A
t the end of August, back in Hollyville, time seemed to have stood still everywhere but in my garden. It was overrun with vegetables, Frankie unable to keep up with the harvest while we were gone. He’d made an effort, but the garden looked like a jungle, a tangled mess of vines and leaves and vegetables going to rot. Untended, the garden was wild and unwieldy. I couldn’t help but wonder, as I hacked my way through the six-foot-high cornstalks and the voluminous leaves, about the other ways things would fall apart after I was gone.
The first two weeks back, while the children were at school, Eva and I picked green beans and swollen tomatoes and peppers. Rose sat among the labyrinthine rows of corn and cabbage, playing in the dirt. I spent hours in the kitchen boiling and canning until my palms blistered from the lids and my face burned from all that steam. Eva, in the throes of morning sickness, couldn’t bear the smell of the kitchen. I went to sleep at night dreaming of turnips and eggplant and squash, the scent seeping into my hair and my skin. No matter how many baths I took, I couldn’t seem to get rid of the smell of the earth.
But with each jar I placed on the shelf in our basement, I felt a sense of accomplishment, as though the colorful glass jars were evidence of my self-sufficiency. We would have a garden. We would feed our children with the vegetables and roots we coaxed from the earth. We could survive without grocery allowances, without the men.
Rose was three now, and had given up both her morning and afternoon naps. Eva resumed her position as troop leader with me, but Hannah insisted on continuing on as a leader as well, which meant that more often than not Hannah was with us at our meetings. We were never alone.
Aching for each other, we discussed the various badges the girls hoped to earn this year: Sewing, Cooking, Wilderness Survival. We reached for each other’s hands under the kitchen table as Hannah chattered on about plans for the flying up ceremony. We stole glances as we mended the girls’ old uniforms, and kisses in the pantry as we perused the unsold boxes of Girl Scout cookies and Hannah’s voice clattered on in the kitchen. Normally, this would have driven me mad. But now we had a
plan
. All of this was endurable, because there was an end in sight. We were only biding our time.
We knew that realistically we couldn’t go anywhere until the baby came. She needed to have a doctor, but once the baby was here, we would be free. And so as Eva’s belly grew, the distance between us and our future together shrank.
“I hope it’s a boy,” I said one day as we stood in the pantry together.
“Why?” she asked, leaning into me. Her breath skipped across my collarbone.
I shrugged. And I thought about the miscarriage. That lost baby that had first brought us together. I was certain it had been a boy. Here was our second chance.
“What would
you
like?” I asked, peering around the corner. Hannah was in the restroom freshening up. Her vanity had bought us endless stolen moments like these.
She shook her head. “Girls are easier when they’re little,” she said, shrugging. “But they have it so much harder later on.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, putting my hands on her hips, those two perfect bones.
“I mean, a boy has a chance in this world. To be someone. To do something.”
She was right. It was true. As much as I loved my girls, I feared for them. When I imagined their futures, it was not with excitement but trepidation.
Johnny was getting in trouble at school that year. It seemed like every other day Eva was getting a call from his teacher with one complaint or another about his behavior in the classroom and on the playground. He pushed, he shoved, he spat and kicked and cussed. Eva’s fear, though she never said it aloud, was that he was turning into Ted. That all of Ted’s rage had somehow been channeled into Johnny. That this was his inheritance, this violence.
One late September night, the kids were all outside playing kick the can or some such game. Rose was riding her tricycle up and down the sidewalk while the other children played. I checked out the window periodically, making sure that they were all staying out of the street.
I was canning the last of the beets, and my hands were stained magenta. Frankie was watching
The Ed Sullivan Show
in the other room when I heard the scream. My heart flew to my throat as I set down the tongs I’d been using to lift the jars out of the boiling water and ran to the front door. Frankie followed behind.
Rose was standing on our porch, pointing toward the street, where Johnny was standing over Mouse with his fist raised as if to strike her. I flew to him screaming, “Johnny, stop it right this instant!”
