“We went out to dinner at a pretty bad restaurant,” I said softly. “It was nice. We went to see one of my patients. We watched Miracle on 34th Street after. I think that’s why I called.”
“We watched it, too,” Grace said. “Trudi cried and said she’d always been in love with Natalie Wood.”
“We were watching the same movie at the same time. That’s pretty good.”
“I miss you so much,” Grace said.
“I know.”
“Give Robert a hug and tell him I miss him, too.”
“I can’t, Grace. I can’t tell him I talked to you. I can’t confuse him too much, about now and then, here and there. I can’t stay on too much longer, either. I’m afraid. I’m afraid for you, mostly.”
There was silence again. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s is on the Movie Channel at midnight,” Grace said. “You want to watch it together?”
“We don’t get cable here.”
“Will you call again?” Grace said.
“If it’s safe,” I said. “I’m with you every day in my mind. I’m running.”
“I’m running with you in my mind,” Grace said. I put down the phone in Florida and she hung up in New York.
I bought Robert the game he wanted for Christmas and hid it in the crawl space above the second floor. I bought Cindy a small sweet landscape I saw in a poster shop at the mall, and Mike Riordan a nylon jacket for running on rainy days. I bought presents for all my patients, although we weren’t supposed to: a computer game for Jennifer, full of dragons and demons and a female superhero in a breastplate; a book for Melvin on smart investing and a romance novel for his wife; and, for Mrs. Levitt, a three-year subscription to People magazine. Christmas was coming, and I had enough money to buy presents. No one asked for the rent; I didn’t get a phone bill. There were calluses on my heels from my running shoes. When the phone rang now I just answered it, listened to the home-care agency ask about taking on a short-term assignment, Cindy ask whether I wanted her to drive me to school for soccer practice, the school to ask if Robert could take Tylenol for a headache. Twice it rang and no one was there. That happens to everyone, I told myself. To everyone.
“You all right?” Cindy said one morning in the library.
“I’m not sleeping real well,” I said.
“Ladies,” Mrs. Patrinian said, “not too loud please.”
“You tried taking melatonin?” Cindy said. “One of the moms at Gymboree swears by it, says she can’t even manage to stay up for the news now.”
When we went back to her house that morning she made me muffins and searched her medicine cabinet for sleeping pills. “Nothing but under-eye concealer, hon, but to tell the truth you could use it,” she said.
“Do I look that bad?”
“You look tired. Sort of frail. I don’t know, some men like that look.”
“Some men like single women in their twenties with no kids.”
“You just stay away from those men, and keep on running around that track.”
“You got a one-track mind,” I said.
“Ha, ha,” Cindy said.
I told Cindy about Grace, and a little about our parents, although I placed them all in Wilmington, Delaware, along with two older brothers and the accountant from whom I was divorced. I changed the subject Gracie taught from American studies to English literature, and I never mentioned Hunter College. I told her that my father had died of cancer, not of the emphysema he’d picked up as a New York City firefighter, all those buildings with asbestos insulation and two packs of Camels a day. I told her my mother was a secretary, even told her that she was the secretary to the head of a labor union. Soon I knew all about Craig and his pool business, about how Chelsea was afraid of thunderstorms, dogs, and insects, and how Chad was afraid of nothing, about Cindy’s mom, Helen, and how she was one of the people who discovered that the Avon bath oil repelled mosquitoes, since the farm had more mosquitoes than crops. She was a second-generation Avon lady, Cindy was; she showed me the story in the Avon annual report about her and her mother. Her parents’ farm was somewhere between Lake Plata and Jocasta, and her mother had logged sometimes a hundred miles a day dropping off eyebrow pencil and bath-oil beads to the wives of other farmers, before the area was all built up, chock-full of retired Northerners and people who confused sunshine with gold. Cindy went along when she got older, swiping those little sample lipsticks that the Avon lady left at our apartment for me and Gracie, even though our mother wouldn’t buy a thing. A sea of moisturizer managed to keep Cindy’s parents’ place afloat, the thirsty faces of all those women baked leathery by the harsh Florida sun.
Cindy and Craig had lived on the farm right after they were married, then built their own place in a subdivision two miles from the center of Lake Plata, in a redwood house with a lot of windows and an aboveground pool with some kind of automatic alarm on the surface so Chad wouldn’t fall in and drown. Chelsea was afraid they’d all drown, in the pool, at the beach, in the tub. They lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, in an area of cul-de-sacs, as though by eliminating through roads the people who lived there could keep the rest of the world away. Every time I came for coffee I took the measure of Cindy’s kitchen, envying her her no-wax linoleum and the double-door refrigerator with the automatic ice maker. But as my eyes roved around the white Formica and the oak cabinets I was really walking through my own house in my mind, up the four steps with the white iron railing, through the storm door and into the foyer with the half-round table and the gilded mirror over it, the one Bobby’s mother gave us for a house-warming present. It’s funny how you get about a house when you’ve never had one, never ever thought you’d have one. The day we signed all those papers, with thirty-years this and thirty-years that, passing around the checks like in some grown-up board game, we’d gone over to the house and wandered about like a couple of kids, our words echoing in the emptiness. Buying the house made it seem as though it was us that was so solid, made of brick and plaster so that nothing could blow us over. I remember looking up the stairs and it was like they were reaching up, not to three bedrooms and a bath with a glassed-in stall shower, but to heaven. He’d shoved me a few times by then, even hit me in the stomach once. But I never looked up those stairs and imagined myself falling down them with a fist in the small of my back.
