Running from Monday

by Lea Sims

  “I really wish I hadn’t, but yes, I heard a good bit of it.”

  “Oh goodness, Drew,” she exhaled slowly, not sure what to say. Then her eyes flared, a sudden thought gripping her. “Did anyone else hear it? Were the others in here?”

  “No, they were all leaving when I came in to do the dishes.”

  “Well, it would have been better for you not to know, that’s for sure. It’s really Delaney’s story to tell.” She sighed and sagged back into her chair. “But seeing as how you do know, I can’t say I’m sorry about it, because truth be told, I’m having a devil of a time wrapping my mind around it.”

  “It’s pretty horrifying,” he agreed grimly. He leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees and hands laced loosely together. His expression was somber, his eyes shadowed with concern. “I only know bits and pieces about Ms. Elizabeth’s life before she came to Refresh. How did Delaney end up living with Elizabeth and Jimmy?”

  “Her parents were killed in a car accident when she was just ten years old. She was an only child. Elizabeth and Jimmy never had children of their own, and Elizabeth spent a lot of time watching Delaney from the time she was a baby because her sister—Delaney’s momma—worked the second shift as a nurse at the hospital. So, when her parents died, it was only natural she’d go to live with Elizabeth and Jimmy.” She paused to blow her nose in her Kleenex.

  “I remember that funeral like it was yesterday,” she continued. “Elizabeth and I had only been friends a year or two at that point, but I was asked by the pastor to sing at the service. You never saw a sadder funeral in your life, Drew. Those two caskets side by side at the front of the aisle, and Delaney sitting on the front row staring at them absolutely fixated through the entire service, shoulders trembling and shaking the whole time. It was awful. At the graveside service, when it was time for everyone to go, she ran up and stood between the two caskets, a hand on each one, crying and begging the pastor not to put her momma and daddy in the ground. It tore my heart out to hear that girl wailing.”

  “That’s terrible,” Drew said, struck by the picture Claire was painting. “She had a really hard time today when we were pulling out of the cemetery. She couldn’t take her eyes off Elizabeth’s casket sitting under the canopy. I imagine she was reliving that memory. That’s a lot for a child to process.”

  “It was very hard,” Claire said. “I’m honestly not sure how any child that age can rebound from having both parents ripped out of their life in an instant, but she seemed to recover from it fairly well after the first year, though, and appeared to settle into her life with Elizabeth and Jimmy. I would see her often around the church. She was always with Elizabeth…like a little shadow. If Elizabeth was at the church, Delaney was at the church. If Elizabeth was stuffing membership packets, Delaney was stuffing membership packets. If Elizabeth was taking a meal to a family, Delaney was taking it with her.” It suddenly struck Claire why Delaney had stayed so close to Elizabeth. She didn’t want to go home or be left alone with Jimmy.

  “I thought you said Elizabeth and Delaney were estranged,” Drew said. “Sounds like they were close at one time at least.”

  “They were, but Delaney really started pulling away from Elizabeth in high school. She withdrew from everyone, actually. She stopped coming to youth group, stopped showing up for church suppers, stopped accompanying Elizabeth to women’s group. She came to Sunday service only because Elizabeth and Jimmy required it, but she’d slip out the instant the service was over. Whenever she was around, she was very closed off, and you could tell she resented the heck out of being there.

  “Everyone who knew that girl growing up could tell you that she went from being a bright-eyed, joyful girl who was quick to laugh and eager to please to a detached and reclusive teenager who kept to herself and would rarely talk to anyone…except her dog.” Claire had a sudden recollection of Delaney sitting on the hood of her Jeep in the 7-11 parking lot, throwing a Frisbee for her dog into the vacant lot next to the convenience store. How often had she seen Delaney up there by herself like that? Dozens, probably. Knowing what she knew now, Claire’s heart broke for the girl who had avoided going home.

  “How bad do you think it was?” he whispered, not looking directly at Claire. He almost wished he hadn’t asked. He didn’t think he wanted to go there. If something fierce rose up in Drew Hemming at the thought of someone abusing an animal, it was exceeded only by the thought of someone abusing a child.

