Swallow the Ocean (17 page)

Chapter Eighteen

THE COURT FINALLY HEARD my father’s appeal to the custody suit on September 13, 1977—Amy’s eighth birthday. I had just started sixth grade. My father was unequivocal about the out-come: he would win. This time he had all the forces mustered: lawyers, psychiatrists, child welfare workers. I believed him because at this point anything else was unthinkable. I had no backup plan, no scheme to run away from my mother if the courts ruled against us again. I was wholly fixed on the decision. It seemed to me I would either go live with my father, or I would perish.

My father was less certain how the day itself would unfold. The judge might want to talk with us before ruling. We had a new judge and this one was kind, he said, and if we had to talk with him it would be in his chambers, not in the courtroom. That did not reassure me. A judge in his chambers—black robes, in rooms hard with wood and sternness—conjured no images of sympathy in my mind. And anyway, I didn’t believe I’d get off so easily. I was sure I would have to testify in open court—raise my hand in the air, swear on the Bible, spill our secrets, tell everyone publicly how crazy my mother was. And she’d be there, her eyes boring into me from the other side of the room. She’d find out finally that I was not on her side.

This scene went no further in my mind. It was like a dream, where you come close to the point of death, but you never actually die. What might happen after I crossed that line, I could not imagine.

The principal came to call me out of my classroom around eleven. I felt ill but not surprised. My father had said he might come get me out of school to go see the judge. I followed the principal into the hallway and saw my mother waiting for me in her beige trench coat, hands thrust into the pockets. My stomach dropped. She’d come to steal me away before the judge could rule. Why else would she be here?

I walked numbly towards her. The principal left us standing face-to-face in the long quiet of the hallway. The light was dim, the walls a pale institutional green. Doors to classrooms ran the length of the hall on either side of us. They were all closed. Each had a small window at adult eye level. Behind those windows I could hear the murmur of teachers’ voices, students reciting answers in unison.

My mother had written a letter to the judge, she told me. She started to cry. This confused me. Then I was crying too, though I could not understand what she was telling me. She wrapped her arms around me, pulled me to her. “You’re going to have to live with your father,” she whispered into my shoulder. I sobbed louder. “Just for a little while,” she said, stroking my hair. I clung to her and in the same moment willed her to go. Just go away. The more I willed her to go, the harder I cried.

“We’ll be together again, soon,” she said, “very soon.” We stood there for several minutes until she began to pull away, still crying. She patted me on the shoulder. I couldn’t bear to see her cry.

“Go back to class now,” she said.

“OK,” I whispered, hoarse with tears.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.”

She turned to go. I watched her move heavily down the hall. Her coat billowed behind her. Then she turned into the stairwell and was gone.

I walked down the long hallway, past my classroom, past the sound of Mrs. Raymond’s voice, and the clack and scrape of chalk on the blackboard. I went into the girls’ room. In the stall I fumbled at the metal latch until it fell into place. I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, pulled my legs up, rocked myself, and cried.

A very long time passed. When I stopped crying, when I could see again, I read all the graffiti on the walls of the stall.
Deanna + Marky 4 ever, Rachelle fucked Danny W
. We were in sixth grade; it was turning nasty.

In front of the mirror, I stared at my eyes. Puffy. Red. Impossibly bloated. When I walked back into my classroom, everyone would turn to look, follow me with their eyes until I reached my desk. I wondered how long it would take until I looked normal. Like I hadn’t been crying. I pulled brown paper towels from the dispenser over the sink, ran them under warm water, and pressed them to my eyes. The warmth took away the sting, but the paper was coarse against my skin.

My father was waiting for me in the schoolyard at the end of the day. Somber in his suit, fresh from court, he put an arm around my shoulder. We walked slowly across the yard together. He explained that my mother had not shown up in court. She’d sent a handwritten note to the judge saying that she was no longer contesting the custody suit.

“I guess she knew she couldn’t win,” he said, shaking his head, his voice strained. He seemed sad, but not surprised.

