Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  “Well, according to this motion, now Liam states—honey, are you sitting down?”

  “No, I am not sitting down. Addison. What are they saying?”

  “They are saying that you had a”—and here her voice changed because the horror of it was so bad she had to speak as if quoting them because I could tell she could barely bring herself to say it aloud to me—“that you had a lifelong, consensual sexual relationship with your father.”

  I dropped the phone and threw up all over the floor.

  * * *

  The next morning, Avery and I traipsed back over to Jack Calhoun’s office to have another “talk.” He had Avery come in first and was done in just a few minutes.

  When I sat down across from him at his desk, he immediately reassured me in his deep drawl, “Alice, this whole thing is goddamned bull crap. I know you didn’t do that to Avery.”

  “Thank God. So it’s not going to go anywhere?” I asked.

  “Now, I didn’t say that. I wish that was how things worked, but it’s not,” he said, sliding two photographs across his desk in front of me. In both, Avery was naked, wet, hunched over sitting on her haunches with her little behind showing, in what looked to be a darkened room on dirty carpet. Her bruise was in full display.

  “Now, this don’t look good,” Jack said.

  “It looks horrible!” I blurted out, not sure if I was more mad or devastated. “Jack, he’s a doctor; he knows the protocol. If he wanted to document abuse, he could have done it at the hospital when he was having her ribs x-rayed!”

  “I know, I know,” Jack said, smiling, trying to reassure me. “But the judge is going to have to give him his due process.”

  My fingers still rested on the two photographs of Avery. In one, the top of her bottom, that sweet little split, showed clearly.

  “These photos are the only child abuse that’s happened,” I said.

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  “Jack, this is crazy. I’m not the one that did anything wrong. Ethel Kahn is meeting with Liam, and they’re deciding that I have multiple personalities and am going to murder my children? Does that make any sense?”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense, Alice, but you’re going to have to fight it. I hope you took Addison’s advice. Court’s Friday—bring as many people as you can.”

  For a moment, I thought he was going to hug me. I was furious with him, wanting him to somehow call bull on the whole thing, like he said, and put a stop to it. But he couldn’t. And he didn’t hug me.

  It felt like the whole world was imploding on me.

  “Jack?” I said, a panicked sob escaping my throat. “This is bad.”

  “Darlin’, just hang in there. What I’m fixin’ to do is to set that goddamned pot to boil.”

  “But what if—” I started.

  He held up his hand. “No what-ifs, Alice. I’m gonna tell you something: I’m goddamned fucking furious now. But the next couple of weeks are going to be hell. Pull up your bootstraps, you hear?”

  “Thanks, Jack,” I managed to whisper as I left. He placed his hand in the small of my back as I left his office, and I wished I could just fall into his arms and let him make it all go away. I was like the dying girl with the crush on her doctor—hope’ll do that to a girl, make you all weak at the knees when your heart is breaking.

  “Okay, go. Call your friends. All of them, hear? Every last goddamn one of them. And then call a few more,” he said, laughing.

  And that’s how my house ended up full to the gills.

  Friday morning, I would come to court with my whole family, eighteen friends, my priest, the kids’ piano teacher, two Walmart greeters, Mac and Daddy, two of Liam’s old nurses, three of his colleagues from the hospital, a friend’s nanny, the cleaning ladies that serviced his office and sometimes our house, a doctor who used to work for him, seven teachers from the Catholic school, five neighbors, and Tim Burr.

  FEMA Trailer Courtroom A would be standing room only.

  Liam’s only witnesses would be Ethel Kahn and his parents. A court-appointed psychologist named Dr. Colette Colette would sit front and center. When I took my place in the courtroom, Jack Calhoun would lean in to me and whisper in my ear, “Welcome to the circus.”

  Their emergency hearing was granted on the grounds of erring on the side of caution for the safety of the children.

  And that’s when all hell broke loose.

