Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  But Liam was long-limbed and long-haired and kissed like a house afire, and I forgot my promise, and I closed my eyes. And that’s when I saw him—a figure, moving form, enormous shadow appearing somewhere between my eyes and the air. I felt again how easy it was to be that small—how my chin fit in a mouth, my buttocks in the crook of a hip, how easy it was then to be filled.

  Behind closed eyes, I was six again, turning cartwheels out on the sidewalk, with my mother in the kitchen window, calling, “Be careful not to turn into the road!” But I kept turning, windmilling from asphalt to sky, asphalt to sky. I smelled the beefsteak on the barbecue, where my father called over the fence to the neighbor, saying, “This is the life.” But when I hear his voice—my father’s—it is enough to send me sideways. I fall into the street. My knees are scraped and filled with rocks, but I’m almost me again, knees wide open, panties pushed to the side. I’m gone now from the wavy windows covered with falling rain: someone else has taken my place. I’m cloud now. Blue sky. I’m gone. Liam is there, but I can’t see him anymore.

  And then.

  He bites my lip. I bite back. Pain is what I know. We move together like we’ve known one another all along. And when finally it happens, I realize that it isn’t my father filling me this time; he is only making me fall. My eyes are open and staring at Liam, who looks back and almost seems to know. And when finally it happens, Liam filling me, I open my eyes and I’m back.

  And Liam says, “Isn’t sex amazing?”

  And I say, “Yes.”

  It takes only that one time for Liam to recognize what was in my childhood, how I was a girl marked in the way so many girls are marked—keeping the terrible secret from everyone, except those who themselves carried the undeniable mark.

  After, we got up. He put his jeans and T-shirt back on.

  “You’re leaving?” I asked, putting on my tuxedo shirt and sounding like a college girl who just got fucked on a first non-date.

  “Oh no, but … my personal statement. Do you mind?” he asked.

  “No, not at all,” I said, blinking. I’d completely forgotten. He was out the door to his truck and back in an instant, a crumpled little stack of white paper filled with three pages of single-spaced, typed material, PERSONAL STATEMENT OF MR. LIAM RIVERS blazing across the top of the first page in Baskerville Old Face font.

  I sat down on one love seat with it and began to read. He stood looking at the ruined bookshelf, reaching up from time to time just as I often did to try to pry one book or another out from the expanded wreck.

  The books wouldn’t budge.

  He tilted the shelf toward him, balanced it on his knees, tried to bang the separated frame of it back together with his palms. His statement paper was pretty straightforward—about his impoverished childhood, his alcoholic father, and how as a child he’d vowed that if he ever found a way to get to college, he promised himself he’d go to medical school so he could help the disadvantaged. It was spectacularly poorly written, but I didn’t want to tell him that. I wasn’t sure what to say. I sat staring at the page long after I’d finished reading.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked, a look of hope in his bloodshot eyes.

  “When do you have to send this off?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow,” he said apologetically. “I have to work on it when I get home. Actually, I have to get going in a minute here.”

  “In that case, there’s just one thing I can tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Maybe try not to start every single sentence with the word I.”

  SO MUCH CALAMITY SMOKE

  Not long after we started squatting in the FEMA trailer they wouldn’t take away, I realized that in the very near future we were going to have to go back home. My black eyes were still dark as the tree trunks in the salt-water-scorched piney woods surrounding us. It had been only four days since that wretched night, but I’d left the next morning and had already filed for divorce. My attorney, one Miss Addison McClanahan, was making swift work on a motion to have Liam removed from what was now referred to as the “marital residence.”

  I didn’t know Addison McClanahan from a hole in an altar guild cloth before the attack. She went to St. John’s Episcopal and sat behind me and my babies in the old wooden pew with her tall, handsome husband and sweet little girl, her gravelly voice raising in perfect alto harmony with the old hymns. She was one of those perfect Old Ocean Springs gals who made me a little nervous. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her, not at all—it was just that I was slightly intimidated by her perfect blond coif, deep connections in the community, and seemingly perfect family. Not only that, but she had a big billboard out to the entrance of the I-10 advertising, “Addison McClanahan, Attorney at Law,” her smile wide, her eyes steely, her suit crimson and sharp-shouldered.

