Sunburn: A Novel(27)

He was an awful person. That was his true calling. Being awful. It was inevitable that he and Irving would form a partnership. The things they did—she tried to stay as ignorant as possible, but she knew they did terrible things. She tried to figure out how to make it right, how to tell someone, make it stop. But she knew he would kill her. He would smell the betrayal on her, kill her, and then what would happen to Joy?

After that first punch, the one to the gut, he began giving her little slaps if she dared to say anything contradictory. Even something as mild as, No, honey, it’s the eighteenth, not the nineteenth, brought a reflexive backhand, sharp and stinging.

On the rare times she dared to actually disagree, to stake out an opinion opposite his, he would throw her to the floor and lower himself on top of her, as he had done on that blanket in the cemetery the first time they had sex, only now pounding and kicking and choking her until she passed out, or he lost interest.

She was stuck. Circumstances being what they were, she couldn’t leave him. Besides, he had these friends now, dangerous men. He boasted about what these men would do for him. She was so scared of him by then, she didn’t even allow herself to think mean thoughts against him when he was in the house. Her fantasies of escape were saved for those quiet moments, 1 a.m. to 2 a.m., when he was still out and she was too exhausted to sleep. Imagine if we could leave, she would think, then cry at the impossibility of it.

Then came the night in 1983 that the Orioles lost what seemed a crucial game. They would go on to win the World Series that year, but that knowledge would arrive too late to comfort Burton. He picked up the kitchen radio and heaved it through the kitchen window, then told her to clean it up.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “I’ll get it in the morning.” Not saying no because she never said no. Not pointing out that he was the one who had tossed the radio, only appealing to him to recognize what her days, her life, were like.

For a moment, he seemed to soften. He went outside with the dustpan, came back with the fragments of the window. Smiling at her, shy as the boy who had first tried to get her attention at the pool, he emptied the dustpan into the kitchen trash.

Then reached in, pulled out a shard, and held it to her throat.

“I’ll kill you if you ever fail to do what I say,” he said. “I’ll kill you and burn this house down in such a way that they’ll never know what killed you.”

She thought she was going to die that night. That freed her to say what she had never dared to say: “What about Joy? Without me, you’ll need someone to take care of her.”

“I’ll kill her, too.”

She considered spitting in his face. He would kill her, but maybe it would be better to be dead. She was tired. She was trapped. This was her life and it was never going to get any better.

But—Joy. He said he would kill Joy, too. And she believed him.

She begged, she babbled: “I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I’ll be good.”

Impulsive acts are a luxury. She needed a plan. Days went by. Weeks. Months. She balanced the checkbook, cooked his favorite meals. Seasons went by, years.

*

Winter 1986 was mild, temperatures reaching the seventies a couple of days. She made him his favorite dinner and let him have his favorite sex, although it was never really a matter of letting. He fastened his hands around her throat, claiming all the while that it was for her pleasure. She turned her face to the wall—he preferred not to see her face during sex, the better to imagine others—and wondered at how her body still could respond to him at all. Muscle memory, she guessed.

She waited for him to fall asleep, then got up, took a shower, knowing she would have to shower again. She stood there looking at him a long time—on his back, limbs splayed, snoring. His arms and legs were still the limbs of the boy she had once known, Burton, hard with muscle and tanned year-round. But Ditmars was soft around the middle. He blamed her cooking. He was thirty-one. She was twenty-five, almost twenty-six. They would celebrate their ninth anniversary later in the summer.

Except they wouldn’t because she raised both her arms above her head and plunged a kitchen knife into his heart with all the force she could muster. His eyes flew open at the impact, but her aim was true. It had to be. There would be no second chances.

At her trial, the medical examiner testified she almost cleaved his heart in two with one thrust. Her lawyer, court appointed, had tried to use this to prove that her initial story about an intruder must be true. He was a little bit in love with Polly by then. He asked a jury to contemplate if Polly could have mustered the force, even if she was lucky not to hit a bone on the way in. But he knew and she knew that she was more than capable. Just another of those superhuman feats of strength that a mother can summon, like lifting a car or leaping from a burning building. Polly was surprised the knife didn’t pierce his back, pinning him to the mattress as he had pinned her there time and again.

She did not take the stand in her own defense.





16


Adam can’t stop singing.

He sings in the shower, hums while shaving. Little tunes bubble out of his mouth at work, snatches of songs he doesn’t remember ever learning, show tunes and pop tunes, all with one word in common: Love. Love, Love, Love. As in: You’re not sick, you’re just in love. As in: I can love you like that. And once, before he stopped himself: I’m in love with a wonderful—