October Snow (27 page)

Looking into Tyler’s eyes now, she thought that had she been able to translate what she saw there, they would have said
save me
.

“You didn’t make me leave, baby. You could never do that. And your dad’s telling you the truth. And so am I. I’m going to go see Josie and Maxine for just a little while, because I promised them I would. You and Dad are going to come spend time there, too.”

“When?” he whispered.

She looked past him to Dave. “Every weekend.”

Dave nodded. “That’s right.”

He pulled back and looked at his father. “Honest?”

“Yes. Honest.”

“And then you’ll come home, Mom?”

“After I spend some time with my friends, yes.”

“Forever? Home forever?”

In the pause before she answered, Dave could tell that something was troubling her. “Forever. I’ll never be away from you again.”

Dave thought it was an odd way for her to phrase the answer. “Know what? I have a big surprise for you at home, Ty. Maybe I should tell you about it now?”

He nodded, wiping his eyes on the corner of the tablecloth, then looking sheepishly at his mother. “Guess I shouldn’t do that, huh?”

She laughed, handing him a napkin. “You’re fine, sweetie.”

“What’s the surprise, Dad?”

The boy was intrigued, distracted now from his fears. Dave was relieved to see him moving past the uncertainty of a few moments before, but worried about the things Tyler may not have shared with them. The years without his mother had come at a cost, even beyond what Dave had suspected. Thoughts about Jack–hurting his son, costing him his mother–struck a glancing blow at him, and he struggled to shake it off. He breathed deeply before he spoke again. “You’ve got some brand-new fishing equipment waiting for you at home. You’ll need it when we go see Mom at the lake.”

Tyler’s exaggerated look of surprise brought laughter from the elderly couple at the table next to them. “Wow! Wow, thanks, Dad!”

Sam moved to her seat as Dave stood up, taking his glass from the table and holding it toward Tyler. “Raise it up there, Ty-guy.”

Tyler grinned at his mother as she picked up her champagne. “What’s he doing?” he giggled.

“Shhh. Quiet while the Toastmaster speaks,” she said, looking at Dave, amused.

“To the three of us,” he said, and Tyler beamed as they all touched glasses.

Dave sat then, putting his hand over his son’s. “And to Tyler.”

The boy looked back and forth at his parents, wide-eyed. “Me?”

“You’ve been my strength while we were on the wrong path for a few years here, and I’m grateful.” His voice was thick as he finished. “We wouldn’t have made it without you. I love you, son.”

“To Tyler.” Sam thought about how Dave always knew exactly what they needed; and tonight, their son needed to believe that he had been the solution–not that he was a problem. She leaned over to kiss Tyler on the forehead, grateful for the pride in his eyes as he blushed. Dave had put him back together again, and she wondered how many times he’d had to do that while she was off chasing the fairy tale, the horror story that was Jack. The thought of him made her shudder.

Dave caught her distress and took her hand.

“Just really glad to be where I am,” she explained.

“Which leads us to that good news.” He turned to Tyler. “Your mom and I are finally getting it right.”

Sam wished she had told him about the baby already, before the evening had happened.

Tyler bounced lightly in his seat, his heart pounding. The sadness of a few minutes before was completely forgotten. “What are you getting right?”

Dave kissed Sam’s hand and said, “We did everything in the wrong order, but we want to teach you better. And we want our family together, always. So, we’re getting married.”

“
Yes
!” He hopped from his chair, plopping himself onto his mother’s lap, wrapping his arms around her neck and squeezing her hard. “So, does that mean…is Jack…so I don’t have to see him anymore?”

Sam held him as she whispered in his ear, “Never again, baby.”

Tyler talked them into stopping for ice cream after dinner, so it was after nine o’clock when they arrived home. “Hit the shower, Ty, it’s late.”

“Can I see my new fishing pole first?”

“After. Hurry up.”

“Mom?” He turned to her, wrapping his arms around her waist.

She handed her wrap to Dave. “Yes?”

“Will we really come see you next weekend?”

“You sure will.”

“And there’s really a lake right there where they live?”

“Absolutely.”

“A big one?”

“With lots of fish.”

“And seagulls? They tell you where the fish are.”

“You’re so smart. You know, Aunt Josie told me she can throw a potato chip from her bedroom window, and a gull will catch it before it hits the ground.”

“
Wow
!”

“Shower,” Dave said sternly.

“Shower,” Sam agreed.

“I’ll hurry.” He turned to run up the stairs, then stopped at the landing. Breaking into sudden, joyous laughter, he ran back and threw himself into Dave’s arms, leaning out to pull his mother in.

Dave enfolded them in a quick hug, then set Tyler on his feet. “Love you too. Now get clean.”

