Come Back (4 page)

Nothing ruined what it felt like to mother Mia, nothing sullied it. Every time I looked at Mia, I felt a jumping happiness in my chest that no fear or crazy husband could dim.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill us both!” Nick screamed as he jerked the wheel left and sent the car flying across the opposite lanes. We’d just left marriage counseling. It wasn’t his cup of tea.

“I hate you, bitch! I hate this marriage!” He slammed the car up a curb and into an empty lot. It was like the wide prairie before us. He hit the gas.

I heard a hoarse, “Stop, please stop,” as if some other woman were saying it. Terror had disembodied my voice from me, made me my own ventriloquist.

“I want you both gone! Take the baby and go!” He spun the car around, floored it, and we screeched back to the street, barely missing two cars.

And then the car sputtered. And died.

Oh, sweet miracle, we’d run out of gas. I gaped in amazement as the car rolled toward miracle number two—a gas station right in front of us.

One of lunacy’s virtues being instant mood change, Nick simply sighed and coasted to self-service as if nothing had happened. The second he screwed the gas cap on, I shot into the driver’s seat, started the car, and left him there.

The next day, he strolled in as serene as a Buddha, saying in his soft, stoned voice that we don’t need therapy anymore, “Therapy’s the problem, it just stirs things up.”

Therapy’s the problem? Stirs things up?
That he could say that right after trying to kill me was stupefying. I, on the other hand, had sat up all night realizing that it wasn’t the fighting, the “stirring up,” that was the problem. It was the things being stirred up, the very things themselves. Like Alice in Wonderland, I’d been away from the real world so long, the one inhabited by sane people, that I’d forgotten that one shouldn’t
have
to argue about things like taking babies on roofs, naked gardening, or parenting on drugs. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole where miserable, intimidating creatures argued the ridiculous, the dangerous, and the perverse.

It was time to crawl out of the hole, which was going to take some doing. Like learning to bite my tongue at his screwy ideas. To smile and be agreeable. Because I wasn’t going to be as clueless getting out of this mess as going in. I would bide my time while I got a degree so I could support Mia. Then I’d take her and get out. Before he did kill me.

“See,” he said of the return of his sweet, accommodating wife, “what did I tell you? Therapy, schmerapy.”

Now that Mia spoke and walked, he spent more time playing with her. He’d giggle on the floor with her, pulling on a curly blonde wig from her dress-up box. I’ll wish later I’d never bought that wig. For years, she’d have nightmares of him wearing it.

While Nick was at work, I’d scour college catalogs at the library. Then I’d go home and pretend. This retreat from the battlefield was a relief for both of us. I was worn out from fighting him. He must have been worn out from fighting him, too. Because he mistook my new acquiescence for approval, permission. For freedom to be who he really was, at last.

Which would end up being so much worse.

“What’s wrong with relaxing in my own home, Claire? There’s no one here but us.” One of
us
was an already walking, talking little girl. He’d started going around naked again. “You’re going to teach her to be ashamed of her body,” he clucked. He’d wait a week or two, then do it again.

One morning, I found him sitting in bed with her, reading the comics. He always slept nude, almost always woke up with an erection. I picked her up and walked out as I threw him his underwear.

“What’s your problem, she doesn’t know what it is.”

He reminded me that it was a natural thing, a normal part of life. Nothing is normal about you, I wanted to say.

“I can’t believe you did that without asking me first!” Nick yelled as he walked in the door from work.

“Asking you what?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Mia was helping me set the table. She grabbed onto my legs, scared.

“I hate bangs on women! I like to see her whole face!”

The Hatter was back. Later, when he’d calmed down, he decided to expound in earnest his theories on raising happy children. This should be interesting, I thought. He announced that henceforth Mia herself would decide on her haircut.

“You’d let a two-year-old make that choice? What if she wants to shave it off?”

“Of course,” he said, “it’s her body.”

“What if she wants to shave her legs and dye her hair when she’s three?”

“Of course, once she’s able,” he replied, encouraged by my calm responses.

“So, it’s sheer ability that sets a child’s limits, not parental guidance?”

He decided to reveal at last how he saw Mia’s unfolding future: “Children should be able to do whatever adults do once they’re able to.”

The possibilities chilled me. “Really? A ten-year-old has the
literal
ability to drink or smoke marijuana or have sex, that’s okay?”

“Why not? How will they learn about themselves, about life? And why shouldn’t they feel the pleasure of their God-given bodies? Other cultures allow it.”

Other
cultures allow cannibalism. I was recalculating our departure date with each answer.

“Sex isn’t something children should be protected from, Claire. It’s like protecting them from good food or music.”

I practically sprang from my chair and strode off to clean, cook, anything to get away from his satisfied face, his folded hands.

Because the air in my house felt deadly. From the stink of animal breath. There is a wolf outside our door, I thought. Watching with glittering eyes and waiting. Till Mia was older, to do what wolves do with big girls, ravish them. After they’ve lost their bowlegged, baby-fat bodies and grown slim hips and tender breasts.