  “I don’t know the details, but she said it was bad and that it began when she was six years old.” Seeing the fire that suddenly flared in Drew’s eyes, she said, “I know! I felt the same way. How could anyone do such a thing to a child that young?”

  The intensity of his feelings in that moment surprised Drew. He had known this woman for less than a week, but he was suddenly seized by an irrational desire to protect her and it was all he could do to stay put in his chair. Claire watched him closely, took in the pained look on his face and could see him mentally pacing. His reaction comforted her. He wasn’t repulsed by what he’d heard. His response was to protect and defend. “Did he—did he rape her, do you think, Ms. Claire?” Drew’s voice was low and strained.

  “I don’t know, Drew. When I asked her if she thought Elizabeth knew or suspected this was happening in their house, Delaney said her uncle was a master manipulator and that he knew Elizabeth was a heavy sleeper. That tells me Jimmy was coming to her room at night. I don’t know how often or to what degree he was abusing her—maybe it was molesting but if it started when she was that young, it probably progressed to more…but I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know.”

  Drew’s eyes widened as some of the dots from earlier in the day now connected in his brain. “That’s what was going on today at the graveside! I came up behind her and touched her on the arm, and when she turned around, she had the most terrified look on her face. I couldn’t figure out what had frightened her, but I realize now that she had been staring at Ms. Elizabeth’s headstone…at Jimmy’s name.”

  Claire nodded. “She didn’t come home for Jimmy’s funeral, so today would have been the first time she’d seen it.” She sighed again. “I remember being very disappointed in Delaney when she didn’t come home to help Elizabeth with Jimmy when it got bad at the end, and when Elizabeth told me Delaney wasn’t coming down from New York for the funeral, I came really close to calling her up and giving her a piece of my mind. I’m really glad now that I didn’t.”

  “And you don’t think Elizabeth knew about it?” Drew found it almost implausible that such activity could be going on right under someone’s nose and them not have a clue, especially a wife not knowing her own husband was leaving their bed frequently in the middle of the night. That thought was deeply disturbing. “How could she not know this was going on?”

  “If she knew or even suspected it and was able to hide it from me all these years, I would be shocked. I would have to question everything I know about her. I mean, you got to know her, Drew. Elizabeth wore her emotions on her sleeve. She was very transparent about everything.” She shook her head emphatically. “No. There was no way she knew about this. It would have devastated her.”

  “But how could she not know…how could he pull that off for years? I don’t understand how that happens.”

  Claire thought about Jimmy Lowell. “You had to have known Jimmy to understand that. He was a very charismatic guy. He knew everybody. We never went out anywhere that he didn’t run into at least three people he knew. He could strike up a conversation with anyone and he’d always leave you laughing. He was full of jokes and witty remarks. He was very well thought of at work—at least for most of his career. Later his drinking became harder to hide, and it ended up costing him his job, but for the most part, he was a joker and a happy drunk. You know, the life of the party. And everyone in town had a Jimmy story. You should have seen the turn out for his funeral and all the people who stood
up to share stories about him and the funny scrapes he got into as a teenager. At the church, people generally loved him, though a lot of people whispered about his drinking. Most people would never have thought Jimmy capable of this kind of behavior.”

  “Most people?”

  Claire grimaced. “When Delaney confessed this to me tonight, I have to admit that it shocked me but it didn’t surprise me. Don’t get me wrong. I never suspected anything like this and I’m devastated to learn it, but almost the instant she said it, I knew without question it was true. Not only did it finally explain Delaney’s behavior, but it confirmed a red flag I always had about Jimmy. There was always something…off…about him. He was too slick, too sure of himself. And there was something about his eyes. There was a coldness in his eyes that didn’t match his personality. It always creeped me out a little. But probably the biggest reason I didn’t like him was because his drinking was a huge source of pain for Elizabeth, and when he didn’t think anyone was looking, he wasn’t always kind to her. He was quick to belittle her under his breath and put her in her place. That told me pretty much all I needed to know about him.”

