The way he looked at the crowbar in my hand made me flush. “Oh, what, Fran?” Bobby said, looking up from the frayed green tweedy armchair that I’d moved from one end of the living room to the other at least a half dozen times, trying to find a place where it wouldn’t look so bad. “What, you’re going to hit me over the head with a piece of pipe?” He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, sometimes I think you’re brain damaged. Sit down.”
After the first momentary taste of adrenaline, metallic and bitter in my mouth, I didn’t feel much. Certainly not surprise. It seemed perfectly natural, Bobby sitting there. Made for each other, together forever: me and Bobby, Bobby and me. He was in front of me and the kitchen was to one side, and I could feel the phone on the wall where I couldn’t reach it. Like always, he read my mind. “The phone’s not working,” he said, flicking ashes onto an old magazine on the coffee table. “Besides, what the hell are you going to tell the cops? There’s a strange man who’s in my place, who happens to be my husband. Yeah, what’s he doing, lady? Oh, officer, he’s smoking a cigarette? Hell, we’ll be right over.” He dragged in, deeply. “The response time here is about twelve minutes, anyhow. Sit down.”
“I’m staying right where I am.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said.
He looked good, Bobby. He always had. His jeans were pressed, and I wondered who was pressing them now. His polo shirt was tight and his pectoral muscles and his abs looked like an anatomical drawing. His arms were big, the muscles thick and rounded. He’d been working out hard, and suddenly I could picture him perfectly, in the basement of the house, my house, doing his concentration curls and his crunches, getting bigger and bigger, angrier and angrier, picking up my panties and my bottles of perfume, waiting, waiting. Around his neck I saw a glint of metal, and nestled in the V of the polo shirt, glowing from amid the fur on his chest, the old medal his father had worn. It looked different, somehow, and then I realized that it was flanked by two halves of a jagged heart, the half he’d kept himself and the one I’d worn and left in the jewelry box on our dresser in Brooklyn. He looked handsome, Bobby, tasty and dangerous, just like Clarice Blessing had said that day in the ER. Tasty and dangerous. I figured he’d come to kill me.
“How you been, Frances Ann? You got yourself a real dump here. The whole place is maybe a third the size of our house. I was gonna sell it, but your name is on the deed and the lawyer said I couldn’t sell it without your permission. Jesus Christ. I needed your permission to sell my own house.
“I had to tell him a story, about how you were in Florida. That’s a laugh, right? Even before I knew you were in Florida I said you were in Florida. I had to make up more fucking stories to cover your ass, Fran. First you were real busy, then your mother was sick, then you were in Florida because my twenty years were almost up and we were gonna move down here.” He lit one cigarette from the end of another. He’d smoked when we first started going out, but he’d quit after Robert was born. He put the dead butt out on the floor and ground it out with the front of his foot. He was wearing the soft black leather loafers he always got at the Italian leather-goods place on Avenue X. They were so shiny, in the dark. Bobby always shined his own shoes. “I don’t know why the hell anybody comes down here,” he added. “I wouldn’t retire here on a bet.” Two hearts that beat as one: Fran and Bobby, Bobby and Fran. Our wedding song had been “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” That was one way of putting it.
I was shivering in my thin nightgown and I wondered if he could see through it in the light from the streetlamps that oozed through the half-open blinds. He said something but his voice was so low that I couldn’t make it out, his head down, the cigarette in his mouth. Then he looked up and his eyes were shining, black, like the shoes, and I could tell he was repeating what he’d just said.
“You took my son. My son. My child. You took my son away from me. What, were you nuts? Were you crazy, you didn’t think I’d come after you? With my boy with you, filling him full of garbage? And for what? Because I made a mistake and came at you a little bit. Jesus, I should have broken both your legs, you bitch, so you couldn’t’ve run.
