The Shade of My Own Tree

by Sheila Williams

  LaDonna called me at work from the Women’s Crisis Center late one afternoon. I was up to my ears juggling two faxes, ten voice-mail messages, and more E-mail than I ever knew existed, plus a call from an irate attorney with whom I was having a really unpleasant conversation about his inflated bill. How can one attorney possibly bill 168 hours in one week unless he is working while he sits on the toilet?

  “Hey, LaDonna, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m referring Beni Douglas to you,” she said.

  I pulled out my little notebook and started writing. The fax machine beeped. Paper jam, darn.

  “OK. I have room. When is she coming?”

  A pause.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.”

  I put my pen down. LaDonna was never unsure about anything.

  “She’s like the wind. Comes and goes. I won’t see her for weeks; then, out of the blue, she just shows up or calls needing a place to stay for the night.”

  “OK,” I said slowly. Beni Douglas sounded like a hemorrhoid to me.

  LaDonna explained.

  “She’s young, a college student, artsy-fartsy type. Bright as all get out, but she’s hooked up with this boyfriend.” LaDonna paused. “You know.”

  Oh, yeah. I know.

  “She’s not from around here. Her folks live in Illinois, I think. I just want to leave a porch light on for her. Let her know that she has somewhere safe to go. Do you know what I mean?”

  Yes, I did.

  I first met Beni Douglas when she showed up on my front porch at two in the morning with a Coke in her hand, a cut on her left eye, and a busted lip. She grinned at me like a puppy. Her locks danced along her shoulders as she moved her head back and forth.

  “Hi! I’m Beni Douglas. LaDonna sent me. Are you Opal?” She bopped into the front hall with the enthusiasm of a freshman pledge during rush. The only problem was I had expected her to arrive at 7:00 P.M., right after dinner.

  I was sympathetic and irritated at the same time. And, of course, the “mother” in me came out. Beni was about Imani’s age.

  I turned her face toward me so that I could get a good look at her eye. With nearly twenty years of experience, I was an expert on black and soon-to-be-black eyes. Beni’s soft brown eyes were bright but bloodshot.

  “Do you know what time it is?” I scolded her. “You were supposed to be here hours ago! Has anyone looked at that eye?”

  Beni was unfazed.

  “Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I stopped off at a party on campus. Do you still have a bed for me? I can’t go back to the apartment yet. P-Bo is still pissed off.”

  I looked at her as if she had just landed from Mars.

  “Yes, there’s a bed for you,” I said. “But I’ll need to do something with that eye first. And you need to see LaDonna first thing in the morning. You can’t go back to that apartment, Beni.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and looked at the hall now bathed in lamplight. The rest of the house was dark.

  “Your house is beautiful,” she said, running her fingertips along the top of a small chest that was sitting under the French window. “That’s a great window. It looks like stained glass.”

  “Beni, are you listening to me?” I sounded like a mother again.

  She giggled. In the dim light I couldn’t see her eyes clearly, but I could smell the burnt weed on her clothes. This time, she smiled sheepishly, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. No, she wasn’t listening to me.

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s just a little cut; it’ll be fine. You got any ice?”

  Cool as a cucumber, that Beni.

  I briefly told her about the “house rules.”

  “No smoking,” I said firmly as we walked to the kitchen. “Of any kind.” I looked her in the eye when I said this. She grinned again, her eyes shiny. Nope, she wasn’t listening.

  I got her an ice pack and sent her to bed.

  She was gone in the morning.

  And I worried about her.

  LaDonna tried to reassure me.

  “Don’t worry yourself to death about it. She’ll be back,” she told me grimly. “That’s the sad part about these situations. She hasn’t left her boyfriend for good. And that means she’ll be back.”

  Beni was like the kamikaze. In Japanese, the word means “divine wind.” She came out of nowhere and you never knew when she was coming, so it was impossible to prepare for her arrival. If there was a “sighting,” then you were on alert. LaDonna would call from the crisis center. “Beni Douglas’s boyfriend kicked her out. We’re full. Can she stay at the yellow house tonight?”

