A splotch of red bloomed on Lorraine’s chest and Nessa watched it travel up her neck and into her face. “Do you realize how foolish I feel?” Lorraine said. “Knowing that everybody besides me knew about her? That I was the last one to find out?”
Nessa looked down at her thighs and wondered if it would make things better or worse if she started to cry.
“It didn’t occur to you that maybe you should have told me?”
Nessa squeezed her eyes and tried to conjure tears, but nothing came.
“Look at me.”
She looked. Her mother’s face was hot and it was quivering in strange spots—above her eyebrow, in the cushion of her chin. The thought came to Nessa before she had the chance to will it away: her mother looked ugly.
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
Lorraine’s eyes gave way, like something frozen puddling. She blinked fast. “It’s not your fault,” she said, her voice softer.
Lorraine pulled her chair closer and leaned over the table. “What’s her name?”
“Simone.”
“Do you know how long they’ve been seeing each other?”
Nessa shook her head, relieved not to know the answer.
“Do you know how they met?”
She shook her head again.
“Do you know what she does? Like, what her job is?”
“No.”
“What does she look like?”
Nessa shrugged.
“What color hair does she have?” Lorraine’s eyes were bright with impatience.
“Brown?”
“Curly or straight?”
“Straight,” Nessa said.
“How long?”
Nessa touched her arm to show.
“How old is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you had to guess?”
Nessa turned different numbers over in her head. “Twenty-nine?”
“Jesus,” Lorraine said.
Then her mother’s face broke, and she covered it with both hands.
“I don’t know, though,” Nessa said, hating herself. “I couldn’t tell.”
Lorraine exhaled hard and whispered Jesus Christ into her hands.
“She’s not very pretty, Mom,” Nessa said, and Lorraine looked up. “Tanya says she looks like this.” Nessa did the face—the buckteeth and the cross-eyes and the furrowed brow—and her mother laughed. Nessa did it again, even uglier, and Lorraine started to cry.
“Nessa, sweetheart,” her mother said, wiping her eyes. “I need to tell you something. And you can’t tell Tanya about this, okay? She’s not old enough to understand.”
Nessa nodded. It felt so good to hear her mother call her sweetheart that she thought about reaching out and grabbing her mother’s hand. Instead she leaned over the table and tried to show Lorraine how much she loved her with her eyes.
“Your father was cheating on me. When we were still married. Do you know what that means?”
Nessa nodded. Cheating. It was one of those things she knew about, though she had no memory of ever being told what it was.
“Asshole,” Nessa muttered. It was a word she’d never used before, and she thought her mother might chastise her—or laugh at her—but all Lorraine did was smile sadly and shrug. “I thought you should know,” she said. “I thought you should have the full story.”
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT NESSA thought about Simone in her bathing suit. She pictured the yellow knot at the base of her neck, and she imagined Simone reaching back to pull the string, the bikini top dropping to the floor. She imagined Simone’s breasts, smaller than her mother’s, and just as beautiful; her nipples dark and sharp; the flesh around them cold and goose-bumped. Nessa rewound the picture and this time she imagined it was her father pulling the string at the base of Simone’s neck. She pictured his hands skating down Simone’s sides to the bikini bottoms and sliding them off; Simone stepping out of them. She imagined Simone naked, lying on a bed with her legs open, the dark triangle of hair between her legs similar to the hair Nessa now had—hair that sometimes excited her and sometimes embarrassed her.
As she thought about it, her body began to pulse impatiently. She turned over on her stomach and slid her palm between her legs, and pressed. Slowly, quietly—so that Tanya wouldn’t be able to hear from the bottom bunk—she moved against her palm, meeting each pulse with pressure. She closed her eyes and pretended that her hand belonged to somebody else—not her father or Simone or anyone she knew—but some unnamed, faceless man who she imagined loved her very much.
Nessa breathed hard. The roller-coaster floating feeling spread from between her legs to the rest of her body—her arms and her legs and her fingers and toes—warm and tingling and so perfect she had to stuff her face into her pillow to stop herself from making noise.
When Nessa returns to 12 Winter Street after driving to Dan’s house, Tanya and Lorraine are sitting on the front steps. Lorraine is smoking, lazily holding a cigarette in one hand. They’re both wearing sunglasses and from a distance they look stylish and dreamy, like two teenage girls with all the time in the world to kill.
When Nessa approaches, they look up at her from behind their sunglasses and she gets the uneasy feeling they’ve been talking about her. Lorraine taps her sandaled foot on the step. “Sit,” she says, and Nessa sits, settling on the step below, leaning against her mother’s legs.
Tanya reaches out and pulls a stray hair from Nessa’s shirt. “Where were you?”
“I took a drive.”
“I took a drive,” Tanya mimics, making her voice low and theatrical.
“Jesus. I can’t say anything right with you people.” She pulls Tanya’s big toe and Tanya flinches, yanking her foot away.
“So we’ve decided something,” Tanya says. “Mom’s going to get a restraining order.”
