both went sprawling.  I was mortified, as I looked into the eyes of the mountain of a man I had knocked to the ground. I saw irritation flash through his eyes, then amusement, then, perhaps, something else.

        “I’m so sorry,” I said to him.

        “No, not at all,” he replied.

        He gained his feet quicker than I, and he held his hand to me.  I took it.

        “I’m David,” he said with a wry smile.

        “I--I’m Lisa,” I managed to stutter.  “I--I’m sorry.”  He had blue eyes, sky blue eyes.  It would only be later that I would understand that the richness of their hue was the reflection of the sky that spring day.  Later, I would know them as cold blue eyes, but that is later in my story.  At that moment, he was handsome, and he had already won my fragile heart.

        People around us began shouting and running.  David turned, as if to see what had happened, but then instead asked, “May I walk with you two?”

        I smiled and nodded.  “Yes.”   We walked in the direction of the noise and found that someone had been killed in the park.  It was horrible.  I had never seen death before, and certainly not displayed so indecently midst the innocence of spring tulips.  I turned away and hid my face in David’s strong chest.  He held me gently and comforted me.

        “You should not see this,” he said.  “I will protect you.  I want to protect you forever, Lisa.”

        I went with him that day.  Sophie thought I had lost my mind, a topic oft discussed since then amongst those who heard part of my story.  My parents were outraged, but they died in an automobile accident the next week.  There was no one to give me away, so I gave myself to David.  I was rich.  He took me willingly.  We were married, and I thought to live happily ever after.

        The events of the first few months of our marriage are difficult for me to relate.  I have always been a very private person, and being thrust into the sudden intimacies of marriage were somewhat of a shock.  I mean, first of all, that David was a very domineering and  powerful figure in my life.  I had thought to have freedom to enjoy life with my new husband, but he quickly set limits to that freedom, in the guise of protecting me.  His work kept him traveling, a lot.   He had work associates who ‘guarded’ me when he was away.

        I was happy to find that he apparently had a lot of money as well, and we lived in a beautiful house in the country, armed like a fortress.  I felt very safe there, if a trifle confined.  At least  I knew, he didn’t marry me for my inheritance.  He did, however, take over the control of it.  It was only natural.  He was my husband and more experienced in financial matters.  That was obvious.  He’d been very successful on his own.  I mean what did I know about handling all that money, stocks, bonds and all that portfolio jargon.

        Not knowing any better, I lived an idyllic existence for several months, until David’s return from one of his longer trips.  After speaking with one of his (my) guards, he determined that I had made an inadvertent transgression while he was away.  I had been observed chatting with the young man who attended to our landscaping.  David was most displeased.
 
        He paced back and forth in front of me, while I still had no idea why  he was so angry.  “I don’t want you having anything to do with strange men, while I’m gone, Lisa.  Do you understand me?” he shouted.

        I cringed.  “I don’t know what you mean.  I haven’t done anything, David.”
 
        He jerked me to him.  “Don’t to lie to me, Lisa.  You were seen talking to a stranger on the patio.”

        I had trouble comprehending his swift change in mood.  I’d been so happy to see him come home, and now....  “I--I don’t know what you mean.”

        Slap!  I hadn’t seen the blow coming, but it knocked me to the ground.  It was only the first, but it set a pattern in our lives, a pattern that would become all too familiar.    I tried so hard to be a good wife.  I just knew if only I could keep from irritating him or breaking one of his rules, he would change.  I always failed him in some way.  I would say the wrong thing, or wear the wrong thing or gain five pounds in the wrong place.  David had very strict standards about everything.

        Once I had  committed some grievous error in David’s lexicon of rules, I would be punished.  Punished was his term for the slapping and hitting that accompanied my transgression.  Then he would be so remorseful, apologizing, telling me that if I could only learn to obey, everything would be wonderful between us again.  I did love him.  He was all I had left.  My two friends Sophie and Céline had not come around since my marriage, so my marriage was the only relationship I had.  I was determined to make it work.

        During one of David’s longer business trips one winter I gained six pounds.  I have one of those pear shaped figures, and it all went to my hips and thighs.  Now six pounds is not much, and I really didn’t think too much about it until David came home.  He was not pleased, to say the least.  That time he used terms like hippo and whale to humiliate me in front of his friends.  Needless to say, I determined to lose the ugly fat.  He refused to make love to me until I did.

