I Love You, Jilly Sanders
Page 9
The hell she would! She moved forward, ignoring Tage’s pattern of approach, following as straight a line as she could toward the increasing noise.
“Don’t!”
Jilly heard a woman’s rasping voice. Vividly, she could imagine that whoever had been squeezing the woman’s throat had released her.
She heard the sound of a fist hitting flesh, and the gasp of fear and pain that followed it.
Tage had disappeared; Jilly had no idea where he was, and she was close enough now to see a man and a woman standing near the gates of the cemetery.
The woman tried to kick the man. “Don’t you do me that way,” she hissed.
The man neatly side-stepped the kick and launched his fist out, carelessly catching the woman on the side of the face.
She dropped to the ground, but looked up. There was something fierce in her upturned face. “I told you if you ever hit me again, I was going.” She was crying now. “This is the last time—”
The man laughed. “You ain’t got nowhere to go, woman. Now get up from there. We’re going home.”
In response, the woman curled into a fetal position, gripped her hands above her neck, and buried her face into the ground.
The man bent down and slugged the woman in the ribs as hard as he could. Jilly heard her shocked exhale.
Rage blinded her. “Hey!” she screamed, jumping out from behind a headstone. “Leave her alone, you bastard!” She had the satisfaction of seeing the man jump and look wildly toward her as though he thought she might be a ghost.
Jilly ran toward him, trying desperately to quell her shaking knees. Even in the dim light she could see he was the most beautiful black man she’d ever seen, his form perfect. He wore a tight pair of blue jeans, a soft red shirt, and his eyes were coal black.
“This ain’t none of your business, girly,” he said. “Now get the hell outta here before I give you a taste.” He reached down, grabbed the woman’s hair, and hauled her halfway to her feet.
Jilly didn’t hesitate. She launched herself at the man.
She took him by surprise and he let out a little woof! of air as he let go of the woman and fell to the ground, Jilly on his back like a wild beast. Ridiculously, she wrapped her skinny arms around his throat, attempting to get a choke-hold.
He flicked her off like a bug.
“You crazy little bitch,” he said, jumping to his feet and spitting on the ground at her feet.
Jilly pulled herself to her feet and faced him. “I said leave her alone!”
He took a step toward her, his intent clear, and out of nowhere Tage appeared. He swung the grocery bag with the flour in it in a wide arc and took the man right beside the head. Flour exploded outward, covering Jilly’s face with a dusty film, and the man dropped to his knees and fell forward with a theatrical thump. The flour floated downward to land on the woman who had lifted her head out of the dirt and was staring up at the two of them with a dazed look.
She blinked. Then she turned around and sat up.
Jilly saw gravel imbedded in the woman’s knees. “Are you okay?” she asked. She felt kind of weak herself and went to sit beside the woman who was crying without making a noise. Tears slid down her cheeks like a crack had opened in riverbank. There seemed no end to them.
Jilly awkwardly patted her hand. “Do you need to go the hospital?” She looked at Tage, but he only shrugged helplessly.
A burst of laughter escaped from the woman, and she tried to cover her mouth, but giggles filtered through. The tears still streamed from her eyes, bubbling over her fingers like fountain water.
“Shock,” Tage said.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I really am.”
Now that she wasn’t screaming in fear Jilly noticed the musical quality to her voice. She sounded like a guitar string thrumming with perfect pitch.
“When Reuben wakes up, he’s going to be one mad man.” The laughter cut itself off abruptly. “You two better get outta here.”
Jilly shook her head. “We’re not leaving you here.”
The woman smiled at her, a sad smile that barely creased her face. “He was right,” she said, nodding toward Reuben. “I don’t have anyplace to run to.” She sighed. “But that’s neither here nor there.” She stood up and swayed. “He’s liable to kill all three of us if wakes up and sees you two still here.” She reached up and with a tender touch felt her cheekbone.