  I had spent the first night in the Gulf Coast Women’s Center for Nonviolence, awake till dawn, huddled in a bunk bed with all three kids, singing “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” over and over to my babies until some lady down the hall hollered, “Shut up, stupid!”

  The next morning, Lana called the secret cell phone Mama’d sent me from California months earlier, after Liam had forbidden me to have a phone, and said to pack up our stuff and come out to Latimer, a little town north of the coast, where she lived with the extended Manning clan entire. Her brother was in possession of “one bona fide deluxe FEMA trailer” in which we could—for the time being—hide out. For now, my residence was that borrowed FEMA trailer, and I was glad of it.

  If I was going to leave that little tin haven of security, my husband was going to have to be long gone from the marital residence before I’d go. Liam (said soon-to-be ex-husband) was still rattling around the immaculate behemoth of a house, drinking and carrying on pretty much as he always did, as if life itself hadn’t gone up in so much calamity smoke. Tragedy and violence were realities he was unwilling to entertain: as far as he was concerned, life was just fine and I’d return to my senses and be home shortly. About the only thing different in the days following that wretched night was his new mission as drunken telephone harasser, leaving threatening messages for me at my mama’s house in Sacramento.

  Liam was sure I was camped out in Mama’s rickety parsonage house next door to the church in Sacramento, where she’d been the janitor for twenty-odd years, and so he called her landline repeatedly, on the hour. He’d leave beseeching messages one minute about how I was only making things worse and how we could still put things back together, then immediately call back and read—in a muddy, deepwater-bayou-bottom slur—verbatim, the interstate kidnapping law he’d found who knows where the next.

  “Interstate child abduction by a parent is a felony offense, punishable by permanent loss of custody and federal prison time, plus a fine of up to…” He faded off, belching under his breath. “Up to, up to, well, a fine, punishable, felony, baby, you better…”

  This was his official drunk voice, a kind of oratory desperation he affected when he wanted to make a point while ruthlessly obliterated.

  I was used to it; Mama was not.

  “I feel sort of sad for him, really,” Mama started, her gentle voice lilting, forgiving.

  “Mama.”

  “But he sounds so sad…”

  “Mama.”

  I knew better. Mama hadn’t seen me yet, hadn’t witnessed the ravages of his marks on my skin; she couldn’t quite accept what he’d become. I knew he was getting to her, and I begged her not to answer his calls, no matter what.

  “He really used to be a nice young man,” she started.

  “Mama.”

  “Maybe I could talk to him.”

  “I’m serious, Mama. No. Matter. What.”

  “I could call his mama.”

  “Mama.”

  “Maybe I could answer when he’s not drunk?”

  “Mama. He tried to kill me. He stabbed me. He strangled me.”

  “I know, okay.”

  It reminded me of
all the times I’d gone to my mama about Daddy going after me at night and she’d said, “He must have had too much to drink.” I’d lost count at some point. Those conversations echoed in my head like a hymnal refrain.

  Mama, Papa touched me.

  He’s a good man.

  Mama, Papa touched me.

  Be good, sweetie.

  Mama, Papa touched me.

  He must have had too much to drink.

  Mama, Papa touched me.

  Your papa does a lot of good in this world.

  Mama, Papa touched me.

  You want us to be homeless?

  Mama, Papa touched me.

  Hush up, young lady.

  Mama, Papa touched me.

  Nice young ladies don’t talk like that.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “What, Mama?”

  “Where are you staying? Did you get a nice hotel?”

  “No, Mama. We’re with friends.”

  “I just hate that this happened. I really do. For all of you.”

  I knew she meant him, too. In other moments, later, she’d get mad at him. It was her way. She was codependent to the brutal end, but there was no changing her now. She was the only mama I had.

