by DL Atha
The thick black hair that had at one time fallen down my back in long waves to my waist was gone, replaced by a thin, limp mop of hair cut off at the shoulder. My once rounded curves were too sharp. My face was angular, and my eyes had gone dull with apathy. Chronic fear and anxiety were taking their toll. How embarrassed I was to be that girl who stood alone in the crowd while everyone else was talking on their cell phones or making small talk with the other passengers.
I left the bus stop that day a different person, still abused but no longer ignorant of the truth. My insides were in turmoil; my blood boiled as it traced hot paths down my hands and legs. I hated Joel with a rage that was frightening with its intensity as I walked home. I vowed to rip him apart with my bare hands; I wanted to feel his blood running down my arms and between my fingers, but by the time I got home, I knew I couldn’t hurt him because I was partially to blame. I should have left years before.
The rage rushed out of me like hot air from a balloon, and once more, Joel had the upper hand. That’s how abusers and criminals operate. That’s why they usually win even when they’re outgunned and outmanned; they’re never concerned about who’s at fault, and so they never fail to strike first.
That night, I made his dinner. I smiled and pretended nothing had changed. But after he fell asleep, I slipped a dollar bill out of his wallet. My hands trembled as if I was a shoplifter at my first crime, but I did the same thing every night, no matter how difficult the evening had been. And each time, it got easier.
Part of Joel’s control was that I didn’t have any money, and he’d never let me work. I looked for cash nearly any way I could. I picked aluminum cans out of the neighbor’s trash. I scoured the bus stop for lost change. I hocked one of the tools that Joel didn’t use very often. I went to the food pantries so I could squirrel back some of the grocery money he counted out to me each week.
I ached to call Mom. I knew she’d help me, but I wanted to fix this myself. Besides, I’d done enough to hurt her. Joel was unpredictable and dangerous, and I didn’t want to nor did I have any right to drag her into our drama.
Time passed so slowly it seemed, slower than all the years that I’d just accepted my fate, but finally my stash of cash was big enough that I felt I could succeed. I began to plan.
I picked out an older retail district on the other side of Seattle, a place I’d never heard Joel speak about. Using the Internet at a nearby library, I found a shelter that promised to help locate a job within walking distance of its campus. It was first-come-first-served the shelter manager had told me since I didn’t have kids. I’d have to be there right at six in the evenings if I wanted a bed for the night, and at seven in the morning if I wanted breakfast.
I packed nothing except a pair of pants, a shirt, a set of underclothes, and my raincoat in a plastic grocery bag, which I hid in a maxi pad box in the bottom of a bathroom cabinet. The money was buried beneath an ivy plant that had managed, against all odds, to thrive in the kitchen windowsill.
The best opportunity in weeks happened on a Tuesday night. Joel came home, angrier than usual. He turned to the booze early in the evening and was soused by dinnertime.
He was sitting on the couch when I set his dinner on a TV tray in front of him. My hands were shaking so hard, I knocked his beer off the tray. I didn’t bother to duck as he backhanded me. Blood ran from my left nostril, but I wiped it on my jeans absentmindedly as I sopped the beer up with a towel.
Following our usual routine, I sat beside him while he watched TV and muttered about the price of gasoline. Every now and then, he’d squeeze my knee and say, “You’ve got to learn to be more careful, babe. I don’t like to hit you like that.”
Nodding my head at his inane remarks, I struggled not to be stiff, to act normal, but it felt like there was a neon sign blinking over my head advertising my escape.
If there was, he never noticed. Another hour, and a half a case of beer later, he finally slumped over onto the couch and fell asleep.
Too afraid to move, I set there trembling for a good thirty minutes until his breathing was steady enough that I found the courage to slide away from his heavy hands.
The money was the priority, so I sacrificed the ivy. Dumping it into the sink and pulling the plastic sack of cash out of the bottom, I made a beeline for my clothes before grabbing my purse. My birth certificate and social security card were hidden in the lining at the bottom.