  PRETTY PICTURES

  My flip phone was on double duty. In the two days since we’d received the emergency motion to appear, I’d been calling everyone and Jesus to beg them to come testify on my good behalf. Up until now, I’d tried to keep most of what happened quiet in town, but now that I was in danger of losing custody of the sweet three, all bets were off. I’d lined up half of town to come to court already, but Addison said to get “anyone and everyone and people who matter.”

  And they came—all my immediate family (my mama, brother, niece, nephew) from California, Auntie Rie from Fargo, and not only my brother’s girlfriend but his ex-wife and her husband, too. Mama opened a new credit card to purchase most of the tickets. And now the day before the hearing had arrived, and my normally cavernous house was chock-full of everyone who loves me in this world.

  The children slept with me in my room, and the rest of the place was filled with people sleeping on kids’ beds, on blow-up mattresses, on couches, and on porch lounges. Even the rocking chair in the great room was utilized—my brother’s tattooed ex-wife sprawled there, while my brother and his girlfriend of ten years bunked in the baby’s room upstairs. Emergency was an understatement.

  After we had moved out of the FEMA trailer on Mac and Daddy’s land and into the house, I’d tried to resume life as usual, minus the controlling, abusive tyrant. The first thing we’d done when we got back home was go room to room, taking down all the oversized paintings Liam had gifted me over the years.

  Liam thought of himself as a tortured artist, but the only one who was tortured by his art was me. And anyone who came to our house. And our children. We had half a dozen paintings hanging prominently throughout the house, and they were all of “me.”

  Usually, I was naked. Emaciated, to be exact. Above me: doves carrying pistols that pointed at my head. My eyes bulged obscenely from my haggard face: the eyes of a wild animal. About a month after I’d lost our baby five months in (after the new nursery was all set up, after the children had long been campaigning for names), he painted and then gave me a piece commemorating the experience. Maybe it would feature an angel, symbolic rays of light breaking through the darkness? Maybe a dove suspended in a forever-blue sky.

  In the painting, I’m standing, naked, on enormous flat, webbed feet with an flat aura like a deactivated halo surrounding my distorted, distended body. I seem to be holding something in my arms. On closer inspection, my arms are simply empty, but there is a dead baby, gray and lifeless, nestled under my sunken rib cage. Below me on the grass is the shadow of death, with images of my three living children, dressed as winged angels, at my feet. I’ll never forget the sensation I felt when he carried it in at breakfast, the sweet three tucked into their places at the table, polished up to a fare-thee-well, on Mother’s Day Sunday.

  The children were silent. I was silent.

  Liam, said, “Ta-da! Don’t you love it?”

  “It’s, well, kind of sad, don’t you think?” I ventured cautiously.

  He didn’t wait for my response. “Isn’t it amazing? Don’t you love it? Isn’t it like Frida Kahlo?”

  Frida Kahlo was my favorite painter. I liked the deep sense of self-knowledge, of brutal beauty in her work, the way that pain and tragedy were transformed into a kind of archetypal, redemptive truth. Liam’s painting was nothing like Frida Kahlo. Despite my cool response, Liam got out a hammer and nail and went to work hanging it right above the fireplace.

  From that Mother’s Day on we moved around that death painting as if a cartoon of grief was acceptable mantelpiece décor. In e
very room in that house there was something from which I needed, for sanity’s sake, to avert my eyes.

  When the kids and I moved back into the house after Liam had been removed, I decided to take all the paintings down. One by one. I didn’t say why I wanted them down; I just told the kids that maybe Daddy was going to want them back. The kids followed me around as I climbed onto counters and chairs, feet bare, hammer in my back pocket, balancing the oversized canvases in my arms, stacking them face toward the walls.

  “Yay! Scary paintings gone!” they cheered, nearly dancing with delight. “Go away, skeletons! Go away, naked Mama!” they yelled, marching behind me.

  I think seeing me remove these warped, hideous images of myself from our walls was the first time, maybe ever, that the kids saw me stand up for who I really was.

  Not fat.

  Not ugly.

