When we got to Florida and Robert and I stepped inside the apartment Patty Bancroft’s people had arranged for us, I’d realized it reminded me of the apartments I’d lived in when I was a kid. I could almost smell the bland steam that was the smell of cooking in my parents’ house. I could almost hear the soft woosh of my father sucking oxygen hungrily through the heavy black rubber mask. And I could almost see the notes my mother left for me next to the stove in her angular handwriting and then in Gregg shorthand once she’d made me take the secretarial course at Queen of Peace: white wash, ham butt, drugstore. Frannie’s “To Do” list. My mother had needed to work for as long as I could remember. And so, as a result, had I.
Robert had known the worst as soon as we stepped inside the place, as soon as he looked around at the dim L-shaped living room with a wood-grain dinette in the short arm of the L, seen the nubby tweed couch, the kind that’s supposed to be stain-resistant but couldn’t possibly look any worse with a stain or two. He tried to pull up the blinds until I told him sharply to get away from the window. “Are we going to Disney World?” he’d asked, back when we were taking the IRT from Brooklyn to Manhattan and then again as we drove from Manhattan south to Philadelphia in the old Volare, its driver wordless behind the wheel. Now he knew the answer.
On the train from Philadelphia to Baltimore he’d fallen asleep open-mouthed, his face mirrored in the window, and he’d slept on the bus we took from Baltimore to Atlanta. The bus tickets had been tucked into the envelope behind the Metroliner tickets.
“Mom, where are we?” Robert had said when we got off the bus in Atlanta, his eyes dim with sleep and fatigue.
“You must be the Crenshaws,” said a short woman whose car was parked at the curb, a minivan full of children’s car seats. “Yes,” I said, and Robert had looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Where are we going?” he’d said again, more insistently. The woman ignored him, glided over his words with her own as though she was used to doing it. “I’ve got a nice snack for you in the back,” she said cheerily.
She was kind, that woman, although she talked for three hours straight about her show dogs, corgis, just like the ones the queen of England had. She was nervous, but she’d brought some juice, some crackers, and an apple for Robert, and a blessed thermos of coffee for me. Robert got carsick twice, throwing up on the shoulder of the highway while I rubbed the sweet spot between his shoulder blades and the dog breeder called, “Hurry up, hurry up!”
“How did you get into this work?” I’d asked after Robert had fallen asleep again, after the woman had finished feeding me the false biography to go with my new name, finished filling me in on the made-up life in Wilmington, Delaware, and Robert Crenshaw, Sr., the estranged husband who was an accountant. “How do you know Mrs. Bancroft?”
She’d turned on the radio. “Didn’t they tell you not to talk about any of that?” she said.
“They didn’t tell me much of anything.”
“That’s for the best,” the woman said. “There’s a box of doughnuts in the back. Here’s your house key.”
I don’t know what I’d expected when I opened the door of No. 7 Poinsettia Way, its aluminum painted dark brown, its peephole glowing like a glass eye. I was just glad to stand still, to stop moving, to stop running. “Where are we, Mom?” Robert had said for what seemed like the hundredth time, and what could I say to him? We’re home? His home was on the bay in Brooklyn, his room carpeted in a blue so thick and vivid that it was like walking through the sky, his shelves and drawers filled with everything he’d ever wanted: stuffed bears, battery-powered robots, plastic Supermen, electronic games, so that he could sit in his room for hours and not go out where things were scary. Out on the streets, his father said. Out in the kitchen, I thought, where there were loud voices and sharp noises and sometimes crying, too.