Sam waited at the bottom of the steps, listening for the shower, then turned to face Dave.

“We need to talk.”

Max wrapped her bath towel around her head turban-style as she wandered into the kitchen. Jo was studying the portrait of the boy at the beach, reaching out to straighten it.

“Looks good, Bim. You getting a shower too, or are we having a bedtime snack?”

“Snack,” Jo said, tapping the bottom edge of the frame. “There. That’s straight now.”

Max was setting bowls and spoons on the counter. “Coconut almond?”

“We ate it all.”

“Uh oh. We’re down to chocolate, then.”

Jo frowned as she sat at the table. “Bowls tonight?”

“I’m making it into a banana split,” she said, her head buried in the refrigerator. She peered over the door. “Have we got any nuts?”

“Almonds. In the cupboard over the stove.”

“No peanuts?”

“Peanut butter. Put a handful of chocolate chips in with some of it, and melt it in the microwave. Makes a great topper.”

“Mmmm.” She set the carton of ice cream and the chocolate syrup on the breakfast bar. “Come get these.” She put a large spoonful of peanut butter into a glass bowl, licking the spoon as she asked, “Did you call the boys back?”

“Yeah, just a little while ago.” Jo was slicing bananas at the table, slowly and carefully. “They’re having a great time. Love their new family.”

Max paused with the spoon halfway to her mouth. “They said that?”

“Yup. You forgot the whipped cream.”

Max pulled the aerosol can from the door of the refrigerator. “That has to sting, Jo.”

Head down, she shrugged.

“Want to talk about it?”

“I think so. In a few minutes.”

“Sure.” She slid into the chair across from her, and they made their desserts with an assembly line efficiency that made her smile. “We’re good at this, Bim.”

“Too good. It’s almost sad, when you think about it,” Jo said, making an obvious effort to smile.

“Wanna do the whipped cream?”

“Yeah.” She flipped the cap from the can with her thumb, squirting a large mound onto the top of both bowls. “This is artistry.”

“Beautiful.”

“Max, remember what you said, about people praying that you turn from Satan, when you aren’t in that place at all?”

“Yeah.”

“Matt said that Shelly was praying for me after dinner tonight, that I turn from my evil and learn to love others–especially my children.”

Max felt her stomach grip, and her face reddening. There was little that could move her to rage; however, the thought of what Jo was describing was more than she could process calmly, or even rationally.

Jo continued. “He said that they’ll be okay, that Shelly and her family are there for them, while I decide which way I’m going to go–with God, or not.”

Max threw her spoon down on the table, disgusted. Jo didn’t move or look at her, didn’t react at all. “I want to say something profound, Jo, I really do. But the only thing I can think of is how badly I want to scratch her eyes out. And her bastard husband, too.” She buried her face in her hands, resting her elbows on the table. “What an unimaginable prick. What is it with these religious people? What do they get out of turning decent, loving people into some kind of spiritual road kill?”

“There just seems to be something especially evil about using God as a weapon.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I think Johnny was trying to shut him up.” She shrugged, retrieving Max’s spoon. “Not sure if it was to keep me in the dark or to protect me.”

“Does it matter?”

Jo considered it for a moment. “Not really. Not anymore.” She stared blankly at her hands. “I do wish it did, though. You can’t feel hope if you have nothing to fight for, you know?” She finally looked up at Max, her eyes empty. Max had never seen that expression, or absence of one, in her eyes before.

“They’re falling for it.”

Jo nodded.

“You seem resigned to it, like it’s a foregone conclusion that…” She let her voice trail off, uncertain how to finish the thought.

“That I’m going to lose them?”

Max was silent.

“I will,” Jo answered for her. “I’ve seen it dozens of times. It’s the way these situations go. These kids, they grow up terrified with the monster in the house, and then they escape and they turn on their mothers.” Her voice and her expression were completely flat.

She could have been talking about something as mundane as when to do the laundry, Max thought. “Jo…”

Deep in thought, she didn’t seem to hear her. “I’ve never been able to crack that one. I wonder sometimes if it’s just battle fatigue or something. Maybe they want–need–to pretend that I was to blame. You know…” She was silent for a minute as she contemplated something.

As she began to gesture with her spoon, Max took in her odd, clinical affect: it was as though she had somehow managed to disassociate herself from her own experiences.

Jo was speaking rapidly now. “Okay, try this: if the children of abused women can blame their mother somehow, that may make them feel like there’s some kind of logic to
why
their mother was abused while all they could do was watch. These kids grow up with the craziness of a no cause-and-effect dynamic, and so they
create
one, once they’re free to do so. And they create a cause that lets them feel less helpless.” She nodded, satisfied with her conclusion. “I think that’s it, Max. That’s why the court does further damage, too–no effect on the bad guy, you know? The kids need the cause and effect in order to make any sense of it. If it’s logical, it’s predictable.”

