Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  “Well, I do review literary fiction and poetry for The Times-Picayune Sunday book review,” I offered.

  “You do? How much do they pay you?”

  “One hundred dollars per review, and books,” I said.

  “That’s not work, darlin’, that’s a hobby.”

  I felt like I often did at dinner parties and social outings—like the slightly ridiculous, foolish wife of an accomplished man, with delusions of becoming a “writer.”

  It was a long way from Sarah Lawrence and winning the Bobst Prize.

  “Let me give you a bit of advice, okay?” Addison asked.

  “Sure,” I said, holding back inexplicable, furious tears.

  “Don’t ever marry a man on whose head you could set a plate and eat your supper,” she ventured, smiling.

  “It’s a little late now,” I managed, through tears.

  “Second piece of advice?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Court’s going to be brutal. Wear armor.”

  BE SWEET

  Every last person in my house, save my niece, Katie, and the boys, came to court that day. My nephew, Josh, drove me over in the rental car with Mama and Auntie Rie and a few other people in the back seat. I was moving through a fog akin to shifted night sugar—everything was thick with an otherworldly fear I’d never felt before in my life, not in the dark nights of my childhood, not when Liam had held the tip of that eight-inch butcher knife to my heart.

  We crossed over the Pascagoula Bridge, and I watched the flattened marshes, devoid still of cranes. Mama kept saying every now and then, “It’s going to be okay.” And then, when no one answered, “Well, surely it will.”

  I was silent. Avery sat between me and Josh in a gathered pink peplum dress with her pink cowboy boots, her hair tied up in a matching bow. I didn’t want to talk about it in the car. She and I held hands the whole way there. We’d talked about it into the night, and she’d fallen asleep in my arms. The last thing she said was, “You’d never hurt me, Mama—never, ever, never.”

  “Never, baby. Never. Now sleep.”

  I stayed up half the night, watching her eyes flutter behind the milk-blue tender skin of her lids, wondering if tomorrow would be the day they’d take her.

  Never. No way. Liam had told so many lies so far, and none of them stuck. This one wouldn’t either.

  We drove through town. Even after the storm, the fast-food signs still stood tall, but with their plastic interiors missing. Did anyone else notice they looked like framed art of sky and clouds and, at night, stars? Did anyone else wait for birds to appear in those stark black frames again?

  Finally, we drove up on the fairgrounds. In my mind, I heard carnival music of years past, pumping away in unbridled cheer. Instead of endless rows of FEMA trailers, I saw Ferris wheels and frozen horses, turning round and round on fading merry-go-rounds. I saw carnival barkers with alphabet candy necklaces tattooed around their necks and fathers with enormous stuffed mice perched on their sturdy shoulders. I smelled the sweet scent of cotton candy and saw a little girl in a maraschino cherry–print dress, standing in the middle of it all, dirty faced and lost. I heard a gun go off, and saw thin dogs the color of a hurricane race around a track in tufts of dust.

  “Alice? We’re here,” said Josh, his hand on my shoulder.

  I stepped out of the sedan, my low pumps crunching on the sandy gravel of the fairground. Cars were lining up, parking the way they pull in to a revival come a Friday afternoon when they mean to stay, folks pouring out in their finery, greeting one another, friendly but solemn, ready for the task at hand.

  In one glance, I saw my friends Miss Wanda and Miss Lou, the greeters down to the Walmart; Miss Charlie Jones and Miss Sweet, Grayson’s preschool teachers; Avery’s first-grade teacher, Mrs. Trigiani; my girlfriends Charlotte and Deidre and Lana and Susan and Stephanie and Alma and Jane; my priest, Ellen Gautier; Liam’s former partner Dr. Stephanie Jensen; Liam’s former nurses Becky and Louise; our across-the-street neighbors Huck and Misty; Tim Burr; Mac and Daddy; and my dear friend Miss Oenida, who sold beer by the can and homemade tamales out of the front window of her house on the wrong side of the tracks in downtown Ocean Springs, one of my “secret” friends whom I could never reveal to Liam.