Numbers were singing in my head. 153 49 5151. That was Elizabeth M. Crenshaw’s Social Security number. $1,256. That was how much had been in our joint checking account, and half of it was in a wad at the bottom of my purse. And Gracie’s phone number. If only I could talk to my sister, the way I had in the half-light of our bedroom when we were girls, the streetlamps shining in a divot of yellow across our twin beds, the car wheels a hiss outside on the city streets. I’d never hidden anything from Gracie, at least until after I was married. She was six years younger than I was, my baby as much as my mother’s, probably more, me pushing her around the neighborhood in my old stroller when she was a toddler, telling her the names of things, singing “Old McDonald,” always interrupted by people making comments about her burning bush of curly hair, like mine but brighter, wilder. If only I could talk to Grace the way I did when we were older, lying in the darkness, listening to her questions, answering them as best I could. How come the nuns can’t get married? How old were you when you got your period? How many feet in a yard, yards in a mile? What’s our address now? Eight apartments I’d lived in with my parents before I’d married Bobby when I was twenty-one, in six of them I’d shared a room with Gracie. There was never any discernible reason for why we moved; we never moved up, or even down, just from one shabby two-bedroom in Brooklyn to another. As suddenly as the weather changing, we’d get dressed one Saturday, the first week of the month, and load the couch and the easy chair and my father’s oxygen into a U-Haul and lie down to sleep that night a dozen blocks away. What’s the point of hanging pictures, my mother always said, the sound of my father’s wheezing a counterpoint from in front of the television. The mirror was always sitting atop her bureau, propped against the wall.
They’d given me low expectations, all those places. All I wanted was a house that felt like home, where the furniture matched, where the carpet was clean and a color I liked. I wanted to sit in a big chair in a den somewhere, with my feet up on an ottoman, and look around and think: this is my home. I wanted to be able to picture myself in that same room thirty years in the future, with my kids grown and my grandchildren babies and the smell of my cooking so familiar that no one even noticed it anymore. It didn’t seem like too much to ask, and there was a while there, with Bobby, when I thought I had it nailed. I’d had a neighbor who kept the key to my house in case I locked myself out, a butcher who knew that I wanted loin of pork with the bone out, a school at the end of the street, a climbing rose working its way up the supports of the deck out back. I’d had roots. I knew how deep they’d gone.
Knew it so powerfully when we stepped into that fugitive apartment, my boy and I, my eyes burning as we stood on the threshold. It was not an anonymous apartment, this narrow duplex somewhere in central Florida, miles and miles from the coast. That would have been bad enough. It was, like those others where I’d spent the years before I married Bobby, redolent of the lives of dozens upon dozens of strangers who’d smoked cigarettes, fried chicken, taken showers, slept late, risen early. It was a transient place, right down to the ubiquitous sound of the tap dripping into the scarred stainless-steel sink. When I entered that apartment I hated Bobby Benedetto with a ferocity I had never allowed myself to feel while I was living with him. I hated him on behalf of my lost life, on behalf of my bedspread and dust ruffle, my landscape over the couch and my guest towels in the powder room. Forced back into the rootless life I thought I’d left behind when I married him, I hated him so that, in that moment, I thought if we ever met again, I’d be just as likely to murder him as he me.
But after two weeks the feeling dulled, and I kept thinking I should count my blessings. Isn’t that what Daddy always said, coughing in his recliner, when I complained about not being able to go away to college or take a job at the beach with my girlfriends in the summers because then Grace would have no one to look out for her? Count your blessings. My nose no longer hurts. The bleeding has stopped. And four doors down in the horseshoe of our little apartment court is a family named Castro, and among their five children is a ten-year-old boy who has mastered the sixth level of Double Dragon, whatever that is. “You know the finishing move?”
Bennie Castro asked Robert the third horribly bright morning we had been there. The games kept them grounded, so that Robert was either upstairs or on the front steps, he and Bennie shoulder to shoulder bent together over the flickering screen. Bennie has two sisters, twelve and four, and brothers who are seven and five, and it is a great luxury for him to be almost alone, with no siblings demanding his attention or his toys. So every day now he comes to our apartment and he and Robert sit upstairs, the ninjas punching one another incessantly. Mrs. Castro just smiles and nods and says in pidgin English that this is very nice of me and acts as though there is nothing noteworthy about the fading bruises on my face. With her round cheeks, her hair scraped back into a ponytail, her Tasmanian Devil T-shirt and dimpled knees, she seems younger than any of her children. “Good boy,” she says, nodding at my son.
