Wings of Glass (13 page)

ISOLATION
is an abuser’s best weapon. If a woman has no friends or family around, then who can tell her that what she’s putting up with at home isn’t normal? Where will she go if she decides she’s finally had enough? Who will build her up so she starts believing in herself enough to say no to what she knows, in her heart of hearts, isn’t right? The abuser tells her that he should be enough for her, but one person can never be all things to someone else.

Most women have sisters, friends, or mothers in their lives to teach them about their bodies. I’d been a teenager when I met your father, and completely isolated until getting the cleaning job. I knew nothing about what was or wasn’t normal for pregnancy.

When I finally spoke to my mother about you, she recommended I pick up some books from the library, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I so wished Trent would go out somewhere and leave me alone in the house so I could call her again. There were so many things I wanted to ask her.

One morning at work, Fatimah and I were just getting started on cleaning our first house when I discovered I was bleeding a little bit. I didn’t know enough to be worried.

Fatimah wore her face mask as she mixed up a new batch of bleach water in the kitchen sink. The smell burned my nostrils as I approached her.

“Where is your mask?” she asked.

I backed up a few steps. “Is it a problem if I’m bleeding?”

She screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle and set it on the tiled floor. “You are bleeding?”

I fidgeted. “It’s just a few spots.”

“You should not have blood.” She set the bottle on the counter beside the toaster and turned around. The look in her eyes worried me. “Have you tell it to your doctor?”

“It’s just a few drops,” I repeated.

“I call Callie Mae.” She used the house phone to relay what was going on. When she hung up, she said to me, “She will meet us at the clinic.”

As we gathered our supplies, the frantic pace at which Fatimah worked troubled me. Here was a woman who delivered babies. She knew a lot better than me what was and wasn’t of concern.

At the clinic, we were led to a small room that smelled of rubbing alcohol and lotion. Several chairs faced a wall of thick procedural manuals and one rough-looking
Woman’s Day
sitting atop a rolling chair. After what seemed like forever, a redhead dressed in scrubs walked in, holding a clipboard. She picked up the magazine to free the chair, and sat down across from us. “How far along are you? When did the bleeding start? Do you feel cramping?” and the questions continued until her form had been filled out to her satisfaction.

After she finished gathering information, she led me to a room across from the one I’d gotten my ultrasound in. Fatimah waited outside the door while I replaced the clothes I wore with a thin paper gown. I sat on the examining table listening to overhead music and the sound of wax paper crinkling beneath me as I fidgeted. When I told Fatimah she could come back in, Callie Mae was with her.

She rushed over and gave me a hug, smothering me in her warmth. “Oh, sweetie. It’s going to be okay.”

I was already so in love with you, Manny. Losing you after everything else I’d lost in my life would kill me. “It’s not me I’m worried about,” I said.

“Your baby’s going to be just fine.” Callie Mae guided my head to her shoulder and stroked my hair like my mother used to do.

“What if she’s not?” I dared to ask.

Fatimah took my hand and held it. Hers was so cold. “I see many women bleed in my country. Having blood sometimes is a very bad situation, but sometimes is nothing.”

Very bad.
Those words hung in the air like a guillotine ready to crash down on me.

Callie Mae frowned at her. “That’s not helpful.”

Fatimah gave her a perturbed look. “I said sometimes is nothing.”

Instinctively, I held a hand over my belly as if that could protect you somehow. Callie Mae laid her hands over mine. Fatimah added hers to the pile, and the three of us took turns praying you would be okay.

After a while, the nurse returned, along with an Asian man in a white lab coat who looked too young to be a doctor. He put his hand out for me to shake. “Good morning. I’m Doctor Lee.”

His hand felt softer and smaller than any man’s should. I repeated to him the same things I told the nurse.

“I need to have a look.” He turned to Callie Mae and Fatimah. “Would you two please have a seat in the waiting room? I’ll call you when we’re finished.”

Callie Mae must have sensed I didn’t want to be alone because she said, “Can I stay with her?”

He looked to the nurse, who nodded, then to me. “Is it okay with you, Mrs. Taylor?”