Ever so slowly, I eased the door open. The movement seemed to suck the air out of the room with it, and I looked over my shoulder expecting to see Joel wake up to tear me a new one. But he never budged. The step out the door was not an easy one, but inch by inch, I made it across.
I ran down the street like a mad woman, and only an elderly couple smoking cigarettes on their front porch paid me any attention at all. The woman took a deep draw, the end of her smoke growing hot, as she looked away from me and down the empty street. She blew the smoke out as leisurely as she dismissed me from her thoughts. In my part of town, no one was terribly concerned to see a woman escaping into the night.
It was six blocks to the dollar store, but I never stopped. I’d planned to come here, it being one of the few strip centers that still had a pay phone. With the cab on its way, I slumped against a concrete wall to wait.
About an hour and ninety dollars later, the dim lights of the shelter came into view. The cheap bulbs, surrounded by little halos of mist, were a beautiful display—a beacon of hope. It might as well have been Vegas; I’d hit the jackpot.
The night air was chilly, and it misted rain against my raincoat, but the cold air was invigorating. Rain dancing on the concrete smelled like freedom, and I danced a little as well, my feet kicking up their own little showers with every step.
It was a long night waiting for the shelter to open. Seattle and a few of her suburbs can be dangerous places, and the shelter wasn’t exactly prime real estate unless you were looking for a spot out of the way of the eyes of the police. Luckily, the rain picked up and even the drug dealers found other places to go. So for most of the night, I was alone and happy for it.
The shelter was a godsend. The staff was good on their word; they helped with the job search, and soon I was checking groceries at a little mom and pop store not too far from where I slept. I never missed the deadline for a bed, and in a couple of months, I counted out the deposit money for my first place.
That’s when I really started to feel free. Work was enjoyable; I loved talking to the customers as I checked their groceries. Most of them had shopped in this same store for half a century, and they continued to, not because of our great prices but for the atmosphere.
At night, I went to the library and played on the web. I checked out tons of books and read voraciously. I splurged on Chinese take-out once a week. I went to the free concerts advertised on the flyers posted around town. The tram carried me downtown on Saturdays and I went to the fish market.
Life was good.
Except the guilt over Mom.
I passed a payphone on my way to work every morning which served as a constant reminder that I should call her. The door on the booth stood open wide, never occupied by a single caller and beckoned me to enter.
“It’s a sign,” my conscience whispered to me daily.
Sometimes I’d take a different route home just to avoid the phone, but it was always on my mind. Even when I didn’t see it, I dreamed about it. Mom’s voice rang in my ears at night. I could feel the buttons under my fingers as I dialed the number.
Exhausted and unable to take the dreams anymore, I finally gave in and stopped in front of the payphone on my way home from work. I paced in front of the booth, working on my breathing for twenty minutes, before I picked up the receiver and fed in the change that the mechanical operator required.
It rang twice before Mom answered, and my nails were white from my tight grip on the receiver before I finally got the nerve to respond.
“Mom,” I whispered into the phone. My voice br
oke.
The other end was silent.
I cleared my voice. “Mom?” I questioned, wondering if she was still there and knowing that I had no right to expect her to be.
My name was her only response for several minutes. We had volumes to say, but all that would come were tears.
The machine asked for a lot of money that day before we were done talking, but when we said our goodbyes, it was as if the last ten years hadn’t happened.
I was still her daughter. How could I have ever doubted her?
I called her weekly after our initial phone reunion. She wanted me to come home, but I convinced her we’d both be safer if I was nowhere near her. Joel was still a danger. He wasn’t the kind of man who took kindly to losing.
The weeks that followed will always be special to me. Mom and I became close again, even if it was over the phone. Money was too tight on either end for an impromptu trip, but we both started saving.