Nessa turns around and looks at Lorraine. It’s impossible to read her mother’s expression from behind her sunglasses.
“Against Jesse?”
“No, against you,” Tanya says. “Of course against Jesse.”
“How do we do that?” Nessa asks.
“We’ll go to the courthouse,” Tanya says. “Fill out the paperwork. We were waiting for you.”
“Okay.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” her mother says then, her voice tense and defensive, as though Nessa has disagreed.
* * *
—
THE COURTHOUSE is a modern-looking building in Medford, right on the Mystic Valley Parkway, between a Gold’s Gym and a Bertucci’s Pizza. They enter through a metal detector and send their purses into X-ray machines. The security guards who usher them through get annoyed when Lorraine forgets to take her iPhone out of her pocket.
“Your phone, Mom,” Tanya says, from the other side of security.
“Shit,” Lorraine says. She rummages in her jeans pocket, looking up at the guards, panicked, and Nessa wishes they could turn around and walk back out the way they came. She has a terrible feeling about this restraining order—how determined Tanya seems on getting it, like it’s a simple solution to a simple problem.
They make it through. Once inside, Tanya leads them to a long counter with a sign above: clerk magistrate.
The woman behind the counter studies them through a pair of green reading glasses propped up on the bump of her nose. “Good morning.” She phrases it warily, as though they’re about to prove her wrong.
“Good morning,” Tanya answers. “My mother would like to apply for an emergency 209A.” She touches Lorraine briefly on her shoulder.
The clerk turns her attention to Lorraine. “I’ll need the names and dates of birth for both you and the defendant.” She puts a piece of paper on the counter and Lorraine steps forward to write, glancing sideways at Tanya.
“What sort of relationship do you have with Mr. Wright, Ms. Bloom?”
“He’s my husband,” Lorraine says.
The woman nods and hands Lorraine a clipboard with some forms. “You’ll fill out these questions here, regarding what sort of protective order you’d like.” She eyes Tanya, waiting for her to interject. “There’s no abuse, vacate premises, stay away, no contact. You can choose any of these—any combination, or all of the above. On the last page is where you’ll write your affidavit explaining to the judge why you’re in fear of imminent serious physical harm. You’ll want to go into detail, and be specific, starting with the most recent incident.” She turns the page over and points. “When you write on this last page here, your affidavit, be sure to flip the page so you’re not writing on the carbon paper. Do you have any questions?”
Lorraine shakes her head.
“Alright. Let me know if you do and once you’re done you can bring this back to me.”
They find a free bench in the hallway, and Nessa and Tanya sit on either side of their mother. Other people are filling out paperwork on benches, while some mill around aimlessly. There are people dressed professionally, like Tanya, and others in jeans and sweatshirts. Nessa watches a mother and her young daughter walk quickly across the open lobby, hand in hand. The woman looks as if she’s about to burst out crying. The child looks catatonic.
Tanya explains each section to Lorraine in a low voice, prompting her what to write and where. It’s the most relaxed Nessa has seen Tanya since they’ve come home and Nessa feels suddenly irritated at her sister—how comfortable she is telling their mother what to do and how to do it. When Lorraine gets to the final lined page, she asks, “So what exactly do I write here?”
“This is where you’ll tell the judge why you’re getting the order. He wants to see that you’re scared of Jesse. You’ll start with the strangulation last night, and that we went to the emergency room.”
Lorraine shakes her head. “I don’t want to include that.”
Tanya raises an incredulous eyebrow. “Why the hell not?”
“Because.” Lorraine looks down at the blank form. “I don’t want to get him in trouble. And I’d rather talk about his yelling and anger anyway. He’s never done anything like that before.”
“You have to include the physical abuse,” Tanya says firmly. “That’s the whole point.”
Lorraine puts a hand through her hair and glances down the hallway.
“Mom,” Tanya says. “Were you frightened last night?”
Lorraine closes her eyes and looks as though she’s counting silently in her head. Then she opens them. “It’s complicated, Tanya. I know you don’t see it that way. But it’s not so black and white.”
“If someone strangles you to the point where you almost black out, that’s pretty black and white.”
“I don’t want him to go to jail.”
“He won’t,” Tanya says, exasperated. “Not if you don’t report it to the police. But you have to include it in your affidavit.”
“Will Jesse read it?”
“If he shows up at the two-party hearing, yes, most likely he will.”
Lorraine’s eyes widen. “What’s a two-party hearing?”
Tanya nods patiently and all at once, Nessa is scared. She hadn’t realized Jesse would have to show up to some sort of hearing.
“So how this works,” Tanya explains, “is that today the judge will decide whether or not to grant you an emergency restraining order. If he does grant the emergency order—which he will, if you write that Jesse strangled you—he’ll set a date for a hearing, sometime in the next ten days. In the meantime, Jesse will be served with the emergency order, and if he chooses to, he can show up at the two-party hearing and say his side of the story. He is not obligated to show up, however. After the two-party hearing, the judge will decide whether he wants to extend the emergency order. Usually it’s for a year, but sometimes he might extend it for a shorter period of time—three or six months.” Tanya’s voice is calm. “Having a restraining order taken out against you is not a crime. It does not go on your permanent record. He’ll only get in trouble if he violates the order. Violating a restraining order is a criminal offense—it’s grounds for arrest—and that’s what makes it effective.” She pauses. “For law-abiding citizens, at least.”
