Black and Blue (31 page)

“I loved the shit out of you, and look what you did to me.”

“I loved you, too, Bobby.”

How come I had so lost the ability to read him, to understand what went on beneath the black holes of his eyes? Or maybe I’d never had it at all. A dozen times, as he’d talked and talked, I’d felt myself pressing into the wall behind me, so that my heels ached where the molding hit them. Maybe it was the words, or the sudden wash of feeling, the sadness that came over me like a kind of faintness, that made me yearn forward as I said those last words, and meant them with all my heart even as I felt the metal of that crowbar in my hand: I loved you, too, Bobby. They were barely out of my mouth when he came out of the chair, like a cat, so quick I scarcely knew it until he was holding me against the wall, pressing against me with his body, his forearm against my throat, the way the older cops had taught him when he was a rookie. He’d showed me once as a joke, so many years ago, my head buzzing,
the floor coming up to meet my face. This time was no joke. He brought his knee hard against my wrist, and the crowbar fell to the carpet with a thump and rolled onto my foot, mocking me.

In the past it had always been like I’d been waiting for it, almost grateful, like he’d said, that the waiting was over. Maybe he was right, that I’d spent years with a look in my eyes that told him a scream was always hiding in my throat. But somehow it had always been Bobby, so that even when he was pushing me around, yelling right in my face, I could smell the smell of him, feel the feel of him that I knew so well. This time it was like a stranger coming at me. The hard hands no longer felt familiar, the breath tarred with cigarettes and some kind of booze was noxious; the feel of him through his pants, up against my groin, felt like something strange and criminal. Even the voice was no longer as hypnotic as it had once been, somehow different, diminished, tinny. Or maybe it was that I was somebody different, that Beth Crenshaw wasn’t going to let this man bloody and beat her. I used all of me to fight back against it, my hands, my knees, my feet, everything but my voice, held captive in my throat by the iron of his arm. I let my eyes close, went limp, and started to slide down the wall, and I felt him relax, a noise in his throat like crooning, like purring, and as he let down his guard for just a moment I came up hard against him, surprised him, almost knocked him over.

“That’s it,” he said, reaching for me, grabbing me around the throat. And then I saw points of color against black, like the fireworks we watched every year on the Fourth from the Coney Island boardwalk. That’s it. That’s the last thing I remember.

M
y daughter has red hair and the sort of disposition associated with it, willful, a little wild. Since she learned to speak she has appended a question mark to almost every sentence she has spoken: Mommy, what this thing? Mommy, water hot? Mommy, have that? How come? Why not? Probably most people cannot understand her. Her words are like soup, the smooth broth of the vowels, the chunky consonants, and she swirls them around in her little mouth until they sound more like mush than anything else. Sometimes I even have to translate for her father, the beloved, the adored Daddy. But I know everything she says. Everything.

Sometimes people see us all together in the supermarket and they remark on the tangle of orange curls, like a flag above the wire cart. The two of us so blond, they cannot quite figure out where this rogue gene comes from. Loving Care No. 27, California Blonde, makes me look a little less like my daughter’s mother, but I have a sentimental attachment to it. Besides, it makes me look a little more like Mike’s wife, an attachment much more tenuous than the attachment between me and Grace Ann. “Gwacen,” she calls herself, all one word. “Let’s say grace,” we say before holiday dinners, and she screams with laughter, two years old and full, as my father might have said, of piss and vinegar.

My name is Beth Crenshaw. I did not change it to Riordan, nor
back to Flynn. I left Frances behind. Beth Crenshaw is the name of the me I am today, Grace Ann’s mother. And Robert’s mother, too. No matter what.

It was Mike who found me, half a day after I’d found Bobby smoking in my living room. There was a pile of dead butts on the floor and my nightgown was up around my sternum, as though he’d looked me over one more time. He didn’t rape me; I checked. He’d contemptuously left the front door unlocked, Bobby, as though there was nothing worth safeguarding in the apartment anymore. I had an onyx and lapis lazuli necklace of bruises from ear to ear. I don’t know whether that was what Bobby wanted, or whether he meant to kill me and miscalculated. Or perhaps at the last minute he saw in me what I’d always seen in him, someone hated, feared, and yet beloved, and could not give that final squeeze. Perhaps at the last minute the death grip was a hug instead, or his twisted version of one.

