And Now She's Gone(27)
He rushed toward her, veered at the last moment, and slapped the bucket on the bed. Quarters exploded like tiny grenades around the room. “How do you think it made me feel,” he shouted, “seeing my wife whore herself out like that?”
She stepped to him, the daughter of a Bureau man who had told her to never take shit from anybody. Nostrils flared, Mrs. Dixon shouted, “Who the hell are you calling a whore?”
Sean growled, “I know you better step the hell away from me, bitch.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Or what?” That was the daughter of a public school teacher, who’d told her that bullies didn’t like to be challenged and would pull back if they were.
But Sean didn’t retreat. He grabbed her arm, grabbed it so hard that she gagged from surprise. She tried to pull free from his grip, but his fingers only tightened. He reached with his other hand and clutched her throat and she could barely let out a cry of surprise. Then he shoved her and she flipped back over the couch and splashed into the Jacuzzi, coming to a stop with a bone-breaking bang.
That moment was like … like … one of those tornadoes spouting over Illinois, randomly dropping, all dark, mean, and sudden.
Sean didn’t speak. He just gaped at his wife, a wet mess now, struggling and slipping out onto the carpet. And then, he … left the room. No “Good-bye,” no “I’ll be back.” He just … left.
The fall hadn’t broken any of her bones, but it had broken plenty of other things.
Mrs. Dixon cried as the city beyond those floor-to-ceiling windows shimmered and sparkled. Magic! Loose slots! Girls! Lobster! She spent the night searching for quarters, a diversion from the sudden mess in her life. She winced with every pull of breath into her lungs. Pain ricocheted from her eyes to her tailbone to the web of skin and cartilage around her ankles.
She had no one to contact. Her friends hated Sean, and over the year, Mrs. Dixon had stopped calling Avery, Zoe, and Jay. She’d still been invited to birthday parties, cookouts, and Zoe’s engagement dinner, but her friends’ lives were so … different from hers. Avery and Zoe still lived in Northern California, and Jay lived in North Vegas, twelve miles away from Mrs. Dixon’s home in Summerlin. It had become the longest twelve miles in the history of the earth.
Cleave to your husband. Faye had, even after Victor’s death, which led to her own death.
Mrs. Dixon’s mind worked frantically until it found memories of Faye and Victor, rest their souls. Victor had been an FBI agent in San Francisco’s field office, and Faye had been his public school teacher wife. They hadn’t been violent toward each other, not ever. A stable and loving environment. Black excellence. It’s what we expect from you. That’s what Faye and Victor always told her.
But this—sprawled out on a chaise longue in tears? This wasn’t black excellence.
Do something. That’s what Dad would have told her. Mom would have folded her arms, cocked an eyebrow, and said, “Well?”
Mrs. Dixon crept down to the closest coin collector in the casino and converted those quarters into cash—another seventy-five dollars for her rainy-day fund.
Back in the room, she wrote the first entry in the Tiffany leather journal that Sean had just given her to celebrate their first anniversary: The night did not go well. She could still smell her fear, his breath, and those quarters. Tears slapped at the words on the page as she chronicled the push, the cut that resulted from biting her lip during the tumble, and Sean’s disappearance. The pain from all over her body gathered in her right hand as she wrote in great detail, preserving the moment like a lepidopterist pinning down a Sapho longwing butterfly. As Dr. Underhill had told her throughout her therapy, journaling relieved the pressure, caused her thinking to slow, squeezed at the fear. And soon she had filled those pages with her fears, along with dates, descriptions of how Sean had hurt her, and the threats that he’d made.
Any time she wrote in that journal, she’d hide it in the secret pockets of her designer handbags or beneath the false bottom of the waste can in her bathroom. She’d think, This is ridiculous, but she never stopped hiding it. All day she’d write, since she had no job—he didn’t want her to work. She scavenged and saved any money she found in his clothes, in the washing machine and dryer. Sometimes the money jingled. Sometimes, if she lucked out, the money folded. And the rings—she always had Faye’s rings and her rings just in case.…
But on this night, just a year married, she hadn’t thought that far ahead, and only one page of that fancy leather journal had been filled.
Around three in the morning, Sean returned to their suite.
She pretended to be asleep.
He didn’t breach the bedroom’s doorway. No, he just stood there, his shadow growing loud and long. Finally, he retreated, and then … music. Luther Vandross on the stereo. The hell?
Mrs. Dixon lay with one foot on the ground as Luther sang about the time when she played her sweet guitar. She didn’t know what to think. Sean wasn’t like that. Obviously angry, cartoonishly possessive. He hadn’t been drunk, which would have made sense. She’d seen that sort of anger before. She’d been slapped, pushed, pinched in those hard times. Always on display, that kind of violence. And she cried in bed as Luther Vandross, her favorite crooner, sang strange-sounding love songs from the other room.
This couldn’t be Sean.