“Then we’ll all go,” Jilly said. She stood up and faced the woman. “I’m Jilly Sanders and this is Tage Oakes. My grandfather is Otto Beckinhide and he—”
The woman interrupted her. “I know Otto. I didn’t know he had a granddaughter, though.”
“How do you know Otto?” Jilly asked, amazed.
“Child, when you live in a small town, there isn’t a person within two hundred miles you don’t know. In fact, when you live in a town like Briar Rose you’re probably related to half the people you set your eyes on.”
“Well, then you know Otto’d never turn you away,” Jilly said bluntly, hoping to hell she was right. “You can come and stay with us until you get on your feet.”
The woman hesitated.
“She’s right, you know,” Tage said, and Jilly smiled at him with gratitude. “Otto will let you stay. His house is big enough.”
The woman stared down at Reuben who let out a thick groan. She shivered and looked first at Tage and then at Jilly.
“I—I’d appreciate it,” she said softly. “My name’s Cat. Cat Catella.”
Jilly smiled at her and took hold of her arm. Gently, she guided the woman away from the cemetery. Tage walked on the other side of her. Jilly wondered if Cat had the strength to make it all the way to Otto’s house, but she figured between herself and Tage, they’d get her there one way or another.
“Is that guy your husband?” Tage asked her.
“His name is Reuben Payne,” she answered. “He’s not my husband.” She hobbled forward. “We’ve been living together for a couple years.” She sighed, and looked over at Jilly. “Don’t you ever let a man take control of you, you hear? Sometimes you give a man your heart and he thinks he can cut it up and eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And ‘for you know it, you’re the one spoon-feedin’ him your own self ‘cause you don’t know what else to do to save yourself.” She straightened her back a little, grunting with pain. “He don’t know it, yet,” she said,
“but I’m all through feedin’ him. I’m taking my heart back right now.”
Jilly darted a glance at Tage. The thought of giving him her heart dashed through her mind, and to her surprise the thought didn’t frighten her at all, not the way it would have in the past. Was she changing then? Out here with Otto and Gwen and Tage, was she learning that loving other people wasn’t that hard at all?
Chapter XII.
The walk home was excruciatingly slow. When they were almost there, and could see the glow of the house lights in the distance, Cat moved to the side of the road and was quietly and violently sick.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled over and over. “I think Reuben did me some real damage this time.”
Jilly tried to peer into the dark to see if Cat was throwing up blood but she could barely see her hand in front of her face.
“Did he hit you in the stomach?” Tage asked.
He stood a few feet away, and Jilly could tell he felt helpless, inadequate to the situation. Of course, she didn’t feel too competent, either. Neither school nor life had taught her how to handle a severely beaten woman.
“I’m okay now,” Cat said, straightening up. “I can make it.” She stumbled forward and Tage grabbed her around the shoulders. She leaned heavily on him.
“Why don’t you run ahead?” Tage suggested to Jilly. “Tell them what happened and see if Gwen knows what to do.”
Jilly gave a frightened nod, and sprinted toward the house.
Five minutes later she bounded up the front steps, yanked open the screen door, and burst into the kitchen.<
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“Cripes!” Gwen burst out. “What happened to you?”
Otto’s chair scraped the floor as he stood up. “I thought you were getting flour to make a pie, not to take a bath in,” he said.
“We found a lady—” Her heart pounded, cutting off her breath.
“A lady?” Otto said.
“What do you mean?” Gwen echoed.
They both moved toward the door, peering into the darkness.
“Tage and I were in the—” She broke off as Otto stared at her and started over. “We were coming home and this man was hitting this woman! We got into a fight with him trying to stop him. He was hurting her bad! Tage bopped him on the head with the bag of flour and it exploded and that’s why it’s all over me.”
“What?” Gwen said. “Slow down and tell us the most important parts. We’ll figure the rest out later.”
“Tage is helping Cat Catella to the house right now. Her boyfriend Reuben
Payne beat her up. She was just throwing up beside the road a few minutes ago, and
I think she might be bleeding internally.”