  And I wouldn’t see Beni for a week.

  Other times, she would just show up.

  One of her visits lasted seven hours, just long enough for her to get some sleep and leave the bathroom a wreck.

  On her next visit, she was subdued. Beni sat down at the kitchen table with a soda can in her hand. Her hair was a soggy mess and her face was rumpled. She looked like she hadn’t slept. No almost-black eye or fat lip this time, the boyfriend was becoming more strategic in his abuse. Beni wore a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt that made me hot just looking at it. It was eighty degrees already this morning. I knew that if I rolled up Beni’s sleeves, her arms would be finger-painted with bruises.

  The animation in her eyes was gone. She looked as if something had sucked the personality out of her. Gloria and I glanced at each other. We knew a lot about that feeling.

  Troy sat at the table eating his breakfast. Beni fascinated him. She had played chess with him on her last whirlwind visit and he thought she was “cool.” This morning, he kept staring at her. She looked like a completely different person.

  “Troy, don’t gobble your food,” his mother chided him. “It don’t have … doesn’t have legs; it won’t run outa the bowl.”

  “All right,” Troy mumbled, milk dribbling down his chin.

  Gloria started to say something else, then thought better of it. We all sat in silence until Troy finished inhaling his cereal and juice and flew out the door with his backpack to catch the bus for day camp.

  “You can’t go back to him,” Gloria said matter-of-factly. She wasn’t waiting for an invitation to get into Beni’s situation. “He’ll just knock you around again.”

  Beni took a long gulp of her soda.

  “He was just upset,” she said in a low voice without looking at either of us. “His portfolio was turned down by the art academy committee. He was really disappointed.”

  “Then he needs to take his disappointment out on the photographs and not on you,” I said, setting a small plate of toast in front of her. “Here. You need to eat something, Beni.”

  She pushed the plate away.

  “No. Thanks. My stomach is … a little shaky. I’ll just drink the Coke.”

  Gloria’s fingertips tapped the table. Whenever she did that, tapping like a pianist playing Bach, I knew that she either was agitated or wanted a cigarette or both. She looked at Beni as she raised her coffee cup. “You can’t go back to him,” she repeated.

  Beni’s eyes narrowed and, for the first time, I heard the voice of a frightened, confused girl instead of the hip, wise, gum-cracking college student.

  “I-I know. But … but I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said sadly. Hearing that tone in the voice of a girl so young ripped into my stomach.

  “That’s not true. You can stay here until you get another place. Stay as long as you want. That will give you time to recover.”

  She stared off into space.

  “Frankie said I could move into their place.”

  Gloria’s brows knit together.

  “Who’s Frankie?”

  “One of my girlfriends. She and two other girls have a big old house like this one off River Road just a few blocks from schoo
l.”

  “Sounds like a good deal to me,” Gloria commented, glancing at her watch as she put her dishes into the sink. “Maybe you should look into it. Because if you go back to P-Bo, he’s going to hit you again.”

  “How do you know that?” Beni snapped.

  Gloria’s eyes widened.

  “I mean, just how the hell would you know? Are you psychic? Some of kind of wisewoman?” Beni’s tone was sharp and sarcastic. “P-Bo said he was sorry. He’s … he’s just temperamental. Moody. He feels really bad about what happened.”

  “They always do,” I said to myself loud enough for Beni to hear.

  “He said he was sorry! What do you want from him anyway? He’s even taking me to dinner tonight to apologize!”

  “If you’re smart, you’ll turn down that invitation,” I said coldly. There was no other way to say it. How many apology dinners had I been on? How many “I’m sorry, sweetheart” roses had I gotten over the years? And boxes of chocolates? And scarves and jewelry? All not worth a damn.

  “Don’t go, Beni,” Gloria said quietly.

  Beni stood up, but her legs were wobbly and she sat down quickly. Her face was gray.