The summer, although months away, seemed a good time. I’d have a pretty good sum of money saved by then, and the cruise boats would be docking in Sitka several days a week. Mom could sell jewelry, and I could get a job with one of the seasonal tourist businesses for a couple of weeks. The owner of the grocery store where I worked promised I’d have a job when I returned. And return I would; I wouldn’t stay and risk my Mom’s life by giving Joel a stationary target.
I was so certain Joel would show up that I pleaded with Mom to move to Seattle with me. She refused; Sitka had been our family home for generations. “Joel is not going to run me away from my own home,” she said.
I begged her then to keep the doors locked and have her mail kept at the post office. I wouldn’t have put it past him to steal her phone records and try to track me. My heart told me she was in danger, but after a few months, life was still good. Nothing had happened and I dropped my guard. I filed for divorce. I had to. The end of the year was coming and taxes would be due. I, for one, planned on filing separately.
The phone book had more listings for attorneys than I could count and the sheer number of them made my vision blur as I ran my index finger down the list. Ever the resource, the manager of the shelter recommended a young attorney just a few streets over from the grocery who specialized in confidentiality.
I saw the lawyer on a Wednesday. It was a cool winter day. The skies over Seattle were heavy with wet leaking clouds, and I was glad to sit in her waiting room and dry off a bit before she called me back.
An hour later, she promised to treat my address as top secret, and I had no doubts she would. The divorce agreement would be simple. I wanted nothing except Joel’s signature. The attorney promised to file that afternoon.
Outside her office, the clouds remained heavy. I called their bluff and walked home in the dry, and as I neared my apartment, I caught a look at myself in the glass of a dollar store window. This time, the woman who stared back at me was smiling. Her hair had a new shine, and it was growing. Where angles had been, curves now took their place. Her face was full; her complexion clear. I was optimistic about the future as I flashed a bright smile to my reflection.
Two weeks later on a Saturday night, everything came crashing down.
The clock to the right of my front door had struck ten when I turned out the lights that fateful evening and headed to bed. Nothing had been out of the ordinary about the evening. Mom and I had talked the day before. She’d mailed a cashier’s check to help me buy a cell phone. I’d eaten a turkey sandwich for dinner and some chips that had passed their expiration at the store but were still perfectly good.
The historical fiction novel I finished that evening set on the counter waiting to be returned to the library in the morning. No romance mind you, as I didn’t need any nightmares. The neighbors were all quiet when I climbed in bed and bundled up in the covers. Sleep came so easy I don’t remember closing my eyes or counting numbers like on a lot of nights. I must have begun to dream right away, and that’s where the normalcy ended.
Drawn from the haziness of a dream, I opened my eyes to the sensation that I wasn’t alone. I was facing the far wall of my bedroom; my eyes strained to find something in the darkness, and I stretched one hand across the covers, watching as the hair rose of its own accord from my wrist to my neck. Behind me, the air stirred and flipping over, and I found my mom sitting on the edge of my bed.
Black hair draped down her back like a thick heavy curtain. It fell on either side of her shoulders, shadowing her face, which was smooth and sculpted. Her normally dark eyes glowed with a blue light. She was more beautiful than was humanly possible; I would say she looked young, but that would be wrong. She was timeless.
This is a dream, I told myself, which did nothing to calm the building anxiety. Besides, it was a lie. She was an apparition, and I was frightened not because I thought she might hurt me but because of what it meant. She was either dead or very close to it.
She didn’t say anything, only watched me while she stroked my face and hair. I lay quietly under her soothing touch, knowing it would be the last time I ever felt it.
“I’ve come to ask your forgiveness.” Her voice was like the tinkle of fine wine glasses in the midst of a toast.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s me that needs to be forgiven. I betrayed everything you and Dad ever taught me. I let a man take it all from me.” My voice hoarsened with disgust at myself.
“I need to know you forgive me for not finding you years ago. I should have done more to protect you from him,” she whispered, her skin cool against my cheek as she leaned towards me. “Please, Tam.”
