Eli the Good (20 page)

My mother was lying flat on her back on the bed, and she drew in a great gasp of air, as if she were trying to suck in everything the room offered, a drowning woman out of the water. Then she sat up and put both hands to her neck, coughing and hacking from the back of her throat. She had not cried, had perhaps been too scared to cry, but she shuddered the way someone does after a meltdown. She looked up at me, then away, as if she didn’t want me to see her. I was frozen again, unable to move. Besides, a thin layer of broken glass lay on the distance between me and the bed. But my mother brought her arm up and curled her fingers in toward her palm, her eyes large on my own in the gray room. I stepped toward her with caution, using the tip of my bare foot to brush glass away before each step. When I got to the bed, Mom pulled me into her arms, folding me up in her own body. She pressed her flat hand against the side of my face, forcing the other side against her wet chest. She was drenched in her own and Daddy’s sweat.

“He was asleep,” she strained to say, in a voice like rough wood. I knew that she was saying,
Don’t worry. He wasn’t trying to kill me. It’s all right.
I could hear all of that in those three small words. She put her hand to her throat and massaged it, running her forefinger over her windpipe. Even in the dim light I could see the bruises spreading out across her neck, the bruise on her shoulder, the redness of her cheeks, the sweat on her forehead.

He did not rise up and beg our forgiveness or show us his face. He lay there, mostly unmoving. Every once in a while, though, there would be the click of glass that let us know he was uncurling his arm or legs. Sometimes we would hear the quake of his crying. I had never seen or heard my father cry before. I had not thought him capable of such a thing.

Mom settled back against the pillows, worn out, and pulled me down with her into the crook of her arm. “The war,” she said. A witch’s voice. I thought she was reassuring herself. It took me a long time, years and years, to understand that she was just trying to comfort me. But back then I didn’t believe she cared anything about me.

The night creatures, after having reached full hysteria, calmed down. Maybe because morning wasn’t too far away. But maybe because they were aware of what had just happened in our house.

Unbelievably, impossibly, after a long time, I drifted back off to sleep as she trembled against me, as Daddy lay in the broken glass on the floor, trying to understand what was happening to him. I guess he spent the rest of the night that way.

When I awoke in the morning, he was already gone to work. I found my mother at the stove, and at first I thought it had all been a nightmare. But then she turned from the stove where she was boiling an egg and her bruised neck was revealed to me. And then I knew that this was my life.

M
y mother wore the purple bruises on her neck without shame. She didn’t situate herself in high-necked blouses or try to cover the marks with makeup, but walked around with the handprints on her neck. The only thing I ever heard her say about the bruises with any amount of worry was that she hoped they’d be gone by the time school started.

“My students would have a field day with these,” she said one morning, looking in the mirror and poking at the discolorations, which were becoming green at the edges. “I can hear the rumors now about how the biology teacher’s husband tried to strangle her to death.”

Something had changed in my father’s eyes. He didn’t look at my mother the same way anymore. He barely looked at her at all in those first few days after he’d strangled her in his sleep. Later I would understand that he was ashamed, that he felt guilty of something that was beyond his control. I imagine that at some point he turned to her and put fingers lightly on the bruises that decorated her tender neck, his eyes on hers. Silence splayed out between them like level water. I picture him apologizing to her in a trembling voice, the words caught somewhere halfway up his throat, finally pulling away as if startled, only to saunter away while she called out to him that it was all right. “Come back,” she’d call to him.

I’m sure this happened at some point. But it was a long while before he could acknowledge properly what he had done. It is an awful thing to know that you have hurt the person you love most in the world.

I ought to know, because my father and I had both damaged the most important people in our lives that Fourth of July. In many ways, the hurt I inflicted was worse. For one, I had done it intentionally — whether conscious of it or not, I had been trying to impress the boys — and I had also hit Edie with my words when she was at her most tender, shortly after her mother had abandoned her.

My mother didn’t have to forgive my father because even when he was choking her, she knew it wasn’t his fault. When she placed any blame at all, it was on the war. Stella had happened by the day after and had burst out crying upon seeing the bruises on Mom’s neck. “You have to leave him,” Stella had said, but Mom just laughed. “It was just the war, Stella,” she’d said. “Just that old war.” For two weeks after that night, her voice was raspy and hoarse, her windpipe dented by his big thumbs. When her voice came back to normal, it occasionally went out on her, like a deeply scratched record album that causes the needle to jump ahead on the grooves. Entire words of a sentence would be mouthed but have no sound, lost in the cracks of her voice box. When this happened, she’d shake her head and cough up two words of explanation: “The war.”

While my father shuddered at her touch, she became even more intent on saving him from his nightmares and flashbacks. My mother thought that most things could be healed by human touch, so she handled him as much as possible. During supper she would often lay her hand atop his, since he always kept his left hand lying on the table next to his plate. He would let this linger a moment, then slide his hand out from under hers, easy and quick, like someone ripping a tablecloth off without disturbing the dishes. She sat very close to him on the truck bench, lay her head on his shoulder when they sat on the porch glider. She was trying to convince him that she didn’t hold anything against him. He had tried to kill her in his sleep, but he hadn’t been himself; he had been out of his mind. A night terror, she called it. There was nothing for him to be sorry about, she said.