Lorraine’s eyes dart toward the front entrance and Tanya follows her gaze. “Mom, if you’re frightened for him to read it, if you’re scared what he might do in retaliation, that’s all the more reason why you need this order.”
Lorraine nods and then leans over the clipboard and starts to write. Her hair falls around her face like shields, blocking the paper from view.
“What are you writing?” Tanya asks.
Lorraine doesn’t answer.
“Mom?” Tanya says.
When Lorraine doesn’t respond, Tanya exhales emphatically.
Lorraine writes the last sentence and dots it with an ambivalent period. Then she leans back so they can read.
I have been with Jesse Wright for sixteen years. He is a good-hearted person but he comes from a sad family. His parents were abusive. His father hit his mother and as a little boy Jesse would be the one to intervene and stop his father. So sometimes Jesse was hit, too. He carries around a lot of anger. Sometimes he takes it out on me. He calls me names and yells at me and gets in my face. Sometimes it gets so bad that I leave the house. Once I slept in my car. He always apologizes afterward but in the moment, he loses control. One time he was so angry that he ran over a cat with his car. The cat was in the middle of the road and it was hurt so it couldn’t really move. It was bleeding. Jesse ran right over him. I don’t know if he meant to do it, but he also didn’t try to go around it. He was driving really quickly. He didn’t stop at any of the stop signs. I felt extremely scared.
Nessa feels sick—not because of what her mother has written—but because of what she’s left out.
She glances at Tanya. Her sister’s face is stony. “The only relevant thing here is that he murdered a cat,” Tanya says.
“What about the yelling and the anger?”
Tanya shakes her head. “The judge isn’t interested in your psychological evaluation of Jesse. It doesn’t matter if he grew up in a Russian orphanage or was raised by terrorists. It still doesn’t make it okay that he hurt you. Do you understand that you could have died last night? You’re in denial, clearly, but—”
“Tanya,” Nessa says. “Stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop yelling at her.”
Tanya throws up her hands. “I’m not yelling at her. I’m telling her basic facts. Neither one of you seems to realize the extreme lethality of this situation.”
“You’re talking to us like we’re stupid,” Nessa says.
“That’s because you are,” she says. “I’ve seen millions of restraining orders get denied. I know what the judge wants to see.”
“Girls.” Lorraine’s voice cuts through the hallway and a man on another bench glances over curiously. “Stop.”
Tanya looks pointedly in the other direction and Lorraine stands with the clipboard and takes it back to the clerk magistrate. Nessa and Tanya follow. The clerk flips through the pages, surveys the affidavit, her eyes moving quickly, betraying nothing. Then she nods. “You can go to the courtroom now. You’re going to be in courtroom 1.” She points. “Make a left and then straight down that hallway. There’s a sign on the door. Please turn off your cell phones before going inside.”
Court is already in session when they enter courtroom 1—a large room with butter-yellow walls, adorned with paintings: portraits of old white judges in black robes, the knots of their ties peeking through lik
e little fists. Tanya leads them toward the middle of the room.
The benches are scattered with people: some alone, some in twos or threes. The lawyers, seated at large desks in the front, are dressed better than everyone else—their hair, especially, is nicer than everybody else’s. Suddenly, Nessa feels relieved that Tanya is there with them, that her sister blends in with the other attorneys, with their polished looks and their aloofness.
The judge, an older white man with a head full of white hair—his portrait would fit in among those on the wall—is in dialogue with a boy standing in front. “Mr. Mahoney,” the judge is saying in a thick Boston accent, “do you understand the charges against you?”
The boy nods. He is lanky and slouched, his hands deep in his pockets. “Yes, Your Honor.” He has been charged with a DUI. Nessa thinks about Henry then, and what he must have been like in court. She imagines him in a button-up shirt, his hands clasped behind him, nodding deferentially to the judge. For some reason, the thought excites her.
When the judge calls Lorraine’s name, her mother stiffens and turns to Tanya.
“Right up there, Mom,” Tanya says quietly, nodding toward the front of the room. She squeezes Lorraine’s arm. “You’ll be great.” Her sister’s voice is reassuring; it must be the voice she uses with her clients.
Nessa and Tanya watch their mother walk quickly down the carpeted aisle, her fists balled at her sides.
“Hopefully the judge notices the hemorrhaging,” Tanya whispers to Nessa. Lorraine’s hair is down, matted against her head, and the tag of her shirt is peeking out in the back. Nessa moves closer to Tanya and they hold hands. Tanya’s palm is warm and sure against her own.
“Ms. Bloom, raise your right hand.”
Lorraine’s hand goes up.
“Please state your full name for the court.”
“Lorraine Abigail Bloom.”
“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God?”
Something Wild Page 9