“This is it, baby,” he said, and he pulled me down to the wall-to-wall, his words echoing in the empty, stripped-down rooms. And it was. I got carpet burns on my butt that day, and I was the happiest woman in the world. People can talk about self-respect all they want, and people do plenty, usually when they’re talking about somebody else’s business. But whenever I thought about leaving, sometimes as much as leaving Bobby I thought about leaving my house. Balloon shades and miniblinds and the way I felt at night sleeping on my extra-firm mattress under my own roof that we’d had hot-tarred the year after Robert was born—all of it helped keep me there. And if that sounds foolish, just think about that solid settled feeling you get when you open your cabinets and there are the mugs for the coffee that have held the coffee day after day, year after year, hanging in a row from cup hooks, all the same color, the same size. Small things: routine, order. That’s what kept me there for the longest time. That, and love. That, and fear. Not fear of Bobby, fear of winding up in some low-rent apartment subdivision with a window that looked out on a wall. Fear of winding up where I’d come from, where I was right now. It took me a dozen years of house pride and seventeen years of marriage before I realized there were worse things than a cramped kitchen and grubby carpeting.
I wondered how much damage Bobby had done to our house when he’d found us gone, with no one around to bruise or break. I wondered what he’d told his mother, whether he’d told his friends, or whether he’d just quietly set about the business of finding me. He had a half-dozen friends who were on full pension and working as investigators; maybe he’d called one of them. One hundred and thirty days I’d been gone. August. September. October. November. Som
eone would have thought of Patty Bancroft by now. When a car pulled to the curb in front of the apartment complex at two in the morning it rocked my world. Cindy gave me a bottle of melatonin, but I was afraid to take it, afraid to sleep deep. I dozed on and off each night, lulled by the sound of Robert’s breathing over the baby monitor.
It’s funny; with all the elaborate preparations that Patty Bancroft’s people had made, I never doubted that some day he would find us. I always felt like I was just buying time, the time it takes to raise one boy from child to adult. I never figured out how hard it was going to be to do that until I started, and then the bitch of it was that it was too late to turn back, though I wouldn’t have turned back anyhow. The bitch of it was that it takes so much time and effort to make things good for them, and so little to make them bad. The bitch of it is that we’re never sure whether what we’re doing is right or wrong.
Some of the damage is done. Robert watches too much, is too quiet. It’s better when he’s with other kids, but with adults he’s always waiting for something to happen, like a psychic looking down at someone’s palm. When he got thrown out of the supermarket, he was angry and upset, but he wasn’t surprised. It was as though he knew that grown-ups, at any moment, might go off like car alarms, loud, scary, for no reason at all. The truth is, that’s the way Bobby made him. And me, too, by taking it. Robert has a look on his face too much of the time that people have when they think they’ve heard something moving around in the basement, heard the rumble of thunder so far away it just might be a truck in the next block. He had that look on his face that last time in Grace’s apartment. That’s how I think of the weeks before I left: the last time. The last time Bobby hit me. The last time I saw my sister. The last time I left my house, locking the door behind me.
The last time in Grace’s apartment I saw Robert’s face change, saw it go still and watchful, realized in a minute or two that he’d heard the elevator and the footsteps before we had, had been listening for them. His eyes were huge but his shoulders hunched, as though he was trying to make himself small, smaller, tiny, invisible. Bang, at the door. Bang, and Robert shrinking into himself like a little old man. It’s amazing, how furious the sound of knuckles meeting wood can sound.
“How the hell did he get upstairs?” Grace had said, and she made herself big, threw her bony shoulders back, marched in her clogs—bang, bang—to answer the banging at the door.
“Go away, Bob. Just go away.”
“I want my wife and my son.” I had been able to hear in Bobby’s voice that he had been drinking, but not too much. “Now.”
“Go away, Bob. You’ve done enough damage.”
“This is none of your goddamn business, Grace. Frannie? Fran? You come out here and talk to me or I’ll break the goddamn door down.” I could feel Robert’s shoulders vibrating beneath my fingertips, or maybe the vibrations were coming from inside me.
“How the hell did he get up here?” Gracie said, all her freckles standing out against the white of her face, and from the other side of the thick oak door of her apartment came what sounded like a chuckle. “I showed the doorman my badge, Grace.” That voice again, that deep bass line, music to someone’s ears, if not mine. You could just see him talking to the Russian émigré who minded the door of Grace’s building, an old man in a faded blue-black uniform and ill-fitting hat. You could see Bobby flipping open the little leather case I’d given him when he made detective and the doorman falling back before him, perhaps even touching his hand to the corner of his hat. Sometimes I thought how hard it was to be a cop, to put on the clothes and be force of law and then take them off and be no more than a man with a cheap sport shirt and a stack of bills. But sometimes it made things easier.
