October Snow (4 page)

Jo finally responded. “They’re afraid of him.”

Pit Bull snorted. “Really?” And then, the sneer again.

“He’s been violent for their entire lives…”

“Self-defense is not violence.”

“Unless you’re a woman, you mean.”

It was the only moment that Pit Bull seemed to be off of his game. He recovered quickly, though, lecturing her on the fact that they would break her financially. Put her in jail. They would take the children. Anything to make her “comply.”

“What you’re doing is called
Parental
Alienation
,” he said.

His was the exact same expression that she had seen so often on Keith’s face, especially in the early years of their marriage, when he would punch her, or throw her against a wall, or pick her up and body-slam her. Then, there was one pivotal day - years earlier, when the boys were still small - that he shoved her to the floor. She had missed landing on Johnny’s little brother, Matt, by only a few inches.

Jo got up, shoving Keith down the hallway of their townhouse until he reached the end of the line: the bathtub at the end of the hall. He tore the shower curtain off of its hooks, grabbing for something to break his fall.

She gazed down at him, and in a soft, menacing voice, said, “No more. That’s
it
. If you ever touch me again, you bastardized
moron
,
one
of us is going to die.”

It had felt good to be where she was at that moment; even better to see
him
there, looking so small and so stunned. She had never told anyone about that, about how much she had enjoyed the feeling.

It would be years before he beat her again. He never touched her until that time, not in any way at all, and it was a lonely, sad life for her. He’d had an arsenal of other ways to abuse her, though, and countless methods of getting even; but Jo had taken him back and lived with him for another four years after The Day of the Pit Bull. She couldn’t let Johnny and Matt be alone with him. She needed them to get older, old enough that custody wasn’t a noose dangling above them.

“If you let Keith come back now,” her attorney had warned, “you lose your grounds for a Fault Divorce.”

Jo stared at her, thinking about the coward the woman really was. “I have grounds now. Big deal.”

“You’ll be in danger.”

“My kids are in more danger than I am.”

“Okay. I just have to advise you, you’ll have no basis later. The courts don’t really care that much about his temper, or his mind-games, or his affairs.” She was writing out a receipt for final payment on Jo’s account. She slid it across the desk. “No grounds.”

Jo considered it for a moment. “Unless he hurts me bad again, right?”

The alarm jolted her awake. She turned off her phone, staring blankly at the picture of Johnny and Matt on her nightstand. They were laughing, their arms around each other. Jo had taken the picture on Johnny’s seventeenth birthday.

Her favorite picture was beside it, taken over ten years before: Jo, seated in an easy chair, with Johnny and Matt each perched on one side. They were thirteen and eleven then, Jo was forty-one. They were smiling. Happy. It was just before Keith had moved back in.

She picked up the picture of the three of them, kissed it, and gently placed it in her vanity drawer.

“Yeah, I’m done.”

She was taking Max’s pink mug out of the cupboard when Daisy trotted to the front door of the apartment, sniffing at the bottom and wagging hard.

“Hey Jo, get up. I want my coffee.”

“It’s unlocked.”

Max opened the door a few inches, sticking a dog biscuit through the opening. Daisy snatched it and galloped to the bedroom.

“Thanks for spoiling her, Bim. What you got for
me
?”

Max plopped a small, white box on the counter.
Lu’s Uncommon Bakery
was stenciled on top. “Here ya go. Spoiling us today, too.”

“Yum. What’d you get?”

“Cranberry-orange muffins. Jumbos.”

“I just love you, Maxine.”

“Yeah, but it’s a shallow kind of a thing.” She took the cup Jo held out, wrapping both hands around it and drinking deep. “Ooh, good coffee.” She said the same thing every morning.

They sat at the glass-topped table Jo had put in what was intended to be the living room. It was a tiny space, so she had decided to use it as a dining room, fashioning the large bedroom into a studio apartment-style living and sleeping area. The dining room looked out over the fields of the state conservation land. It was a rarity, having that view from a city apartment, and it was much of the reason that Jo stayed where she was.

