“In the end, that was one true thing he said; I did need help. I need help to be safe from him, to never be hurt by him again, and to not live in fear of seeing him. In fact, I hope I never have to see him again.”
Avery came back to the bench and sat by me and gave Aidan a small squeeze on the arm as he went up to read his statement.
“Hi. My name is Aidan Anderson. I am twelve years old, and I am the youngest of our family. I am here to talk about how Liam Rivers affected my life. I don’t think of him as my dad anymore.
“I don’t like how he bullied me so many times. He made fun of my hair, he called me fat so many times I lost count. He would constantly, every time I saw him, pretend to “wrestle” with me. What he was really doing was throwing me around, pinning me on the floor, pretending like I was his punching dummy. I would always tell him to stop, and he wouldn’t. Instead he would laugh at me and wouldn’t stop. Usually I ended up crying and hurt.
“A father should be someone who supports you, accepts you, feels proud of the person you are, and takes care of you. He didn’t support me and help me, he didn’t like me, and he didn’t take care of me or help me in any way. He made me feel like he was ashamed that I was his son.
“When I was with him, I felt uncomfortable because he would always be very, very drunk and crazy and usually very mean. Last summer is not the first time he hurt any of us—he has hurt us a lot of times over our whole life.
“I do not want to see him again because of his actions. I feel like if I have to go see him, then he will do it again. Last summer when he attacked my brother and sister, I was hiding in a different closet. I heard crying and screaming. It made me feel so confused and scared. He told us if we called the police he would beat us up again. That is not the words he used, but I do not want to say what he said. He basically told us he would hurt us if we tried to get help.
“Even though there is a protective order, he still tries to contact me. When I see his name come up on my iPad, I feel panicked. It feels like he is creeping up on me and coming back into my life. This last year, when we didn’t have to see him at all, have been the most amazing days of my life. I felt safe. I felt free.”
Liam smiled through these statements as if the kids were reading book reports in school, as if he were a proud parent at a spelling bee. Aidan came and sat down and hard next to me, not catching my eye. Finally, Grayson went up and stood, facing his father. His voice was low, steady, strong.
“My name is Grayson Anderson. I stopped using the Rivers in my name years ago because he is not a father to me. A father does not scream at you in a drunken rage. A father does not lock you in hotel hallways in the middle of the night in your underwear when you’re five. A father does not leave you and your sister alone outside of bars in the French Quarter while he is inside drinking at night. A father does not tell you your mother is crazy and call her names. A father does not shove you into walls. A father does not come after your sister with a saw. More than anything, a father does not try to kill you.
“On the night that we are here for today, he took us out with him and his girlfriend to a string of bars. In one after another, we had to sit at a different table, alone, while they sat at the bar and drank. What kind of people make their kids sit at a different table? It was so bad the waiters felt sorry for us and gave us free food and drinks. I wish someone had helped us. On the way home, he was so drunk he kept falling off his bike. When we got there, we were just having fun, playing with squirt bottles. It’s summer, it’s hot. That’s what kids do. They goof around. We squirted water off the balcony and got him wet. Most kids would laugh at that, right? Not us. We were terrified. We hid. My little brother hid in one closet, and my sister and I hid in another. We have a father we know to hide from.
“And he came up in his usual drunken rage and found us. And he pulled my sister out first. He yanked my sister out by her arm and threw her across the room and onto the bed, and that’s when I came out to help her. And that’s when he did it. He grabbed me and threw me down on the bed and put his hands around my neck and choked me. I thought he wouldn’t stop. I thought he would kill me. He was on top of me with a red, drunk face full of rage and hate. I’ve seen him do this before—to my mom. This is the second time. The second time. Then he finally got off me and he started kicking me everywhere with his pointy, hard boots. Then he yelled at us to get in bed and not to call the police. That’s the kind of father I have. And that’s why I have no father at all. This last year with no contact with him has been the best year of my life. Because it has meant safety and it has meant freedom. Finally, I know what it means to be safe.”