“You had every fucking thing you could want. ‘Why are you letting her work, Bob?’ the other guys would say, but I let it go, figured if it made you happy, so be it. You had your house. My mother took care of your kid when you were at work, when you were late. All you had to do was pick up the phone. She’d say, how come she doesn’t invite me over, Bob? I’d say, Ma, you got to give her a little space. Always standing up for you. Being the nice guy. Taking the kid to the park. Telling my friends to mind their own business. She’s not too friendly, Bob, they’d say, and I’d tell them, well, she’s just quiet. Knowing it was a lie, because you could be plenty nice when you wanted to. But you didn’t want to be.
“You think it was such a goddamn picnic living with you, Fran, you always out of the house bandaging people up or whatever, give me your tired, your poor, but God forbid my husband needs a break. Sitting at the kitchen table pretending to listen to me, your skinny little Irish lips getting tighter and tighter when I talk, like you got something sour in your mouth. My mother’s a bitch, my friends are crude. You tell my boy I’m a bigot, Fran? You’re telling my son things when you don’t know shit.
“You want to hear something fucking sad? I loved you. I really fucking loved you, Frances. But nothing was ever right, nothing was ever good enough. You wanted to do what you wanted to do, go off with your sister, go off to the hospital, go off with your dyke girlfriends, just go off, go off, instead of being home, where you belonged. And even when you stayed home you looked at me and you looked scared all the time, like something bad’s gonna happen. What the hell do you think that’s like, to look at your wife and see that she’s always looking back at you, sideways, sneaky, like you’re a grenade that’s gonna go off in her hand. Half the time I only came at you to wipe that goddamned look off your face.”
It was the first time in a long time it had been like this, the two of us really alone, without Robert a wall or a floor or a room away, so that I didn’t have to think about protecting him, about keeping my voice down. I don’t know why I didn’t scream then. Maybe I was making the same mistake I’d always made, that sooner or later he’d see sense, that I’d see behind his eyes the Bobby who used to kiss my knuckles, one at a time, when my hands were chapped from washing them with Lubriderm at the hospital. “You had no right to hurt me, Bobby,” I said.
“Hurt you? Hurt you? What the hell do you think you did to me? I used to come home, the house is all dark, I’m beating off in bed right next to my wife because she’s sound asleep. My boy won’t look me in the eye because she’s been telling him shit—”
“I never said anything—”
“DON’T YOU FUCKING INTERRUPT ME!” My back was against the wall at the foot of the stairs, and I kept hoping that the walls were thin enough that somebody would hear. But they always did hear, other people, always had heard and did nothing, left us alone.
“I come home one night and my wife and my son are gone, but everything’s still there so they couldn’t have gone too far, and I go to see your sister, and your mother, and that big dyke you worked with at the hospital. And she has the nerve to say to me, you been beating on her all this time, haven’t you? And I say, you been diddling her all this time, too. She shut the fucking door in my face and called the cops. The cops!” Bobby threw back his head and laughed. I could see that his hair was going silver at the temples. He looked good. Handsome. I couldn’t stop shivering.
“It took me a while, I gotta give you that. Your sister, now, she is one tough bitch. No matter what I tried on her she wouldn’t give you up. I had her so she wouldn’t even pick up the phone, but she wouldn’t give you up no matter what I did. That woman, what’s-her-name, the one who’s always on television with the snotty voice, you can’t get near her, but some of her people are pussies, pure and simple. Jesus, talk about folding. The one who drove you down here, wit
h the dogs, she was easy to shake up. And the guy in New York, when I threatened to have the New York City Police Department all over him like a cheap suit. That scared them, you could tell. They would have given you up sooner or later.”
He took a drag on his cigarette and smiled. What a smile Bobby had always had. It changed his whole face. This one made him look so scary I almost looked away. “I didn’t even need to wait,” he said. “I got this little box on the phone, caller ID. All these scared little cunts in the city buy ’em, like it’s somehow gonna help them when the bad man calls. You can scramble the numbers up so they don’t come through, but my good luck is, I know a guy in the department, he can unscramble them. That little box sat there for a long time, Frannie, but I didn’t take the damn thing off, and look what happened. Here I am. Because my son is loyal. A loyal boy. He calls his father and I write down the number and”—he waved his cigarette around the dark living room—“here I am. In Shitsville. Home of a woman who had everything a woman could want and left it all in a mess. In a big fucking mess for me to clean up.”