  “How are the babies?”

  “They’re okay. We’re all okay, Mama. Just promise me you won’t talk to him.”

  I couldn’t trust she wouldn’t let slip the fact I was not hiding out in Sacramento but was instead right there on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, within Liam’s easy, angry reach.

  “Well, I’ll sure try not to.”

  The minute Liam found out I was still within hair-pulling range, any flimsy scrap of security I had would go up in flames like so much crumpled wrapping paper in a roaring-hot Christmas morning hearth. So Liam stayed put in our house in Ocean Springs’s swankiest planned deepwater bayou subdivision, the Bayou Sauvage, while the brood and I lay low in our hijacked FEMA trailer on the Mannings’ burned-out ancestral seat.

  The fanatical, rambling messages continued—official declarations that the Ocean Springs Police, the Jackson County Sheriff, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, even the goddamned FBI had been informed.

  Mama’d call me on my secret cell to keep me updated.

  One message really scared her in a way that only a professional, chief of medicine, bank board member voice droning on in dulcet tones could.

  “Hello, this message is for Mary Anderson, or for any members of the Anderson family related to Alice Mary Anderson, or any known parties willfully related to the interstate abduction of the minor children known respectively as child one, Avery Macen Anderson Rivers, child two, Grayson Layne Anderson Rivers, and child three, Aidan Lake Anderson Rivers. The FBI will be in direct contact with you within the next forty-eight hours regarding the felony offense of interstate kidnapping and your criminal involvement with said offense—just thought you’d like to know. You’re really screwing yourself.”

  When Mama called to tell me, half whispering the relayed message, which she failed to realize was irrelevant, as I’d not taken the children to California and she was, therefore, not involved in a felony kidnapping conspiracy, Mama substituted the words screwing yourself with you-know-what-ing yourself, the tone of her voice rising in an almost panic that told me she was getting to the end of her rope of being involved.

  There was nothing I could do about it; one hour Liam would leave menacing threats of bodily harm, holier-than-thou proclamations of God’s wrath by first light the next.

  Mama’s answering machine sounded like a broken record of the last sixteen years of my life.

  I tried my God’s honest to keep the brood entertained until we had our next day in court. At this point, Liam didn’t know I’d been to court at all. It was a grace period of sorts—not only a time before he was involved in the whole mess of family court but a window in which I still held dear to my early-days Pollyanna notion that the court of the great state of Mississippi was going to be an absolute victory of justice for me.

  That there’d be justice at all.

  I was a great wife and mother, right? Everyone in town knew it, I reasoned to myself as I spent sleepless hours squeezed between five-year-old Avery on one side, the thumb-sucking boys on the other, atop the rock-hard, bug spray–scented, full-sized mattress of the trailer each night.

  Never mind the candy necklace of bruises around my neck, never mind the scabby gashes where I’d clawed his hands from my neck, never mind the raw raised scrapes across my belly from the menacing tip of our kitchen butcher knife. Never mind the punctured pink T-shirt and white tank top and carefully wrapped butcher knife I had in a handbag hidden on the top shelf of the trailer fridge, the blood surrounding a hole in the same shape as the puncture wound above my heart.

  Honestly, by that time in my life, I wasn’t used to being right on any occasion, which is why I ticked off a desperate list of reasons I was entitled to protection from a husband who seemed to be—at least from the outside, the way my father did my whole life growing up—ideal.

  Our home was run like an immaculate island resort.

  Our little slice of extravagant unreal estate, finished just a few months before the storm, was a cross between a coastal estate and a Paris flat, spare and clean and ocean-influenced and filled with books.

  I had the mantel around the custom-designed eight-foot fireplace fitted with the same glittery mercury glass tiles that graced the backsplash of our plantation chic country kitchen. Chandeliers lit every room, including the powder room off the study, baby pink and cobalt and savanna green and glinting jet crystals hanging like miniature sugared fruit. I’d had the ceilings built to twelve feet and, downstairs, each one to the last was painted a blameless, true sky blue.