Or maybe this is exactly what he intended. “Frannie, Frannie, Fran,” I can hear him say in his rich deep voice. “Killing’s too good for you. I want you to suffer.” And I do, every day.

“He went home,” Mrs. Castro said when Mike and I ran to the apartment at the end of the row, Bennie’s puzzled, troubled face peering from the kitchen doorway as he read our expressions. “He is home a long time.”

I like to think his father met Robert outside, at the front door, and not in the living room. I like to think that if Robert had seen me on the floor, he would have made so much noise that someone would have heard him. That he would have flown to the Castros, screaming, crying. That he would have taken my side over
Bobby’s. I like to think that Bobby told him some story, some irresistible fairy tale about redemption, forgiveness, the happy family come back to life like Snow White awakened from her long sleep in the glass casket by her handsome prince. I like to think he did not know that he was leaving me until he was already going sixty miles an hour down some highway somewhere.

All I know is that my boy is gone, and I don’t know where to find him. Mike made me go to the police, and they took pictures of my throat, and took down the address and telephone number of my husband, and duly noted the fact that he was a New York City police detective, and that I had no legal papers granting me custody of my own child. They listened carefully, and they took a few notes, and nodded their heads, but I could see in their eyes that the budget of a small-town police force, four men strong, didn’t extend to flying to Brooklyn to look for a man who’d done to his wife what so many men had done. And I knew that even if it had, Bobby would not be there, just as I had not been there that day a year before when he’d come home from work. After all, what could I say Bobby had done that I had not done myself?

Mike found a private investigator, and together we went and I told him my story. He seemed like a nice man, a former Texas sheriff with a big stuffed sailfish over his desk and a hunk of Red Man tobacco puffing out his upper lip. He pushed the check back across the desk. “You seem like good people,” he said, “so I’m not gonna bullshit you. Your boy is gone, and he’s gonna be hard to find. Your ex is a cop, which means he knows things about making himself scarce. Look how easy it was for you. But let’s say you go looking for him and maybe you find him. What then? You got
no case, is what. You took this guy’s kid and absconded with him. He took him back. It’s maybe you who could get in trouble for this. Assault charges, you might try against him, but it won’t necessarily help you get the child. He goes to court and says you disappeared with his boy for a year, you are gonna get your head handed to you.”

“We won’t give up on this boy,” Mike said.

“I appreciate your sentiments, mister. I got two boys of my own. But what I’m saying to you is, you may not have a choice. You could grab him back, if you could find him. And then maybe your husband could grab him again. And so on, and so forth. You get the idea. Ping-Pong, only the kid’s the ball.” He turned to me, shaking his head. “If you were divorced and you had custody, I might be able to find him and you could get him back. You don’t even have a custodial snatch here. I don’t even know what to call the situation you got.”

I knew what to call it. It was like death, except I had to go on living with it. I couldn’t look at Mike Riordan when he stopped by with cardboard bakery boxes of cookies and stacks of magazines because I knew he had spent his day with kids at the local day camp, breathing in the sweet fragrance of their skin and hair, listening to the staccato sound of their light feet, hearing their high voices calling to one another across the ball field, teaching them how to kick a soccer ball into the goal the way my own boy had once done and, maybe, a thousand miles away, was doing again. I slept in my clothes and canceled out on Cindy whenever she asked me to dinner. And then one July day, three weeks after Bobby found me, almost a year to the day from the day Robert and I had disappeared, the bell rang in the still apartment, the air
so thick with dust motes that it looked like a blizzard when I moved, and I lunged for the door like a crazy woman.

“Frannie,” she said, in a voice so thick with sorrow I almost didn’t hear the word. And Grace was in my arms and I in hers. She cleaned and cooked as though I was an invalid. She cried with me and read to me. Once I heard her on the phone. “She’s not ready to talk yet,” she said. Once she handed me an envelope. It was full of documents: my birth certificate. My nursing license. Robert’s baptismal certificate. I ran my fingers over the notary’s seals.

