Read Things We Didn't Say Online
Authors: Kristina Riggle
I drift down the steps. The kids in my peripheral vision look like angels to me, out of focus and distant.
I should get my phone back, but I won’t. I’ll get a new one.
Change my e-mail, change my number, change my address. Maybe I’ll be Eddie again. I liked that nickname, better than Edna at least.
I stroke Jewel’s hair once before I go, cup her cheek for a moment, which still feels soft like baby skin, but that might be a trick of my senses, still clinging to the hope I’d had for a baby in this house.
There are voices, but they are babble to me.
I close the door and walk down the porch with a heavy step. The whole world seems muffled by the wet snow as I walk away, up the hill, turning east, then north again, then I stop paying attention because what difference does it make?
I’m not wearing my boots, so before long my feet are cold, my toes numb like the rest of me.
I walk, and smoke, past the Wealthy Street Bakery, full of happy weekend couples, past the Literary Life Bookstore, these landmarks I’d started to feel belonged to me, in my new life.
I have no phone, and no one knows where I am. Out of my numb haze comes a blast of giddiness. No one knows where I am!
Minutes, maybe an hour, pass as I coast on my anonymity. Up ahead I see a huge rectangle of glass with a neon Miller sign hanging in the middle, a cavelike interior beyond. Without a thought I swing open the door and step into the comforting dark of a neighborhood dive. Not my neighborhood, and the patrons can tell, but they merely look up, note my presence, and look back to their tables and drinks and video Keno.
I seek out a corner table. The middle-aged waitress recognizes my silence as a fortress. She bothers me as little as possible, no doubt well versed in the body language of those who’d like to get quietly drunk. As it’s afternoon, I go with my standard afternoon drink and order a beer on tap. There’s a college football game on a small TV in the corner. I don’t know who’s playing, and I don’t care.
The beer glass is cold in my hand. The bubbles pop against my nose. It’s more bitter than I remember, and for a moment my stomach heaves,
No, not again
, but soon settles down to the inevitability of it, the familiarity of it.
Wake up, liver
.
Back to work.
I lose myself in the football game. I used to watch with Billy all the time, and he’d explain offsides and downs. I pick a team to root for based on the color of uniform, to keep myself interested, so I don’t think too much.
But the game ends, and my cash runs out. It’s getting dark already.
I should call Tony. I could borrow a phone, and it’s a local call. But I feel myself falling away from him, too, because he would be disappointed in me. Drinking twice in two days, and this time I’ve got no one to blame.
So I walk some more, not knowing how long, struck that it doesn’t matter now. Kid bedtimes, homework routines, band practices, all of it has winked out of my life at once. It’s only me again, and no one cares when I do anything.
Pondering this, I unfasten my watch and drop it in the snow.
I investigate the details of my surroundings as if I’ve never seen them before, as if I haven’t cycled past these places a hundred times. But everything looks different when you’re walking. Closer. Real.
I start to consider where to spend the night. I figure there’s room on my credit card for a hotel room, if I don’t go anywhere fancy. But that would require talking to people. I don’t want people now. I wonder about overpasses and cardboard boxes. I remember learning in Girl Scouts when I was a kid how if caught in the elements you could dig a trench in the snow and be actually quite warm.
The beer has made me sleepy, and the cold has been so constant now I don’t feel it anymore.
From the corner of my eye, I notice a car trailing me. I’m down a side street, I realize. I don’t know which street. I haven’t been paying attention.
The car pulls almost even with me, and my heart seizes up. The rest of me is unplugged, like someone’s cut a cord between my animal self, which wants to preserve my safety, and my higher brain, which is only mildly interested.
I hear the crunch of a door swing open and my feet take over, forcing me to a sloppy, numb, tipsy run.
“Casey!”
I turn before I think better of it, and it’s Michael. It’s his car, with the door open.
He holds out a hand, beseeching. I just stare at him.
“Please, it’s at least warm in the car.”
I shrug and allow my feet to carry me back to the car, though the rest of my soul feels banished and locked away, somewhere far from here.