I was stunned. I’d never considered the possibility that she would stop fighting. If there was one thing I thought I could count on, it was her will to hold us to her. All these months I’d been bracing myself against her. Her will, her anger, her ferocity. Now she’d given way. I tumbled headlong into unfamiliar territory—territory I would inhabit for the rest of my life—where my pity for her was rapidly outpacing my fear.

“Of course you can still visit her whenever you want,” my father said. I looked up at him sharply. Blinking back tears, I looked down at the ground. We stood inside the grid of a foursquare court, near the front gate of the schoolyard. I tried to imagine a time when I would want to see my mother.

“Listen, it’s still your sister’s birthday. Your mother wants you and Amy to spend the night with her.”

She’d made a cake, bought presents and ice cream. My father said we could stay with her overnight, get our things together, and he’d come for us in the morning before school.

I rubbed my shoe along the outside line of the four-square court.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“She’ll be mad.”

“I’ll tell her I won’t let you go. You don’t have to say anything.”

I nodded up at him, flooded with relief that he was going to take the hit for me.

My mother’s two brothers had flown out from Denver that afternoon. My father had asked them to come. He didn’t know how my mother would react to losing custody of us and didn’t think she should be alone. He’d just come from picking them up at the airport, then rushed to talk to me before my mother came to get me from school. He hadn’t had time to drop my uncles at their hotel, so they were waiting in his car.

As we came out of the schoolyard, I saw the brown station wagon parked at the curb. Amy looked at me from the backseat—already her face had that frozen look she got whenever Mom was mad. My mother came out of the driver’s seat fast, furious that my father had gotten there before her, anger hardening around her mouth at the sight of him.

I don’t remember what they said to each other. Her anger. His firmness. Me staring down at the speckled gray and white sidewalk, trying to look like a hostage. Eventually, she got back in her car, convinced he was not going to relent.

“Wait for her to leave,” my father said. “I don’t want her to see Tom and Peter with me.” He shook his head. “She’ll go nuts.”

We stood on the curb, but my mother did not pull away. She sat in the driver’s seat watching us. Our mistake was imagining we could put one over on a person whose suspicions were perpetually aroused.

My father let out a train of air. “Let’s walk. See if we can lose her.”

We walked in the opposite direction from where he’d left his car. She followed, the brown station wagon creeping alongside us as we walked. My father glanced back over his shoulder. He had a plan. “This is a one-way street. We’ll take her down this way, then double back.” He winked at me. Strategy, cunning, these were his strong suits. I felt better. We were both walking as fast as we could. Then we were laughing. I felt sick to my stomach. And giddy. It was so ridiculous, her trailing us, us trying to get away. Anyway, I was safe as long as my father was there.

At the corner we turned, doubled back, and then raced around another corner to where he’d left his Mercedes.

As we got to the car, the station wagon came around the corner from the opposite direction. My mother stopped the car in the middle of the street, head-to-head with the Mercedes. She came out screaming, calling out her brothers’ names. “Thomas,” she wailed, “Peter,” she screamed as they piled out of the car.

I stood on the sidewalk looking from my father to my uncles to my mother. I watched my father raise his hands as if to calm the air under his palms. “Take it easy, Sally,” he was saying, “calm down.” But she had blown; his words were gas on fire. Her anger flared and rose, flickering back and forth between my father and my uncles. Their presence here confirmed for her that they were all in contact, were in fact conspiring against her, that her brothers had perhaps played a part in this plot to take us away from her, perhaps were even planning something worse: to put her away.

Tom placed a hand on her shoulder. She rolled away in fury, and turned her eyes on him. All three men were over six feet tall. At five foot seven, there was no way she could have loomed over them. Still they cowered. She lunged. They dodged.

“Sally, Sally,” my father repeated as if it were a plea, a complaint. Then very quickly he turned away from her towards the station wagon, whose driver’s door was wide open to the street. He opened the back door. “C’mon, Ame,” he said, and pulled her out by the arm in a way that made me worry it would come out of joint. My father hustled her over to the Mercedes, calling to me as he moved, “Laura, get in the car.”

I pulled my door closed; it slammed with the heavy Mercedes thud. Amy turned saucer eyes up at me.

