Authors: Natalie Ann
She didn’t even feel the basket slipping from her hands, or the noise it made as it fell off the table and onto the floor, followed by the ribbon she was threading through it.
The room started to spin, her breathing increased, and there was a haze all around her, making her shake and want to hide. In a rush, she felt the fear clogging her throat, threatening to choke her.
“Whoa there,” Sean said, rushing forward and picking her up, cradling her and rushing her to the couch. “Don’t pass out on me.”
She heard his voice but really didn’t comprehend what he was saying. She was the little girl again hiding in the closet, running away and trying to make herself invisible.
Pulling out of his arms, she brought her knees to her chest, hid her face on them and started to rock back and forth. Sean didn’t exist to her in that moment, nothing did.
Nothing but the nausea and the sound of the screaming and yelling in her memories, the furniture and lamps being broken, and her mother crying out in pain that last night it happened, the worst time yet. Her mother coming to her room after her father had been called into work, throwing what clothes and few toys she could in a garbage bag, and whisking Carly away in the middle of a snowstorm.
The sickening smell of dried blood on her mother’s face and arms mixed in with burnt skin. The tension and pain of every movement that Trisha made during that drive in Pennsylvania to her mother’s house a few towns away. Then when the three of them vanished into the night.
Memories that Carly had shut away for years. Things she thought maybe she’d imagined from that night all came rushing to the forefront.
“I have to leave,” she said, gathering herself as much as she could. She was still shaking, she knew it, but she was an adult now. She was strong; she could pull it together and stand up, grab a few things and leave. He knew where she lived now, so she had to escape this town.
“No. You aren’t going anywhere. Tell me what is going on, Carly.” She heard the pleading in his voice, but didn’t care—she needed to leave.
“He isn’t outside still, is he?” she asked suddenly. Maybe he was waiting outside for her.
“No, I turned him away. He said he has been trying to reach you and you haven’t responded. I took that as a sign you wanted nothing to do with him.”
“I don’t know how he found me.”
“He said he has been trying to reach you though. He had to have had a clue.”
“Just email. The email addresses that I’ve used for volunteering. They are handed out at the shelters and they listed me once as a volunteer on their website. Even though it was a national shelter and addresses and cities were not listed, I asked them to take it off once I realized that, but he must have found it, even though I’ve changed the email address multiple times.”
“Multiple times? How many?”
“Four. The first time was two years ago when my name was on the site. Then I changed the address, but had the emails sent to that one forwarded to me. I kept all the addresses open, but forwarded emails to me at a different one. I never responded back to them.”
“Well, he said he read of our engagement. I remember a car following me home yesterday. I didn’t think anything of it, but he confirmed it was him. He can’t hurt you, Carly. Tell me what
is going on.
I can protect you. You trust me to do that, right?”
“You don’t know what he’s like. No one can protect us. Oh my God, my mother. I need to call my mother.” She swung her legs over the couch and tried to stand.
“No. Sit. I’ll call her. Carly, take a few deep breaths. You need to talk to me.”
“Please,” she begged him. “Call my mother. Warn her. Tell her and my grandmother he is in town and to leave right now.” She wasn’t thinking clearly, she knew that. She wasn’t thinking anything about throwing her job and friends away to leave right away. Her thoughts were formed from fear.
He walked over and grabbed her phone off the coffee table, put it on speaker and placed a call to Theresa instead. Carly realized that was probably a better bet than calling her mother.
Theresa blew out a breath. “It took him long enough, but I’m ready for him if he makes an appearance this time. I’ve got a shotgun, and I’m not afraid to use it. We’re good. Take care of Carly. I can take care of Trisha, but I don’t think Joe will show his face around here. Not if he knows what’s good for him. Then again, I hope he does.”
“Grandma, please don’t do anything foolish. Go to the police, or call the police, please.”
“Carly, you listen to me. He can’t hurt you, and he’ll have to get through me to get to your mother. You’re not ten anymore and your mother isn’t alone.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Theresa?” Sean asked. “Maybe you should come here. And will someone
please
tell me what is going on?”
“Carly,” Theresa said, “tell Sean. He’ll protect you. He needs to know what’s going on. You’ll be fine, Carly. I believe it wholeheartedly. No harm will come to you or Trisha.”
“Grandma, call me in an hour, please. Just check in.”
“I will, sweetie, but you are worrying for nothing. Now tell Sean the truth.”
“Okay,” she said weakly and took the phone out of his hand. She looked at him, saw the recognition in his eyes and didn’t need to hear the next words out of his mouth.
“He hit you and your mother, didn’t he?”
If only, she thought. “He hit me, Sean. He beat my mother.” She picked his hand up, faintly felt the tears slipping down her cheeks and tried to remind herself she was safe. She was in her house, and she was an adult now. She’d counseled plenty of women over the years on what to do and how to handle themselves, yet she never sought counseling herself. In her eyes, the counseling she did for others was a form of counseling for herself.
Running her fingertips over his knuckles, she asked, “Ever have a fist to the face, Sean?”
***
He was feeling sick. What he saw on her minutes ago when he walked into the kitchen—the paleness, the nausea—all of it was running through him now. “No. I haven’t.”
“Imagine the biggest meanest person you know. Someone that was at least six inches taller than you and more than a hundred pounds heavier. Now picture him angry, fuming, and more pissed off than you’ve ever seen him before.” Gripping his larger hand with hers, she added, “Now put liquor behind it. All that together, mixed into one, a power keg of emotion aiming right at your face with nothing you can do but take it, because if you fought back, it was only worse. Not that my mother ever fought back.”