        It was after he left on his next business trip that I decided to hire a personal trainer.  I wondered what David would think of my doing it on my own, but I decided that if I could hire a female trainer, that he wouldn’t be jealous and that he would be pleased to see my old figure return.  So I did.  Her name was Nikita.

        How to describe Nikita?  She was beautiful.  I suppose she is still, wherever she is.  She was the perfect depiction of a Norse Valkyrie--tall, pale blonde hair, sky blue eyes, strong.  I had no trouble envisioning her riding a mythic horse, wearing armor, and escorting the dead Viking warriors to Valhalla.  I no longer painted, but if I had painted Nikita, I would have depicted her that way.

        We spent two wonderful weeks together.  I fancied that we became friends.  It had been so long since I’d had anyone in whom to confide.  She seemed to understand that I needed a friend.  She seemed to understand, without my telling her, how unhappy I was in my marriage.
 
        When David returned from his latest business trip, he was very irritated to find a stranger in the house, and one that was not afraid of him.  She talked back to him.  I was in constant fear that he would strike her or make her leave.  I didn’t think I could go back to being alone with him again.  It had been several years since I had desired my husband the way I had when we first married.  I was dead to him.  I think he knew it, and it fueled his paranoia about my fidelity.

        The closeness of our situation must have been getting to Nikita, because she suggested we go to the park and run.  I  was thrilled.  I hadn’t been to the park, since the day I’d met David.  After our run, Nikita and I stopped at a juice bar.  It was then my life changed forever.  I met a former client of Nikita’s.  His name was Michael--is Michael.  We commiserated about training while Nikita went for juice.  I wondered how well she knew him.  I was intrigued by him.  He was gentle and soft-spoken.  He had an ethereal inner beauty that one associates with religious icons.  He could have been an angel in an old pre-Renaissance painting.  He could have been so many things;  however, at the moment he appeared to be interested in seeing me again.

        The first time I was to meet him alone, he was late.  I gave up on him and turned to leave, when I was accosted by two ruffians.  Suddenly, Michael was there and fought them.  One went over the side of the foot bridge, and the other ran away in fear.  He was my protector, and I was totally his emotionally, if not physically.  I tried to end it there, but he would not hear of it.  We talked and walked that day.  It was the most normal day of my adult life.

        Nikita managed it so that we could be together again.  I was so grateful to her, I was almost beside myself.  I rushed in where the ‘angels fear to tread.’  He made me feel so alive, so young, so out of control.  It was a heady feeling, and I gloried in it, never thinking that we could be caught, pushing from my mind what would happen if we were caught.
 
        I won’t bore or titillate you with details of  how he kissed (like no other) or where he touched me (everywhere), or how we made love (blissfully).  Understand that I’d had no other man, except David.  My needs were not exactly high on David’s list of priorities, but with Michael....  To say that he was gentle and yet powerful, yielding and yet exacting would be to diminish what I experienced with him.  Words cannot describe....   I mean to say the dictionary is incomplete when it comes to conveying the essence of our experience.

        You can imagine the chill that penetrated my heart, when he climbed from the warm bed and declared,  “This has to end.”  The chill in my heart froze it, and it clattered in pieces before his feet.

        Then he begged, “Come away with me.”

        I told him I couldn’t, but what I really meant was that I was afraid of David.

        He turned his back to me.  His next words were heartless and meant to wound.  “Thanks for the fling.  The sex has been great.”

        I pulled him back to me, and together we concocted a plan to break into David’s computer system and steal money from his many bank accounts.  Actually, I was to do the break-in with Michael guiding me.  Naturally, after I had completed the dangerous task, I was caught.  I caught hell.  David was enraged, and my face showed the evidence for over a week, but I’m ahead of my story.

        The next day, after David beat me, Nikita saw my face and was appalled.  Suddenly, we were under attack.  Nikita protected me, but David accused her of being behind the attack.  Things happened so quickly.  David and Nikita fought, and Nikita beat the hell out of him.  Then the attack was over.  I turned to Nikita.  She explained that David was a really bad man.  I’d had no idea just how bad.  Then Michael came in.  I was thrilled to see him.  I was rescued by my lover.   I turned to him and saw ‘nothing’ of my lover  in his cold eyes.  I wanted to die right then and there.  I tried, turning David’s gun on myself, but Michael was quicker than I.

