Authors: Roxane Gay
“I like you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you are brave.”
I brought my fingers to my lips, shook my head. “This is how you would treat your mother? My child’s mother?”
“The Commander needed to teach you a lesson. He is a very angry man. He does not like to be defied.”
“He’s an animal. He is capable of anything. Don’t think he will ever respect you.”
TiPierre stood and the tightness in my chest began to unravel. I needed to believe I was safe despite holding so much evidence to the contrary in my skin.
Instead of leaving, TiPierre closed the door. I started shaking, moved to the corner, to the false safety of two walls, tried to become part of that house, part of something bigger and stronger than myself. I held my hands out in front of me. “No,” I said. “Don’t.” I said, “You said you paid for me to be left alone.”
He wore Nike sneakers, green with a gold swoosh. He bent over and unlaced the shoes, stepped out of them, set the shoes neatly to the side. I wondered how he kept his home, if he was a clean and organized man. “You will be left alone. I can’t keep the Commander away, but the others, yes.” He pulled off his shirt. His torso was lean and long, his skin the color of caramel. He had a birthmark, dark red, in the shape of a ragged diamond, just under his navel. Under different circumstances, he would have been an attractive man.
“I don’t want this,” I said. Another man inside me would render me further undone.
“I bought you for myself.” He smiled as if I were supposed to smile back, as if what would happen and who we were made sense. He walked toward me holding his hands open. “I will not hurt you.”
I ran my hands through my matted hair and took a deep breath, again tried to find the right combination of words to save myself.
When he reached me, he traced the bruises on my face. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be with someone like you. I see you women, how you wear your designer clothes and your beautiful shoes and your dark sunglasses, your French perfumes. It’s like the shit of this place doesn’t touch you. You never see me but I am there, watching. You are all so beautiful.” He pressed his lips against mine. I shrank from him, from the insistent heat of his tongue, the way he wet my mouth with his. “You are beautiful,” he whispered, hotly.
He kept caressing my face. The gentleness of his touch over my broken skin made me shiver, broke me further. He kissed my forehead. His lips were cool. His fingers were soft and warm. If I closed my eyes, it would be easy to pretend the man before me was a lover, that our bodies belonged together.
I fought him. I swallowed the pain. I did not close my eyes.
Even before I was kidnapped I knew there were lots of ways the body can be broken—our flesh and bone are so weak.
Michael always said his mother had never been sick a day in her life. As a boy, he would come down with a cold or flu and she would tend to him and nothing would compromise her legendary immune system, her strong German constitution. When the call came that there was something wrong with Lorraine, Michael refused to believe. He said it wasn’t possible. His mother was an impenetrable fortress, made of steel. That is who she was for him. He was inconsolable. There is no graceful way to deal with the fear of losing a mother.
Michael was in the middle of too many projects at work, he said, but mostly, he couldn’t face his mother as her body fell apart. He told me this when we were in bed, trying to figure out how we could best help his parents. It is one of the only times I saw my husband cry in the before, one of the only times he had reason to cry. I held him, his voice cracking as he admitted he couldn’t bear watching his mother die. “Oh my love,” is all I could say, to see him like that, so exposed and so honest. I surprised both of us when the next morning, I said, “I’ll go to the farm to take care of Lorraine.”
It was easy enough to take a leave of absence from my law firm. I started the firm with four of my smartest lawyer friends—two immigration attorneys, two criminal defense attorneys, and one personal injury attorney. We were an odd mix but wanted to practice law and be damn good at it without sacrificing our entire lives. We each had offers to go to big firms in Chicago and New York but the thought of having to work a hundred hours a week, eating meals from damp Styrofoam containers in dimly lit offices, all in the name of getting ahead, earning money we would never have time to spend—it was too much. That wasn’t why we had gone into the law. It’s not that we were idealists but we aspired to be. We took the risk, pooled what money we had, and promised we could always take the time we needed for ourselves and our families so long as we gave our all when we were at work. We were lucky. The first few years, we did work crazy hours and didn’t know how we were going to make ends meet but we were working for ourselves. Then we won some big cases. We developed a reputation—the sharks of Biscayne Boulevard. We were able to hire a handful of associates and two paralegals. We were able to breathe a little and live a little. Even my father, who had never approved of our starting our own firm, grudgingly acknowledged we had made a wise gamble.
