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“You’ll have fun. I used to love field day, because it meant I could play with my friends all day long. But as for bringing the tadpoles, I suppose we could put them in a jar, but I don’t know how long they can live that way, especially if they’re in the sun for hours. I’d hate for something bad to happen to them.”
For a long moment, he was quiet. He let the tadpole go and scratched at his cheek with a dirty finger. “I miss my old room.”
Whoever had slept in his current bedroom obviously wasn’t a child. The closet and chest of drawers were still full of clothing for an adult, and the bed was oversized. There were paintings, not posters, on the walls.
“I know you do,” she said. “It’s hard moving to a new place.”
“Why couldn’t I bring more of my toys?”
Because I couldn’t carry them. Because people at the bus station would have remembered. Because running meant we had to travel light.
“We just couldn’t.”
“When can I see Brady and Derek again?”
They were his best friends, also left behind. She smiled at the irony. When she was little, there were kids in her class with exactly the same names.
“We’ll see,” she said. “Probably not for a while, though.”
He nodded, then bent lower, looking for tadpoles again. Barefoot, with his pants rolled, he struck her as a throwback to a different generation. She prayed he wouldn’t ask about his father, but he seemed to know that it wouldn’t be a good idea. There were, after all, still bruises on his arm from the last time Gary had grabbed him.
“It’s different here,” he finally said. “I can see the moon through my window at night.”
Because it was more than he generally volunteered, she couldn’t help but smile again.
“I used to read you Goodnight Moon. When you were little.”
He knitted his small brow. “Is that the one with the cow jumping over the moon?”
“That’s it.”
He nodded again, then went back to searching. Caught one, let it go. Caught another and then let it go, as well. Watching him, Beverly was suffused with love, glad she had risked everything in order to keep him safe.
After all, Tommie’s father was, on average days, a very angry, dangerous man.
But now, with his wife and child gone, he was likely even worse.
The rest of the afternoon was quiet. Tommie watched cartoons, and Beverly examined the paint cans stacked near the washer and dryer before locating not only a can of primer but at least half a can of yellow paint called Summer Daisy, which might not be the exact tint she would have chosen but was a thousand times better than god-awful orange. There was a beige she might be able to use in the living room, even if it was a bit bland, and an almost full can of glossy white for the kitchen cupboards. Kind of mind-boggling to find so much paint, but in a good way, like the house had been waiting all along for her and Tommie to claim it.
She took a closer look, too, at the paintbrushes and rollers. On closer inspection, they were obviously used but looked clean enough to suffice. And unless she wanted to make a trip to the hardware store and spend money she didn’t have, they would have to do.
She brought everything she thought she’d need to the kitchen before starting dinner. Tonight would be chicken, boiled carrots, beans. She added extra carrots to Tommie’s plate, but when he didn’t finish them, she reached over, eating them one by one. Though Tommie wanted to turn on the television again after dinner, she instead suggested a game. She’d spotted a box of dominoes in the cabinet in the living room, and though it had been a long time since she’d played, she knew the rules were simple enough for Tommie to grasp. He did; he even beat her a couple of times. Once he began to yawn, she sent him upstairs for a quick bath. He was old enough to do it alone—he’d lately started reminding her about that—so she let him be. Since he didn’t have pajamas, he slept in his underpants and the shirt he’d worn to school. She thought again about kids at school beginning to tease him and knew she’d have to find him something else to wear, as long as she could find bargains.
Money. She needed more money. Life always came down to money, and she felt her anxiety suddenly rise before forcing the feeling away. Instead, she sat with Tommie on his bed, read Go, Dog. Go! before tucking him in, and then retreated to the rockers on the front porch. Residual heat lingered from the day, making the evening pleasant; the air vibrated with the sounds of frogs and crickets. Rural sounds, country sounds. Sounds she remembered from her own childhood. Sounds she never heard in the suburbs.
As she rocked, she thought about the years she’d spent with Gary and how the sweet and charming demeanor that she’d fallen in love with changed within the first month of marriage. She remembered him sneaking up behind her to kiss her neck after she’d just poured a glass of wine. White wine, not red, and she’d collided with him when she turned. The wine splashed onto his shirt, one of his new ones, and though she’d apologized immediately, she’d laughed, as well, already planning to rinse the shirt before dropping it off at the dry cleaner’s the following morning. She was about to flirt with him—I guess I’ll have to get you out of that shirt, handsome—but even as the thought was forming, he slapped her across the face, the sound deafening and the sting intense.
And after that?
