Whisper Me This(93)
It occurs to me that this must be hard for him on so many levels. He’s the only father I’ve ever known. Now Mom is gone, and I’m meeting this other shadow family. Maybe he thinks I won’t need him anymore. Of course I need him, will always need him.
But the need to know the secrets my mother has been keeping has become a driving force. Besides, I need just one more chance at Marley. One more opportunity to get her to agree to try to be sisters again.
So, wise or not, I nod. Yes. “Deal.”
She scribbles an address on a napkin. “Be there at eleven tomorrow. I’ll make the introductions.”
Without another word, she turns her back on me. I have been dismissed.
Leah’s Journal
She walked into the office with three solemn children trailing behind her. At a signal of her hand, they arranged themselves on the waiting room chairs while she came to speak with me at the reception desk. The oldest, a girl not more than ten, took the toddler on her lap and rocked her.
The fading bruise on the woman’s cheek was all too familiar, and I knew what her problem was going to be without asking. Still, I followed the professional script Hetty had taught me. “How can I help you?”
“I need to leave my husband,” she said. “I need help with the divorce.”
Hetty swept her away into the office and left me with those children. Not a one of them would smile. The littlest, safe in her sister’s lap, stared at me out of wide eyes and sucked her thumb. None of them fidgeted or fussed.
I could hear fragments of conversation through the closed door. Two of those fragments caught in my head.
The first was about a safety plan. “Where will you go, where will you stay, how badly will he hurt you when he knows you want to leave?”
These words, rather than weighing me down, sang to me, in that way it is when a bit of a tune gets stuck in your head. Over and over, all the rest of that day, into the night, and the days that followed.
Where will you go, where will you stay, how badly will he hurt you when he knows you want to leave?
Maybe those questions would have been enough to set me free, but it was the next bit about the children that changed everything. There they sat, unnatural in their silent watchfulness, like small animals, hoping they won’t be seen if they don’t move.
And in the office Hetty asked her, “Does he hit the children?”
And she answered, “No. I’ve taught them how to keep from being hit.”
Those were the words that took my breath as surely as a punch to my gut. Three pairs of watchful eyes on me, aware of my every movement. Three pairs of watchful eyes in a home where it was their responsibility to avoid getting hit.
I was so enmeshed in my own nightmare, I still might not have dared a break for freedom, but Boots, in perfect timing, chose that evening to come home, high and edgy. Probably he hadn’t slept since the last time I saw him. Certainly there was a craziness in his eyes.
The girls were tired. I’d been leaving them with Boots’s mom while I worked, and she hadn’t given them a nap. They smelled of stale cigarettes, and they were cranky and difficult. Dinner wasn’t quite ready when he walked in. Marley was whining, Maisey was crying.
“This is ridiculous,” Boots said. “You are not going back to that job.”
The world slowed down.
I watched both of my little girls respond to his tone. They went quiet and still. The tears stopped. The whining hiccuped once, then trailed away. They froze. And in that moment, even before the first blow came at me, I saw again the children waiting in the office, and I knew—knew—I had to get the girls away from him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
We follow GPS directions, Tony driving slower and slower as we get closer to our destination.
“This can’t be right,” Mia says, when the too-cheerful GPS voice informs us we have arrived. “Maybe she wrote it down wrong.”
Elle consults the napkin where Marley had written the address. “This is what it says, all right.”
Tony pulls the car over to the edge of the road, and we all stare at a run-down single-wide trailer occupying a lot where weeds and garbage compete for space. The trailer itself is beat-up and faded. One of the windows is boarded over.
Two cars are parked in the rutted dirt driveway. One is burgundy with one black door and a rear bumper hanging at a crazy angle. The other is a nondescript hatchback, far from new but at least all one color and not looking like a kindergarten kid’s crazy drawing.
All of us stare at the trailer. I can feel Tony assessing the rest of the neighborhood. We’re out of the city, but here it isn’t suburbs. We’ve passed grassy lots with horses, goats, chickens. Even a small herd of sheep. Plenty of mobile homes, many of them well kept up, the yards clean, the animals healthy. If we were in a movie, this lot would house the psychotic murderer.
“Looks about right,” Dad says. “Are we going in?”
He has an expression on his face that I haven’t seen there before. It’s almost like Mom left her iron will lying around, and he’s picked it up and put it on. His mild features set in those lines of determination make him look foreign and strange. I feel adrift again, without anchor, but before I can restore my equilibrium, he’s opened the door and started unfolding himself out of the car.
“Wait,” I call after him, getting out of my own door. “Maybe we don’t all have to go in. You and Elle could wait—”