My partners would manage my cases until I returned. I had a laptop and a cell phone. Any work I needed to do I could handle from anywhere. Michael and I flew back to Nebraska a couple of days before Lorraine’s surgery. We said goodbye in the hall just outside my mother-in-law’s hospital room. The air around us was stale and antiseptic.
Michael ran his fingers through my hair. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
I pressed a finger against his lips. “You don’t thank me for being your wife.”
He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off the ground. “Yes, I do. I thank you. I’m going to miss you like crazy. I thank you.” My arms circled his neck and we kissed softly and then we stood, my feet in the air, our lips barely touching. I wanted to say
do not leave me here
. I wanted to say
I cannot sleep without you.
I was silent. I patted his shoulder and straightened his tie. He set me down and smiled, almost sadly. “I know you’re going to miss me too even if you won’t say it.” Before I could respond, Lorraine coughed loudly. We returned to her bedside and Michael held his mother’s hands in his. He kissed her forehead and we stood, for a long while on either side of his bed, staring at each other. Finally, he patted the plastic bedrail. He said, “This is my mother.” His voice sounded strangled. He looked like a little boy. The devotion of an only child runs so deep.
I nodded. “I will treat her like my own.” Lorraine’s lips wrinkled into a frown. “Mostly,” I said.
He left the room, paused in the doorway, watching me standing over his mother. The room felt smaller and darker. Lorraine sat up, huffing as she tried to make herself comfortable. “I don’t really expect you to stay.”
I rolled my eyes and studied the pillow behind her head. I’ve seen movies. “Lorraine, I will be right back.” I ran out of the room. I saw Michael standing at the end of the long corridor, waiting for the elevator. Hospitals are so quiet. I didn’t want to shout his name but I didn’t want him to leave. “Michael,” I said, whispering loudly. He continued staring ahead. I called his name again, louder this time. Finally he turned and I ran toward him, my heels echoing loudly.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I stood on the tips of my toes and wrapped my arms around him, held tight. He held me against him, sliding his hands slowly up and down my back. “I’m going to miss you too, like crazy,” I said into his shirt. My husband is much taller, so I pulled him down until my lips met his ear, tried to memorize the steadiness of the pulse in his neck. Quietly, very quietly, I told him everything that needed to be said about how I feel about him and us and what it would be like to be apart from him and how I knew he was scared and it was okay for him to be scared but he would never have to be scared alone. I talked for a long time. It surprised me, how much I had, until then, left unsaid between us. I held my husband’s face and looked into his eyes. I said, “Okay?” He nodded. I did not want to let him go. He had a flight to catch so he pulled away reluctantly, jabbed his finger against the elevator button. As the elevator doors hissed shut, he held his hand out to me, palm open and I held my hand over my heart.
My mother-in-law was in the hospital for just over a week. She was not a good patient nor was she popular with the doctors and nurses. She was scared and she is stubborn—a hellish combination. During the day, we watched soap operas and courtroom dramas and Maury Povich. Lorraine picked fights. I tried to be patient as she criticized my shoes, scowling at me as I walked to the window. “Those shoes are impractically high. Accept your natural height.” When I leaned over to adjust her pillow, she wrinkled her nose and said, “That perfume of yours is too young for you, makes you smell like a teenage tart.” I whiled the hours away, staring at my phone. When she was trying to get my attention, Lorraine said, “You have the attention span of a gnat; you can’t even hold a damn conversation without staring at that thing.” There were blissful moments when I stepped out to talk to Michael. When I returned to her room, she said I was keeping her son from his important work. She stared at my engagement ring and muttered, “That is an ice-skating rink you’ve got on your finger. You are probably going to put my son in debt.”
