Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  The morning before the fall festival, the arrest report came in. Addison called me on my cell.

  “You’re not going to believe this. He was arrested with six counts. He did, indeed, crash through the sobriety checkpoint. He actually drove through the barriers and took them on a high-speed chase.”

  “No! You’re kidding!”

  “Yes, ma’am, he did. Ran several red lights, charged with reckless endangerment, too. The best part is he ran off the road, and they had to basically pull him out of his car and drag him into the back of their squad car—he was so drunk. He refused all testing, and he was falling off the seat of the squad car asking to talk to his lawyer, and he was blaming it all on you!”

  “On me?” I laughed.

  “It actually says in the report that he says, ‘This is all my ex-wife’s fault.’”

  “Oh, now that is rich.”

  “You can’t make this shit up!”

  “So you’re going to file a motion?”

  “Yes, today. I’ve already called Jack. You might imagine he was pretty entertained. I have my legal assistant working on the motion today. We’re asking for a halt of all visitation until we can have a hearing. We will be asking that he no longer be able to transport the minor children, which will essentially put him back to a Saturday visitation in a prearranged spot. You will drop them off someplace, and he will visit with them there, and you will pick them up later. He may not take them anywhere.”

  “How long will it take to get a hearing?”

  “Probably a few weeks—but the emergency motion will be sure to be granted. I’m also forwarding it to Dr. Colette. Both Dr. Colette and Jack will be writing recommendations to the court in the next day or two. So just go about your life and don’t worry.”

  “Thank you, Addison.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. See you at the festival.”

  “See you there.”

  The next morning, we woke up early and drove the five minutes downtown to get the Country Store set up before the festival started. Parking on the street was filling up fast, and the only place I could find was in front of Ethel Kahn’s office. A fissure of rage snaked up my spine as I got the kids out of the car, seeing the high window of her office in the morning light, lined with her dusty collection of Russian nesting dolls.

  I wondered how she lived with herself, being Buford’s paid gun. Of all psychiatric disorders, dissociative identity disorder (DID) is one of the rarest and most complex to diagnose. The idea that Ethel Kahn met me once for forty minutes with all my children in the room and then she met with Liam for a month, twice a week, and they went over my book of poems and diagnosed me with DID was perhaps the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Even Dr. Colette had suggested I file a complaint. A court in any other state would never have even entertained Kahn’s letter of diagnosis. At least that’s what I thought at the time, having still not learned the ways of family court.

  I felt a strange pang in leaving my car sitting there in front of Kahn’s office, but I stuffed it away, plastered on a smile, and went to start the day. It was not lost on me that the whole town knew of my personal business. Liam was, after all, chief of medicine at the hospital, as well as on the board of directors at the bank. There were plenty of people who thought I should mind my business, shut up, and be grateful for my fancy house and my three children and ask God’s forgiveness for dragging my poor husband, who, yes, likes to drink a little, through the mud. I’d undoubtedly run into more than a handful of those folks today. But I’d also stocked the Country Store with my girlfriends, and I could hide out among the hair bows and chokecherry jam and baby quilts and drink lemonade and feed the kids dollar bills and know that soon, I wouldn’t have to send off my three little birds to terrifying weekends any longer.

  I sold through my onesies by two o’clock, and the hair bows were half out. My friend Tammy offered to go get more hair bows from her car. She’d been holding back some for her tennis team fund-raiser but capitulated to the festival’s market demand. Aidan, who was always starry eyed at Tammy’s New Zealand accent and her wild blond golden ringlets to the waist, said, “I go? I go, Miss Tam Tam?”

  She looked over at me with a cocked brow, and I said, “Sure, take him!” and watched them disappear into the crowds.

  And less than thirty seconds later, I heard Tammy’s voice raised, shouting, “Let him go!”

  The crowd moved back immediately. You’d think someone would have rushed in to help, but people backed away like a bomb had gone off, the rings getting wider and wider as Tammy’s voice rose. I couldn’t see whom she was talking to from my high stool at the back of the Country Store.

  “Back off, you drunk bastard! I’ll call the police!”

  The crowd gasped. I got off my stool and started running.

  “He’s a baby, and you’re not allowed to take him. Fuck off, you!”

  By now I could see Liam, his hand squeezing Aidan’s arm, grabbing him from Tammy. Aidan was crying, being pulled the same way he was the night Liam attacked me.

  “Noooooo!” My voice sounded like a bird’s cry, from high, high in the sky, a screech, desperate and desolate.

  When he heard my voice, Liam let go, turned, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Tammy was on her phone and calling the police in an instant.

  Another mom from St. Al’s got in her face. “Put that away! The man just wants to see his son!”

  “Oh, shut up, Christy! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Both Tammy’s and Christy’s husbands were also doctors at Ocean Springs Hospital.

  Just then, two Ocean Springs policemen walked up and asked what happened. Tammy told them, “This bastard tried to steal her baby!”

  By now, the crowd had gone back to their own day. The police officers came into the Country Store and took a report.

  “We’ll never find him in these crowds, ma’am. We probably wouldn’t arrest him anyway, as he didn’t actually take the child.”