  I didn’t have the heart to talk to anyone as I crossed the scabbed earth of the fairgrounds. So there I stood, in my Sunday best—a blush linen suit to the knee and white cotton blouse—in the strangling summer air rising off the rough-hewed slats of the walkway outside Jackson County Chancery Courtroom A set up in one of dozens of FEMA trailers strewn like Chicklets thrown into the dust of the Pascagoula County Fairgrounds in Gautier, Mississippi. I entered the trailer and stood on one side of the folding table, an old, rail-thin, bent-to-the waist bailiff with silver pompadour stood on the other.

  “ID, ma’am?”

  “Yes, sir.” I smiled, handing it to him.

  “Your bag?” he asked, one brow raised.

  “My bag?”

  “Yes’m, I need to check it.”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” I said, handing it over.

  The bailiff unzipped the squat bag, holding his elbows high as he pulled out items, inspecting them like they were treasures from another time. He pulled out my lipstick, my reading glasses, a copy of Emily Dickinson’s collected, some folded legal papers. He was taking his time.

  He looked me in the eye, smiled. Paused. He remembered me from the first hearing. I had seen him catch a tear before it fell, and it gave me such an overwhelming feeling of safety and tenderness I thought I might die of gratitude.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I believe,” he said, drawing it out with a wink, “ya left something in your car.”

  “Come again, sir?”

  He leaned over the table then, his eyes the color of a South Mississippi sky right before a storm, deep blue bleeding into sulky gray. I was still in that fog of fear.

  “Ma’am, you may want to head back to your vehicle before you enter the courtroom.” The way he said vehicle, it rhymed with pumpernickel. He looked down at my purse, made his eyes real wide, nodded pointedly toward it.

  It was then I remembered: the gun.

  But my heart didn’t race even then.

  My heart was steeled: not stolen.

  “I’ll be right back; give me the keys,” I told Josh, who looked at me quizzically.

  When I got to the car, Addison was just stepping out of her Mini Cooper.

  I slipped the gun into the glove compartment.

  “Okay,” she said. “So today is going to be brutal, but same deal as always. Stay completely calm, no matter what happens. They’re going to say crazy things about you; they’re going to portray you as depraved and insane. So even though the reaction of any normal person would be to be hysterical and wild and angry, you have to be incredibly calm. Stepford wife calm. Bizarrely calm. Patron Saint of Calm. Anything else and you’ll be playing into their hands.”

  “No problem. Seriously, I can handle it.”

  I thought I saw red birds cross the sky, but I knew there weren’t any. Avery waited outside the courtroom, and her pink boots had little tooled red hearts that flashed in the sunlight.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  We walked into the courtroom, and I couldn’t believe it: the tiny trailer was stuffed like a tin of sardines—standing room only. I knew people were coming, but this was beyond the pale. Three rows of metal folding chairs lined the courtroom, and every seat was taken. Another row of people stood behind those seated, and another row still of people sat on the floor in front, and then people crammed in along both walls of the courtroom. Someone had saved a seat for me in the front row.

  Liam was there. His parents stood next to him. I saw him wave at his nurses and our neighbors, wrongly assuming they were there for him.

  I felt like I might throw up. I felt like I might start laughing and never stop. Tears stood at the edge of my eyes, about to fall.
I tried my best to turn them into the shining confidence of a smile: happy gratitude of a mother whose community had come out in support.

  Skittering at the edge of desperate: passing it off as calm.

  Jack Calhoun walked by me, whispered in my ear, “Welcome to the circus, act two.”

  I looked to Addison, asked, “Is there a bathroom?”

  She pointed with her hot-pink fountain pen to a nondescript door behind Judge Taylor’s desk. I walked across the room, my shoes thumping on the hollow floor, just a few feet above the scraped earth of fairground, conspicuous.

  Once inside, I looked at myself in the fake, wavy mirror above the sink. I looked stricken, hollowed out. In the last month or so, I’d lost forty pounds. First the storm hit and we’d had the oppressive heat, then Liam’s increasing abuse, the weekends in New Orleans and Oshner and the threats of killing me, the lack of food with the Walmart still missing a refrigerator, now the weeks since the attack: I was whittled down to an inch of my being. I stared back at my wobbly fun house reflection in that cheetah-print scarf around my neck, and suddenly I looked like someone in a carnival attraction: THE LADY WHO COULDN’T BE KILLED.