Jo’s favorite vista was open fields. She rarely made the short trip–the “summer pilgrimage,” she called it–to the New Hampshire coast. She found the ocean to be tedious. Predictable. Even high and low tides could be timed to the minute, unless a storm turned it violent. Other than that, it was just constant back and forth, ebb and flow.

Yet, she also feared that flip side, how treacherous the ocean could be: it pretended to be peaceful, and that was its lure; yet, it could swallow someone up in a moment, dragging them by their feet into silent oblivion. And sharks hid there. It seemed like every summer, some poor soul, somewhere on the New England coast, was fast food for one of those things.

Fields, though, and farmland–those were always changing, always showing their different colors and textures, always responding to the season. Dependable. Deer wandered there, living peacefully. Your feet were on solid ground–you could run through fields, and stop whenever you wanted. Wide-open spaces were where life could be lived.

“Beautiful day,” she said.

Max was refilling their cups. “I know. And I’m working at eleven.”

“’Til…?”

“Eight.”

“Wow. Long day.”

“You’re in at noon, you said?”

Jo nodded.

“’Til eight?”

She was spooning sugar into her cup, smiling faintly. “I suppose.”

“I’ll finish my muffin, then I need to head back down and shower. I’m so tired.”

“Tough night.”

“Heard from Sammy?”

Jo shook her head. “She’s in at noon too.”

They were quiet again for a few minutes, then Jo’s phone rang. “It’s her,” she said, flipping it open. “Hey, sweetheart, how are you?…Yeah…? Well, she
should
be upset, Sammy. You show up at her door…Okay…Hold on, she’s right here. I’ll ask her.”

“What?”

“Barb called her in for eleven instead of noon, and she needs a ride.”

Max sighed. “All the way to Bedford and back. Sure, tell her I’ll be there in an hour, and
be ready
.”

“Sam…? Okay. See you later.” She closed the phone. “She heard you–said she’ll be waiting outside.”

Max gulped the last of her coffee, grabbing her muffin as she stood up. “How’s she sound?”

“Okay. Tired.”

“What a mess.” She frowned. “What do I say to her?”

“Just ask how she’s doing. She’ll talk if she wants to. And if she does, just nod a lot.”

“Yeah. Gotta go.” She scratched Daisy’s neck as she left.

Jo put the cups in the sink and turned on the small TV on the counter. The Manchester station was broadcasting a special report.

A young, blonde reporter was staring wide-eyed into the camera, gesturing anxiously with her microphone, using it to emphasize every other word she spoke. She looked over her shoulder, and the camera followed her sweeping hand to the house behind her.

“It was here, in this quiet cul-de-sac off of North Lewis Avenue, that Culverson is alleged to have shot his wife, Cassandra, and their two-year-old daughter, Brittany. Both victims died at the scene, despite paramedics’ best efforts to…”

Jo felt her throat closing. She reached to turn it off, but the old TV didn’t work well. After she had jabbed the power button several times, she pushed the channel up.

Channel eight was the regional news station, and they were covering the same story. “A tragedy out of Londonderry, New Hampshire, late last night. Thirty-eight year old Samuel Culverson is alleged to have gunned down his wife and daughter as the woman ran from the couples’ home, carrying two-year-old Brittany in her arms…”

Jo yanked the plug out of the wall, and stared out the window for a minute.

“I’m getting in the shower now, Daize.” She dropped her nightclothes on the kitchen floor, ignoring the fact that all of her curtains were open, and walked naked across the apartment to the bathroom.

She had refused the counseling they had offered her after May Walker was murdered. Jo stood in the shower, letting the water massage the back of her neck, wondering now if perhaps she had made a mistake.

You’ve done this stuff before
, Max had said. Jo considered telling her about working for the crisis center, and then throwing in with the DV Underground–which of course was just the moniker for an organization that technically didn’t exist; but even now, three years later, she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. May had proven herself to be right about the saddest lesson that Jo had ever learned: that there are no heroes left in the world.

May was forty-two years old when she became Jo’s client through the center. Hers had been a worst-case scenario: her husband was an anesthesiologist, with a great reputation, tons of money, and a large circle of supporters. Jo termed them “fans” in her private thoughts, because they were mostly guys who were too smart to be truly ignorant about the reality of their buddy, but who pretended not to know anyway. Jo believed that they also wanted to be able to get away with beating their wives, just like Walker could.