“Tom, Peter, let’s go. Sally—enough, you’ll see the girls another night,” my father said as he slammed his own door shut.

Tom and Peter were still on the sidewalk, trying to talk my mother down. My father started the engine. He leaned across the passenger seat, rolled down the window. “Tom, Peter, let’s just go,” he yelled again. Finally they obeyed. Peter got in front, and Tom in back with Amy and me. My mother hovered at the window on the passenger side, her face a mask of rage, the lines in her forehead carved; furrowed channels ran down either side of her nose. Her eyes were wild behind her thick glasses. She pounded a fist on the side of the car as we pulled away from the curb.

Amy pressed in against me in the back seat. My uncles were shocked, embarrassed, and frightened. They’d never seen my mother this way. Her family, living at a safe distance in Colorado, had tended to downplay her illness. I don’t know if they’d ever trusted my father’s version of events up until then. Some part of my mind, the part not frozen with fear, was saying a silent
you see
to them.

“We should never have let her see us with you,” Tom was saying.

My father didn’t answer.

“She’s following us,” said Peter.

I turned in my seat, and looked back through the black defrost lines of the rear window. My mother maneuvered a ragged three-point turn in the narrow street, then she pulled out behind us.

What happened next I have logged in my memory as “the accident,” but of course it was exactly the opposite of an accident.

Our car slammed forward. My body crashed into the driver’s seat, my neck whiplashed forward. Amy fell into the space between the front seats. My father’s arm came out to stop her.

“Oh, my god,” said Tom.

“Holy Christ,” my father said, looking into the rearview mirror. “Hold on.”

Our car bucked forward again. The second time my mother rammed her car into ours was not as violent; she was already hard on our bumper. Amy hung onto me so we went as one into the back of the driver’s seat. We put out our arms against the seat back, bracing ourselves for another blow.

My father made a fast right turn onto Geary Boulevard, into flowing traffic to try to get away from her. She came right after him, careening into us from the side as we made the turn. Amy and I were thrown over against the door, then over onto my uncle as we lurched back. We scrambled to right ourselves as my father stopped abruptly at the corner.

We were at a full stop when my mother slammed into us. Then she put the station wagon into reverse, backed up, and slammed into our car again.

People on the corner, waiting for the bus, put their arms in the air, raised hands to their mouths. I could hear their reactions, muffled through the window, first shock, then shifting to the higher pitch of horror as they realized what they were witnessing was not an accident.

Two more times my mother put the car into reverse and slammed into the Mercedes. Each impact sent a wild spike of adrenaline up through my stomach to my heart.

My father got out of the car, and for one sickening moment, he was in her path. She jerked forward, pulling around our car. He jumped onto the median in the middle of the street. She kept coming, after him, away from us, running the car, squealing, up onto the median. The front tires of the Oldsmobile lumbered up over the curb. My father dodged back, off the median, into the lane of oncoming traffic, slapping a hand on the window of her car to push away. The station wagon came back down off the curb onto our side of the street. She screeched past us, and I watched the station wagon shimmy away down the hill.

Inside our car was very quiet. Outside people were yammering and pointing. Outraged. Shocked. Telling each other what they had just seen.

My father came to the passenger door, which my uncle opened. “Is everybody all right?” he asked.

I looked down at my body. My knees hurt, and my wrists were jammed. Nothing broken, nothing bleeding.

“We’re OK,” I said for Amy and myself.

We followed my Uncle Tom out of the car, Amy first, then me, feet sliding across the seat. We were stopped outside the Sears and Roebuck department store. I glanced just once at the mangled rear of the Mercedes; the bumper hung loosely on the ground. We were blocking a lane of traffic on a busy street—cars were backing up behind us. The drivers would take a long look at us, then fight their way out into the second lane.

People on the street offered themselves up to my father as witnesses. “I saw the whole thing,” one man said. Another proffered a slip of paper on which he’d written my mother’s license plate number. My father took the paper. Vaguely, I hoped he would not tell anyone that we knew that number by heart. I was keeping a good distance from all this. The roaring in my ears, the pressure in my veins, the pain in my wrists provided a barrier between these people and me.