Tuesday Night Miracles (11 page)

“Excuse me?” Kit says.

“Do you have a question, Kit?”

“Yes. Did you say we’re painting birdhouses?”

Leah starts to giggle before Dr. Bayer can respond. She quickly looks around, sees everyone staring at her, and clamps her hand over her mouth.

“Leah, laughing is okay in here. No shouting, but laughing. And yes, Kit. Birdhouses. We’ll be talking while we paint.”

The women still look a bit dazed. But Grace gets up and walks over to Dr. Bayer while she’s taking small jars of paint and adorable little wooden birdhouses out of a paper bag. “Let me help,” she offers. Soon there is a birdhouse in front of each of them, paintbrushes, and jars of paint.

Jane looks totally baffled. “I get it,” she finally says, before Olivia can give them any instructions. “You want to see if we paint our house with dark, nasty colors.”

“No, Jane. Look at the paints. There’s not a black or a brown in there.”

Jane looks. There’s a rainbow of bright, vibrant colors. “Oh.”

“We’re just painting birdhouses and also talking for a bit,” Dr. Bayer says. “So get to it. I suggest that you take a moment to look at the house and then plunge in.”

Grace and Kit are still staring at Dr. Bayer as if she’s lost her mind. They keep turning the houses over and over in their hands. Leah is smelling the wood, and Jane can’t remember ever painting anything in her entire life.

“The wood—it’s pine,” Leah says softly. “It smells like a forest. It’s lovely.”

Everyone but Jane smells her birdhouse. Jane is imagining what she would tell someone, if there were someone to tell, who might ask her what she did in class tonight. “Oh, we smelled birdhouses and then we painted them.”

She starts to laugh and she can’t help herself. She laughs out loud and then decides to tell everyone what she’s laughing about. The moment she says it, they all start laughing.

Jane, unwittingly, has helped push everyone forward a tiny bit and all four of them start to examine the paints, twirl the birdhouses so they can look at each side, and start their projects. Dr. Bayer gives them a moment to get going and explains that she wants them to keep working but they also need to talk.

There are some things that need to be shared, need to be said, need to be understood before any of them can turn the very large corner that lies ahead of each one of them. Maybe they will get lost while they’re creating something and return to a place of loveliness. Dr. Bayer has banked her life on maybes.

“Leah,” Dr. Bayer says, turning to face the newest member of this special class. “Can you please share with us why you have been ordered to attend this class?”

All eyes turn in Leah’s direction.

Leah looks so fragile, so used up, so exhausted that it’s all Dr. Bayer can do to keep from putting out her hand to help Leah raise her head. When Leah looks up, she focuses on something behind Dr. Bayer. Her paintbrush stops moving, and she tells her story.

“I’m sure you can tell that I’ve been beaten,” she begins slowly. “I was in the hospital for three days before they moved me into a women’s shelter, where they had already taken my children. That is where I live now. I’ve lived with domestic violence and abuse for a very long time. Please don’t make me go into too much of that now.”

There is a long pause, and all the other women, except Dr. Bayer, stare at Leah wide-eyed. The paintbrushes are still.

“What happened?” Dr. Bayer asks gently.

“I made a terrible mistake,” Leah barely whispers, her voice trembling. “I hit my children. I was angry. I did what he did. I’m no better than he is now. And I’m so ashamed.”

There is a pain that comes from Leah’s story that shoots itself up from a deep and very dark spot under Dr. Bayer’s breastbone. It is such a clear, physical ache that she has to force herself not to bend over to try and still it, to keep it back where she put it so long ago, to make certain that she controls when and where it rises.

She would love to graduate this sad, battered woman right now. She’s almost certain, from knowing her story, that the abuse charges were a onetime mistake, but she can’t be one hundred percent positive. Not positive in the way that she needs to be positive in order to sign the piece of paper freeing Leah Hetzer from one of the many burdens that she is carrying. Not positive that Leah is strong enough to stand upright for more than two hours. Not positive that there are not still lessons to be learned, hearts to examine, wounds that need the gentle touch of not simply her fingers but also the fingers of all the women in this room.