“Bobby—”
“Ah, shit, Frances, don’t bother. I don’t want to hear your bullshit. Even when I was good you looked at me like I was gonna be bad any minute. You looked at me like you were just waiting.” He laughed again. “I didn’t want to keep you waiting, Fran. Not like you kept me waiting, a whole year, to see my boy.”
“He’s not here,” I said.
“You don’t think I know that? You don’t think I know exactly where he is, and where he goes to school? That’s why I waited, Fran. I could have been here two days after he called me. But I waited another week, and you know why? Because I’m a good father. I’m a goddamned good father. I waited so I wouldn’t fuck up the school year. So he could finish at that piece-of-shit public school where you put him. Don’t they all hate you, Fran, that you’re getting special treatment for your kid because you’re fucking the teacher?”
“I—”
“Never mind the lying. I’m so fucking tired of your lying. Lie, lie, lie.” He sighed heavily. “Frannie, Frannie, Fran. I know where you been working, Fran, and for who. I even know how much money you make. I know your phone number here. You got a loose window in the back. The screen flips right out, and the pane is so flimsy it takes maybe a minute to get it out with a glass cutter. If I told you once, I told you a hundred times you’re bad with security, Fran. Any animal could get in here. Anyone. My boy isn’t safe here.”
“We’re not going back, Bobby.”
“I wouldn’t have you back on a bet, you bitch.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “You know what the worst part about this whole thing is? I loved you so much, Frances Ann. Sometimes I used to fall asleep, after I had a couple of drinks, and I’d have dreams, but they weren’t made-up dreams, crazy shit. They were like movies of real stuff, like home movies. Like that time we went to the beach when Robert was a baby and we put up that big umbrella so he wouldn’t get burned, and I took all those pictures with the Instamatic, you sitting there next to that little box you kept him in. I was holding him, jumping the waves, and I looked back at you and you had that little smile you had sometimes, real sweet, real nice. I woke up and the burning in my gut was so bad I thought I was dying.
“I loved the shit out of you, and look what you did to me.”
“I loved you, too, Bobby.”
How come I had so lost the ability to read him, to understand what went on beneath the black holes of his eyes? Or maybe I’d never had it at all. A dozen times, as he’d talked and talked, I’d felt myself pressing into the wall behind me, so that my heels ached where the molding hit them. Maybe it was the words, or the sudden wash of feeling, the sadness that came over me like a kind of faintness, that made me yearn forward as I said those last words, and meant them with all my heart even as I felt the metal of that crowbar in my hand: I loved you, too, Bobby. They were barely out of my mouth when he came out of the chair, like a cat, so quick I scarcely knew it until he was holding me against the wall, pressing against me with his body, his forearm against my throat, the way the older cops had taught him when he was a rookie. He’d showed me once as a joke, so many years ago, my head buzzing, the floor coming up to meet my face. This time was no joke. He brought his knee hard against my wrist, and the crowbar fell to the carpet with a thump and rolled onto my foot, mocking me.
In the past it had always been like I’d been waiting for it, almost grateful, like he’d said, that the waiting was over. Maybe he was right, that I’d spent years with a look in my eyes that told him a scream was always hiding in my throat. But somehow it had always been Bobby, so that even when he was pushing me around, yelling right in my face, I could smell the smell of him, feel the feel of him that I knew so well. This time it was like a stranger coming at me. The hard hands no longer felt familiar, the breath tarred with cigarettes and some kind of booze was noxious; the feel of him through his pants, up against my groin, felt like something strange and criminal. Even the voice was no longer as hypnotic as it had once been, somehow different, diminished, tinny. Or maybe it was that I was somebody different, that Beth Crenshaw wasn’t going to let this man bloody and beat her. I used all of me to fight back against it, my hands, my knees, my feet, everything but my voice, held captive in my throat by the iron of his arm. I let my eyes close, went limp, and started to slide down the wall, and I felt him relax, a noise in his throat like crooning, like purring, and as he let down his guard for just a moment I came up hard against him, surprised him, almost knocked him over.