“Why?” he asked. He wasn’t even sure what question he was asking, so many were going through his head at once.
“Why, what? Why did he beat her? I don’t know. His dinner wasn’t hot enough, she was two minutes late coming home, she smiled at a stranger on the street. You name it, he had a reason.”
“Was it all the time?” He couldn’t even begin to imagine this, but now things were all starting to fall into place and he honestly felt like a fool for not seeing the signs that were so easily placed in front of him.
“Does it matter? Once is enough, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is. Which begs the question why she stayed.”
“Sean, I don’t know, I really don’t. And no, it wasn’t all the time. Not even once a month. A handful of times a year really. But like I said, once was enough. He was always belittling her, knocking her down emotionally. I have no clue when he started to get physically violent with her. We’ve never talked about it, but it was like a game—beat her down worse than the last time, give her more time to heal, and more time to play with her mind that it wasn’t going to happen again, that he was sorry. And when she least expected, then he’d strike again.”
Sean had so many things he wanted to ask and just didn’t know if he should, or even if he could get the words past his lips. Before he could speak, she just started to talk some more and he was going to let her. “My mother used to be more like me, you know. She was happy, but shy, always helping others, always making things and wanting to make our house pretty. Crafty, I guess you could say. I remember those things as a child. It’s surprising to me that I have those fond memories, that they weren’t all clouded with fear from the other times.”
He was surprised too but kept those words to himself. Instead he asked, “What changed with her?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen it enough in the shelters. The women get beaten down enough, so much so they think they deserve it. I think she was afraid to leave him. I remember him threatening to find her and kill her. It’s sad, but I remember those words so vividly.”
“Which is why you reacted the way you did just now and why you’re fearful for your mother. But it’s been what, over twenty years? You haven’t had any contact with him at all in that time?”
“No, I haven’t, and neither has my mother that I know of. I really believe my grandmother would shoot him if he stepped foot near her. My mom was beaten down so much, physically and mentally, but she finally had enough and we left in the middle of the night, in the worst snowstorm I can remember. I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as I remember, but as a kid, I just feared we weren’t going to make it by car.”
“She left in a snowstorm?” He couldn’t imagine what would finally possess Trisha to leave at that point in time, under those conditions. “Why not during the day when he was at work?”
“My father worked for the city we lived in, for the Department of Transportation. He was always driving around town in the vehicles, spying on her, I’m sure. I remember bits and pieces of conversations and my mother asking him how he knew she was at the store on her lunch hour and such. She probably felt she had no way to run without him knowing. But he got called in in the middle of the night to clear the roads, and I’m sure she saw her chance.”
He was holding her hand now, running his fingers over her knuckles, over the ring he gave her—his heart. “What happened that night?” He just felt something had to trigger it.
“It was bad. My father had started to hit me months prior, but he never left marks, or marks that my mother could see. He’d pull my hair, slap my face. I guess you could say little things compared to what she went through. But one day he got careless and threw me against the wall. I don’t even remember why, but he left some bruises on my back and my mother noticed. She confronted him, and things escalated. Which is why I never told her what he was doing. He said if I did, he’d make her pay.”
Carly was crying now, and he couldn’t do anything other than hold her while she did, let her talk only if she wanted to. “I was ten, Sean, and I remember that night, even though I’ve tried so hard to forget. I was in my room and I’d locked the door from the inside. I heard her screaming at him. She’d never yelled before; she always tried to calmly talk to him, and sometimes it worked. Maybe that’s why she stayed, I have no idea, but it was bad that night, louder than before, tons of things broken, my mother crying and yelling out in pain. I was hiding in the closet and still heard it all. More than I wanted.”
Sean felt sick. This beautiful little girl hiding in her closet, listening to her father beat her mother. There were just no words.
“Things got silent; maybe I fell asleep. It wasn’t the first time my mother used the key to open my door and found me sleeping in the closet in the morning. But I heard the phone ringing. That’s what woke me up. No one called our house and I feared it was the police, or a neighbor.”
Taking a deep breath, she explained, “We’d been evicted before over the noise and damage. Police had been called in, social services, you name it, it all happened, yet nothing ever happened either. The system is pretty broken at times. Anyway, the next thing I know, my mother is in my room throwing a few clothes in a bag and telling me to hurry and grab whatever I could hold and move.”
She paused and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I’d never seen her like that. There was dried blood all over her face, one eye was swollen shut, cigarette burns on her, and she was limping, but she was determined. I could see it even then, so I did what she said. Then she bundled me up in my jacket over my pajamas and we raced out of the house and left. We never looked back. We drove to my grandmother’s about an hour away, and my grandmother threw what she could in her car, then followed us as we drove all night and into the day. It took twice as long as it should have, but we finally reached Saratoga.”
“Why here? Why didn’t she go to the police?”
“He worked for the city we’d lived in, like I said. They knew him; they turned a blind eye. Why did we come here? Because my grandmother said that they’d passed through Saratoga once on their way to the Adirondacks when my mother was a child. They’d stopped for lunch and gas and she remembered thinking what a great city it was, the quaint downtown, the homey feel of it all. That night, she said her car just seemed to take her here, and my mother followed.”
“For months, maybe years we looked over our shoulder, but he never made an attempt to come after her. That first year here we noticed the change in my mother, the depression setting in. I heard her talking to my grandmother one night, saying she blamed herself for staying as long as she did. She really believed he’d follow her and kill her; that’s why she never left before. But he didn’t and she felt she subjected herself and me to it for longer than she should have.”