  “Look. I don’t mean to be ungrateful or anything. And I really appreciate your taking me in, but … you’re older and you’ve got kids and … well, you’ve been putting up with this stuff for years with alcohol a-and other things. P-Bo doesn’t have a drinking problem. He doesn’t! And he’s a brilliant artist! He just … He’s just excitable, that’s all. He didn’t mean it.”

  This impassioned defense of one who was so undeserving exhausted her. She closed her eyes and leaned back into her chair.

  “Anyway, I’m too tired to do anything right now. All I want to do is go to sleep.”

  I patted her on the shoulder and lifted her chin.

  “Then go upstairs and get some rest. When you wake up, call LaDonna. You need to talk with someone. You can stay here until you get it all sorted out. OK?”

  Tears glinted from the corners of her eyes. She nodded, her lips pressed together.

  “OK.” Her voice came out in a whisper.

  Gloria looked away.

  Beni did not come back that night. I didn’t see or hear from her again for almost a week. But, just like the kamikaze, that girl brought trouble to my door. We tried, in vain, Gloria and I, to help this girl and give her the benefit of our sorry experiences. But the young know best. It is only us old folks who are fools.

  Chapter Nine

  “P-Bo” showed up on my front porch at one o’clock in the morning screaming at the top of his lungs. Scared my intestines clean. He sounded like a pair of mating cats harmonized by nails pulled across a chalkboard. I sat up in bed so fast that I nearly gave myself whiplash. Wells yipped a few times and raced down the stairs. Bear woke with a start, woofed loudly, then ran after him. I heard Gloria and Marsha, a sixty-year-old refugee who was staying for a few days, rustling around downstairs. Gloria yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Opal! Opal! You hear that?”

  “Yes, I’m coming right down. If it’s not Ice Tray in heat, I’m calling the police.”

  It wasn’t Ice Tray in heat, although the screeching woke Tray and CW and a few other cats that were rooming with them for the night. It did not wake Troy, who, as usual, slept the undisturbed sleep of the not-so-innocent.

  We ran down the two flights of stairs and I turned on the porch lights.

  “Do you want me to call the police?” Marsha asked, clutching her robe around her.

  “Not yet,” I said, peering out the front window. “I just want to make sure it’s not the cats fighting again.” Ice Tray and CW had notorious reputations on this corner of Burning Church Road. They challenged and attacked anything with legs that moved across the yard at night, human or animal.

  The screeching came again. Its shrillness made my teeth hurt.

  Marsha shook her head.

  “That doesn’t sound like cats fighting,” she said.

  No, it didn’t.

  A man stood in my yard. If this had been biblical times, I would have thought he was John the Baptist. As it was, I figured he was a poor slob who had drunk too much at a dive on the main drag and lost his way home. We get those in Prestonn from time to time. He was shirtless and his pants were falling down around his hips. I thanked God for the invention of boxer shorts or Gloria, Marsha, and I would have seen more than we needed to at that late hour of the night. He was bearded and his hair was long and twisted into thin dreadlocks. Wells took off before I could grab him and circled the intruder, yapping at him. I tried to hold Bear, but he weighs almost as much as I do, so he broke free and joined Wells. The man was surrounded by angry, barking dogs. But he didn’t seem to notice.

  I had just told Marsha to go ahead and call for Prestonn’s finest when I actually heard the words he was saying.

  “Benetia! Benetia!”

  Beni.

  “She’s not here!” I yelled from the front porch. I started to go farther, but Gloria, very wisely, pulled me back.

  “Opal, you don’t know that boy. He might be crazy. Or he could have a knife or a gun. You might want to call the dogs back, too.”

  But this fool wasn’t going to hurt the dogs.

  “Beni! Beni!”

  “She’s not here, P-Bo,” I told him. “And if you don’t beat it, I’m calling the police.”

  His screeching, which was a combination of crying, sobbing, and yelling, stopped as my words finally sank in. He blubbered on incoherently while he ran his fingers through his matted hair. Then he dropped to his knees and continued to cry.