        As quickly as they had come into my life, Michael and Nikita left it, taking David with them.  My husband’s guards--their bodies had been taken away by Michael and Nikita’s people, too.  All that was left was the mess.  There amid the ruins of my home and my life, I began to clean.  Glass was everywhere.  Some kind of rocket had blown the front door to pieces.  Like a demented Martha Stewart, I began calling tradesmen.  I swept and gathered debris until there were no physical signs of the attack, other than missing windows and doors.

        Exhaustion claimed me.  Alone in the empty house, I huddled in the bedroom that had been Nikita’s, hoping that some residue of her strength and spirit would carry me through whatever came next.

        Part of me knew that David had to be taken down.  I had been a pawn.  I had been used, once again.  I was too hurt to consider what to do next.  A week later, I was still too bruised to face the world.  The glass had been replaced.  There was a new door, but Lisa wasn’t repaired as easily as a splintered door or broken window.

        A small package came in the mail.  A check for a million dollars... and a tape with ‘his’ voice.  He didn’t ask for forgiveness.  He said I’d earned it, and “not to ever love a man who didn’t treat me as I deserved.”  But I did still love a man, no longer within my reach, but then I supposed I deserved to be discarded, as I had been.  That was the only thing that life had taught me thus far.  I didn’t deserve to be happy.

        I didn’t stay huddled in misery long.  My fear that somehow David would come back overwhelmed me.  I engaged an attorney, who handled the sale of our house, and I decided to disappear.  With enough money, I suppose one can do just about anything.  While a million dollars isn’t all that much money, the sale of the house and land, brought another tidy sum, and I used it to change my name, hire body guards and escape from the  country that had been the scene of all my misery.

        I never stopped being afraid.  Every three or four months, I would change names again and go to another country.  I discovered I had a talent for foreign languages.  Perhaps, it was born from necessity, but whatever the reason, that facility served me well.  Periodically, I would surface long enough to contact my attorney.  She was sympathetic to my plight and was of great comfort to me, as well as the more practical matters.  She urged me to seek therapy, but I was unwilling to stay in one place long enough for something like that.

        As for my feelings for Michael, I never stopped hoping he would find me.  For a year at least, I kept hoping he would still rescue me, this time for real.  I took his sending me the check as a sign that he at least cared what happened to me.  In time I romanticized that if he were free, he would have.  I never looked at another man.  I was too afraid of being hurt again, of being used again.

        I certainly had a poor track record.  The first man in my life, my father was an unspeakable monster who abused me in more ways than I care to elaborate.  I ran straight from his ‘loving’ care into the arms of an assassin, who used my every insecurity to bolster his power and control over me.  Then I had an affair with Michael, who was what?  Certainly not an ordinary man.  What ordinary man could or would seduce a woman in order to get to her husband?  What legitimate government agency would  use this tactic?

        When Michael returned to my life, I had begun to relax in my latest life.  I had bought a club, and resided on the top floor of the building.  I thought that enough time had passed, that if David were going to find me, he would have.  Obviously, I had not covered my tracks well enough.  Michael found me.  My heart nearly stopped when I looked over my shoulder and saw him through the French doors.  He was dressed in a black suit and white silk shirt.  He looked nothing like the Michael with whom I had fallen in love, nor did he look like the ‘agent’ who had taken away my husband.

        I didn’t trust his soft words of entreaty.

        “I just want to be with you.”

        I was too angry, but I would have my revenge.  I would use him and discard him the way he had me.  I tried.  Oh, I did use him... to great effect.  As I felt his lips on my body, I reveled that I could still feel desire.  I was not dead to his touch, not at all.  Perhaps, a part of me still wanted to believe his words, but another part of me knew better.
 
        "Was it as good as you remembered?” I asked him.  I wanted to hear him lie to me.  It would make my next move easier, if I were angry.

        “Yes,”  was his soft reply.

        I enjoyed his look of surprise, when I called my guards.  He nearly defeated them, but Hugo, the big one, pulled a gun, and even Michael knew that it was useless to resist.  They beat him, blows that rocked my equilibrium as well, but I reminded myself that he stood by and listened to my husband beat me once, and it made my determination stronger.
 