Otto blinked. “Hmmm. Now that’s getting right to the most important parts, all right,” he said to Gwen. “Let’s go see if we can help.”
Jilly dropped into a kitchen chair and tried to slow her breathing while Otto and Gwen went outside.
It seemed like forever before the group came into the house, and when Cat stepped into the harsh light of the kitchen, Jilly bit her lip and stared in shock.
Cat’s feather-brown skin was bruised and bloody, and her face had a lopsided look due to the swelling bruise on her high cheekbone. Blood had crusted near her ear, and it matted one side of her black hair. Her arms and legs were bruised and bloodied, too. Her dark eyes, darker even than Tage’s golden brown ones, were framed by thick, spiky lashes clumped together with dried blood.
She sat down on a kitchen chair Gwen pulled out for her and let out a sigh of relief.
“Any bones feel broken?” Otto asked. He knelt in front of her, assessing her injuries. “Get me a cool cloth, Jilly. Tage, you go in the bathroom and see if you can find some antiseptic. I believe there’s some in the medicine cabinet.”
“Nothing feels shattered,” Cat said, her husky voice sliding along Jilly’s nerves in a pleasant way. “I might have a cracked rib, but mostly he just banged me up pretty good.”
“Pretty bad, you mean,” Otto said. He smiled sympathetically.
Jilly went into the bathroom with Tage and found the softest washcloth in the pile in the cabinet. “She’s going to be all right,” she said, and Tage nodded when their eyes met in the mirror, but neither of them looked certain.
She returned to the kitchen and handed Otto the cloth and he gently washed Cat’s face. Gwen brought him a pan of warm water and he dipped the cloth over and over again, wiping the blood away and staining the water a bright pink.
“I remember you, Otto,” Cat murmured. “I used to have a wicked crush on you when I was in my twenties.”
To Jilly’s amazement, Otto’s face flushed, but he only said, “You hush now, Cat. Or you’ll be having them telling all sorts of tales.” He took the antiseptic from Tage and dabbed some of the salve on the cuts on her face.
Now that she was partly clean, Jilly could see Cat was probably in her mid-forties, closer to Otto’s age than any of theirs. And despite her injuries, she was also a beautiful woman. If Gwen was the golden-white fairy princess, Cat had
to be a sleek leopard, muscular and physical and yet totally feminine.
Otto washed the bruises on her arms like he was handling a piece of glass. “I can’t believe you got mixed up with Reuben Payne,” he told her. “There isn’t a person in town who wouldn’t have warned you away from him.”
Cat’s dark eyes flashed, and she pulled her arm away. “He wasn’t the wisest pick of the litter,” she said dryly. “But you ought to know that sometimes you get mixed up in things you can’t see your way out of no matter what you do,” she returned. “Where you been hiding yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Otto said, and Cat’s chuckle filled the room.
“He’s serious,” Jilly told her. And, with Otto’s approval, she briefly explained about his memory problem.
“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard of,” Cat said, and she looked as though she might cry again.
“If that’s the saddest thing you’ve heard, I think you’re all done in,” Otto said, his voice brisk. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? We could get you there somehow—”
“No,” Cat said. “I’m happy to be resting here, and I do thank you, Otto. You know that, don’t you?”
Otto waved away her thanks. “Don’t you have enough to worry about?” he teased.
“I’ll make her a bed upstairs,” Gwen said. “You want to help her up the stairs, Otto?” She carried the pan of water to the sink and dumped it.
“I’m going to go home,” Tage told them all. “It was nice to meet you, Miss Catella, even if the circumstances weren’t so nice.” He looked over to Jilly. “If you need anything, come and get me, okay?”
She nodded and he left.
Otto helped Cat up the stairs, and Jilly followed them. She said goodnight and went into her own bedroom. She felt completely worn out by the events of the evening.
She was far from naive; she knew about domestic violence, knew there were people in this world who abused others. What distressed her was the stark, blunt truth of the actual moment of physical violence: the sound of a fist hitting flesh, the amount of blood in a human being’s face, the terrible retching vomiting that resulted from being hit in the stomach, and the harsh raspy sound of breathing through broken ribs.