“You have my forgiveness, Mom. But you don’t need it,” I answered, knowing that I had to say whatever it took to put her at peace. This was not the time to be selfish. I couldn’t even bear to ask her if Joel was involved. I couldn’t say his name and see her lose any of her peace.
“Thank you, Tamara. Be strong. Have faith in yourself and know I will always love you,” she whispered as she kissed my forehead, her form beginning to dissolve.
The room was cool, the way I liked it, but still I was drenched. My damp hair was stuck to my face, and I had to pull strands from my eyes as I sat up to clutch at the empty spot on my bed. The scent of rosemary hung in the air, and I inhaled deeply of the fragrance. The evergreen had been Mom’s favorite spice.
Searching the darkness for her, I called out in one last selfish, desperate call for her. “Mom! Don’t leave me. I need you.”
Her image flickered in the corner, and she reappeared one final time, a peaceful smile touching and lighting up her face in silvery shadows. Unable to stop the tears that leached from my eyes, I watched as her form flickered once more then dissolved completely into a thin vapor.
The last remnants of her spirit dissipated on the air, and a numb feeling crawled through my body. I shook with the chills even as sweat pooled in my armpits. My mind danced between logic and soul. Maybe it was simply a bad dream. I took a deep breath, reminding myself of everything I’d been through in the last ten years. Bad dreams were to be expected, right? It crossed my mind that Joel had found me and not her. Maybe this was a warning from my subconscious.
I tried to rationalize, but my heart knew the truth. It was Mom’s spirit coming to me after a bad death. According to my family’s beliefs, the dead didn’t necessarily leave the earth for forty days after dying. If someone experienced an untimely death, their spirit would be restless. They spent this time seeking forgiveness or visiting their loved ones. My grandmother believed that during sleep you could visit the other world of death and return by waking up. It was an old Russian concept, but she never doubted it.
I crawled trembling out of bed and, grabbing only a jacket and some change off the counter, I ran to the nearest payphone, my bare feet slapping the wet pavement loudly. Mom’s number rang over and over, her answering machine picking up on the first ring after the first two calls. Panic settled around me like netting. Desperate, I begged the operator to connect me to the Sitka Po
lice Department.
A woman answered the phone informally. She was clearly a transplant with her southern California accent. My voice was shaking as I explained my bad dream and why the police needed to check on my mom. Unconvinced, she snickered a little and said someone would get back to me. I waited five minutes and called again. It was the same response the next six calls.
The only other number that I remembered from Sitka, besides my mother’s, belonged to the local church Mom had faithfully attended. I dialed it frantically, my fingers flying across the small buttons of the payphone as I cursed my lack of a cell phone once more.
The number rang twice before a calm but strong male voice answered on the other end. I hesitated at the familiar sound. Momentarily stunned, I lost my courage and my voice.
“Hello? Who’s there?” he questioned.
“Peter?” I spoke hesitantly.
“This is Father Peter. Who’s asking?” he questioned.
“It’s Tamara. Umm…” I paused here, embarrassed that I so clearly remembered his voice when mine might have held no place in his memory at all. “Lena’s daughter. It’s been a really long time.” I swallowed hard. “You might not even remember me.”
He laughed softly, a pleasant sound that took the edge off of my jitters, if only for a minute.
“Of course I remember you, Tamara. We only spent most of our childhood together. But I’m a little confused at your call. It’s nearly three a.m. Is something wrong?” he asked.
I took a deep breath, looking for some steadiness in my voice and not finding any, I plunged ahead. “This will sound kind of crazy, I know, but I’ve had a dream that Mom’s spirit came to me, and now I can’t get a hold of her.” Tears threatened to steal my voice and I choked them back, at least for the moment. “I… I… I don’t know what Mom has told you over the years, but I ended up in a bad way. A bad relationship, and I’m afraid that something awful has happened to her because of me.”