“She wanted a husband, that’s what she told me.”
“I’ve taken care of her just fine. There isn’t anything I denied that woman. Not anything!”
“A baby,” Sable said. “You not only forbade her to get pregnant, you warned her she’d better get an abortion before you got back from your trip ‘or else.’ What’s ‘or else’ mean to you, Jack? You going to kill her next time?”
“You’re blowing this all out of proportion. I’m not perfect, okay. She hit me with it when I was worrying about other things. She did it behind my back—tricked me. She didn’t even talk to me about it first. But I’ve given that woman everything I have to—”
“Really? What have you given her? Boats and planes and lake property and ski trips and poker games and—”
“She can have anything she wants, she knows that! You’ve poisoned her mind against me when all we need to do is talk things over.”
“Save it, Jack. You beat her. You fucked around on her, beat her up, emotionally abused her and tried to isolate her. We’re the only friends she’s got, because even though you weren’t home, you couldn’t take the risk that there would be people in her life, people who might tell her she didn’t have to live with an ape like you.”
“When was the last time you even had a man, huh? What do you even know about it? You married? You ever been married?”
“Oh, don’t tempt me to tell you what I know about that.”
“Well, you don’t know shit about it, that’s how much you know. I need my wife back and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to stand by and tolerate some butch chick like you spoiling her mind against her own husband, the father of her child, when—”
“She can’t work things out with you,” Sable said flatly. “It’s too dangerous for the child.”
“She has to work things out with me! I’m her husband! She can’t just walk away when she feels like it. We have vows. We said till death do us part!”
“She hopes to avoid that eventuality. Now get out of here.”
“Go get my wife,” he ground out. “Or I’ll go get her myself.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“Don’t push me, bitch. You’re starting to make me really mad.”
“Oh really? You mean, you’re just starting to get mad? This is just the beginning? That’s what I thought. When you get really mad, you—” She stopped midsentence and looked at him curiously. He had been far too easy to incite. This was a bad case. A lot of abusive men could hide their tempers when they had to. True, Sable knew the way to an abuser’s fist—years of practice, and all. But Jack’s fuse was shorter than short. “Tell me something, Jack. How young was the youngest baby you beat up?”
“Get my wife,” he said, singularly emphasizing each word.
“You beat your children,” she said.
“That’s a lie. That’s a fucking lie.”
“That’s why you pay child support but you don’t have visitation, right? Because the court protects them from you. Because you beat them. When they were small and helpless, you beat your babies.”
“That is a fucking goddamn lie!” he screamed, his hand coming out at her face so fast she didn’t even have time to duck. She flew backward, her buttocks hitting the tile floor with such force that she slid about four feet. Her hand had barely come up to her cheek when he was on top of her, choking her, screaming at her and calling her obscene names. She returned to a very familiar time and place—stars swirling around in her darkening vision. She remembered sustaining a blow like that from Butch and one of her odd semiconscious thoughts being, “There really are stars.”
She didn’t hear the thudding of feet on the stairs as the women came running down from the loft, nor did she hear the frantic ringing of the doorbell and pounding on the door. But what she did hear, though she couldn’t really respond, was the sharp report of a gun. One shot. And miraculously Jack let go of her neck. She dropped to the floor, dazed.
Sable couldn’t focus. Beth knelt behind her and pulled Sable’s throbbing head into her lap. Through teary vision Sable looked to her right and saw a very, very strange thing. At first she thought the angels had come for her. Soon she realized the angel had pink hair and wore a purple, lacy peignoir. Ceola. She was pointing a petite, shiny gun at Jack.
“Stand up, young man,” Ceola said, “so I can get a good aim at your head. You wouldn’t want to try and live with yourself after that.”
“Put it away,” Jack said, but he said it nervously. He was still on his knees, his hands raised as though he were being arrested.