  “It’s attempted kidnapping! Are you fucking mad?” Tammy protested. She was clearly not from these parts.

  They looked at her like she was a frothing dog.

  “I understand, sir,” I said calmly, resigned.

  “I would recommend you leave for the day, ma’am. You don’t want him coming back. Go home, keep your doors locked, and call us if he comes around.”

  This was the level of help I was used to in this town.

  I started gathering up our stuff to go.

  “Mama, Daddy tried to steal Aidan!” Avery said.

  “I know, baby,” I said, weary. “Let’s talk about it later.”

  People were staring.

  Tammy offered to walk us to our car.

  “It’s okay; there’s so many people out. I’m sure it will be fine.”

  I felt a kind of numbness sink in. I just wanted to be with my babies and go home. It felt like it would never end. No matter what I did, no matter what I discovered or what the court ordered, we would never be safe, and he would never leave us alone. We walked through the grounds of St. Alphonsus in silence. Past the upper grade classrooms, through the garden. When we came through to the front of the school, I looked across the street to see our car parked there in front of Ethel Kahn’s office. At first it didn’t register: Had someone left flyers on my car? Why so many?

  “Mama?” Avery asked as we crossed the street, getting closer.

  There was white paper all over the car. Across the windshield, on the back windshield, under the wipers, tucked into the side windows, folded into the door handles. It was like the car was covered in white feathers, a winged creature, ready to take off and fly. Some paper was flat, some folded, some had fallen in the gutters, while others skated quietly down the street toward the beach a few blocks south. I pulled the papers from the door handles and told the babies, “Get in.”

  Quickly gathering all the pages up from off the car, then from the gutters, then running and capturing the l
oose ones on the road, I ran back to the car, got in, and locked the doors.

  “What are they, Mama?” asked Avery.

  “Just some papers, sweetie.”

  They were all the same: a printed page from the journal I kept on my computer. I’d started it after Liam threw away all my handwritten journals. On each and every one, Liam had burned out or knifed out the places where his name appeared:

  The date of the entry was the day Liam attacked me.

  I drove straight to the police station.

  The whole way there, I imagined that at any moment Liam would step out behind a magnolia or a cottage and shoot me in the head.

  It was all I could think of—how the bullet would pierce the windshield, would go into my forehead so cleanly, how the back of my head would come off like a broken shell, the blood exploding like a wave crashing, how it would splatter the children, how the car would keep going, roll up into the lawn of First Baptist, come to a thud against the old stone façade. I thought of the way my torso would sound the horn, a long wail that would go on and on, and how many people would turn to watch in slow motion before they ran to help.

  That is what fear does to you. That is what living every moment wondering if he’s going to kill you does to you. That’s what going from watching him try to take your baby and no one thinks it’s an emergency to going to your car plastered with a page from the day he tried to kill you does to you.

  It makes your death real, and you know one thing: it’s coming.

  But this day, you make it. To the police station. With your children. Who get cans of pop and packs of crackers and sit on a bench in the hall and you hope they’ll still be there when you come out, and you go in.

  And so I sat opposite the detective in a tiny square office in the police station, explaining the chain of events. The divorce, the attack, why I hadn’t pressed charges because I didn’t want the kids to end up in foster care.

  “That was very smart; you put them first.”

  The officer looked up and saw how many reports I’d made when Liam had broken the restraining order.

  “Pardon my French, but he don’t give a fuck. You said he’s a doctor?”

  “Yes, he’s the chief of medicine down to the hospital. He actually had me convinced that he was y’all’s personal doctor, sir.”

  “Our doctor?”

  “Yes, sir, he told me he was the doctor for Ocean Springs Police, so I could forget about calling y’all if I ever need help.”

  “Oh, fuck that. So the bully uses us to scare a woman? And you say your lawyer just filed a new motion today?”

  And that’s when I put it together. Ever since Liam filed that emergency motion to take the kids from me, I’d been reading up on fathers’ rights tactics and I’d read enough to know that the higher the stakes, the more dangerous it is. When we filed the emergency motion, Liam knew that we knew about his DUI and had filed the motion to stop visitation.

  He had nothing left to lose.

  “Look, I can’t tell you what to do, but—”

  “Can’t you? Really? Because I don’t have anyone to tell me. My papa passed away. My mama’s no help at all, really. I don’t have any family here. I need someone to tell me what to do. I wish my papa was alive. I tell you what he’d do—he’d be buying us plane tickets and getting us on the first plane out of here. But I don’t want to be charged with kidnapping. I really don’t know what to do!”

  “If you were my daughter, that’s what I’d do. You got family out of state?”

  “My mama’s in California.”

  “Honey, get on a plane. Tonight.”

  “Really? What if I get in trouble? I have to ask the court.”

  “Call your lawyer. Tell her what happened. Call her right now.”

  I did. I called Addison, told her I was calling from the Ocean Springs PD and that Liam had not only just tried to kidnap Aidan at the fall festival but that he’d scared me half to death papering my car with burned-out, knifed-out pages from my journal from the day he attacked me, which seemed like he was coming back to make good on the promise he made to kill me on that day. And that I wanted to leave.