  Claire got up and walked over to a set of bookshelves that lined a wall of her living room. She ran a finger over the spines of a set of large photo albums on the bottom row, and then pulled one of them out. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for, then turned the album around for Drew to look. She tapped a finger on a slightly yellowed photo in one of the picture sleeves. It was a picture of two couples sitting on Claire’s back porch. Claire and Elizabeth were sitting together on the porch swing, each looking about twenty years younger than Drew had ever seen them. He smiled at their younger faces grinning back at him. A tall, thin man sat in a wicker chair beside them, and a shorter, stockier man was sitting on the porch railing, both hands planted beside him, looking directly into the camera. “That’s Jimmy on the rail, isn’t it?”

  Claire nodded. “Yes, that’s my Dale in the chair. You’d never mistake him for Jimmy. They were like Mutt and Jeff. But you see that look right there? That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Drew peered closer and took in the chiseled face of Jimmy Lowell. He was well-built, very tan, and good-looking in a rugged, James-Dean kind of way. But the dark, hooded eyes staring back at him from the picture were without warmth, just as Claire said, and if he had to render a judgment about the man based solely on this picture, he’d say there was almost a cruel edge in his gaze that was unsettling. Drew’s eye then caught the outline of a tattoo peeking out from under Jimmy’s right shirt sleeve. “What’s that tattoo on his arm?” he asked, curious.

  “Marine Corps,” Claire said. “He served a tour in Vietnam toward the end of the war—went over in ’70, I think, and came home when troops withdrew in ’72. He was a helicopter mechanic. Actually, he was certified to work on pretty much anything that flew, and he was also really good with fixing cars. Dale always called Jimmy when something was wrong with one of our vehicles.”

  “He was older than Elizabeth by a fair bit if he was in Vietnam,” Drew stated, doing the math in his head. Elizabeth was only fifty-six when she died, which meant she was born in 1961. She was eleven years old when Jimmy Lowell came back from Vietnam.

  “He was eleven years older than her. They met when she was twenty and he was thirty-one and were married a year later. I think their age difference may have had a lot to do with why Elizabeth never knew what Jimmy was up to. She was young and very naive, and she always deferred to his experience and age. He called all the shots, and she went along with whatever he said. I always thought their relationship was a little weird that way. It just made it even harder when his drinking got out of control and his health began to decline. She had to switch roles with him, and she had a hard time getting him to respect and listen to her, and toward the end, he really needed to.”

  “When was this picture taken?” Drew asked.

  “That was March of 1996, I believe,” Claire said. “The four of us were on our way to Atlanta to see Garth Brooks at the Omni.”

  “So Delaney was already living with them by this time.” Drew’s face tightened as he stared back down at Jimmy Lowell. Claire blew out a heavy breath. They were both thinking the same thing. When this picture was taken, the rugged man of forty-four sitting on that railing was sexually molesting a twelve-year-old girl and had been doing it for at least six years. And none of the other people smiling back from the photo had any clue it was going on. “It’s pretty frightening, isn’t it?” Drew whispered. “That you can think you know the person sitting across from you in a friendship or sleeping next to you in a marriage and actually have no idea what darkness they’re hiding.”

  “I think you’ve just articulated how I feel right now, Drew.” Claire slammed the album shut. “It makes me want to yank every photo I have of him out of these albums and burn them all, but I’d be burning precious pictures of Elizabeth if I did. My heart hurts so much right now for both of them, Delaney and Elizabeth, to have lived with such a broken and perverse human being for so long. Part of me is very glad that Elizabeth didn’t know—that somehow my sweet, trusting and often gullible friend managed to make it through all of that oblivious to who her husband really was. She lived and died never knowing it.”

  “And the other part?”

  “The bigger part of me wishes I or Elizabeth or someone had paid closer attention, recognized the signs of trauma and abuse in Delaney, and intervened to rescue her. She needed rescuing, Drew! And no one did it. No one saw her. No one took the time to really see her. She has carried this story and this pain inside her all this time. Alone! And to her credit, when no one came along to rescue her, she rescued herself.” Claire’s voice broke, face contorting painfully, and she began to weep. She sank to the floor and buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking. Drew dropped down beside her, pulled Claire into his arms, and held her while she wept. He didn’t say a word, just let her cry it out. She had been holding back this flood of tears all day, probably for several days. At one point, her sobs diminished and she pulled back from him suddenly and looked up into his face. “Drew, this is why she left the church. This is why she turned her back on God!”