Max decided that if she needed to talk about it, then that’s what they would do. It was preferable to letting her spin out there on her own. “And then it’s controllable, and they can feel better about themselves at the same time. That’s pretty good, Bim. I think you’re right.” She watched her carefully. “And I think battered women do that themselves, to some extent. That’s why they take responsibility for the guy.”

“Your mom did that?”

It was the first time she had allowed herself to think of her mother as an abused woman. “All the time.”

“I could never get there–to blaming myself, I mean. I wasn’t good at living the battered-woman stereotype. Most women aren’t, actually. The reality of it isn’t like the movies depict it.”

Max coughed, as a snicker–one she hoped wasn’t insensitive–escaped her. “Geez, you have a way of phrasing things. Please to explain?”

“I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to please him, and I certainly never blamed myself for what an ass he was. And I’d antagonize him when I knew he was in the mood to attack me…”

“The escalation period?”

“Yeah. Because he was going to do it, and I wanted it over with so he’d storm out for a day or two, and the kids and I could actually
live
then. When he was gone, we were happy.” She caught Max looking at her with something like pity. “Hey, I don’t need sympathy, Maxine. I simply didn’t make for a malleable little wifey. I learned early on how to get him to attack.” She seemed to take pride in that, and Max didn’t know whether to feel compassion, admiration, or alarm.

“What was the worst?” she asked quietly.

Jo looked surprised, even amused–Max had the impression that she had, truly, detached from her own history for the moment. “You really want to know?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“New Year’s Eve, I think it was ten years ago? Actually, he hadn’t attacked me physically for a lot of years, because he knew I’d clean his clock if he did. And I didn’t push him, not any more than it took to get him to leave. But he’d scream, and he’d threaten, and then tear the house apart before he’d make his melodramatic exit.”

“You tried to divorce him more than once, right?”

“Yeah,” Jo sighed. “He got this daddy-has-all-the-rights lawyer, and–to make it short–they accused me of parental alienation. Turning the kids against him. So I let him come back until the boys got older.”

Max shook her head, pursing her lips as she sighed. “What happened New Year’s Eve?”

“It was all in the timing,” she said. “Good story–but I won’t tell it if you turn it into a reason to feel sorry for me.”

Max didn’t know exactly what she meant, but she agreed. “Deal.”

“See, the boys were finally getting old enough to have a say in custody, but that parental alienation thing would’ve still hung over my head if they didn’t want to be around Keith, and they didn’t. I probably would have lost custody if I complained about his violence in front of the wrong judge. Know what I mean?”

“Kind of.”

“The way these dad’s rights groups–and lawyers–work it, it really doesn’t matter what a guy does to a woman, once she has his kid. They believe that even if the kids are terrified of a violent father, it’s only because the mother
brainwashed
them to hate their father, not because the father is scary.”

Max frowned. “Get out.”

“That’s how it is.” She stood. “I’m making some coffee. Want some?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, after having him back for a few months, I was
done
with having him around. Plus, I needed to ease into the actual divorce–start with a separation.” She was quiet while she counted out the scoops of coffee. “I needed to work out a way to get Keith away from us, but still postpone the divorce for another year or two until the boys were older–and so I hatched a plan.” She lit a cigarette with perfectly steady hands, appearing to relish the memory.

She turned on the coffeemaker and came back to the table. “I told Keith that I was going out that New Year’s Eve. I hadn’t been out–not socially, I mean–in years at that point, and so I was too agoraphobic to go anyway. But he didn’t know that. So, I bought a skin-tight red dress with a slit up to here,” she pointed to her upper thigh, “did a perfect makeup and hairdo, and sent the boys to a party their friend was having down the street. Then…” She looked beyond Max, off in the distance, lost in thought.

“Then what?”

She refocused on her. “I rubbed his nose in the fact that I was going out alone. Told him I needed to find a real man–one who could cut it in the bedroom. See, he was impotent for almost the entire time that we had any physical relationship–which was very briefly. I was lucky to have my boys.”

Max whistled softly, reaching for a cigarette. Her stomach was in knots.

“It took no time at all to get him to attack. He cracked right after I called him ‘dickless’.. Beat the living hell out of me. By the time he was done, I looked like I had been run over by a truck.”

“I…Wow.” She knew that Jo’s marriage had been awful, but she wasn’t at all prepared for the nightmare she was hearing.

“I remember looking at myself in the mirror after he left…It’s mind-bending, being all fixed-up and then …” She stopped.