“Thank you, Leah,” Dr. Bayer says in a strong, professional voice. “I’m certain the other women appreciate your openness. It’s not always easy to see or express the truth.”

“No kidding,” Kit blurts out.

“Speaking of truth,” Dr. Bayer adds, “maybe you could all tell Leah why you’re here, so she doesn’t feel like an intruder.”

Grace looks up and her paintbrush, loaded with red paint, slips and she is suddenly drawing on her arm. “Damn it!”

No one says a word. Dr. Bayer waits, and it’s Leah who says something while everyone focuses on the next brushstroke.

“I can’t even look at myself in the mirror because of what I’ve done,” she begins, never raising her voice much beyond a whisper. “You shouldn’t be afraid to say it out loud, to admit that something horrible happened to you or because of you. I keep thinking there must be some magic line inside all of us and if we slip, fall, or are pushed over that line, or maybe even go there on purpose, we do things we might otherwise never have done in a million years.”

Dr. Bayer is watching the other three women. They are watching Leah—brushes not moving—who keeps her head down as she speaks. It’s as if she is afraid to look into anyone’s eyes or have anyone look into hers. Grace is biting her bottom lip so hard that she tastes blood. She wants to say something, but she doesn’t know where to begin. She wishes it were time to leave, but she’s also having fun painting. Is this a bad thing? Jane keeps painting. She does not want to talk about what brought her to this building, where she is painting and smelling a silly birdhouse. She can’t believe she’s making a waterfall on the back of it, in the middle of anger-management class. Is any of this even real? Kit moves her boots back and forth in front of her as if she were ice-skating under the table, and is the first one bold enough to say something.

“Are the kids okay?”

Leah lifts her eyes and looks directly at Kit. There is a river of sorrow there, rushing back and forth, that Leah blinks away so that no tears can fall.

“Yes,” Leah says, and then quickly asks, “Do you have children?”

At that moment, Kit so wants to leave. She wants to turn without looking at any of these women, run to her car, and drive until she runs out of gas. Her only child rarely calls or comes home. Kit never beat her—maybe a smack on the rear end now and then, but never anything more. Never something that would send her to anger-management class. Can she even mention Sarah’s name? Can she bring herself to imagine why her daughter stays away from her own mother?

“I have one grown daughter,” she manages to tell Leah, wishing she could crawl right inside the birdhouse.

“Well, then, you know how much pain I must be in, how much I hate myself, how I will do anything to make it up to them.”

Dr. Bayer waits out the silence. The birdhouses might as well be pinecones, blank canvases, rocks from the beach. She thinks of all the men and women who may have spoken up in past situations like this if they could have held a paintbrush and had been able to lean against a table to settle their quivering hearts.

“Leah deserves to know,” she finally says. “And, just so you all know, after this we will never again mention what brought you here. We will move forward, put this behind us, focus on the horizon. We may even watch birds nesting in these houses you’re painting.”

“Never again” apparently does the trick. The paintbrushes begin to move again, and Grace speaks.

“I have two daughters,” Grace shares, as the ache in her head soars. “One daughter still lives with me. I guess I snapped. I drove my car several times into the back end of her boyfriend’s car. She pushes me and pushes me, but I didn’t even tell her about this class; she’d just have one more thing to hate me for. I’m in the health-care industry. I should know better. I’m embarrassed, too, Leah.”

“Kids can push you right to the wall,” Kit adds, hoping that if she distracts everyone she won’t have to say anything too personal.

“My friends tell me teenagers are the worst, but they all have younger kids,” Jane pipes in. “I don’t know what would be worse—all this baby crap I hear all the time or frightening stories about teenagers running wild.”

“No kids?” Grace asks this, but she’s already certain what the answer will be.

“No,” Jane says quickly, and then looks away. Ouch!

Jane realizes that this is the moment when she’s supposed to say something meaningful about how sorry she is about what happened, but the truth is that she would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Just thinking about it, talking about it, having to be in this room with these losers, makes her want to stand up and scream. A woman who beat the holy hell out of her own children is looking at her as if she has the plague. The woman next to her attacked her own brother with a jagged wine bottle, and Little Miss Sunshine, who obviously has a fetish for polyester, demolished two cars in ten seconds.