  He thought about the question Delaney had asked Jason during the service—What about the choices other people make? The ones you have no control over—the ones that pull your whole world down around you? Where is God when that happens?” And then he remembered her comment to him in the car when he had jokingly told her that God always takes our calls—I’ve always gotten a busy signal. Of course she would feel that way. Claire had just said it—no one came to her rescue. How many prayers had she prayed in that church? How many times must she have cried out to God in the darkness of her bedroom as a young girl, only to be abandoned to the cruelty of her uncle over and over again? If Drew was not deeply convinced of the love of God and the often invisible work of his hands, he would have been sorely tempted to question the Almighty himself in this moment. These were the scenarios when it was most difficult to understand the ways of God, but Drew knew that no matter what God was doing, he was always working things for the good.

  “Based on a number of things she’s said to me in the last day or two,” he said, nodding in agreement. “I believe you’re right, Claire. And you could hardly blame her for wanting no part of a God, a church, or a family who had allowed these things to happen to her. But it’s also very obvious to me that God is working on her heart through all of this. She went and made a new life for herself in New York, but she brought all this with her. She may have thought she left it all behind, but you can’t leave behind what’s inside you. You and I both learned that in Freedom. This pain…this story…it has shaped who she is and the choices she’s made. She’s recently divorced, and she said today that she thinks she’s ‘broken’ when it comes to relationships. I watched her quite a bit today.” He ignored Claire’s raised eyebrow. “What I saw i
s a woman who is struggling to keep all this locked down and failing miserably to do so. It’s all bubbling up to the surface. And I believe God has a plan to draw it all out and heal those wounds.”

  Claire considered that. “Well, God certainly used Elizabeth’s death to bring Delaney home, and being here enabled her to share her story with someone for the first time. So yes, maybe he’s working in all of this.” That thought cheered her up a bit. “How beautiful would it be if Elizabeth dying was actually the event that gave life to Delaney. Elizabeth would have considered that a cause worth dying for, that’s for sure. She loved that girl so.”

  She got up from the floor and wiped her eyes with a tissue. Then she turned to Drew and gave him a big hug. “Drew Hemming, you are a treasure, do you know that? I don’t know any other young single guy who would have dedicated their entire day to a couple of old girls like me and Elizabeth. Next time your momma comes into town, I’m going to thank her again for raising you so well.”

  He gave her a squeeze and headed to the front door. As he stepped out on the porch, a thought occurred to him and he turned back to Claire with a quizzical look on his face. “One thing is very curious to me about Delaney’s story. You said that she went through a pretty dramatic change in high school, but by that time, Jimmy had been abusing her for a number of years. What happened in high school…what was the straw that broke the camel’s back, do you think?”

  “Huh…that’s a good question.” Claire looked puzzled, searching her memory for some landmark event that could have accounted for it. “You know, she did run away from home in tenth grade. Elizabeth called me in a dead-out panic because she’d come home from work and found a note on Delaney’s desk that said the girl was ‘emancipating’ herself. I chuckled at the time because I thought Delaney was just being dramatic. But I rushed over to pick up Elizabeth and we drove around all evening trying to find her, talking to kids at the 7-11, going by the school and the park. When we couldn’t find her after a few hours, Elizabeth was freaking out, so we went to the police station. They sent us home to wait, and it wasn’t until the next morning that they finally knocked on the door with Delaney in tow. They had found her on the backside of the old paper mill. I’ll never forget her standing on that porch behind that cop, looking like something the cat drug in, arms folded defiantly across her chest and…get this…a dog beside her. She’d found a stray dog at the mill, tied a rope around its neck as a leash, and insisted the dog had to come with her when the cops brought her back…like she was Little Orphan Annie or something.”