  The first time Liam’s hardscrabble parents came to visit, his mama looked up at that ceiling and sang, “Blue skies, nothing but blue skies, nothing but blue skies, from now on,” the contempt dripping off her unmistakable in a way that sounded like a warning more than anything else.

  I should have taken heed.

  But the blue skies of our life, of our nine-year marriage, were a little cloudy, and had been getting cloudier by the day ever since the storm. In Ocean Springs—in fact, everywhere along the Gulf Coast—we didn’t refer to the havoc that came in like a drunken vixen to our lives as “Hurricane Katrina.” In social halls and parking lots, in the blacked-out freezer section down at the Walmart, on roadsides next to sky-high debris piles, what we talked about, the way we named that wanton destruction was simply “the storm.”

  And night after night, in that wretched, toxic trailer bed, as my babies snored next to me like baby doves, my midnight musing—a kind of desperate conjuring—continued.

  Surely, it’d be clear I was a good mother, with our well-behaved children spit-shined within an inch of their pristine lives. My girlfriends called me the Baby Whisperer with not even a teensy trace of irony or disdain. I had a secret for maintaining the flawless silence of infants through endless Sunday services; a knack for achieving a baby’s full night sleep like clockwork at eight weeks old; a gift for being the one woman at garden club into whose arms you could plop any baby and be assured no fit would ensue.

  My children’s birthday parties were extravaganzas of organic culinary delights, wholesome yet gratuitous entertainment of circus-like proportions. Castle bounce house for the girls, monster truck bounce house for the boys, with ponies circling the kitchen garden like moody unicorns, glittered and ashamed.

  Of course, these parties took place under the carnival paintings of horror hanging from every wall. Except for my closest girlfriends, no one invited me back in return.

  Dinner parties were executed with a flawless devotion to elegant precision. Each bathroom stocked with baskets of fanned-out hand towels in the shaped of elaborate seashell conchs. The floors glistened to a fare-thee-well; the Schonbek New Orleans crystal chandeliers in every room glistened like starlight from every high ceiling. Honestly, I don’t know h
ow in the helicopter I managed to live up to Liam’s ever-rising standards, but I did. Everything in our little small-town, traditional, pitch-perfect life was flawless—everything, that is, but the man of the house, my “sweets,” Daddy, the man.

  Everything went right until everything went wrong.

  I’d been working for years to get Liam help for his drinking and, as he called it, his “crazy.” He always laughed a maniacal laugh when he referred to “my crazy” and used it often as an excuse for poor behavior.

  He’d been diagnosed with a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder when I was pregnant with Avery, after a wild night in which he happened to hear a Cake song on the radio and, knowing that I had dated the lead singer, screamed at me about a “secret affair” and how I was “carrying the Cake baby,” and finally he chased me out of the house until I escaped in my little red Honda Prelude. He chased me down the street, with my driver’s door open and him holding on to the door, until finally I could pull away and go to Mama’s.

  As yet unmarried, I called the next morning and vowed I’d live a separate life altogether with my baby girl unless he got his increasingly bizarre behaviors in order and quick. And he did. He got a diagnosis, stopped drinking, started going to AA nearly every night.

  I bought one of those god-awful silk slips of a wedding dress that I thought was Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy–esque but in pictures just looks like I was wearing, well, a slip, and married him. He took his high-dose Fluvoxamine, and soon the hand washing, the superstitious touching of doorknobs and faucets, the equation of death with elaborate patterns of dimes he would not allow me to pick up from windowsills faded.

  Over the years, he went on and off various drugs—mostly off. As soon as he’d get it all under control, he’d decide he was fine and didn’t need the medicine anymore. Then when things would start to spiral out of control, he’d self-medicate with samples from work and yet more alcohol. You’d think, as an internist, he’d know better. But the mind is sometimes stronger than common sense, and doctors are notorious for being their own worst caretakers. As the chief of medicine at Ocean Springs Hospital, he was devoted as a newlywed to his mental health vow of secrecy.