Piecing Together My Abusive Ex-Boyfriend's Final Summer

Jenny Chang/BuzzFeed

I recently called the Little Rock Police Department to ask about obtaining the incident report from the night my ex-boyfriend stabbed a man with a knife. “I wasn’t involved; I’m just a writer in New York,” I told the woman who answered the phone, as if I needed to clarify my relationship to Jason’s crime: far away, removed. As if to reassure myself that I was no longer the girl by his side, sharing the consequences of his transgressions.

The stabbing happened in the Little Rock neighborhood of River Mountain on July 10, 2011. Jason was arrested and released on bail. Eleven days later, on July 21, he died in a motorcycle accident while on his way to Walmart in rush-hour traffic. I had just seen him — had just slept with him — for the last time in June.

I thought that if I could get a copy of the police report, I would be able to put that summer back together. I thought I’d be able to draw a clear, straight line between our visit, his crime, and the accident, and then the story of our lives together would finally make sense.

I put the check for $10 in the mail and I waited.

Jason and I met in 2007, at an audition for a tragedy. I was 22 and wanted the role of Medea. He was 18 and didn’t know what the play was about. We were paired as scene partners, and although I remember hardly anything of our actual audition in front of the director, I remember the rest of the night in acute detail: what his mouth looked like blowing Marlboro smoke in the cold when we stood outside the theater, the texture of his suede coat, the snowball fight we had in the parking lot, my wet socks when I removed my boots at his apartment, drinking a pitcher of Kool-Aid he made, and making out on the couch while the Oscars played on the TV and we pretended to watch. The Departed won that year. I drove myself home in the middle of the night, and in the morning there was a voicemail from Jason: “Leigh, I don’t actually hate spending time with you. We should go out sometime. OK, bye.”

Neither of us got cast in Medea, but it didn’t matter — we kept seeing each other. I was anxious, bookish, living back at home with my parents in the Chicago suburbs for the third time, after my life in New York had collapsed and my sublet in Chicago had run out. Jason was the magician, the vision of what my dull, directionless life could become. He was tall, an All-State athlete, with golden skin and pale green eyes. He’d grown up in the South and said “pin” for “pen” and called me "darlin," without the "g."

Even in retrospect, I don’t think I can overemphasize Jason’s charisma; he literally turned heads when we went out together. Strangers would stop us on the street to ask what movie they recognized him from. And he had his own one-bedroom apartment near the community college he attended, which meant I went from early evenings with Mom and Dad in front of the TV to late nights driving around the suburbs with Jason, getting drunk and high, talking in his bed until dawn, feeling like my real life had finally started.

As much as I felt Jason was saving me, I also wanted to save him: He was troubled, neglected, and volatile. A child of divorce, he’d grown up getting shuffled around the South for his stepdad’s career and spending summers with his dad in Illinois. Jason was a smart kid with emotional problems, and none of the adults in his life could deal. His parents and stepparents sent him away to anger management programs and wilderness camps for troubled youths, but from Jason’s perspective, he came out harder, not softer; he bragged to me about all the psychotherapists he’d made cry. I found a pharmacopeia of antidepressants and antipsychotics in his medicine cabinet; he claimed he wasn’t taking any of them because he hated the side effects. And in any case, his tragic childhood, his mood swings — these were part of his allure.

I was with him the day he got the motorcycle — a 1988 Honda Nighthawk, 1988 for the year he was born. Winter had turned to spring, I was now living in his apartment, and I used to sit on the grassy lip of the parking lot and read a book while he took his motorcycle apart and put it back together again to see how it worked. I realized I was doing the same thing with the books I read, and one day told him I wanted to write a novel.

“What if we moved to New Mexico,” he said, “and I could work while you wrote your book?”

“Are you being serious?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“Jason,” I said, “that’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”

We were in love. We both wanted to run away. Using all my savings, we moved ourselves and all we owned from Illinois to Albuquerque