By the third day, I had taken to wearing earbuds, pretending to listen to music, occasionally nodding my head. Lorraine smiled and said, “Your people do have a fondness for music and dancing.”
I perfected saying, “Whatever you say, Lorraine.”
When my mother-in-law was thirsty and too weak to hold the plastic cup, I gently held her head and brought the cup to her lips as she took tiny, careful sips. Her face was gray, drawn, her skin practically blue, paper-thin. I thought of my own mother and how unbearable it was to imagine her in a hospital bed, small and afraid, something dark and unknown eating away at her from the inside. When the pain was too much Lorraine pursed her lips and held her hand against the incision, shaking her head slowly. When she was hurting like that, we talked about Michael, wondering what he was doing, marveling at how well he was doing in his job. She told me about Michael as a little boy, so curious, always building things. He was a good boy, she said, and I said, “He is a good man.” We were both happy, smiling. “At least you seem to really love him. You treat him right,” Lorraine said grudgingly. I said, “Thank you, Lorraine.”
The doctors treated the cancer aggressively so as soon as she recovered, she had six weeks of radiation and chemotherapy. Three or four days a week, we drove the hour or so from the farm to the hospital in Lincoln. I’d sit with her as the IV in her arm pumped poisonous chemicals into her body; I’d do a crossword puzzle or read, or stare at the wall wondering how much time would pass before I lost my temper. We got to know some of the other regulars who had their chemo appointments at the same time. Lorraine and I confused them as they tried to make sense of our connection. One day Lorraine told the woman next to her, “My boy married this one. I have no idea why,” and the woman said, “Maybe because she’s here with you.” I wanted to high-five that lady.
After chemo, Lorraine spent hours in the bathroom, hugging the toilet. I brought her ice chips, wiped her face with cool cloths, played Willie Nelson tapes from a small boom box. Lorraine loves Willie Nelson, says he’s the only man who would make her leave Glen. “Something about a man with long hair,” she said, one afternoon, me sitting on the bathroom counter while she sat on the floor, with her back against the bathtub. I nodded, said, “I can see that.” Michael has beautiful hair, shoulder length, thick and blond. He often wears the top half of his hair in a ponytail and lets the rest of it hang loose. When we’re making love, Michael’s hair brushes against my shoulder in such a way that makes my back arch at an unnatural but entirely pleasant angle.
There were times Lorraine was so weak she could barely stand. I helped her bathe, running a soft washcloth over her body as she sat in the tub, her knees pulled to her chest. The first time, she stood naked in front of me, shifting nervously, trying to hide behind her arms. I wore a tank top and a pair of shorts. “I never had a body like yours,” Lorraine said, looking me up and down. Her ribs were beginning to protrude and her skin hung loosely but there was no shame in her body, none at all and that’s what I told her. “I ought to be able to do this for myself,” she said. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and pointed to the empty tub, said, “You ought to know when you need help.” She scowled but got in the tub without much argument, said, “Don’t make the water too hot. I don’t want you to boil me.” I started buying fruity soaps from a store in the city and each morning I’d say, “What fruit do you feel like today?” and she’d humor me, grumble, “Raspberries,” or “Green apples,” and we’d go from there. There is something terribly intimate about bathing another person. I learned almost everything a person could know about my mother-in-law’s body—her scars and birthmarks and wrinkles, the single strand of hair behind her left ear. Sometimes I hummed as I washed her and if she recognized the song, Lorraine hummed along too.
Toward the end of her treatment, Lorraine lost all patience with everything. It was understandable. She was exhausted and completely worn down. We were in her bedroom, Lorraine in bed, me sitting in a chair next to her bed, flipping through a glossy magazine. This is how we started every day. Mornings were hard, her body always stiff and unwilling to move. There was the nausea, the aches of aging, and a variety of other complications that made having to get out of bed an ordeal.