My mother couldn’t afford for us to stay in Spain, so we moved back to St. Clairsville, Ohio, near her folks, where we lived in a rented house trailer and Mom worked as a waitress in Wheeling, West Virginia. Dad didn’t stay in touch. It was as if he never existed.
My mom remarried a decent man. He wasn’t an artist or “any other kind of flake” my grandfather liked to say. Rocky was a steel mill worker with a steady income and long hours. We moved into a real house in Bridgeport and he helped pay for my tuition at Ohio State. I never called him Dad, though. Adam did, but to me, Rocky has always been my stepfather.
Almost thirty years after I last saw him, my father showed up at my window in the bank. I didn’t recognize him at first. The lines around his eyes and mouth resembled bad stitches, and his skin was the color of concrete. But the eyes, green as new grass, were like no one else’s. Dad wanted to cash a money order for five hundred dollars. “And I want to make amends,” he said. He told me he’d already seen Adam.
I stared and wondered if he could see my pulse racing. “You just walk in here out of the blue after thirty years and I’m supposed to say, ‘Oh sure, Dad, you’re forgiven.?’” I started counting his cash. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“I didn’t figure this would be easy,” he said.
I looked down and recounted the handful of twenties. “How the hell did you find me?”
“I called your mother.”
I looked at the man standing before me. He was once handsome, with thick, black hair and the whitest teeth. He’d aged badly. He was only sixty-two, but looked eighty, and I was tempted to feel sorry for him. He looked like someone who spent a lot of time in the company of Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. I handed him his cash and coolly told him to have a nice day. My hands were shaking under the counter.
My husband told me my dad stopped by the house about an hour ago. “I asked him over for dinner this weekend.”
“Without telling me?”
“He’s sick, Pam. He’s dying.”
I set my purse on the kitchen table and glared at him. “He told you that and you believed him? Ron, my father is a chronic liar who will do and say anything to get what he wants.”
“He looks pretty bad.”
“He once claimed there were fleas in our beds at a fancy hotel to keep from paying the bill” I shook my head. “He taught Adam and me a routine for getting free meals in restaurants by claiming there was hair in the salad or soup.”
“I still invited him over.”
“Well you can just un-invite him,” I said.
My head felt like it would split wide open. I took two Tylenol with codeine and lay down. I slept and dreamed my father and husband were eating steaks on our patio.
My father called and I agree to meet him for lunch. He ordered a bottle of Chardonnay and we started with small talk about my work.
“I never pictured you’d work in a bank,” he said, as he poured each of us a glass.
“What did you think I’d be doing?” I asked, looking at his ashy skin and wondering how much alcohol he consumed in a day. He polished off a bottle or more of wine each day when I was a kid.
“I remember you used to sing.”
“I was a kid,” I said. “All kids are singers. Besides, I was a terrible singer.” I couldn’t recall the last time I sang.
“Yes, but you enjoyed it so much. I guess I pictured you as an entertainer of some sort. An actor, maybe.” He picked at his salad. In fact, he ate very little.
I bit into a roll. “Ron says you’re dying. If I was dying, I’d skip the salad and eat that whole tray of desserts.”
He laughed and took a bite of bread. “I remember you used to draw and paint. I still have one of your sketches.”
“I haven’t done any artwork in years.” I didn’t tell him my degree is in art. For some reason, I didn’t want him to know. Yet I was curious about which drawing of mine he had. I did hundreds back then. Silly things, animals, still-lifes, bad portraits of the family.
“I guess I take after you in one way,” I said.
“Being artistic?”
“No. Wanting to be around money.”
I saw a touch of color form on his sallow face. “It wasn’t the money that made me fall for Monique,” he said. “She shared my passion.”
“Well, yeah. You left Mom for her.”
“I don’t mean just sexual passion. Monique loved the whole world around her. With Monique, I felt charged-up and alive.” He sipped more wine. “Your mother is a lovely person, but… I don’t how to say this without being cruel. She is somewhat limited intellectually.”
“Granted Mom’s idea of high art is changing the dress on the cement goose in the yard, but is that enough of a reason to walk out on your family?”
“We had nothing to say to one another. We didn’t connect. I needed more.”
I took a few sips of wine before I was able to ask, “Was it worth it?”
He gulped his wine, set down his glass, and shrugged. “Monique went back to her husband after a couple of years.”
“So, you threw everything away for a fling with a woman who was already married?”
“It sounds bad when you put it that way.” He poured himself another glass of Chardonnay. “But I never felt more alive than I did those two years.” He tapped the side of his glass. “Once I got over her leaving me, my life was still transformed.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Sometimes I felt nonexistent around Ron. He was a nice man, a good husband, but I’d never felt transformed by him. Maybe underneath I was just like my father. The difference was I’d stayed with my spouse. Or maybe Dad just had more guts than I did. “But you never called or wrote,” I said. “You just vanished.”
“I thought about you kids every single day.”
Our entrées arrived and I cut into my medium-rare sirloin. “So, are you really dying or is this another ploy to keep from paying for our lunch?”
He grinned, but it was a sad smile, one that contained an awful truth. I laid my fork down and reached for his hand. “How long have you known?”