Forget the degree, get any job and then a divorce. I have time for that, I thought, she’s not yet three, she’s still safe. What on earth could anyone even
do
with a toddler’s squirmy little piglet body? An absurdity, an impossibility.

Sexual abuse wasn’t in the media then. I’d never even heard the word pedophile.

Or I’d have remembered that wolves liked little pigs.

It was the tears.

It was Sunday morning and Mia was in the laundry basket, handing me things to fold. He was reading the Sunday paper. On the front page was a story of the children who were molested in a home care center. He was reading what the kids said the owners did to them after their parents dropped them off. When the owners were done, they would bring in the bird. Sometimes a cat. Mostly birds. Their necks were easier to twist.

At night, in their beds at home, I thought it was not between their
legs nor their soft lips that those children touched, to comfort. I thought it was their necks.

I thought they were older kids, school age.

Mia tumbled from the basket and I picked her up to fly her around the room. She giggled and gasped in flight as I dipped her high and low.

He stopped reading to ask softly, “Why is what they did so bad? Why do people hate them so much?” With genuine, sad puzzlement. I stopped dead in my tracks. Mia was aloft in my hands, in midflight. A twitchy disgust tied my tongue.

“Not the bird part,” he said, without looking up.

“Because they’re sick,
sick,
” I said, bringing Mia down, walking to the door.

“But what makes them sick?” His voice was tight, pleading. I hadn’t heard that voice before. I held Mia close and turned in the doorway. And I saw that it wasn’t me he was asking. He was staring out the window, with tears in his eyes.

Something in me contracted, I felt shrink-wrapped, suffocated. My body was sending up an alarm, saying
leave now
. Only years later, I would look back and know that what my body was also trying to tell me was this: that the wolf had already come in the door, unzipped his husband-suit, and stepped out with his hungry hands.

He was very quiet when I told him. We can do it amicably, split everything down the middle. He just nodded and left. I sat up waiting. Because quiet scared me. He was back at 3 a.m., surprised to find me awake and telling him to pack some things and leave. He didn’t pack, he didn’t speak. He exploded.

He roared, picked up a glass-topped coffee table and smashed it to slivers at my feet. Then he flew through the house like a crazed beast, grabbing everything in his path and smashing it, hollering and screaming gibberish.

He threw chairs, demolished shelves, pulled down pictures and whizzed them at me like Frisbees. I played dodgeball with books, shoes, and records. He blocked exits, ripped the phone from the wall.

He wasn’t going to kill me tonight, he bellowed. Noooo! He’d do that when I wasn’t expecting it. When I was leeeeast expecting it.

“THIS IS JUST” as a wall clock smashed into me—

“TO SCARE” as my sewing box sailed into a window beside me—

“THE SHIT” as knives and silverware whistled through the air—

“OUT OF YOU!” as he stomped a lampshade to death.

Mia’s screaming sent me bolting down the hall. I grabbed her out of her crib and kept dodging him, trying to get to the door, a window, any escape. The madness continued as long as there was anything to demolish. Food, plants, furniture. Mia dug her fingernails so far into my neck she drew blood.

He yelled “
Give me the baby!
” at the same time he was throwing our house at us. Until there was almost nothing left to destroy, until he’d worn himself out. Until he stood, spent, amid the splinters and shards, cried, and left.

Mia and I stayed with my mother for only a few days. It made her nervous, all the drama, my bruised ribs, gouged neck. Mia, however, acted as if nothing had happened at all. When we returned home, she marched about the wreckage, singing, making forests and islands of the debris. She imitated me taking photos of the carnage.

I didn’t know if this was a child’s remarkable resilience or if she thought she’d dreamt it or if she’d simply buried and forgotten it. I called her doctor, who assured me that if she was distressed, she would show it.

A neighbor came by to ask how I was, said they were afraid he might have hurt me. “They” turned out to be half my block, who stood in my front yard in their jammies at 4 a.m. listening to “all that screamin’ and bangin’ goin’ on.” Ringside seats to the show. No one wanted to knock or call the police. It “wasn’t really our business.”

Nick didn’t call, which unnerved me. The thing about being told “when you least expect it,” is that then you
always
expect it. I spent nights in her room, sitting up, listening. Jerking my head up when I nodded off.

I was half-dead with exhaustion. I finally took a cab to the lake, too sleep deprived to drive. I staggered across the beach to a wide-open spot, jammed our umbrella in the sand, and waited for Mia to take her nap. I tied her to my waist with a jump rope, lest she wake up and toddle away from me, then passed out cold beside her.

It was almost dark when I woke. Mia was sitting beside me, patting
me and muttering to herself. She burst into a smile when my eyes opened. “Thee, mudder, I patected you! Did you have a good thleep?”

“The husband shall have the right to decide how and where the child has her hair cut for each alternate haircut until the child is old enough to decide on her own.” He insisted on the clause in the divorce papers we were having drawn up.