She might have forgiven him, but I hadn’t. I thought that I might truly hate him. I wasn’t completely sure about that, but I do know that I was afraid of him. I was even jumpier than he was. One day I wrote this in my composition book:
Daddy scares the hell out of me.
I had never written a cuss word before. And still hadn’t said one, although Edie had.

Several mornings I crawled beneath the screen porch, knowing that my mother and Nell were bound to talk about all of this at some point. The dirt was unnaturally cold there and populated by all manners of spiders, but I didn’t care. Reading
Charlotte’s Web
had cured me of any fear like that. I liked to put daddy longlegs on my palm and let them take high steps up my arm, amazed by how I could barely feel them. They must have weighed no more than an eyelash. I only regretted missing the best part of the morning to go riding. Pedaling through the morning mist was like speeding through a cloud, like flying, and I hated to miss that. But after only a couple mornings, my waiting paid off.

Nell was in her usual place, sitting on the glider, smoking and reading
Angle of Repose,
with which she was obsessed. Only the day before, she and Mom had driven away in Mom’s Cougar and had been gone the entire day under mysterious circumstances. Mom had said they went to the Piggly Wiggly, yet they brought back no groceries. So I figured Mom had gone to the doctor with Nell for a checkup on her cancer. I had been so frantic that I had almost spilled the secret to Josie. I didn’t know why I didn’t tell her, but somehow it felt wrong. She probably already knew, anyway. She and Nell sat up every night whispering and giggling, and it was a constant source of disappointment to me that our bedroom walls were so thick that I couldn’t hear their conversations.

Nell was silent and reading when Mom came out from washing the breakfast dishes, and I was in the perfect spot to listen to them.

“Morning,” Mom said, and her voice sounded like rocks being scraped together.

“Loretta, you’ve got to go to the doctor. Listen at you. Your voice box might be shattered or something.”

Dust puffed into my eyes when my mother plopped into the chair just over my face. “It’s fine,” she scratched.

“And Stanton needs to go to the doctor, too. You know he does, now.”

Silence. Apparently my mother was giving a firm shake of the head to let Nell know that she didn’t agree because Nell spat out her words rat-a-tat-tat after that, afraid she would be cut off before she could say all she wanted. “It’s a stress disorder, Loretta. From the war. I heard about it all the time up there in DC. A friend of mine worked at the Veterans Administration.” I could almost feel the frustration sizzling on the air between them, could imagine my mother’s steely gaze. “Why are you so damn stubborn?” Nell cried out. “What’s
wrong
with him going to the doctor?”

“People are always saying how Vietnam vets are crazy. He’s not.” She coughed these last words out. I pictured her holding her throat as she spoke, kneading out her sentences one by one.

“For God’s sake, nobody’s saying he’s crazy. He needs some help. He’s been carrying that war around with him all these years, and nobody is going to help him unless he asks for it and —”

“Nell, I love you just like my sister,” Mom said, and cleared her throat long enough to speak clear for a few words. “But you don’t have any right to say anything to him about the war. I’ve forgiven all that stuff that happened back then, but still —”

I could hear the disbelief in Nell’s voice. “Are you out of your mind, Loretta? Forgiven me? What was there to forgive? You agreed with me back then. That war wasn’t right, and you know it as well as I do.”

“Nell —”

“And you know that
I
never did anything but fight to get the soldiers out of there. I never called anybody a baby-killer. Because that happened to him, he groups all the protesters with those dumb-asses who said that to him in Boston. I was
for
the soldiers.”

“A lot of people weren’t, though, Nell. You know that as well as I do.”

“But that wasn’t
me,
Loretta.”

“There were two sides in all that — the protesters and the soldiers,” Mom said. She was still scratchy-voiced, but at least she could say more than a few words in a row. Still, I could hear the frustration in her mouth; she wasn’t able to say all she wanted because her voice wouldn’t allow it. “You can’t be on both sides.”

“It’s not about sides,” Nell countered.

Another daddy longlegs marched across my mouth and was gone before I could move to sweep him away. Above me there was a long silence. I thought for a moment that my aunt and mother might have disappeared into thin air.

Finally, my mother said, in a voice choked full of grief, “I don’t know. All I do know is that he went over to fight for his country, then he found himself fighting for his own life. And you think it’s all so simple. That’s what has always bothered me about it all, how people think it’s so simple and it’s
not,
Nell.”

“I know that,” she said, quiet. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’ve never thought it was simple.”

“That’s the problem, that people want it all to be simple,” Mom said, as if she wasn’t even listening to Nell now. “And then everybody just misunderstands everyone else, and instead of trying to understand each other, we all just go to war in one way or another.”

I was aware of Nell moving — the screech of the glider as she did so was the giveaway — and then sounds as if they were hugging. My mother might have been crying; I couldn’t really tell. Even so, I pictured Nell comforting her, taking her hands and wiping my mother’s face, then cupping Mom’s chin between two fingers and forcing her to look up.

“All of the world’s biggest problems boil down to misunderstandings, then, don’t they?” Nell asked.