Sable struggled to sit up. She was holding the side of her face that throbbed and she winced as she touched it. There was what appeared to be a receiving line at the door. None of it made sense to her. She feared she was hallucinating. Barbara Ann stood in the foyer in front of her husband. Her hands were on Mike’s chest and she was looking up at him very earnestly. “No,” she was saying. “No, Mike. I mean it. We just want him to go now.”
“Barbara Ann, please, honey. Please.”
“No, Mike. No.”
“Mom, please.”
“Please, Mom. Please.”
“No. I mean it now. No.”
Mike stood just inside the door. His fists were clenched, his face was red, his chest was puffed out and he was aching to have a shot at the airline pilot. Next to him, straddling the threshold, was Matt. Equal in size, equally mad. Next to Matt was Bobby, as tall but thicker, his boyish face twisted in a grimace. Next came Joe—almost as tall, strong in his own right. And finally Billy, fists up and clenched, face twisted in outrage.
“No,” Barbara Ann said to them all. “No more violence. And I mean it.”
Jack Mahoney got to his feet. He looked at Beth and she averted her eyes. “Beth,” he said meekly. She didn’t look back at him.
“You’d better get going,” Ceola said. “I shot a man once. I didn’t dislike it.”
Remarkably, he brushed down his pants, removing the dust of the floor from his perfectly creased uniform pants. He picked up his hat and brushed it off also. He glanced at the women and strode toward the door, walking purposefully past the Vaughan men. He almost made it, too. Billy couldn’t resist. He tripped him. Jack Mahoney sprawled on the walk with a large oomph! and a groan. He rolled to his feet angrily, but judged the Vaughan men. Jack was a real toughie. He didn’t get in fights he couldn’t win. He mostly liked to smack around women and children. He brushed off his pants again, frowned at the gathering and strode down the sidewalk to his Corvette convertible.
“Put that gun away, Ceola,” Eleanor said. “The only person I’m willing to have you kill is gone now.”
“I could have killed him,” she said, lowering the gun. “I’m a crack shot. But I left my glasses in the other room.”
“Where did you get that gun?” Barbara Ann asked.
“Oh, it’s mine. I keep it with me for protection.”
“Protection from what?”
“Oh, bad manners. Inhospitality. It’s a cruel world. You never know what you’re going to run into.” She toddled past everyone toward her room to put her weapon away.
“Did you really shoot a man once?” Beth asked her.
“Well, sort of….”
“How do you ‘sort of’ shoot a man?” Eleanor asked.
“I wasn’t trying to kill him,” Ceola said. “It was one of my husbands…Jared, the fifth one. And I only shot him in the fanny with one little bullet. I was so out of sorts.” And off she went, her peignoir rustling around her.
Barbara Ann and Elly hoisted Sable to her feet. “God,” she muttered thickly. “He’s got one helluva punch. I think I lost a crown here.”
“You need some ice. Come on. I want to check your pupils, maybe have you walk a line or tell me what day it is.”
“I’m okay. It’s a very hard head.”
Everyone had gathered in the kitchen to go over the details of how these events had unfolded. In order to do the postmortem justice, a couple of
drinks were served, a couple of beers opened, and someone called out for pizza. While Sable held an ice pack to her cheek, she sipped a little white wine.
“While Beth and Jack were sitting on the planter box, I slipped into my room for a second and called Mike,” Barbara Ann said.
“She told me there was no real reason to expect trouble, but this asshole—excuse me—had shown up to talk to his wife and he was a known wife-beater. I don’t much like fighting in general, but there’s something about hitting a woman…”
“Dad asked if anyone wanted to go along, make sure Beth didn’t get any trouble from this guy,” Joe said. “And we all wanted to. It was pretty disappointing, though. We could have all taken one turn with him and maybe he wouldn’t hit no one no more.”
“Anymore,” Barbara Ann corrected.
“I know,” Joe said. “I bet he wouldn’t.”
“Sable pushed him pretty far,” Beth said. “Did you think he’d hit you? How could you do that, thinking he’d hit you?”