“Please,” I said.

Callie Mae stood at the head of the exam table beside me, holding my hand and looking only at my face. The doctor placed my feet in cold, metal stirrups and asked me to relax my knees. I wondered how relaxed he would be if he’d been the one lying there.

He pulled a vinyl curtain, hiding us from the shut door. Trying to ignore the weird foreignness of what the doctor was doing, I concentrated on Callie Mae’s smile. Her thin lips were
outlined in peach and filled in with a lighter shade of the same color. Her teeth were small and slightly yellowed. I wondered if they would get whiter if she were to give up the cigarettes.

She made small talk about the weather as the doctor probed around looking for whatever it was he was looking for. He said nothing to give me an indication of what he was or wasn’t finding.

“I called Trent,” Callie Mae said.

“What did he say?” I asked, wondering if he was sober when she reached him. I figured he probably was, since he only rarely started bingeing before noon.

The doctor pulled out the metal speculum from me and, with a clang, set it in the bowl the nurse held out to him.

The noise made Callie Mae turn her head. “He was worried about you and the baby.”

“What did he say?” I repeated.

She fixed her attention back on me. “He’s on his way over here. I offered to pick him up, but he said he’d call a cab.”

I worried about him trying to navigate his way outside, and if he’d be taken advantage of when it came time to pay. The fact he cared enough to do that for me meant everything.

The doctor told me I could slide my bottom up as he helped my feet out of the stirrups. He threw out his gloves, washed his hands, and asked me to pull up my gown so he could get to my stomach. When I did, he squirted cold goo on my belly button, then pushed around a small Doppler over my stomach until the
whoosh-whoosh
sound of the baby’s heartbeat filled the room. When it did, I smiled.

“That’s too slow,” he said, as if he could read my mind.

He moved the Doppler lower. “That was
your
heartb—” Before he could even finish, he picked up another beat, this one much faster. He looked at me. “This is your baby’s. It’s strong and steady. That’s what I wanted to hear.”

A huge weight fell off my shoulders when I heard your little heartbeat, Manny. I could have listened to it all day, but Doctor Lee turned the Doppler off and used a small hand towel to wipe the gel off my skin.

He tossed the dirty towel into a hamper, washed his hands again, and then he and Callie Mae stepped out of the room so I could get dressed. He said he would be back to talk to me in a few minutes.

After I was dressed, I walked to the door, intending to let someone know I was ready. As I started to open it, I could hear your father’s voice. He was breathless, asking Callie Mae about me.

When I opened the door, Callie Mae led him to me.

“Trent,” I said. “Thank you for coming.”

He looked a mess with his wrinkled shirt and scruffy face, but even so, he was a sight for sore eyes. “Why are you thanking me for coming?” he asked. “That’s my baby in there. Why wouldn’t I?”

Maybe I was being too sensitive, but his omission of me in that statement of concern made my heart hurt.

I hugged him as Callie Mae excused herself to join Fatimah in the waiting room. I pulled up the chair next to the exam table and sat him down.

“We heard the baby’s heartbeat,” I said. “So she must be okay.”

“Why do you keep calling him a she?” he asked.

“Why do you keep calling her a he?”

His brief smile faded. “I was so scared, Penny. If anything happened to you . . .” his words trailed off as he choked up.

Someone knocked twice on the door and it opened. Doctor Lee stepped in, without the nurse this time. He introduced himself to your father and pulled up a rolling stool to sit on. “I think your bleeding is nothing to be concerned about, but until I get you in for another ultrasound, I want to play it safe. Until we tell you otherwise, I want you to refrain from sex, tub baths, and anything strenuous. Light bleeding is fairly common, but the main worry is you might have something called placenta previa.”

Trent opened his mouth, I’m sure to ask what that was, but the doctor continued. “That’s a condition when the placenta grows in the lowest part of the womb, covering all or part of the cervix.”

I felt like such an idiot. I didn’t even know what a cervix is and was too embarrassed to ask.

“What if she has that?” Trent asked, leaning forward.