C
asey didn’t get the heavy house door closed all the way, and it swings back open, revealing a sliver of white outdoors, letting in tendrils of cold. I shove the door closed, hard, and the sound punctures the quiet in the wake of her departure.
The color has come back to Jewel’s face, and I’m sickened with myself, suddenly, that Casey saved her life, actually saved her, and all I did was criticize.
“See what you all did!” shouts Dylan. I startle at this. “You drove her away!”
“And good riddance!” retorts Angel. “You should have seen what she wrote in her diary about me. All the while pretending to like me just because of Dad and secretly hating me. I expect that kind of crap at school, but not from a grown-up in my own house! Some
stepmother
. She called me a bitch!”
“Watch your language!” I shout back. “Jewel is right here.”
Mallory scoffs. “Oh, like she hasn’t heard worse a hundred times.”
I turn to her. “Yes, and that’s exactly the problem.”
She throws up her hands. “And we’re back to Bad Mallory again, how surprising.”
“Well, you make it so easy.”
“STOP!”
This is Dylan. His face is florid and visibly sweaty. Angel has stepped away from him, looking askance as if he might bite her.
“I can’t take it anymore! Dad, you criticize all the time, and Angel’s so mean”—Angel tries to protest, but Dylan steams ahead past her, not appearing to notice—“and Mom is hysterical and no one listens to me and I’m just tired of it! I wish you’d never found me!”
“Well, fine,” Mallory spits out. “Maybe I should go, just go forever, you’ll never have to deal with my
hysteria
again.” She snatches her purse up off the desk at the front of the room, but I recognize the act. She doesn’t intend to go, she probably never did.
Dylan puts his hands to the side of his head and utters a low, frustrated growl. “That’s not what I meant! I-I—”
Dylan’s face is working hard, trying to get words out that stall and sputter on his tongue, and I recognize the anguish in his face over this. Angel has turned pink with fury, and Jewel is sitting cross-legged on the floor; so recently she couldn’t breathe, and now she clutches her stomach, rocking slightly in place.
I put my hand on Mallory’s elbow, fighting against my animal nature, to bring my voice to a moderate, soothing register. “Come on, Mal, settle down, okay? Let’s just catch our breath and talk for a minute—”
“Don’t patronize me, you pompous ass!” She swings her arm in an arc to shake me away, and in doing so her purse flies loose from her shoulder, spinning as it does, and spilling its contents across the hardwood living room floor.
I glance down and see prescription bottles. Three or four, and more for Tylenol and aspirin, which I’d bet my useless college degree don’t hold anything so innocent.
I make a dive for them, flashing back to the time I fought her for the ATM card. She is on her knees on the floor, too, gathering them up to her bosom. The bottles I get my hands on aren’t even in her name.
“Who’s ‘Patricia Clark’?” I ask, no longer able to screen the contempt from my voice. “And why does
she
need so much Vicodin?”
“They’re prescription! And it’s none of your business!”
“So this is how you’ve stopped drinking.”
She tosses her head, trying to be confident and failing as she rarely does. “You have to admit I’m much better now, aren’t I?”
I suddenly remember a failed visitation from a few weeks ago. Mallory was supposed to be home and wouldn’t answer the door, but it swung open with repeated knocking. Angel and the kids came back to the car, said their mom wasn’t feeling good and that they had to go home. They’d said she was lying on the couch, seeming too weak to move, or even give them a hug.
At the time, I thought she’d gotten swine flu, or perhaps was sleeping off a hard drunk. I called Nicole and left a message to check on her. Drugs never entered my mind.
How dare I hope she’d changed?
“Get the hell out of here.”
She puts her hands on her hips. “I’m visiting my children.”
“It’s not your weekend.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’re not getting any extra time after this little revelation.”
She tosses her hair and smiles at Angel. “Well, we’ll see. My circumstances are changing, I’ll have you know. And so are yours, and not for the better. Did you happen to mention to the children that you lost your job? Or are you saving that pleasant surprise for later? You do need to be able to
feed
your children in order to have custody.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“Oh, that’s right, Daddy Turner will save the day. Or maybe he won’t, this time. Maybe he’s tired of supporting you. And now without darling Casey to pitch in around here—”
I pull my phone out of my pocket. “Dylan and Angel. Please take Jewel upstairs.”