  And then Addison said this: “Leave. Go. Get out. Now.”

  I called up Tammy and said, “We need help.”

  We drove to Tammy’s house from the police station, spent the night, and got on a plane in the morning. We never went back to our house again. We left everything behind. As the plane took off at sunrise the next morning, rain began to fall right, slicing sideways through the sunlight.

  Avery held my hand and said, “Look, Mama, it’s sparkling.”

  PART THREE

  BADLANDS

  CALIFORNIA DREAMING

  It was like stepping back into my own soul.

  We found a sweet house in a leafy old neighborhood. You know those helicopter scenes at the opening of American Beauty? All the tree-lined streets and rose gardens and walkways that inexplicably wind their way up to strange little doors in white cottages and brick or stone houses? The way old pines dipped so low against lazy old power lines hung like holiday lights with burlesque seams instead of gaudy garlands? How cats lolled on streets, not even bothering to get up and half the windows have rainbow flags and the community center has socialist community organizing meetings on Friday nights? We moved into that kind of neighborhood, and no one delivered us a layer cake and no one invited us for drinks, and, frankly, that was just fine.

  I started right off teaching community college at the same South Sacramento community college where I’d started out, and I enrolled Avery and Grayson in the local public school while Aidan lolled away his mornings at a co-op church preschool not far from our house. I remember the night before Avery and Grayson started at their new school, the secretary in the office invited us to their annual multicultural night dinner and festivities. There was a potluck with fare from all over the world and dancers and performers from indigenous California tribes, Southeast Asian lands, and African nations. Grayson smiled wryly at me, his sideways grin, and said, “We’re not in Mississippi anymore.”

  Thank fucking God.

  I saw a few old friends here and there, but I was still on high alert, watching out for Liam to show up on every corner. Mostly, I just worked and tried to get the kids settled in and acclimated to California living. The kids’ teachers requested I get them to stop calling them “ma’am” and “sir” at school.

  Fat chance.

  Addison, of course, was successful in getting all visitation stopped. Both Jack Calhoun and Dr. Colette Colette had written stinging letters to the court not only reprimanding Liam for lying to the court about his DUI and alcoholism but for driving the kids without a license for months on end. Then Addison had filed a second motion to get official approval for me to stay in California as my permanent residence. Given what had happened—that little something about attempted kidnapping and stalking with a little hint of maybe I’ll murder you—she seemed confident it would happen.

  But I couldn’t sleep at night, terrified the court would order me back to Mississippi. They could order me back. But I did have full physical custody. I was now employed; even if I was only an adjunct professor, it was a start. Just as Addison had warned me that if the kids were given to Liam after the custody evaluation they’d be unlikely to be given back, she assured me it was unlikely they’d be forced back to Mississippi after they were already settled in California.

  She was right.

  So I settled in. It was like I went from being a placeholder self—Mrs. Dr. Liam Rivers—to the real me—Professor Alice Anderson or, fuck it, just Alice—all at once. People could see me. Hell, I could see me. I was no longer a ghost self in a wavy trailer park funhouse mirror.

  One Saturday morning, as I was dropping the sweet three off at Mama’s house on my way to a comp class to teach To Kill a Mockingbird, I got voice mail from my friend Frank, another poet, telling me that Norman Mailer was in town and giving a talk the next day. Frank was from Ne
w York, had known the Mailer family for years, and said Norman wanted to have dinner with some “real” writers that night. Norman told Frank to invite only the best people, and Frank thought of me. I listened to the message standing in Mama’s driveway.

  “Should I go? I shouldn’t go, right?”

  Norman Mailer had been one of Papa’s favorite writers, but I hadn’t gone out once since I’d moved back to California. Hell, I’d not gone out since I’d filed for divorce.

  “Why not?” Mama said, adding, “I can come over and watch the kids.”

  “You think? Why would Norman Mailer want to have dinner with me? What would I even have to say to him?”

  My self-esteem was at an all-time low. I was just getting the feel of my own skin again, but I had vowed off writing for good after Liam used my poems against me in trying to take the kids away.

  “Because you’re the best,” Mama said sweetly. Mama always said that; she’d been saying that since the first day of kindergarten.

  “You’re okay with watching them?”

  She nodded. I told her I’d call him and tell him I’d go.

  That day in class, I remember two things: one, I was lecturing on To Kill a Mockingbird and was on a particular high until one of my students kept motioning to me strangely—finally, I realized she was trying to tell me the side zipper on my dress was open—and two, in my excitement, I casually name-dropped to the class the fact that I just happened to be having dinner with Norman Mailer that evening, and not one of them had any idea who Norman Mailer was.

  I put on a little black dress and met Frank at the steak house at the Hyatt Regency downtown. I was a little late. The hostess pointed me toward their table. I remember walking toward the table and seeing Norman first—he looked exactly like his author photo, the same silvery sleek mane of hair, the same blue smiling eyes. Frank rose with arms wide to hug me and introduce me. As I pulled back from Frank’s embrace, I saw the third man at the table.