Jo had been manning the crisis line the night that May called for the last time. She had finally gotten Earl out of the house a week earlier; however, it took a concussion and a dislocated shoulder to get the judge to finally take her seriously, and grant her a protective order. That night, Earl had crossed the order: he phoned May, and told her to “get ready.”

Jo turned her face to the shower, letting the water run on her legs, holding her hands palms-up.

When she squeezed her eyes tight shut, the cascading water felt like tears. She had never been much for crying, but she hadn’t shed a single tear since May Walker died in her arms that night, and she wished that she could cry sometimes. She felt like she needed to cry, like her entire existence needed some kind of cleansing.

She recalled how others had talked about the night May was murdered. They never called it that: “murder.” They called it a lot of other things, but not that. Not what it really was. Just like the times Earl had beaten her–those were “Domestic Incidents.” “Family Violence.” Sanitized labels for the felonies the good doctor committed any time he wanted to.

She thought again of all the players in the tragedy, any one of whom who could have been May’s hero, but they didn’t bother.

Well, I didn’t save her, either
.

Jo thought it was just too precious, that the press had dubbed Earl “Doctor Death” for what Jo called the “movie-of-the-week” effect. There had been no trial; in the end, he bargained down to voluntary manslaughter. Jasmine, fourteen at the time, went to Albany to live with May’s parents, and Jo had no idea what became of her after that.

She opened her eyes. Her heart was pounding too hard. She could feel it skipping every few beats. She turned off the shower, thinking again that the counseling would have done some good. Life–and her mind, if she was honest with herself–shifted somehow after that night. She had asked for a leave of absence from the crisis center two days later, after Becca, the Community Affairs Coordinator, debriefed her. “You were on the clock here, Jo, and if you don’t want to talk to the press, then of course you don’t have to. Cite the RSA statutes to avoid them. And definitely, don’t talk to them until the case is resolved.”

Jo assured her that she had no intention whatsoever of talking to the media. She cleaned out her desk that day, and never went back.

She started at The Crate a few weeks later. After a couple of weeks of cringing under Barb, she often thought that she had gone from being abused to helping the abused, to being abused again. As she stepped out of the shower, it occurred to her that still, she too often regarded her life as being measured and timed by Keith and After-Keith.

Standing naked in front of the long mirror on the back of the bathroom door, she made a face. “Old. You’re getting old.” She knew that she was too thin, or at least that’s what others told her. Max said they were simply jealous because she was past fifty and still had a great figure.

Whatever. I got old. Whatever.

She rubbed moisturizer onto her face, hard enough to hurt, and put on her makeup. She reached for a lipstick, and twisted the cylinder–it was a red shade, dark red, the one that she never used.

She put it on heavy, hard enough that it broke. It tumbled into the bathroom sink, marking the white porcelain with glassy red streaks. Her reflection in the mirror, with the bright red so stark against her paleness, looked ghastly to her. She hurriedly wiped it off, and picked up a pink frost.

Daisy, as always, started barking when Jo turned on her hairdryer. She switched it to low and yelled, “Yo,
dawg!
” For some reason, Daisy always responded to that, much better than “no.” Jo grinned at her, feeling some calm returning, and the dog laid down just outside the bathroom door to watch her dry her hair.

“You’re the best friend I ever had, baby.”

Daisy wagged her tail.

“You know, Daize, I was actually thinking about getting my hair cut, until Big Barbie made that nasty comment yesterday. ‘Cheerleader hair?’” She reached to dry the back of her head, which was always difficult: her hair, she knew, really was too long to be stylish, at least for someone her age. Too blonde, too. Usually, she simply pulled it back to keep it out of her face. Sam had once offered to pay for a cut and style if she wanted it, but Jo could never bring herself to cut her hair. Not very often, anyway, and even then she would just trim it herself.

In the kitchen, she poured the last of the coffee, thinking about the day ahead; then, it occurred to her that this was the first day in a long time that she looked forward to.