“Let him in,” I said.
“No.”
“Let him in, Grace. Or take Robert into the other room and I’ll let him in.”
“Aw, hell, Frances,” Bobby had said when I unlocked the dead-bolt and the other two Yale locks, but whether it was because of my betrayal in leaving him and going to Grace or because of the look of my face, which was mottled purple and black where it wasn’t covered with adhesive tape, I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t know how bad he’d hurt me. He’d come in after midnight the night before and banged around the kitchen and the living room looking for something, muttering furiously to himself, waking me from a sound sleep, so that I couldn’t go off again. I don’t know why I went downstairs. I’ve asked myself that so many times, no matter what Patty Bancroft likes to say on television about placing blame where blame belongs. All I know is that if I’d done what I’d done so many times before, pretended to be asleep, ignored the staccato sounds of rage from below, I’d still be sleeping in my own bed now, and my son in his. Or maybe not. If it hadn’t been my nose on a Wednesday in late July, it would have been my jaw on a Saturday in September. I suppose that’s true. Like a cloud to a storm to a hurricane the thing between us had gotten bigger and blacker every day, until maybe it was bound to pick us up, smash us down, leave us all in ruins. In Lake Plata.
There wasn’t even an argument. Or maybe Bobby had been having an argument with me in his head all day long—on the job, in the car, while he was banging around the kitchen. Maybe it was an argument made of saved string, a big, brightly colored ball of an argument, the synthesis of all the arguments we’d ever had before. Why the fuck do you baby the boy go to your sister’s ignore my mother wear that skirt work so many hours look at me like that fuck my friends your friends strangers doctors everyone anyone the man in the moon? I’d stumbled down the stairs and into the hall in my long white nightgown and the light hurt my eyes and I couldn’t see his, could only see half a dozen drawers and cabinets gaping open, as though he was looking for something. He probably was. Bobby was always looking for something, and neither of us knew what it was.
“Bobby, what is your problem?” I’d said, squinting in the light, and it happened, just like that, three good punches that I remember and then I came to maybe an hour later, covered in blood, my nose and tongue numb. I’d broken one and bitten right through the edge of the other. I’d fixed myself up with Bactracin and bandages and gone to bed right beside him. I know people will find it hard to understand that, but it was my bed, I belonged there, I wasn’t going to be thrown out of my own bed no matter what. I woke once to hear Bobby sending Robert off to school, pretended to be asleep when I heard our bedroom door open. I called in to work sick when Bobby was gone, waited for Robert to come home, spent $25 on a cab and took him to Grace’s and let myself in and waited there in the shadows, no lights on, her apartment cheaper because it was at the back of the building. Robert fell asleep in her bedroom.
“I broke my nose,” I said when Grace came in with her briefcase and her tote bag full of books.
She stood there, my baby sister, still that even if she is thirty-two, and her own face crumpled, and she sat on the arm of the sofa and took my head in her hands. She’s little, Grace, but strong in her bones and muscles somehow; she lifts weights, too, just like Bobby, and when she raises those skinny arms over her head to stretch you can see all the connections in her body, everything, biceps, triceps, shoulder muscles like rubber bands.
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t break your nose. Don’t you ever say you broke your nose. Someone else broke your nose. That son of a bitch. That bastard. I told Mom he was doing this. I told Mom about all these things that happen to you. That big bruise you had the last time we had lunch. The time you had the marks all over your one arm. And you know what she said? She said you always were a clumsy kid. Jesus God, if she could see you now.”
We sat at Grace’s round oak dining table, Bobby and I, while Grace took Robert into her bedroom. It was a small apartment and the table was really at one end of the living room, by casement windows that looked out over a sliver of 104th Street. “Where are you gonna sleep here, on the couch?” he said. “Where’s Robert gonna sleep?”
“Look at my face,” I said.
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“My son should be in my house. Not in some shit hole on the Upper West Side. You don’t know this area like I do. He could get hurt here.”
“Look at my face,” I said.
“I’m taking you home,” he said.
“No.”
“Then I’m taking Robert home.”
“I won’t let you.”
Then Bobby looked at my face, looked at it good, looked at it with a cold, cold look that he, for all the things he’d done to me, had never given me before. And like he’d been rehearsing it he said, real quiet, “What are you gonna do, Fran? Call the cops?”
That’s when I knew. That’s when I knew that this was the last time, that I was leaving. If there was a moment when I decided that Bobby Benedetto would never touch me again, it was at that moment. He was gloating, really, although for once you couldn’t read his mood in his voice. He was telling me that I was trapped, that I was chained in some basement he’d created, a basement with flowered ironstone dishes all laid out neatly in the cupboards, with silk flowers in a vase on the dining-room table. He was telling me that I’d never get away, that he could do what he wanted and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
As we were leaving, Gracie pulled me back into the little foyer for just a moment. “Please don’t do this, Frannie,” she said. “I’ll help you. I’ll do anything to help you.”