  I stood a moment, lost.

  Above the toilet, there was a handwritten sign taped up: IF YOU SPRINKLE WHEN YOU TINKLE PLEASE BE SWEET AND WIPE THE SEAT! SIGNED, THE HONORABLE HANK “BUBBA” TAYLOR

  It was written in lime-green crayon.

  This is who was to decide my fate? How did I end up here? I’m supposed to walk out of this bathroom and, in front of this room full of people, hear myself called mentally unfit and a pornographer and an abuser and suicidal and homicidal? After I tinkle? If there were a window, I might have climbed out of it, hitched back to Ocean Springs, and left forever. But Avery was in that courtroom, and so was my fate.

  And so I opened the door, took my seat, and court began.

  Well, it didn’t begin right away. Judge Taylor announced that we were missing an “expert.”

  As if on cue, a woman appeared in the doorway at the back of the courtroom. The alabaster morning light behind her allowed us to see only the outline of her form: imposing. She walked with a cane, deliberately, but with a certain joy. Liam immediately went to her, assisting her over to her place at the table next to Buford Cooter Garland, Esquire, and Ethel Kahn. I heard him mention her “surgery,” and he made a point to put her cane somewhere where she could reach it easily. He was sickeningly accommodating to her, asking her if she was comfortable, if he could get her anything, acting as if he himself were her personal physician.

  Something about that seemed instantly familiar.

  Ethel Kahn actually stood up when she saw Liam, embracing him. I couldn’t believe my eyes: Ethel Kahn, who was supposed to be an impartial witness and a professional, had just hugged Liam in open court.

  When they pulled back, Liam kept a hand on her shoulder as they gazed into each other’s eyes.

  Birds gathered into a great mass of wild panic and swirled within my heart and burst out my chest like a galaxy of silver wings into the paneled ceiling of the courtroom, circling three times before flying out the door. My ears roared with their beating. Liam patted her kindly in the small of her back as he returned to his place holding up the east wall of Courtroom A.

  The “expert” was one Dr. Colette V. Colette, a “court-appointed psychiatrist and child custody and high-conflict divorce specialist.” She had a silver crown of hair that can only be described as a heavy metal beehive, a formidable rose floral dress, knee-high panty hose, hiking boots, and a cane decorated to the hilt and halfway back with Mardi Gras ribbons and bows.

  “I do apologize for my taaaaardiness, Your Honor,” she boomed with equal parts volume and sugar-sweet cordialness. “I’ve just had surgery, and I find it ever so hard to get around, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Not a problem; we were just about to get started.”

  “I also apologize for my appearance. My patients love me so dearly I must wear something quite extreme to remind them that they cannot embrace me, and this,” she said, with a grand gesture with her good arm toward her bandaged shoulder, “is the only solution that seems to work.”

  “Yes, ma’am, well, it’s certainly original,” remarked Judge Taylor, a slight blush rising in his cheeks.

  The courtroom broke out in hesitant laughter.

  Only then did I notice the maxi pads affixed to Dr. Colette V. Colette’s bandaged shoulder. Attached to said maxi pads were just under a dozen Christmas bows and what appeared to be decoratively trimmed Post-it notes that read, I LOVE YOU, BUT DON’T HUG ME, tacked on, too.

  Again, I thought, This is the person who’ll decide my fate?

  Just then, my brother’s ex-wife, always a bit of a rebel, had a sneezing fit next to me. I noticed she had a large, rainbow pagan pentagram tattooed on her chest in full display. I wished I could shove her out of the courtroom. Did she think we were in America? This is Mississippi … I wanted to scream at her, Cover yourself, girl!

  I looked over and saw Liam pointing to my brother, Gene. Josh, who was standing closer to Liam, came over to me, whispered, “He just told Buford that Gene is your boyfriend.”

  Liam had cut all ties to my family many years before, and he didn’t even recognize my brother.