Max could picture it. She didn’t want to ask, but she did so anyway. “How bad?”

“The worst was a gash in my head, right about here.” She pointed to the crown of her head. “My hair was a bloody, gory mess.”

Max was quite certain that she couldn’t handle any more of the story–but she couldn’t seem to pull away, either. She was both fascinated and horrified.

“Now at this point,” she lit Max’s cigarette for her, “he was up for a director’s position at the firm he worked for.
Very
important stuff, this.” She grinned. “So, I waited until he stormed out, then I got out the camcorder.”

Max lifted an eyebrow. “You got it on tape.”

“I did. I made a video of what he had done to me. Then, I cleaned myself up the best I could before John and Matt got home–he didn’t do much to my face, so I was able to hide a lot from them–and I called the crisis center.”

“Manchester?”

“Yeah. The one Victoria works for.”

“You wound up working there, right? I assumed that from what she said that day, about you being back on board.”

Jo nodded. “But that night, that was my first contact with them. I was a client. I gave the video, and a letter, to a woman named Rebecca Lowenstein–she was on duty that night. When Keith came home the next morning, I sent the boys to their friend’s house again, and confronted Keith with the telephone in one hand and the camcorder in the other. I told him I had videoed my injuries and written a letter about it. Then I gave him the choice to either tape a full confession, or I was calling the cops–and then, I would get a
detailed
restraining order which, being a public document, would somehow wind up circulating all over his workplace.”

“Jo, he could have killed you.”

“He said he would. He looked like he might.” She smirked. “He demanded the tape and the letter, and I told him that a nice woman at the crisis center had it, and that she was waiting to hear from me.”

Max leaned back with a shaky sigh. “That was quite the chance you took there.”

“Not really. These guys are all the same. They think they’re omnipotent, but they’re easily manipulated. Anyway, he taped the confession.”

She still sounded to Max like she wasn’t even talking about herself. “Jo, you actually engineered all that?” she asked softly.

“Hey, you do what you have to. I needed to get the boys and me a new life. He never allowed me to build one outside of him, you know.”

Her head was spinning. “So he records a full confession, and then…”

“He moved into the in-law apartment. We went to a judge, had a legal separation done, and the boys and I didn’t have to deal with him too often after that. Then a couple of years later, we converted it into a divorce decree.” She looked well-satisfied, even pleased. “The main reason I moved to New Hampshire was because this place is one of only a couple of states left that have fault-divorce statutes. No fifty-fifty stuff–I got a good settlement.”

“Oh my gosh.”

“Trust me, I know how to flush these guys out.”

“Well…” she struggled for something to say. “I guess you thought of everything, didn’t you?”

Her face fell then. She looked down at her hands. “Not really.”

Max leaned forward, her hand on her chin. “Why?”

“It never occurred to me, at least not until after we separated, that Johnny would abandon us the way he did. He took off as soon as he possibly could.” She looked away. “He ran pretty wild for a few years. Matthew couldn’t deal with it–he blamed me that his brother was gone.” Her hands fell to her lap, and her voice became a monotone even as her eyes widened with the memory. “We fell completely apart.”

Not sure she should comment, she did so anyway. “That had to be devastating, Jo.”

She recalled the day that John had slammed out of the house, running for the car that had pulled up across the street for him. “Yeah. He had a fight with Keith, and said he was out of there. Threw some things in a duffel bag, called a friend. I stuffed a couple hundred dollars in his pocket, and he was gone.” She swallowed hard. “I remember the look on Matt’s face. He turned hard. And bit by bit, I realized that I had survived all those years for…Never mind.”

Max saw the agony reflected in Jo’s face, the way her heart must have broken at that moment. She looked at Jo’s hands, busily rubbing her thighs, and she reached out to cover them.

“If you go back to Wellsboro sometime, can I tag along?”

She looked up, surprised. “How’d we shift to that topic?”

Max didn’t know how to answer. All she knew was that her friend needed something. What that was, she had no idea. “I was just thinking it would be good for you, you know, to maybe reconnect with…I don’t know.
You
, I guess.” She was starting to feel like she was in over her head. There was something going on with Jo, something growing inside her, and she couldn’t reach it. She had wondered–more than once in recent weeks–if she was standing there powerless, watching her slip away.

“If I go back, I’ll time it so you can be there, too. Promise.”

“Good.”

Jo smiled at her then, and Max was aware of her own need, an almost desperate one, for her friend to smile like that–like she used to, years ago when they first met. Perhaps, Max thought, Jo still had hope then. “We should go next summer.”

“Mmm. We’ll see.” She was staring at her bowl. “We blew it.”

“Blew what?”