He squeezed my fingers. “A few months. I was exhausted for a long time and my lady friend finally made me see a doctor.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Pancreatic cancer.”
I’d never heard good news about pancreatic cancer. “How long have you got?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Depends,” he said and left it at that.
I called my boss and told I was sick from lunch, and wouldn’t be back the rest of the day. My father and I sat in the restaurant for four hours. We tried to cram thirty years of our lives into one afternoon. By the time we left, I thought maybe he and I could be friends, and I almost forget he was dying.
Dad agreed to come to dinner on Sunday, and I went home, looking forward to our next meeting.
“You’re gushing,” Ron said as I tossed the salad for Sunday dinner.
I grinned. “I am not.”
He kissed me. “Yes, you are. And it’s nice. I haven’t seen you this excited about anything in a long time.”
I felt lighthearted and cheerful for the first time in years. I even sang in the shower as I got ready.
Dad didn’t show up. At first, I worried he’d gotten lost, but Ron mentioned that he had been to the house before. Maybe he was ill. I didn’t have the name of his hotel and I forgot to get his phone number, so I had no way to contact him.
Then I wondered if he’d pulled another scam on me. Built me up, led me to believe we could start over, but then he got a better offer.
My mother called me at work Tuesday to tell me my father died.
We held a memorial service for him, but I didn’t cry. “It’s okay if you want to grieve,” Ron said. He touched my shoulder.
“I barely knew him,” I said.
After the service, my mother handed me a sealed envelope with my name on it. “He composed notes for you and Adam,” she said, and I wondered just how much conta
ct my parents had over the years, but I didn’t ask because Rocky stood right behind her. I stuffed the letter in my purse and claimed Dad’s ashes.
Later, I opened the envelope and there were no words, only a folded and very dog-eared drawing done by a child—a crayon drawing of my brother with our golden lab. “Petey,” I whispered. I touched my old sketch and felt a stab of grief for the long-gone dog and the child who drew him.
I stashed my father’s ashes in the closet and made no plans as to what to do with them. I didn’t know this man. I had no idea how or where he wanted to be buried.
Life went back to normal, except Ron developed this thing about Dad’s ashes in our bedroom closet.
I lay in bed with one of my headaches when Ron starts bugging me about it again. “Where was he from?” he asked. “Maybe they have a family plot.”
“I don’t know.” I put a pillow over my head and rolled over. “I think they moved all the time,” I mumbled.
“Why don’t you call your mother and ask where she thinks he would want to be buried?”
“The last person I want to involve is my mother.”
Ron made a few more suggestions and I chose to ignore him. Eventually, he went away.
This morning, I put Dad’s ashes in the trunk of my car before I left for work. I still didn’t know what to do with him, but at least he was out of the closet. I pulled into the bank parking lot and popped the trunk to retrieve my purse and lunch. Dad sat there between the spare tire and my daughter’s gym bag. I lifted the plain brown box. A life lived sixty-two years and you end up being two pounds of ashes in an unremarkable plain brown box.
I put everything back in the trunk and drove to Wal-Mart where I bought a starter set of oil paints, a palette knife, some brushes and a canvas. I stashed it all in the trunk and headed north on I-71. At a rest stop, I called in sick.
I wasn’t sure where I was going yet or what I was going to do. Then I recalled Dad liked being near water. I did, too, so I drove three hours north to Lake Erie. It was such a nice day outside I rolled down the windows and cranked the radio up loud, singing along at full volume.
By the time I reached Sandusky, I knew what to do. I parked near the beach and unloaded the trunk. After I kicked off my shoes and sat on the sand, I pulled the acetate off the brand-new canvas. I opened the little tubes of paint and squirted dots of color on the palette that came with the kit and flattened them with the palette knife. Then I opened the box of ashes and scooped out a few grains. I mixed some of Dad’s ashes with Cadmium yellow light to form a subtle grain, and for the first time in years, my father and I painted together.
# # #
Hope After Pain
By Brenda Kennedy
Dedicated to everyone whose life has been shattered by someone they’ve trusted
Chapter One: The Strength to Leave
Leaving at the first sign of a problem would have been ideal. After he hit me, he said he was sorry. He said he would get help, and he said he would never do it again. I believed him. That was my first mistake. My second mistake? I stayed with him.
Liam never got help and he did hit me again. In fact, every time he hit me was worse than the time before. Soon, I was too afraid to leave. He said he would kill me if I ever left him and I believed him.
He didn’t need to be provoked; his rages came out of nowhere.
***
While sitting on the couch, I hold the cold washcloth on my bleeding lip. My nightgown is now stained with blood.
“Ma’am, what time did this happen?” the young male officer asks.
“About 1:00 am.”
“What happened?”
“Liam was out drinking, and when he arrived home, he started hitting me.”
“What did you do?” he asks with his pen and paper in hand.
I snap my head up and ask, “What did I do? What did I do to deserve this or what did I do after he hit me?”
“Calm down, ma’am. I’m just trying to find out what happened.”