Occasionally the two boys go outside to ricochet around the quadrangle of stunted grass and cement, and I stand guard and watch their every move, flushed and sweating in the Florida heat. Sandy, the youngest Castro, shadows them as Gracie once did me, running back and forth on the ragged pavement that makes a broad U around the perimeter of the garden apartment complex. Occasionally she stumbles and falls on a piece of concrete heaved up by a tree root, sees narrow red pinstripes begin to form on the yellow-brown skin of her knee. She wails, shrieks, forces enormous tears from beneath her spiky lashes, calls for Mama as though she is drowning and her mother is on the boat. A moment later there is the thin sound of chimes in the muggy air: “Ice cream,” the little girl shrieks, tears still glittering on her cheeks as she dances and claps. The definition of redemption.
My son scarcely ever cries. And his smile comes so seldom that it’s like bright sunshine on winter snow, blinding and strange. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. “Robert’s an old soul,” Grace used to say, maybe because she knew I needed to hear it, to think Robert’s silence, his preternatural self-possession, were inherent, not acquired, not the equivalent of covering your ears, hiding your eyes. But when Bennie’s little sister hugs Robert’s legs, he always smiles down at her. I had a kid in a coma once, when I was working med-surg instead of ER, and I remember the look on the face of his mother when he blinked his eyes and muttered “water” after he’d been close to dead for a month. That must be the look I have as I watch Robert smile down upon the shiny ebony head of Sandy Castro, the look of a woman whose child has come back to life.
“This isn’t a vacation,” Robert had said in a low shaky voice when we’d first entered the apartment, and he must have seen the look on my face, because he went up the narrow stairs and didn’t come down again. I lay on the couch, exhausted, the cheap fabric scratchy against my face, and all at once I was asleep, a sleep as deep as unconsciousness. When I woke most of a day had gone. The place was as quiet as if it was still empty, and I took the stairs two at a time to the bedrooms, calling Robert’s name, and found him asleep yet again. I stood over him and looked down at his splayed legs, the hands let loose from their habitual half fists, the big bottom lip like his father’s, the light coffee skin. I’d breastfed him for almost a year, an excuse to hold his warm body close. “Who’d have thought, and you as small as you are,” my mother-in-law had said, eyeing the exposed breast disapprovingly. On the beach on summer Sundays I’d taken my time rubbing on his sunscreen, feeling the stalk of his spine beneath my fingers, vertebra after vertebra, loved by me. At night in his room I’d read him One Fish, Two Fish as he curled into the semicircle of my welcoming torso. “You baby that kid,” Bobby said, sometimes with a sweet smile and a hand on my arm, sometimes with a sneer, a snort.
“Hey, big guy,” Bobby always said to Robert, and he’d cuff the boy lightly, playfully, as though to prove that Robert had nothing to fear from his father’s fists. Once one of the cop wives asked me why Bobby didn’t wear a wedding ring, asked me in a way that suggested that maybe my husband spent time in the bars and clubs of Manhattan passing himself off as a single guy. And maybe he did. But the reason he’d stopped wearing his ring was because it had once split the skin when he punched me in the shoulder. I guess you could consider it considerate, that he didn’t want that to happen again. But of course it implied that there would be an again. And there always was.
The second day after we’d arrived in Florida, when Robert still hadn’t spoken, I sat down on the edge of his bed as evening deepened into night and talked to his back as I rubbed it.
“We’re going to stay here for a while. Maybe for a long time.”
He was curled up on his side, his hands, with their long fingers, pressed together between his knees. “This isn’t a vacation,” he had said again, but this time with the dull flatness of fact.
“We’re kind of hiding, Ba,” I said. “No one knows we’re here. No one here knows who we are.”