Doctor Lee looked down at the beeper hanging on his jacket pocket, then back up at us. “We’ll know for sure when we do the ultrasound. If she does have it, we’ll have to take special precautions. I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily, so let’s try not to go there unless we need to.”

“Do you look as young as you sound?” Trent asked.

The doctor grimaced as if he were sick of the question. “I’m twenty-seven, and yes, to answer your question, I look young.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said, trying to get him out of the room before Trent could say something more to embarrass me. “When do you want me back?”

Doctor Lee stood and rolled the stool back over to the side of the cabinet where he’d gotten it. “Tell the front desk I want them to work you in by the end of this week.”

THE FIVE DAYS
between my doctor visit and the ultrasound appointment were bittersweet. Callie Mae wouldn’t let me work again until my follow-up appointment, so I had to endure nearly a week of being home with Trent. He tried his best not to let me lift a finger, but ended up making more work than if he’d just left me alone.

When he tried to cook spaghetti for dinner, the pot ran over and smoked up the kitchen. When he washed the dishes, he broke a glass and couldn’t see well enough to make sure he got all the shards off the floor. And when the phone rang, he tripped more than once trying to get to it in time. I ended up nursing him more than the other way around. He was trying, though, bless his heart, and I was proud of him for that.

After my return visit to the doctor, I relayed to Callie Mae I didn’t have placenta previa like we feared, but she made me bring her a note that spelled out my limitations just the same. I felt like a child trying to get out of gym class, or rather into
it, but knowing concern was her motivation made up for the aggravation.

It was so nice to be cared about. I hadn’t had that kind of love and attention surrounding me since I was a child. I did everything in my power to keep it that way too—ignoring your father’s daily drunkenness and the different turns his abuse took. He no longer hit me, but he found plenty of other ways to torment me. I did whatever he wanted, even through tears sometimes, to keep my job, to keep you safe, and if I’m being honest, to hold on to the illusion that he loved me.

In the months that followed, I received the happy news, via ultrasound, that you were a boy. It took a little while to adjust to, since I’d been so sure you were a girl. But I warmed up to the idea quickly when I saw the tiny bow ties and suspenders in the department store. Your father, of course, had known all along you were a boy. But then, in his mind, what didn’t he know?

His vision returned so gradually we hardly noticed the difference until the day his doctor okayed him to return to work. That’s when the real trouble began.

It was Monday morning, and I was up fixing his breakfast. He strolled into the kitchen in his uniform. “Let me guess, eggs again?”

Now that he could see me, I couldn’t just roll my eyes at him as I’d done before. With my back to him, I stirred the
eggs in the pan. “We have a little sausage left. I could mix it in and add some cheese.”

He huffed. “No matter what you do to them, they’re still eggs.”

I closed my eyes and begged God to help me hold my tongue. My hormones were raging and my stomach was cramping. “I didn’t realize you were sick of them.”
How would I realize it?
I wanted to say.
You were the one cooking your own breakfast all weekend.
But as usual, I said nothing.

He yanked the coffeepot off the burner and poured himself a cup. “It’s my first day back to work. What does it matter if I go in hungry?”

Turning the stove off, I set the spatula on the counter beside my cup of tea and turned around. “What would you like?”

“What I’d like is a woman who knows what it means to be a wife.”

Before I could stop myself, I said, “Like Norma?”

His face tightened into an angry ball. “So help me, if you start accusing me of that again—”

A car horn sounded from the driveway, telling me Fatimah was there to pick me up. Trent stomped to the living room window and yanked back the curtain. “What’s loudmouth doing here?”

I slipped my coat on and grabbed my purse off the counter. “I figured you’d be taking the car, so she’s going to start driving me.” It was only one more week till Fatimah’s baby was due, but at least for this week, I was looking forward to not being dependent on Trent for getting to work.

“Tell your little friend I’ll take you to work.”

“You can’t,” I said. “That would make you late.”

He let go of the curtain and turned around. “You think you’re something special, prancing around in those houses all day, don’t you?”