I remove the cold cloth from my mouth. “I had dinner made for when he got off work. But when he didn’t show up to eat it, I put the leftover food in the refrigerator, took a shower, and went to bed to read. I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up, he was standing over me, yelling because his food wasn’t on the table.”
“Has he hit you before?”
“Yes.”
Do I tell them he beats me on a regular basis? No, they don’t care about that. They pretend they do, but they don’t, not really.
“Where did he hit you?”
I’m sitting here with bruises on my eye and arms, and my lip is still bleeding. With a quivering voice I tell what has happened to me.
“He pulled me from the bed to the floor by my hair. Then he kicked me until I stood up and that’s when he hit me in the face with his fist.”
I remember cowering beneath him and protecting my face with my arms. The sound of the lamp breaking on the hardwood floors still echoes in my head.
“What was he saying to you while he was doing this?”
“He said, ‘Get up, you lazy bitch. Where’s my dinner? You’re a fat, worthless cunt. You’ll pay for this.’”
With a bloody lip, a swollen black eye, and bruises that cover my arms and neck, I tell my story to the police officer. I didn’t call the police, a neighbor did. I know the police are judging me. They always do. I couldn’t call if I wanted to. Liam’s taken my cellphone, my computer, and he’s disconnected the landline. I have no means to contact anyone for anything. He had slowly, but surely made certain of that.
I have enough evidence on my body that I know they’ll take him to jail, but it’ll be for just a few hours. He’ll be released right after court in the morning. But for right now, it’s enough time for me to pack some things and leave. Before the police take him to jail, they lecture me about staying in an abusive relationship. It sounds like they are reciting it from memory.
It’s easy for others to tell a person what they should and shouldn’t do. But until they live my life, they have no idea what it’s like. “Just leave,” they say. If only it were that easy. A battered person needs a place to go, a way to get there, and money to live on. Family and friends say they want to help, but when you need help, they often shy away from you. They don’t want to get involved. What a battered person needs is a place they’ll feel safe and a place they can heal. The injuries are so much more than physical—they are also psychological.
“We have enough evidence to take him to jail tonight. He’ll be in court in the morning at nine a.m. for his arraignment. You’ll also need to be there to testify against him.”
“Okay, I will,” I assure them as I hold the cold cloth to my swollen eye. I have no intentions of being in court tomorrow, but I can’t tell them that. I plan on being far away from here.
“We’ll call the paramedics to have them look at your injuries.”
“No, that won’t be necessary. I’ll be fine.” I decline medical attention to hurry the process along.
He shrugs his shoulders. “Have it your way.”
I wish police officers had special training in these kinds of situations. Maybe if this happened to their sister, mother, or daughter, they would be more sensitive to the needs of those abused.
Standing in the doorway, I shake with fear as they escort Liam away, handcuffed, in the back of a police cruiser. He mouths to me, “I’m going to kill you.” I know if I’m still here in the morning when he gets out, he could follow through with his promise.
As soon as all of the evidence is collected, photographs are taken, and the last officer leaves, I pack a few personal items and take the little money I’ve managed to hide and walk in the dark to the nearest bus station, leaving everything behind me. Or so I hope.
Once I get to the bus station, I purchase a ticket to the farthest destination I can afford. I know it isn’t far, but maybe it’ll be far enough for me to start over. I sit at the back of the bus away from everyone bec
ause I don’t want to draw attention to myself.
I worked early in our relationship as a computer programmer, but when we moved in together, he insisted I quit my job. Liam worked outside the home and managed all of the money. It took a while for me to get a few hundred dollars together, but I did it. I know it’s a risk to leave with so little money, but what choice do I have?
As time passes, my anxiety rises. Every time the bus stops, I fear and even visualize that Liam will be the next passenger boarding. I busy myself by pretending to be looking for something in my small bag as if that will make me invisible. It doesn’t.
A much older woman sees me and makes her way to the back of the bus, pulling behind her a floral tote with yarn sticking out of its side. I watch as she takes the empty seat right beside me. Although I’m wearing sunglasses, I know she can see my injuries.
“Hi, I’m Grace Williams,” she says politely.
Trying to hide my cut and swollen lip, I reply, “I’m Amber Smith.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
I nod politely. She’s making it impossible for me to be invisible. I don’t want to be noticed. Please go away.
She says, “I’m heading home from visiting my daughter and grandson.”
When I don’t answer, she says, “You probably think I’m too young to have a grandchild.”
I smile at her comment. Her hair is gray, and her hands have age spots on them. It’s obvious she wants someone to talk to. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“I visit with them every chance I get, but it isn’t nearly enough.”
She tells me their names as if I’ll be able to remember. When the bus stops again, fear grips me as more passengers get on. I try to hide my fear, but it’s useless.
“Do you think he’s going to find you?”
I look over at her in confusion. “Who?”
“The man who did that to you.”
Looking her in her eyes, I decide I can’t lie to her. She’s as wise as her years.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“You have to believe that if God brought you to it, He’ll see you through it.”
I’ve heard that saying before, but I never really believed it. “Do you believe that?”
Betrayed: Powerful Stories of Kick-Ass Crime Survivors Page 30