Frankie pushed me aside and went to Johnny, grabbing him hard by the elbow and dragging him onto our lawn. Johnny was nearly eight now, and tall for his age, but still clearly powerless to Frankie.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Frankie screamed in Johnny’s face. Johnny looked terrified. For all the trouble he’d gotten into at school, I believe this was the first time he’d been challenged this way.
Ted came out of the Wilsons’ house then and ran over. “Get your hands off my boy!” he said, pushing Frankie in the chest.
Frankie, startled, threw his shoulders back and then corrected his stance so that he looked like he was ready for a boxing match.
Ted towered over him.
Johnny was crying now, and snot was running down his face.
“You think it’s okay to hit girls?” Frankie asked Johnny, and Johnny shrugged. “You teach him that? That it’s okay to hit a girl?” Frankie demanded of Ted.
Ted pushed his chest out, and I watched as his face grew red and the muscles in his blocky neck strained. He looked at me accusingly.
I heard the Wilsons’ door open again and looked up to see Eva standing in the doorway. The hallway light behind her made her an eerie silhouette. “Ted, come inside,” she said weakly. But Ted was clearly not going to back down from this fight.
“What did she do?” Ted asked Johnny.
Mouse clung to my legs like she used to as a toddler. Chessy stood off to the side, her eyes wide.
“She took my bike,” Johnny said. “And she wouldn’t give it back.”
“Is that true?” Ted said, getting his thick face close to Mouse’s.
“Get away from her,” I hissed.
“Sounds to me like she was just about to get what was coming to her,” Ted said, laughing.
I felt anger ballooning inside of me, and all of the colors of Eva’s bruises swirled behind my eyes, the color of my own rage and his mixed together.
“Sounds like somebody needs to teach that girl a lesson about her
place
.”
At that, Frankie lost any composure or control he’d been trying to keep. While my fists remained at my side, Frankie’s were swinging. Then, before I knew what was happening, he jumped on Ted’s back like some sort of animal. He was half Ted’s size, and he looked like a turtle fighting a whale.
I gathered all of the girls, including Mouse, rounding them up like animals and herding them back to the safety of our house, their necks straining to see what was going on in the street. Johnny stood on the sidewalk, looking baffled by this display, his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide.
Inside, I sat the children around the kitchen table and found the last few remnants of some cookies in the cookie jar. I poured them each a cup of milk and as they ate, I peered anxiously through the lace curtains at the two men in the street. The sun had slipped away, and the streetlights had come on. Their hulking shadows moved soundlessly, like some sort of prehistoric beast, up and down the street. It was the slowest fight I’d ever witnessed in my life.
Then I watched Old Man Castillo come out of his house, shaking his fist, probably threatening to call the police, and he put himself between Frankie and Ted, who seemed surprised by his sudden appearance. He stood between them like a referee, arthritic hands pressed against their respective chests.
Eva had gone inside her own house as well. And I worried that Ted would lumber back into the house now and use up all his remaining fury on Eva.
“Francesca?” I said, pulling a second bottle of milk out of the refrigerator and locating a last box of Girl Scout cookies in the pantry. “Can you keep an eye on the children?”
“Why?” she asked, glancing nervously toward the window.
“I’m just going to check on Eva.”
“Why?” she said again, her eyes filling with tears.
“Because I’m
worried.
” And I was. That was the truth, and Chessy seemed grateful for it. Ever since Chessy walked in and found us together, it seemed like lying to her had become a nearly impossible task. She questioned everything. She longed for the untampered-with facts. I had always appreciated this about her, but now it terrified me. I worried endlessly that that image (of our bare skin on those soft sheets, of the arc of Eva’s hips and my own nude body) would remain, memorized like all the other facts she stored like photographs in the album of her mind. And that someday, something would send her back to that moment, that she would pull that particular photo from the magnetic sleeve of her memory, hold it up, and suddenly understand the truth.