“Daddy?” Jewel says, her tiny voice breaking me in pieces with how innocent and scared she sounds.
“Go upstairs with your brother and sister.”
The kids scurry away upstairs, whispering.
I hold up the phone. “I’m calling the police unless you’re out that door in three seconds.”
“I am not leaving until I’m good and ready.”
“Can’t you see the looks on their faces? You’re making them sick. I thought I was doing them such a favor by trying to do everything by the book, everything right, never saying anything bad about you, always trying to keep to the schedule no matter what, and here you are, on drugs now, drugs you’ve obtained in a fake name, or stolen maybe, who knows, so you’re a criminal, too. Are you on them right now? Is that why you let Jewel bounce on the couch with a jawbreaker in her mouth? What if that had happened at your place, Mal? What if Casey hadn’t been here, and Jewel choked to death while you stood there in a daze?”
“That wouldn’t happen! I love my daughter!”
“Then why are you doing drugs! Why did you drink and drive with her in the car!”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why the fuck shouldn’t it
be?” I’m roaring now, past trying, past caring. “I’m tired of your excuses, I’m tired of your tragic past, I’m tired of putting my kids in the line of fire every time I drop them off with you. Get out.”
“No.”
I start to dial one-handed. “Get out now, or I’m calling the police to haul you away, with your illegally obtained drugs in your purse.”
“Maybe I’ll tell the police you hit me.”
She rears back and whacks herself on the cheek. It leaves a red mark. “How do you like that!” she shrieks, and she slaps herself again.
I recognize this. Mallory is spinning out of control now, like a dervish. I walk backward up the stairs, slowly. She continues to slap her face, her smile triumphant.
The kids are all gathered in my room, on my bed. I join them, close and lock the door, and call 911.
I hear some breaking of things downstairs, which makes Jewel gasp. I pull her into my lap. She presses one ear against my chest, and I cover her other ear with the palm of my hand.
I hear Mallory scream up the stairs: “Je
wel is not even yo
urs!”
I press my hand harder over Jewel’s ear as I tell the dispatcher, “Yes, I’m having a problem with my ex-wife . . .”
After a minute or two, I turn on the radio to drown out the tantrum, which has gone past intelligible speech.
I hear someone shouting on the other side of my front door. I go to my window, and look down to see a patrol car.
I think of Mallory slapping her cheek, and a sick fear spreads in my stomach that if she plays her role to the hilt, I may be the one hauled off in handcuffs.
There’s more shouting from downstairs. I look out the window again, and when I hear the bedsprings squeak for the kids getting up I use my best stern-Dad voice. “Stay back.”
Jewel does not need to once again witness her mother in police custody. Mallory is in cuffs, being lowered into a police car. This is what needed to happen, I know. But she was once my wife. My children’s mother.
A deep voice calls, “Mr. Turner?”
“In here,” I answer, forcing myself to be calm.
“Come down the stairs, sir. Make sure I can see your hands.”
I tell the children to wait, and descend the stairs, hands palm out, in front of me, and I reach the landing where the stairs curve down into the living room, where I have an aerial view of half the main floor.
The officer’s face has a practiced calm. Surrounding him are the remnants of my living room. A fireplace poker is in the guts of my TV. Curtains are torn down, the computer is smashed to the floor. DVDs, books, anything she could grasp in the living room, she must have used as ordnance.
This makes the time she threw a mug at me look like an amusing prank.
He asks me who else is in the house and where they are. While I wait on the landing, he ascends the rest of the stairs, peeks into the rooms, always watching me at the same time. When he seems satisfied no one is lurking about, we descend the stairs together.
“We need to speak to you, sir. She says you hit her, and there’s a mark on her cheek.”
I flinch. “No. This is going to sound crazy, but I swear it’s true. She slapped herself, on purpose, trying to get me in trouble. That’s when I took the kids upstairs. She’s . . . she’s not right. Never diagnosed, but—”
“Just tell me what happened.”