  Not stupid.

  It was nice to be back in the house, but it hadn’t been easy. I was forever seeing him, here or there, his stupid fake-gun finger pointing at me from his car. But would he really shoot me?

  I had no doubt he’d like to. After his ejection from the house, Liam swiftly hired the meanest attorney on the coast, one Buford Cooter Garland, Esquire (a man stuffed so completely into his too-small, baby-blue polyester suit he could barely contain the good ol’ belly spilling over his cracked alligator belt). But Addison had, thank heavens, worked for Buford straight out of law school before starting her own practice, so she knew his tricks and warned me to gear up for a fight.

  “It’s going to be ugly,” she warned in her thick drawl. “Buford’s mean.”

  “Mean how?” I asked in a tiny voice.

  “He’ll do everything he can to destroy you. It’s not enough for him to sling half a bayou worth of salt mud at you; he’s going to make your life a living hell,” she warned.

  “As if it could get worse?”

  “Oh, it can get a lot worse.” She laughed. “For one thing, Buford could spot a dumb-ass, deep-pocketed, jilted doctor in the pitch black of midnight on the last day of earth.”

  Addison ticked off three or four doctors in town who’d hired Buford, endured two- to three-year court battles, and spent nearly $90,000 a one. I didn’t care about money, though; I only cared about keeping the kids safe.

  “Also, go home and look up ‘fathers’ rights movement’ on the Internet,” she advised. “It’s his mission in life to try to win custody for fathers, and Dr. Rivers’s case ain’t gonna be any different,” she said.

  “Oh no,” I whispered. “But there’s no way Liam could get custody—he tried to kill me!” I choked out in a panic.

  “You have got to get something straight, right now, you hear me? Whatever Dr. Rivers did to you has nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with his role as a father,” she said, a phrase she’d clearly uttered time and time again. It was a notion I couldn’t quite swallow. How could a man’s violent attack of his children’s mother have nothing to do with his role as a father? I hadn’t learned, and wouldn’t for a very long time, that the world of family court has little to do with common sense, not to mention verified science.

  It’s true Addison tried, on several occasions, to talk me out of fighting that battle.

  She told me, unequivocally, that it would be more reasonable to accept joint custody, set up a visitation schedule, decide on a reasonable child support amount, and be done with it. She explained time after time how, no matter how long and how bitter and how ugly the battle, it would likely turn out very close to what she was advising me to do right then, right there, against all my instincts. But I was still reeling, still healing from my wounds, the memories of that brutal night.

  I still had a puncture wound in my chest.

  I still had a bruise-colored necklace in the shape of his reach.

  I still had a thousand nights of fear in my soul.

  “You can stop it all now, give him visitation, and make it easy on yourself,” she said.

  But if he was willing to attack me, what might he do to the children?

  “No, I can’t,” I told her. “I can’t let him hurt the kids. He’s dangerous. I have to fight. I can’t let him do to them what he did to me, or worse.”

  And so she put her head down and went to work, asking for sole custody, supervised visitation, and support. Simultaneously, Buford asked for joint custody, regular visitation, and for the order of protection to be lifted. Despite my having been a stay-at-home mama since Avery was born, Buford denied that any support was necessary, as I had a master’s degree and had “formerly earned $70,000 a year first as an acquisitions editor and then as a regional community relations vice president for a major book retailer.”

  I could hear Liam’s voice echo through Buford’s every filed motion.

  According to Buford’s motion, I was a regular career girl refusing to work out of a lazy sort of greed fueled by my desire to live off Liam’s meager physician’s salary. In reality, I’d recently negotiated a new physician’s contract for Liam with a hospital up in Jackson, where we had planned to relocate after the storm. Liam was anxious to get away from any signs of a hurricane. We’d interviewed everywhere from El Paso, Texas, to Aiken, South Carolina, since the storm. In the end, Liam couldn’t leave behind the money to be made in Mississippi.