In retrospect, she knew she should have left then. Should have known that Gary was a chameleon, a man who had learned to hide his true colors. She wasn’t naïve; she’d seen the TV specials and skimmed magazine articles about abusive men. But her desire to believe and trust had overridden her common sense. That’s not him, she told herself. Gary apologized as he wept, and she’d believed him when he said he was sorry. She’d believed him when he said he loved her, that he’d simply reacted. She’d believed him when he said it would never happen again.
But because she’d become a living cliché, her life descended into one. Of course, he eventually slapped her again; in time, those slaps turned to punches. Always in the stomach or in the lower back, where the bruises couldn’t be seen, even though the blows would leave her crumpled on the floor, struggling to breathe, her vision fading to a tunnel. In those moments, his face would turn red and the vein in his forehead would bulge as he screamed at her. He would throw plates and cups against the wall of the kitchen, leaving glass shattered around her. That was always the end of the cycle. The out-of-control anger. The shouting. The infliction of pain. But always, instead of ending for good, the cycle would begin anew. With apologies and promises and gifts like flowers or earrings or lingerie, and though she continued to hear the warning bells in her head, the sounds were drowned out by a burgeoning desire to believe that this time he’d changed. And for days and weeks, Gary would again be the man she married. They would go out with friends, and people would comment on their perfect marriage; her single girlfriends would tell her how lucky she was to have walked the aisle with a man like Gary.
Sometimes she even believed them. As time passed, she would remind herself not to do anything to make him angry. She would be the perfect wife and they would live in the perfect home, precisely the way he wanted it. She’d make the bed with the duvet straight and neat, the pillows fluffed just right. She’d fold and stack his clothes in the drawers, organized by color. She’d shine his shoes and line up the items in the cupboards. She’d make sure the television remote was on the coffee table and angled exactly toward the corner of the room. She knew what he liked—he made sure that she understood—and her days were spent doing all that was important to him. But just when she thought that the worst was behind her, something would happen. The chicken she cooked might be too dry, or he’d find towels still in the dryer, or one of the houseplants on the windowsill had begun to wilt, and his face would suddenly tighten. His cheeks would turn red, his pupils would grow smaller, and he’d drink more in the evenings, three or four glasses of wine instead of only one. And then the following days and weeks were akin to walking through a minefield, where a single misstep would lead to the inevitable explosion, followed by pain.
But that was an old story, right? Her story was the same as that of thousands, maybe even millions, of other women. Now she understood that there was something wrong with Gary, something that could never be fixed. And Gary had a sick and intuitive kind of radar, one that seemed to understand how far he could actually go. When she was pregnant, he hadn’t laid a hand on her; he’d known she would leave him if he did anything to possibly hurt the baby. Nor had he touched her in the first few months after Tommie was born, when she was sleep-deprived. It was the only time during the marriage when she’d let her responsibilities in the house slide. She still cooked his meals and did his laundry and shined his shoes and kissed him the way he wanted, but sometimes the living room was cluttered when he came home from work, and sometimes Tommie had drool or spills on his clothing. It wasn’t until Tommie was five or six months old that he slapped her again. On that night, Gary had bought her a negligé, the box wrapped with a pretty red bow. She’d always known that Gary liked to see her in negligés, just as he was particular when it came to sex. He always wanted her to whisper certain things, he wanted her hair and makeup done, he wanted her to beg for him to take her, he liked her to talk dirty. On that day, though, when he came home with the negligé, she was utterly exhausted. Tommie had cried inconsolably for much of the previous night, and it had continued while Gary was at work. By then she’d lowered her guard; by then she’d convinced herself that the anger and the shouting and the pain were behind her, so she told him that she was too tired. Instead, she promised to wear the negligé the following evening, and they could make it a special night. Which wasn’t what Gary wanted. He wanted her that night, not the following night, and all at once she was blinking back tears, her cheek on fire with his handprint.
Again, the apologies. Again, the gifts in the aftermath. Again, the knowledge that she should have left. But where would she have gone? Back home, with her tail between her legs, so others could tell her that she’d made a mistake by getting married too young? That she’d made a mistake by falling in love with the wrong man? Even if she could face the endless judgment of others, he would find her there. It would be the first place he’d look. As for going to the police, Gary was the police, the most powerful police in the entire world, so who would believe her? More than that, there was also Tommie to think about. For a long time, Gary doted on Tommie. He talked to him and played with him and held Tommie’s hands as Tommie began to toddle around the house. She knew how hard it was for children to grow up with only a single parent; she’d made a vow that she’d never do that to Tommie. That Gary wouldn’t change diapers didn’t seem all that important when he was willing to spend so much time with his son, to the point that Beverly sometimes felt neglected.