She kicked off her sneakers and went to take a quick bath before she climbed into bed. Child-like, she burrowed under the covers and put her pillow over her eyes.
But she still couldn’t shut out the memory. It hung there in back of her eyelids until she fell into a restless sleep.
*
Toward the end of August, she told Tage he was part of the misfit mansion, even if he didn’t live there. He laughed so hard, he rolled off the porch where he’d been sitting.
“Quit it!” she ordered. “And get back up here and help me hang up this swing.” Together with Otto, the three of them had revamped the porch. The steps were smooth and firm and so was the deck. Jilly was the one who suggested they hang the old swing back up, and Otto had left them to do it.
He was having a hard time with everything. Each morning, Jilly filled him in on the date and as many details as she could squeeze in about all the people living in his house now and what had happened to all of them. Instead of being angry, which she always feared he might end up being, he was disheartened and filled with self-loathing. Every day he said the same thing: I wish to God I could remember these things for myself. It’s ridiculous! It’s ruining my life! and he would stomp off outside, and return around lunch time, calm in demeanor but not, she suspected, in his heart.
Even worse, now, was the fact that she also suspected Otto and Cat were drawn to each other romantically. But there was no way on heaven’s earth she was going to tell Otto he spent most of the previous day flirting with Cat! So she omitted that information, and left the two of them to figure things out. Jilly hoped if Cat did feel something toward Otto, she’d figure out a way to remind him each day.
“What makes you think we’re misfits?” Tage asked.
“What makes you think we’re not?” she countered. “Grab the chain. I’ll do my end and you do yours.”
She waited while he climbed onto one of the overturned pails they were using for a ladder, then stepped up on her own. “One, two, three . . . ahhhhhh . . .” She lifted the swing by pulling on the chain and clicked the edge of her S-hook into place while Tage did the same with his end.
“There,” she said, satisfied. She jumped down from the bucket. “I’m kind of glad I’m a misfit,” she said. She stood in fron
t of the swing. “You try it first.”
“Not me,” he said, shaking his head and backing up.
She moved behind him and pushed him forward. “Yes, you. You weigh more. If it holds you, I’ll get on, too.” He leaned back against her hands, pretending to resist. “Go on! You wouldn’t want Gwenivere to come out here and sit down and have the swing come crashing down on her and her baby-belly, would you?”
He plunked down on the swing. “Nope.” He smoothed his hand across the wooden seat. “This is pretty good.” He crooked his finger at her. “Come here.” He patted the swing. “Sit.”
She did, and he push-rocked the swing with his foot.
“I’m kind of glad you’re you,” he said, and he put his arm around her. She leaned back into the curve of his arm and closed her eyes. She felt him playing with the ends of her hair. Her heart felt as though it were skip-starting in her chest.
“I’m glad Otto’s a misfit,” she said. “If he were a typical crotchety old man, he never would have let me or Gwen or Cat stay with him.”
“He does seem to have the uncanny ability to collect women,” Tage said. He laughed softly. “Most especially Miss Cat.”
“Well, look at you two!” Gwen came out on the porch. She wore one of Otto’s blue bandanas around her head tied in the back underneath her mane of hair. The faded blue made her eyes appear more green than usual. “Have things progressed?” she asked, arching her eyebrows.
“What are you talking about?” Jilly asked, but her belly made an unexpected fist of embarrassment that she tried to ignore. “Come sit with us for a minute. It’ll be the baby’s first swing ride.”
Gwen sat down beside them. “I mean . . . it’s a pretty old-fashioned courting technique to sit on the girl’s porch swing and romance her.”
Tage pulled his arm out from behind Jilly’s head.
Jilly sat up, and the swing rocked crazily. “That’s not funny!” Is that what all those crazy feelings were? she wondered. She stared at Tage and caught the slight flush that stained his cheeks before he looked away.
He didn’t say a word.