  “Beni, I love you! Beni, where are you?” His voice was dripping with emotion and, well, drama. If he’d been singing, it would have been an opera.

  “Get a grip,” came Gloria’s voice from behind me. Despite the seriousness of the moment, I smiled.

  “Bear! Wells!” Bear gave one last woof and joined me at the bottom of the porch. Wells, as usual, did his own thing. The word retreat is not in his vocabulary. He backed off a few feet but remained in place, barking at intervals just to let the stranger know that he wasn’t home free just yet.

  “P-Bo, get the hell out of here or I’m calling the police!”

  He sobbed for a few moments, still oblivious to the dogs. Then he seemed to wake up and struggled to his feet. Waving off Wells, who continued to yap at him, he stumbled away into the darkness yelling back at me, “Tell Beni I love her! I love her!”

  Yeah, right.

  Beni called the next day. I could tell from her voice that she knew what had happened. And I was madder than a hornet.

  “Hey, Opal, what’s going on?”

  I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. House Rule Number One is that under no circumstances do you tell the abusive partner where you are. In fact, depending on your situation, you don’t tell anyone. There is an old saying: Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

  “Beni, you told P-Bo where you were.”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  Her denial was not at all believable.

  “Yes, you did,” I told her angrily. “He showed up here last night at one o’clock, screaming like a sick cat. I would have called the police, but he finally moved on.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

  “No, you didn’t!” I interrupted. “You had your head up your butt. When you tell people about this place, you put me and the other women who come here in danger!”

  “P-Bo wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Beni cried.

  “He beat you up, didn’t he?”

  This time, my voice was cold. Reality can often be like ice water. It stuns you and then it wakes you up. I knew how Beni felt. Exactly as I had felt when LaDonna told me that everyone already knew that Ted was beating me up.

  Beni’s ga
sp came over the phone.

  Then she hung up. After that, every time the telephone rang, especially if it was late at night, I hoped it might be Beni. But I didn’t hear from her for a while. Instead, after weeks of blessed silence, I started hearing from Ted again.

  First, it started at work. I’m an easy target there.

  I was on another line, so Bonnie at work answered the first call. I could tell from the excitement in her voice that it tickled her to have to tell me that my soon-to-be ex-husband was on the line.

  “Opal! I’m transferring a call to you,” she said, barely able to control her glee. In a whisper loud enough for the rest of the office to hear, she added, “I think it’s your ex-husband.”

  I sighed. I counted to ten. Georgy had said not to take calls from Ted. But legal advice and reality are two different things. Technically, you shouldn’t talk to your soon-to-be-former spouse because you’re in an active case and the negotiations can blow up on you. Not to mention the breach of a restraining order. The reality is that it happens all the time. You can hang up, you can put on your voice mail, or you can ask a coworker to take a message. But that gets old after a while. When it comes down to it, you have to take that call yourself. Because the asshole will keep calling until you do.

  I took stock of what I was feeling and realized that, once again, there was no fear in my stomach. Just like the time that I practically pulled Ted out the window of the car, I was aggravated, pissed off, irritated, fed up, and mad as hell. But I wasn’t afraid. Yep, the new Opal was still around.

  “What do you want, Ted?”

  “You’re a conniving bitch, do you know that?”

  “Unless you have something to say that involves Imani, I’m hanging up,” I told him.

  I heard him take a deep breath. Ted did not like the new Opal. She really was a sassy bitch.

  “I’ve seen those papers my lawyer drew up. And I’m not going to sign them. That’s my money and you won’t get—”

  I clicked over to my next call.

  “Opal Sullivan, may I help you?”

  The client call took several minutes, and by the time I finished it, my second line was blinking. Bonnie’s head popped over the top of my cubicle. “It’s your husband,” she whispered. But this time, her expression was solemn and eyes were filled with worry as opposed to curiosity. I made a mental note to myself to apologize to Bonnie. Ted had obviously been ugly with her.