“Please,”
I said. “Just watch the kids for a minute.”
“Okay,” she said. And with that, she scooped Rose up onto her lap. I looked out the window; Frankie and Ted were separated now and both hunched over, their hands palming their knees, wheezing.
I ran past them toward Eva’s porch, neither one seeming to notice me.
“You okay, Mrs. Valentine?” Old Man Castillo hollered after me. I turned around, tears burning in my eyes. My husband was standing in the street, oblivious, yet here was a stranger, worried about me. I nodded, feeling my entire body working not to cry.
Inside, Eva was sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands. Calder lay at her feet. Eva’s entire body visibly tensed when I knocked. And Calder began to growl.
“It’s me,” I said, pushing the door gently open, and both Eva and Calder looked up relieved.
“What’s going on out there?” she asked.
“They’re still out there, but it seems to be calming down. Mr. Castillo is playing referee. Where’s Johnny?”
“I sent him to his room. I’m so sorry about Mouse. Is she okay?”
I waved my hand. “She’s fine.” And this was also true. Mouse, of all of the children, could fend for herself. If Frankie hadn’t stepped in, I’m pretty sure Mouse would have gone swinging at Johnny herself.
Eva motioned for me to sit down at the table with her. We sat quietly, listening to the kitchen clock knocking out the seconds. “He won’t hurt you if I’m here,” I said, speaking what we both hoped to be true.
She looked at me, her face softening. The sharp angles of her clenched jaw releasing their grip. “I had a dream last night,” she said, reaching for my hand. “That we were driving along the road to Gormlaith, that it was still summer. And it was just you and me, with the windows rolled down. You were playing that awful station you like on the radio. The sun was shining, and I kept feeling the air with my hand through the open window,” she said sadly. “It didn’t feel like a dream at all.”
“We need to leave,” I said, suddenly feeling more desperate than I ever had. “Soon.” I didn’t want to hear her describe waking up. I didn’t want to think of her eyes opening, of her rolling over and seeing Ted’s enormous body next to her. I didn’t want to imagine the disappointment, the sharp edges of reality coming into focus as she woke. I knew I needed to keep that dream fresh in her mind. Keep the radio playing. I felt frantic, struggling to find a way to promise her the wind on her fingers, the sun on her shoulders.
“How?” she asked then, and it felt like an accusation. I felt myself crumbling, the music turning to static. A cloud passing over us. The car running out of gas and leaving us stranded on that dusty road. My eyes burned.
Calder stood up, stretched, and came to me, lowering her chin onto my lap, also waiting for an answer. I rubbed her soft warm ears.
“I’ll talk to Gussy. We’ll go, we’ll just take the children and go.”
Ted came through the door then, throwing it open, his face red, his hair matted with sweat. It took him a few moments before my presence registered. When he realized I was there, the color drained from his face. And he laughed. It was loud, a crackly pop of laughter, more like gunfire than joy. And that was all. He didn’t speak; he only went to the cupboard where he kept his whiskey and began to pour himself a drink.
“That husband of yours is a scrappy little fella,” he said.
I looked at Ted, hard. Challenging him. For a full excruciating minute I willed him to do something, to say something, to give me the excuse I was looking for to just grab Eva’s hand and march out the front door. But his anger seemed to be abating. With each swig from his highball glass, his face softened.
“Maybe you’d better go check on Frankie,” Eva said finally, breaking that fragile wall of glass between Ted and me. “And send the girls back over?”
I nodded, though the last thing on earth I wanted to do was to leave her here with him. As I made my way back across the street, I prayed that Ted had used up all that anger on Frankie. That tonight Frankie had taken the brunt of it. I hoped, with only the slightest bit of remorse, that he had been the one to absorb Ted’s angry blows. That he was the one who was left battered and humiliated and broken. Because otherwise it would be Eva, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.
That night I lay in bed and dreamed the conversation with Gussy. Sat myself down across from her and reached for her hands. “Help us,” my dream self said. “Please.”