  Buford watched the exchange between me and Josh, then made an obscene gesture at me. Ashley had warned me ahead of time of his tricks. He would stop at nothing to get a reaction out of me, and I wasn’t giving him the satisfaction. I looked over at Buford in his baby-blue, ill-fitting suit, his shirt straining at the buttons over his bulging belly, his black alligator boots, and flashed him my prettiest beauty queen smile.

  Two can play at that game, motherfucker, even if I was disguised as a Mississippi Sunday school teacher.

  But then suddenly Judge Taylor swore everyone in—the lawyers, Ethel Kahn, Dr. Colette V. Colette, Liam, me, and Avery—and we began.

  All the air in the courtroom left when the single door slammed shut. A single bead of sweat, and then another, and another, and another ran from my neck, where the cheetah scarf hid the deepest scrape from my own nail where I’d pried Liam’s hands off me just before losing consciousness, all the way down my spine to the waistband of my skirt, where it blossomed into a growing waistband of cold, damp fear.

  “Good morning, everyone,” said Judge Taylor, smiling. “Obviously, we have a very full court. We have a minor with us this morning, I believe, Miss Avery?” he said in a kind voice, the way one speaks to children. “Hello, Miss Avery.”

  “Hey,” Avery said in a very small voice, sitting right behind me next to Mama.

  “Come sit by me, Avery,” Liam said, out of turn.

  “No,” Avery replied.

  “Can we have someone take Avery out for now?” Judge Taylor asked.

  Miss Charlie took Avery outside by the hand.

  “What I want to do first is ascertain who is here on behalf of what party. Those who are here for Mrs. Rivers will be going in Courtroom B across the way to talk with Mr. Calhoun first, then those who are here on behalf for Dr. Rivers will follow. Can I see a show of hands from those who are here for Mrs. Rivers?”

  Every hand in Courtroom A except Liam’s and his parents’ went up.

  I didn’t bother to raise mine.

  “I see,” said Judge Taylor.

  Jack Calhoun cleared his voice loudly, coughed. I might have seen him stifle a laugh, but it could have been wishful thinking.

  “And can I see a show of hands for those who are here on behalf of Dr. Rivers?”

  Liam and his parents raised their hands, high.

  “Okay, then, y’all wait outside. Everyone who is here to speak on Mrs. Rivers’s behalf, please follow Mr. Calhoun into Courtroom B.”

  Like a swarm of bees abandoning a hive, all the people willing to come to court to say that what Liam and his lawyer were saying about me was a lie exited the tin can of justice and followed Jack out.

  I stayed.

&nbs
p; I testified.

  My life entire depended on it.

  I told them, in front of my attorney and Ethel Kahn and Dr. Colette V. Colette and Liam, about how Avery fell in the shower. I told them about how I told Liam about it. There wasn’t much to tell but what I knew.

  No, I didn’t throw Avery out of my moving car.

  No, I didn’t stomp on Avery with my boots.

  No, I don’t want to kill Avery.

  And no, I did not have consensual sex with my father willingly my entire life.

  And no, my poetry collection was not autobiography; it was poetry, which is to say, fiction.

  No, I did not consider it pornography.

  No, I was not suicidal.

  No, I was not homicidal.

  No, I did not want to kill my children.

  Yes, I was a Christian.

  No, I did not go to my father’s funeral.

  The questions were so outrageous and yet I answered them calmly, with as much grace and kindness as any good Southern mother should. That’s the thing about family court: there is truth to the term “courtroom drama.”

  I did not get emotional.

  I did not cry.

  I did not get mad.

  I was pleasant.

  I was kind.

  I was loving in demeanor.

  I behaved as if these were silly questions, you silly men.

  I behaved as if I were happy to answer their silly questions.

  I did not get mad, because anger is unbecoming of a mother.

  Mothers don’t get mad.

  Mothers aren’t negative.

  Mothers don’t say bad words.

  My poetry? Oh, that old thing? That was in my twenties. Didn’t you do silly things in your twenties? My goodness.

  Yes, I was molested.

  A little.

  Daddy drank.

  Whose daddy doesn’t?

  Gosh, I forgave him.

  I’m a Christian.

  Aren’t you?

  Bless his heart, poor Daddy.

  I’m happy to do whatever’s best for my babies.