I hadn’t even thought about that, right away, that I was free now, that I didn’t have to hide because what I’d had worth hiding was already gone. But Mike had thought of it, and he’d found Grace through the college, and told her everything, and picked her up at the airport. And when Mrs. Levitt called and told me that she needed me to come, she was having fainting spells and heart palpitations, it was Mike who had put her up to it, though she didn’t admit it until months later, when she was demanding I be nicer to him.

“You must make a life for your son to come back to, Mrs. Nurse,” she said to me one day, eating a Happy Meal, handing me the toy, Donald Duck on a motorcycle. “Don’t waste your time crying. Crying is nothing. It does nothing.”

Cindy came by one night in August with a bottle of wine, and I drank most of it and finally cried, slurring my words, mucus dripping onto her shoulder as I told her all of it, all the blood and all the beatings, everything, both of Bobby’s babies, the one he’d taken from me and the one I’d taken from myself. She put me in the bathtub with some sort of sweet-smelling oil, trimmed my hair and gave me a manicure, big as she was with child, with children.
The day that Grace flew in and the day that Cindy pushed her way past me into the stale air of the apartment: those were the days when I started to come back to life.

I bought an answering machine so that if Robert called when I was out I would get his message; I bought one of those caller ID machines Bobby had boasted about so that if Robert called when I was home I would know where the call was coming from. I kept Robert’s enrollment current at school. “Tell them he’ll be back soon,” I told Mike on the phone, though I told him not to stop by, no, there was nothing he could bring over, nothing I needed. Except the one thing I did not have.

No one came for the rent, and the home-care agency got me a new patient, whose wife had Alzheimer’s. I relieved Mr. Dean while he went out bowling or to the movies with friends; I sat with his wife while she picked at her skirt and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” We were two crazy ladies, sitting in the living room of a little brick ranch house watching tabloid shows on television. We sat with tray tables in front of us; Mrs. Dean played some sort of solitaire that seemed to have no real rules, and I sent out flyers to schools and police departments. “Have you seen this boy?” the flyer said. Grace printed them on her computer. The photograph of Robert came out grainy, flat, anyboy in black and white.

Two schools called, and one police department, but the boys were too young, too old, too small, too light, too not mine. One night, after Mrs. Dean and I watched a miniseries about a beautiful woman who owned the best boutique in Beverly Hills, I came home to see a red light glowing in the darkness of the kitchen. For just a moment I thought it was the glowing tip of a cigarette, and
thought that Bobby had come back to finish me off. But my heart leapt, too, because if Bobby was there, Robert would be with him. I was happy at the thought of Bobby’s hands on my throat, as long as I could put my arms around Robert one last time.

It was only the light on the answering machine. There was no voice on the message for a few moments, only noise: traffic, big trucks, horns, a faint shouted conversation between two men in the background. Then a deep breath. “Mom,” he said, and I bent over the machine and hugged it to my chest so that the sound was muffled for a moment.

“I’m all right. Daddy is all right, too. He’s being really nice. He really missed me when I was gone.” There’s a silence there, on the tape, a long one. A car honks. The background noise sounds like highway traffic, a gas station, maybe, or a pay phone on a shopping strip. “Are you all right? Mom?” More silence. “We had lunch at McDonald’s. Tell Bennie I said ‘hi.’ Tell him I saw
Batman
on TV.” Another silence, another breath. “I miss you a lot. I have to go. I love you. Don’t worry, I’m good. We move around a lot.” Tears then. “I hope you’re not hurt. I hope you’re all right. I’m sorry. I have to go.”

I listened to that tape all night, that first night. I felt as if I was there, could see the trucks whizz by, feel the breeze around the booth, see the boy feeding the phone with spare change, culled from the top of strange bureaus and the slots of vending machines. By morning I knew every word, every nuance, every shift in timbre and tone. He was afraid, my little boy. Maybe afraid Bobby was going to find him talking on the phone, the way I had that night in the kitchen. Maybe afraid of something more. I wasn’t imagining it, the way his voice broke when he said he
hoped I was all right. Mike heard it, too. “That son of a bitch told him you were dead,” he said. “I just know it. I feel it.”