        He lay at my feet, panting and swearing that he still wanted to be with me.  Finally, he told me the real purpose of his visit.  David had escaped, and he came to protect me.  I was stunned.  Michael did care.  He cared enough to suffer a beating at the hands of my guards to come and warn me.  A few words uttered under duress, I was under his spell again.  I dismissed the guards and attended to his wounds.  Fool that I was!  I answered his questions about my security systems with unwavering trust.  Michael was there to protect me.  Then he injected me with something, and I passed out.

        The next thing I knew, we were on our way to see David.  It seems that David had Nikita.  Nikita!  The light may have dawned slowly, but surely, it did dawn.  I was to be a pawn again, my life and freedom traded for Nikita’s.  Michael the operative was in charge.  I felt nothing for the man beside me, who was relentlessly taking me the last place in the world I wanted to go... back to David.  But Michael offered me a way out.  He would allow the trade to take place, but I would have the means to kill David.  Whether or not I would be able to do it depended on me, because Michael and Nikita would ride off into the sunset together, and I would be left alone with him.  Could I kill David?  At the time, I had no earthly idea, but at least the means to do it would be in my hands.

        Michael’s plan worked well, except Nikita tried to rescue me from David.  By that time I had determined that Michael’s ‘way out’ for me was the only way.  I trudged along behind David.  He had gifted me with the task of carrying the water bottle.  While he answered a call of nature, I slipped the contents of the radioactive vial into his water.  Michael had said in twenty-one hours he would be dead, if not sooner.   My hands shook as I did it, but I managed it all the same.

        Further into the woods we went.  Finally, David stopped for a drink.  I was so thirsty.  He offered it to me, but I was not suicidal.  I would emerge from this forest of darkness free of him forever.  I watched him as he drank thirstily, allowing the water to wash over his face.  In twelve hours, he would begin to suffer the effects.  I waited and dropped the empty vial into the leaves behind me as I walked.

        I knew I was still at risk. If he realized what I had done, he might still kill me.  We reached a cabin in the woods.  He started telling me how it was going to be.  I was going to learn to obey again, and no one would ever find me again.  I was his forever.  Crap like that.  I waited.  He chained me like a dog to the fireplace hearth.  I waited.

        “Might as well get some sleep, Lisa.  We’ll be leaving early tomorrow.”  He threw me a pillow and an old quilt.  He lay down beyond my reach and proceeded to go to sleep himself.   Still I waited.

        Sometime during the night, I awoke.  David was stirring in his sleep.  The poison was beginning to work, I thought.  Soon he was moaning and thrashing.  I had no way to hide.  I could not reach his gun.  I could only pray that he would not suspect that I had been the agent of his death.  He would surely kill me before he died.

        “Lisa, something’s wrong with me.  I’m on fire inside,” he cried.

        I tried to sound sympathetic.  “What is it?  Let me help you.”

        David was pawing at his throat and struggling to breathe.  He came towards me...and unlocked my chain.  His face was red, and blisters were forming where the radioactive water had poured down his face hours earlier.  He reacted to the horror in my eyes.

        “What?” he moaned.  He clawed at his face and strips of skin came off in his hands. The look of horror was now on his face.  It was his face.  I managed to grab his gun.  I prayed it was loaded.  I had no way of knowing for sure, but I thought he had loaded it while we were still in the woods, fearing that Michael and Nikita might try to rescue me once again.

        David looked at me with disbelief.  “Did you do this to me, Lisa?”

        “Yes.”  I pointed the gun at him, warning him not to come near me.

        “I loved you, Lisa.  I did this so we could be together.”  He crumpled to his knees in agony as the poison did something to his inner organs.  He screamed in agony and thrashed around.  “I loved you,” he whimpered.

        I put him out of his misery.

Epilogue:

        During the rest of the night, I wondered what I should do next.  I had killed a man, my husband, like the dog he was.  I considered killing myself, but that no longer seemed like anything I wanted to do.  David was dead.  Michael might as well be.  I was alive.  I waited for the dawn.  I would walk east until I reached a road or a river.  After that, I had no plan, but to disappear once more and begin to live.

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