“I didn’t intend to let it get that far. I didn’t think he’d have the balls to hit me with the rest of you in the house. I thought I could goad him into losing his cool, do a little yelling and blustering. I thought that would serve as enough of a reminder to you that he’s only charming when he wants something. And that he doesn’t have much control. I think he would have killed me if he could have.”
“You hit a nerve,” Eleanor said. “And an angle we hadn’t really thought about. Beth, you need to call his ex-wife in Texas. Sable’s unveiled him. He beat the children, there’s no doubt about it.”
“They’re only fifteen and sixteen now. Jack’s been divorced for ten years. That means—”
“That means they’re lucky to be alive.”
“Why oh why couldn’t he have taken one swing at me?” Bobby asked the ceiling.
“The most remarkable discovery of this evening has been Barbara Ann’s family,” Elly said. “You had absolute control of these beasts even when their hormones were raging and smoke was pouring out of their nostrils. How is it you were unable to intimidate them into picking up their dirty socks?”
“I’m just not in the mood for pizza,” Ceola said, rising from the kitchen table, draining her glass of brandy and putting it down on the table.
“Well, there’s leftover chicken and salad fixings in the refrigerator,” Barbara Ann said.
“Oh, thank you, darling. Any little thing will be all right. And I wouldn’t turn down a bit of soup, if there’s any. I’ll just take it in my room and leave you young people to your pizza.” She flowed out of the room, all purple chiffon.
“How does she do that?”
“Isn’t it the most wonderful thing, the way she handles everything?”
“I’ll make up her tray,” Beth said, standing. “I owe her.”
“Mom,” Joe was calling. “Mom?”
“What, Joe?”
“Come here a sec, will you?” She walked over to the counter where he stood staring down at the toaster oven. “See this here toaster? Like ours? How do you get it to shine up like that? I mean, you know, I can get all the crumbs out and all the dust and stuff off, but how do you make it so shiny? Did this one just never get real dirty?”
“S.O.S. pads,” she said.
“Oh yeah? Like you use on the stove parts? Those little steel-wool and soap things?”
“Yep. Just be sure and unplug it first so you don’t electrocute yourself.”
“No stuff? I would’a never thought of that. S.O.S. That’s great.”
TWENTY
There was a talk show host named Rachael Breeze, an attractive woman in her late thirties, who had been candid with her public about her troubled youth. She came from a dysfunctional home, had spent time in foster homes, had been molested, been promiscuous, and if ever the cards had been stacked against a person, they’d been stacked against Rachael. But she rose to the top of her profession and her honesty had only endeared her to the masses. She not only had the highest ratings, she was the most altruistic. She had quite a lot in common with a certain bestselling novelist, actually.
“The most difficult part of all was the lies,” Sable told Rachael. Rachael had been handpicked to be the one to get the story, should she be interested in this topic. Most of the viewers would tune in to hear the true confessions of the famous novelist, but it was for something far more important than revealing the past that made Sable choose Rachael. “The true story of my life was hard enough, but it was only a very sad story. I’ll admit it took me years to look on that part of my life as only sad. I’ll admit I was ashamed of the life I’d had growing up. But all things considered, it was only sad. Some of the brutal lies that accompanied the story were the most painful part of all.”
“But the true part of your story was the first to come out, isn’t that right? And the true parts are—?”
“Even the very first story was exaggerated unbelievably. True, I was the daughter of an alcoholic, single mother. I was raised mostly in foster homes from the time I was six years old. In some of those foster homes I was also abused—emotionally and physically battered, sexually molested by foster family members and other foster children. There were homes, however, where I was treated humanely, even if my emotional needs were not met. Then, when I was over eighteen and no longer a part of the foster care system, on my own, living again with my alcoholic mother, I met and married a man who was—it should come as no surprise—also physically and emotionally abusive….”
“And an alcoholic?” Rachael asked.