Yes, Manny, that’s exactly what I thought—fancy me with my fancy sponge scrubbing fancy toilets. Fatimah honked again. I glanced out the window at her. The exhaust from her tailpipe turned to crystals in the winter air. Through the windshield, she stared at the front door, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel.

I walked back to the kitchen and pulled my bagged lunch from the fridge. “I told you I’d quit when the baby comes. It’s only for one more month.”

He grabbed his mug off the counter and gulped. “I said I’ll drive you.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but before I could get the first word out, he slapped it right off my lips. The sting of his hand against my cheek brought tears to my eyes. It was the first time he’d hit me since I became pregnant. The fact that it was also his first day back to work didn’t escape me.

I set my purse on the counter and gave him a hurt look.

He swiped spilled coffee from his hand. “Go waddle your fat self out there and tell her your husband will drive you.”

Fatimah sat in her car with the window down, listening to some talk show. When she saw me, she grinned. “Hurry. I want to finish early today. Edgard has present for the baby.”

When I walked over to the driver’s side window instead of
the passenger side, her smile faded. “What is wrong, Peeny? Why do you not get in?” She looked at my empty hands. “Where is your bag?”

I pulled my coat closed against the cold. “Trent wants to drive me to work today.”

Under a furrowed brow, she eyed my cheek. “What is that?”

I touched my face and flinched from the pain. If I’d realized he’d left a mark, I would have had an excuse ready. As it was, all that would roll off my tongue was the biggest cliché in the book. “I fell.”

She white-knuckled the steering wheel. “That filthy—”

“Stop,” I said. “There you go jumping to conclusions again.”

Fire burned in her eyes. “You have a baby—his baby—in your womb, and he hits you? You make call to the police.”

I put my finger over my lips so she would lower her voice. “He’s just stressed out. It’s his first day back to work. That’s all.”

When she started to open the car door, I panicked. Between the murderous look on her face and Trent’s mood, I knew a confrontation between them would end with someone—most likely Fatimah or her baby—getting hurt. “What are you doing?” I shut the door before she could get out.

She pointed at me through the open window. “No one is going to hurt my friend. I will tell him he is no man.”

I turned back to see Trent standing in the window, holding back the curtain.

I lowered my voice. “It’s not going to change anything.”

She leaned toward the passenger door and unlocked it. “Get in. You stay with me and Edgard.”

“Stop, Fatimah. I’m not leaving my husband.”

Sunlight streamed in through the windshield and across her face. She was perspiring despite the weather. “You tell me why not?”

“Because I made a covenant before God until death do us part.”

She clicked her tongue. “And what of his treatment of you? Is he not required by God to take care of you? To love you as Christ loves the church. This is not love!”

I glanced nervously back at the window, but Trent was gone. “You don’t know everything.”

“I know he will kill you.” She chewed her top lip, looking at the house as if considering her options. Finally she said, “He hurts you because you permit him.”

I frowned at her. “I don’t let him. He just does.”

“When he hurts you, you do not leave. You do not call police. Why should he not hit you? You still cook him dinner and lie in his bed. This is permission.” She looked at me for the longest time. “Do you want change, Peeny?”

“What kind of question is that? You know I do.”

She nodded as if she knew as much. “Very good. Then change.”

Her words made no sense to me then, Manny, but I realize now they were the key that could unlock everything. “Just go,” I said.

With lips pressed tight, she rolled up her window. As her car tore out of the driveway and disappeared down the road, it felt like I was watching hope itself drive away.

My head began to throb from confusion. I knew the world would tell me I should leave Trent, but a good Christian woman like Fatimah?

Slowly, I walked up the stairs, ready to face your father again. He was now sitting at the table. The eggs were no longer in the pan, but there wasn’t a dirty dish in front of him, or anywhere else, which told me he’d probably thrown them away.

He rattled the change in his pocket. “What was she hollering about out there?”

“She was mad because I asked her to pick me up, then changed my mind.”

“Too bad. So sad,” was his charming reply. He took a gulp of coffee from his mug. “You better get on those pancakes, or we’re both going to be late.”