“Who from?” he said, even though I knew he knew. “Why?”
“What?”
“Who are we hiding from? Why are we hiding?”
I took a breath and looked at my nails. They’d grown long, too long for a nurse’s nails. But I hadn’t been able to go to work in almost two weeks, not with my face every color, blue and yellow and green, like the faces we’d worked on in the emergency room, shrugging our shoulders and scrawling comments on the chart. Poss DA. Possible domestic abuse. It had always come over me, a weakness in my legs, when I wrote that on some other woman’s records. I should know.
“From Daddy. We’re hiding from Daddy. You know that. You know he hurt me. You saw my face. I know that’s hard for you, but Daddy hit me, Ba. He really hurt me. More than once. A lot more than once. You know that. You saw me. You saw what I looked like. Lots of times. This last time was bad. Really, really bad.”
And suddenly he was up and at me. His black eyes were big and his face flushed, and I reared back and then tried to reach for him as I saw the ghostly curlicues where tears had dried on his cheeks.
“No he didn’t. You said he didn’t. I heard you tell the people at work that you fell. And Aunt Grace. And Grandmom. You said you fell down, or got sick. Stuff like that. I heard you on the phone.”
“Ba,” I said, his baby name, Ba Ba Black Sheep shortened to Ba Ba and then to a single syllable, explosive with love. I reached out my hand but he pulled back, curled up, and turned away, his raised shoulder like a fin, a blade, a wall. How many times had he lain in bed at night just like this and heard the sound of hand against flesh, shoulder against wall, the sound of the arguments, about dinner, disrespect, adultery, a trip to Dorney Park, washer fluid for the car, no garbage bags, no rye bread, the wrong kind of mustard.
“I lied,” I said. “I lied so people wouldn’t know. I was ashamed. And I was afraid. I was afraid of Daddy.” I took a deep breath. “I’m still afraid of him.”
His sobs shook him and me and the flimsy bed, no more than a cot, not like his loft bed at home, with the desk and the computer beneath it, the Yankees season calendar on the bulletin board. Would it be so dangerous if I found another Yankees calendar somewhere and put it on the wall? Was there someone out there looking for us already, looking for a woman buying a Yankees calendar in July, more than half the months of the year already gone? More than half her life gone, too, thirty-eight years of it, much of it devoted to tending her wounds, hiding but never healing them. All I’d ever wanted was to be an ordinary woman, an ordinary wife and mother. Now all I wanted was an ordinary divorce, one of those sad, shamefaced affairs in which the children carried duffel bags from one parent’s house to another amid the sounds of bickering about the support check. Even that was denied me. “You’re not going anywhere, Fran,” Bobby had said more than once. And he meant it.
“Mommy, why can’t we go home?” Robert had cried, turning and reaching for me. And I didn’t know whether he was mourning his familiar room, and his Little League team, and his friend Anthony from kindergarten and his grandmother’s gravy on Sunday afternoons and his old familiar school and block and park and car and his beloved father. Or whether h
e was wishing for something more, all those things overlaid with the sense of safety and security I’d never managed to give him and had run away to try and find for him. For me, too.
“I know, baby,” I said, holding him warm and sticky against me, smoothing his hair and crying myself. “I love you, Ba. I love you so much. You are the best boy.”
The next morning he’d met Bennie, and that was that. We hadn’t spoken about it since. I had to let him get used to things by inches: new town, new school, new friends. No more accidents. No more pretending that that was what they’d been in the first place. How do you tell your son his father did things you can’t always believe yourself? Sometimes I think of Bobby pushing me into the wall, or backhanding me in the car. And for just a minute I think I’ve got to be exaggerating, which is just what Bobby wanted me to think. But then I can taste blood in my mouth again, and I know it’s all just as I remember it. I even started using a soft toothbrush so I wouldn’t have to taste blood in my mouth more often than I already did. How do you tell that to a kid who loves his dad?