I insisted on sole custody and no overnights, but I had no choice but to allow visitation. All I could do was demand he see her with his family present. I began making plans to move as far away as possible. I assumed he’d go on with his life and leave us alone. I assumed wrong.

Mia and I moved into a depressing orange shag, slimy pool, popcorn-ceiling apartment. Nowhere else would take a child. I took a sales job I hated near my mother so she could watch Mia.

Mia was an easy child, happy but not boisterous. Her laughter was light, her movements delicate, considered. She was intensely curious, quietly exploring the world like a little scientist. She was not chatty, she spoke carefully. When she giggled, “You’re a mean mommy!” in the tub one night, I was surprised. I knew all of her small vocabulary and “mean” wasn’t in it.

“What’s a mean mommy?” I asked her, playing along. “Uh-oh, I’m gonna be in biiiig trouble!” she laughed giddily.

Her behavior had been jittery and odd since I’d picked her up from a visit earlier that day. I asked Nick why he told her she’d be in big trouble. Fuck you, he screamed, you’re poisoning her! She’s already calling someone else daddy, I can tell! Which was ludicrous. Mia wouldn’t want to call anyone “daddy” again for the rest of her life.

A week later, I picked Mia up at my mom’s after work. She’d been playing there with my sister’s baby, Rosie. After I took her home and put her to bed, the phone rang.

“Now stay calm,” my sister said to me.

I sat down and suspected that whatever calm I still had was about to vanish altogether.

When my sister was changing Rosie’s diaper, she said, Mia scooted in
front of her, spread the baby’s legs, and demonstrated on her “what my daddy do to me.” Mom saw it, too, she added.

All I could hear after that was my own voice saying he did it he did it he did it he didn’t wait till she was older he did it to her little piglet body to her little self.

I sat up all night, trying to “stay calm.” I wanted to yell, I wanted to cry, I wanted to wring his neck. I wanted to watch her sleep. But it made my heart break.

I took her to her pediatrician in the morning to see if she was hurt in some way, to ask him what to do. She didn’t seem hurt, just hyper, clingy.

When I told the doctor what she demonstrated on her cousin, he didn’t say much. Just looked her over, checked her chart, then had her go play in the waiting room. He closed her file, smiled at me and said, “So, I hear you want to take Mia out of state?”

Bastard.

Nick must have figured where my first stop would be if he got caught. He’d already started damage control, called on the boys to close ranks. Oh, that vindictive wife, that mean mommy.

“You know, Nick is a good man. Are you sure you want to do this?”

I was sure I wanted to slap his splotchy, grinning face, yank out his sparse fluffs of hair. Gritting my teeth around men was becoming something of a skill by now.

“This is about Mia, not me. What do I do about what he did to her?”

“I wouldn’t make much of it, she’s okay. I’m sure once you tell Nick what she said, it won’t happen again. I’ll talk to him.” He smiled and left.

I was frustrated, angry, confused—he’s a jerk, but he’s still a doctor, he must know what he’s talking about. Should I not make much of it, not reinforce the event in her mind? The one thing I did know was not to make Mia feel she’d done something wrong. But I would make damn sure Nick knew he did.

“Mia told what you did to her, you pervert,” I told him. “She tells on you, she demonstrates! You’re worse than a rapist, it’s your own child!”

He didn’t hang up, didn’t argue. He just listened. I was shaking.

“You touch her again and you will rot in jail. You know what they do to molesters in jail, don’t you? Even murderers can’t stand a child molester!”

He was silent, then quietly said thank you, and hung up. Of course, he didn’t argue, I thought, he knows he’s been caught. That ought to stop him, he isn’t about to get himself thrown in jail, oh my the family name. He won’t dare touch her again. The doctor said so. And the mother listened.

Nick had made the earlier mistake of thinking that my agreeableness was acquiescence. My mistake was worse. I mistook his for fear. I thought big, scary me, the Powerful Mother, I locked the evil wolf out for good.

“I’m not fat, pink, and ugly!” Mia blurted in the tub after a visit with Nick.

She started to cry, jumped out of the tub, and went streaking about naked and wet. Her behavior began changing. Some days she’d grow suddenly somber and clingy. Others, she’d laugh out of the blue. She started wetting her pants. Her nursery school told me she’d become withdrawn, twice they found her with her panties off.

I thought she was regressing to baby behavior, probably from the separation caused by my working. I had no idea that what she was doing was not regressing, it was
advancing
. To adult behavior.

One rainy night, she stopped talking as I ran her bath. She refused to go into the bathroom. She clenched her fists and turned red with a kind of contained rage. I picked her up and she screamed. She went rigid and said, “Daddy hurt me down there.”

Life changed forever. I talked listened moved ate slept but in a reality filtered through this. The world thrummed with the strange, sick tone of a nightmare. One I couldn’t shake, because it wasn’t mine. It was as if the devil himself was dreaming, he was asleep and dreaming of our lives, Mia and I.

We would be a long time waking him.