“Of course. It would have been difficult for me to have picked another kind of man to marry. But I wasn’t a drunk or drug user at any time in my life, which is not at all unusual for the offspring of an alcoholic. It seems to go one of two ways—you either become another alcoholic or a codependent who is terrified of alcohol. I was the latter.”
“The tabloids went to some trouble to paint a picture of you as a partyer, a wild young girl who was out of control, drinking, having sex, taking drugs….”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t wild,” Sable said, smiling. “I was molested as a child and started having sex very indiscriminately when I was about thirteen. I was promiscuous. I did a lot of terrible things—I ran away a lot, got in fights, stole when it occurred to me. I was caught shoplifting a couple of times and held in juvenile detention several times while they decided whether to try another foster care facility or just drown me. I tried drugs and alcohol a couple of times, but I was a control freak—drugs and alcohol only heightened my insecurity and made me more vulnerable to whatever abuse would come my way. I was a real badass, but I was always in control.”
“There was a period of time when you went to college…”
“Yes, when I was nineteen. I had a chance to do some testing to see if I qualified for any training programs, since I was, you know, part of the social services system. That’s welfare, for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t think many young people get that chance, but I had an ambitious, idealistic caseworker who was determined to save the world, or maybe just change the life of one young girl who hadn’t had a break yet. I accidentally went to college, something I had never even aspired to. And I did very well while I was there, too. I met some people who had an enormous impact on me, and I started to have dreams for the first time in my life. But it was only a year of college. Intellectually, I could handle it, but emotionally, I was still stuck in that old pattern—no self-esteem, no confidence, no trust. That seems to be the problem with young women who come from dysfunctional backgrounds—even when they’re faced with an opportunity, they have ‘an attitude.’ It comes across as total ingratitude. What it really amounts to is a lack of trust and faith. And why should they trust? Every other time they counted on someone, they were let down. Every other time they dared to have dreams of a decent life, they were beaten down and found things to be worse than ever.”
“You dropped out of school…”
?
??No, remarkably, I didn’t drop out. I didn’t get kicked out, miracle of miracles. I just failed to register for the next term. I was at home with my mother, working at a cosmetics plant so I could keep a little food on the table and a roof over her head. And I found Butch Parker….”
“You say you found him….”
“Like a magnet,” Sable said, zapping her hand out toward the camera in a quick, snatching motion. “The most available man who could make me feel the worst about myself and threaten any chance I had of changing my path in life. That’s all I knew how to deal with. My expectations were negative, and he effectively fulfilled every one. Whenever my expectations had been positive, I’d been tragically disappointed, so it was better for me to avoid disappointment. Another mind-set of the chronically abused.”
“Did you love him?” she was asked.
“Of course I loved him! Like the alcoholic loves the bottle, like the drug addict loves the needle…. I needed someone like him to validate that I was no damn good and didn’t deserve to rise above my miserable existence. That other business, school and all, that was a joke! I didn’t belong there, among hardworking, respectable students who came from decent families and wanted to make something of themselves!”
“Why do we always think that?” Rachael asked. “That we’re the only ones in the world who have some shameful secret? That all the other families are loving, caring, perfect and safe and only we have these terrible—”
“It’s conditioning from the intense secretiveness surrounding all abuse, no matter what kind it is. The first time my mother said, ‘Now, don’t you tell them that I have a bottle around here or they’ll take you away,’ I began to take responsibility for her secret and her abuse. Every time we’re abused or molested we’re warned—if you think this is bad, telling will only make it worse. And most of the time that’s true! Telling usually does make it worse! All hell breaks loose! The prophesies come true! They take you away, or they grill you—disbelieving your allegations. People call you a liar, they remove your only family, you become an outcast, everyone stares at you, people all over the place are unbelievably upset—because you told. Children and adolescents don’t have the maturity, the experience of living, to understand that telling only makes it worse for a little while…so it can ultimately get better.