“That’s it,” he said, reaching for me, grabbing me around the throat. And then I saw points of color against black, like the fireworks we watched every year on the Fourth from the Coney Island boardwalk. That’s it. That’s the last thing I remember.
My daughter has red hair and the sort of disposition associated with it, willful, a little wild. Since she learned to speak she has appended a question mark to almost every sentence she has spoken: Mommy, what this thing? Mommy, water hot? Mommy, have that? How come? Why not? Probably most people cannot understand her. Her words are like soup, the smooth broth of the vowels, the chunky consonants, and she swirls them around in her little mouth until they sound more like mush than anything else. Sometimes I even have to translate for her father, the beloved, the adored Daddy. But I know everything she says. Everything.
Sometimes people see us all together in the supermarket and they remark on the tangle of orange curls, like a flag above the wire cart. The two of us so blond, they cannot quite figure out where this rogue gene comes from. Loving Care No. 27, California Blonde, makes me look a little less like my daughter’s mother, but I have a sentimental attachment to it. Besides, it makes me look a little more like Mike’s wife, an attachment much more tenuous than the attachment between me and Grace Ann. “Gwacen,” she calls herself, all one word. “Let’s say grace,” we say before holiday dinners, and she screams with laughter, two years old and full, as my father might have said, of piss and vinegar.
My name is Beth Crenshaw. I did not change it to Riordan, nor back to Flynn. I left Frances behind. Beth Crenshaw is the name of the me I am today, Grace Ann’s mother. And Robert’s mother, too. No matter what.
It was Mike who found me, half a day after I’d found Bobby smoking in my living room. There was a pile of dead butts on the floor and my nightgown was up around my sternum, as though he’d looked me over one more time. He didn’t rape me; I checked. He’d contemptuously left the front door unlocked, Bobby, as though there was nothing worth safeguarding in the apartment anymore. I had an onyx and lapis lazuli necklace of bruises from ear to ear. I don’t know whether that was what Bobby wanted, or whether he meant to kill me and miscalculated. Or perhaps at the last minute he saw in me what I’d always seen in him, someone hated, feared, and yet beloved, and could not give that final squeeze. Perhaps at the last minute the death grip was a hug instead, or his twisted version of one.
Or maybe this is exactly what he intended. “
Frannie, Frannie, Fran,” I can hear him say in his rich deep voice. “Killing’s too good for you. I want you to suffer.” And I do, every day.
“He went home,” Mrs. Castro said when Mike and I ran to the apartment at the end of the row, Bennie’s puzzled, troubled face peering from the kitchen doorway as he read our expressions. “He is home a long time.”
I like to think his father met Robert outside, at the front door, and not in the living room. I like to think that if Robert had seen me on the floor, he would have made so much noise that someone would have heard him. That he would have flown to the Castros, screaming, crying. That he would have taken my side over Bobby’s. I like to think that Bobby told him some story, some irresistible fairy tale about redemption, forgiveness, the happy family come back to life like Snow White awakened from her long sleep in the glass casket by her handsome prince. I like to think he did not know that he was leaving me until he was already going sixty miles an hour down some highway somewhere.
All I know is that my boy is gone, and I don’t know where to find him. Mike made me go to the police, and they took pictures of my throat, and took down the address and telephone number of my husband, and duly noted the fact that he was a New York City police detective, and that I had no legal papers granting me custody of my own child. They listened carefully, and they took a few notes, and nodded their heads, but I could see in their eyes that the budget of a small-town police force, four men strong, didn’t extend to flying to Brooklyn to look for a man who’d done to his wife what so many men had done. And I knew that even if it had, Bobby would not be there, just as I had not been there that day a year before when he’d come home from work. After all, what could I say Bobby had done that I had not done myself?