  Low population translates to the lowest per capita HMO coverage in the country; hence, Mississippi was the last bastion of fee-for-service medicine and had the doctor salaries to prove it. With student loan reimbursement, an income guarantee, and funds to open a brand-new independent practice, we’d negotiated a deal that equaled more than $250,000 per year for the next four years. Problem was, I didn’t have a copy of the contract. I hadn’t thought to bring it when I left the house the morning after the attack.

  But I was on friendly terms with the recruiter up at the hospital in Jackson. In Mississippi, a doctor’s wife is part of the package, and I played the part well. In the recruitment process, I’d come along to a slew of dinners out and real estate tours and hospital picnics, the children dressed in matching, monogramed outfits. One afternoon in Addison’s office, she wished aloud I had proof of Liam’s new contract. As she went over our answer to Buford’s latest motion, which argued that Liam made less than $5,000 a month, I asked, “You mind if I use your phone?”

  I still had the hospital recruiter’s number in my address book. She answered on the first ring. “Hey, Cindy. It’s Alice, Dr. Rivers’s wife?”

  “Well, hey, Mrs. Alice! How are you? Did y’all find a house yet?”

  “Not yet—there’s so many pretty new houses, it’s hard to find one I like best!” I blathered. “It’s so lovely up there.” I added, “I just can’t wait to get up there and start fresh! We even looked in my old neighborhood I lived in when I was a little girl,” I gushed.

  “Well, when y’all get up here, I want to invite you to my Bunco,” Cindy offered sweetly.

  “That would be so nice. I just love Bunco!” I lied. I’d never played.

  “I know, right? It’s so much fun, and you’ll get to meet all the other wives!” she continued.

  “Well, gosh, thanks. You are so sweet. Anyway, I wondered if you could do me a favor? I’m down to our lawyer’s office here in Ocean Springs getting our taxes and whatnot dealt with, and I plum forgot to bring that contract. Is there any way at all you could fax it to me here?” I asked, sounding as stupid as I possibly could. “Dr. Rivers is counting on me to get this paperwork finished, and he’d just kill me if he knew I was as absentminded as a hound behind a butcher shop.”

  Cindy laughed knowingly. “Oh my gosh, no problem at all, hon. My husband’s like that, too. What’s the fax?”

  And in less than ten minutes, scrolling out of Addison’s fax machine was Liam’s new contract, every financial benefit in stark detail.

  “Holy smokes.” Addison smiled, looking over the contract. “Buford’s not going to like you. He’s not going to like you at all.”

  Together we went over her re
ply to Buford’s motion, and I signed it. I asked her about Jack Calhoun and if I could trust him.

  “Here’s one thing you should know about Mr. Jack Calhoun—he’s my neighbor and he’s a single dad.”

  “That’s two things.”

  “And he and Judge Taylor are in the same hunting club.”

  “That’s three.”

  “Third time’s the charm.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “And Judge Taylor is going to be our judge still, right?” I asked. “I heard he used to be a Baptist minister.”

  “He did, and he left because he thought they were too liberal,” Addison started.

  “And now he’s going to be deciding on my fitness based on my scandalous, queer, sex-with-the–Virgin Mary book of poetry?”

  “Let me ask you this. Was the book published when Liam met you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But was it published when he married you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it published when you had your children?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s a nonissue.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked, feeling a rising dread.

  “I’m sure.”

  Addison knew me as another mama at St. Alphonsus Catholic School. She knew me as the girl who sat in front of her in church at St. Paul’s Episcopal, keeping three small children quiet and well-behaved. She knew me as the girl at the park every day after school, surrounded by kids. As the mama organizing the country store at the St. Al’s annual fall festival fund-raiser. As the wife of the Ocean Springs Hospital’s chief of staff. She knew me as everyone else in town knew me—as a wife, a mama, a nice gal, and nothing more.

  “Look, I’m going to need a copy of that book,” she said. “Make it several. Hardcovers, if you can get your hands on them. And you haven’t worked at all during your marriage, is that right?” she asked.