Jane turns slowly and gazes at Leah. The last time she saw someone who looked this bad was three years ago, when the Realty Association members volunteered at the soup kitchen during the Christmas holidays. Can’t she go serve soup for a week or something instead of bantering with these women?

Before she says anything stupid, Jane manages to summon an ounce of common sense. She turns to glance at Dr. Bayer, whose eyes are open so wide that it looks as if they may pop out. She quickly decides to behave and tells Leah that she beat a man with her red stiletto heels. But she can’t bring herself to say how sorry she is.

Leah and Kit are painting. Grace is staring at Jane. For some reason, she feels sorry for her.

There is so much not being said that Dr. Bayer has a hard time sitting still. But she can almost hear them thinking, and right at this moment that’s better than nothing. The women are quiet then for almost ten minutes, and how Olivia wishes she could crawl inside each of their minds and look around with a bright flashlight.

She gets up and walks around the table. If she peers over their shoulders, maybe they’ll think she’s an art teacher and not a psychologist. She knows this isn’t easy. A part of her has always wished that she could fly her clients to the exact spot in life where they need to be, press her fingers against their temples so everything she knows can be transmitted into them—so that they can forgive themselves, move on, and be happy.

If only that was how it works.

She shakes her head just as she gets to Jane’s waterfall. The serenity of the image is kind of a shock. She bends down to see that Grace has painted flowers everywhere on her birdhouse and Kit is swirling every color available on hers. Leah is writing something all over hers.

“What are you writing, Leah?” Dr. Bayer asks, bending low and wondering if she doesn’t need new glasses yet again.

“I’m writing the names of my son and daughter and then putting words all over that are important,” Leah explains.

“What are the words?” Kit asks, turning again to gaze at this woman who looks like hell but has
something
—Kit can’t put her finger on it. Something special? Some secret?

“Forgiveness. Honesty. Laughter. True love,” she explains. “You know, things that are supposed to be important in life.”

Dr. Bayer waits a moment. She knows that silence is as much of a gift to her as it is to them during moments like this. These women have been so busy making up excuses for their behavior, or ignoring it, that the reality of who they really are, what drove them to this location, what is really important has gotten lost.

Leah, with the ravaged looks and life, is already so much further along than these women. She may be an emotional wreck and she may have used up her last ounce of courage and strength to walk into the room, but she already understands what price she must now pay. Dr. Bayer is counting on that fact; that is the very reason Leah is now in this group.

Is it wrong to throw her into this wild mix? Should she have moved her into a private session or maybe sent her along to someone else in her office because her life story has opened up a very old wound? But as Olivia watches the women suck in air and rattle around in their chairs she knows, knows with certainty, that if they can stretch, Leah can learn and grow from them as much as they can learn and grow from Leah.

Getting there is not going to be a walk in the park.

This is the moment when Olivia absolutely has to stop doubting herself. Even as she wants to take Leah home and feed her warm soup, make Jane walk out the door barefoot, tell Grace, who should know better, to dig deep, and remind Kit that the journey is often much more important than the destination, she must let them all figure it out by themselves.

“Leah,” she finally says, while the other three keep painting, “how lovely.”

Leah drops her head in embarrassment but then bravely asks, “Do we get to keep the birdhouses?”

“Yes, you can keep the birdhouses. Everything you put on it and into it is yours.”

“How I wish,” she whispered.

And Jane, Kit, and Grace stop in mid-stroke.

There is a long stretch of silence then until Dr. Bayer remembers the brownies and Grace feels oddly embarrassed that she brought a treat to her anger-management class. But everyone eats one.

“People still bake, I guess.” This from Jane, who has trouble with a can opener.

Kit does not want to remember baking as a young girl, and her mother who was kind enough to let her Girl Scout troop learn how to bake brownies in her tidy kitchen. The brownie makes her want to cry, but instead she writes her mother’s name very tiny on the front right side of the birdhouse.

Dr. Bayer is back in her chair, riffling through her notes, when Leah suddenly clears her throat, looks at Dr. Bayer, and points to the door.