The judge thanked Grayson and instructed Liam’s attorney that Liam was allowed to make a statement to the court as well. Instead of issuing an apology or any remorse, Liam stood up and gave a short, inspirational speech about how the kids should do their best in school, strive for greatness, always be honest and kind, and continue to know right from wrong. He addressed each child by name, and when he got to Grayson, he said, “Grayson, you are the most like me.”
What he said after that is anyone’s guess, as I had blocked him out with the force of sheer blind rage.
Liam put in a new guilty plea and was sentenced on the spot.
He received not a single day of jail time.
He was, however, stripped of both physical and legal custody and given a five-year protective order that is renewable for life.
As we walked into the sunlight down the wide steps of the courthouse, Avery said, “Remember when I yelled down the stairs that night, ‘Finally’?”
“I do,” I said to the kids, “and finally just arrived.”
DREAM A LITTLE DREAM
I’m second to wake up every day. Mama wakes up first, when it’s still dark outside, and—when I hear the apologetic slap of her size 11 feet pad down the stairs to the kitchen, moving last night’s plates from rack to shelf, the coffeepot starting to bubble and tick—I get up, too. Brother and Papa sleep in. I see her like this every morning (hips bumped up to the counter, black hair wild down her back, hot-pink velour zip-up robe open to her naked body, her nipples like small saucers of raspberry punch) watching the coffee drip. When she hears me, she turns. And it’s then I see it.
The dark flower of her eye. Deep purple with veins of green, it opens slowly, the way a cactus flower opens overnight in the movies they show at school. The morning flickers, bits of light jumping through the room, bits of moonlight filtering in from the screen in a thousand square beams that only I can see. The black eye is the center of her face now, the truth of what she holds in her heart laid bare.
* * *
Summer quarter. Forty students, only one female, fill a class of business writing at the tech college, and we’re in the criminal justice wing. On every wall, student posters of “murder victims.” There’s a guy with stab wounds; a child with a garbage sack over her head cinched tight with a cracked vinyl belt; there’s one of a suit with the head blown off, a perfect splash of blood on the wall behind him; one with a lady with a yellow rope around her neck; more. The students, most of them vets on the GI Bill, work on portfolios while I grade. My phone, upside down on the folding table, starts to buzz.
Buzz.
Buzz.
Buzz.
There’s always a warning, if you know how to listen.
On the freeway, the sky full of infuriating starlight, I talk with the dispatcher, tell her where his house is on that block, read the texts aloud.
They’re sending someone, ma’am.
When I pull up, I see Avery and Grayson: two children shapes in a window looking out.
A police car pulls up, lights on, no siren, just as I do.
We both get out.
Stay back, ma’am.
I hide behind a palm.
The door opens, the policeman takes him down.
The road fills up with sirens.
After ten years of abuse, finally the sirens.
The foren
sic cop comes in, camera hanging from his neck.
Can you lift your shirt, son?
Yes, sir.
Take it off.
And that’s when I see it.
Bruises like desert flowers everywhere on his body, thirteen years of skin and bone. And his neck, the mark of fingers encircling his neck, the scratches from where his own fingers tried to pry his father’s off still raw, blood rising like revelation.
Grayson stands there shirtless like that, the flash popping in the room, each one sounding like a word, whispered:
Flash: pain
Flash: heart
Flash: love
Flash: hate
Flash: freedom
Flash flash flash: a boy alive
* * *
Flash: I wake; next to me in bed is Avery, and the boys are in the other bed and the ocean crashes a few floors below our open sliding door hotel window. It’s the first family vacation we’ve been on, ever, just the four of us. Our lives have been run by the tick and hum of trials and fear and misfortune, and finally we’ve come to this: some ease. These nightmares come, but they are only this: dreams.
Eventually, the sweet three wake, stretching like big ridiculous cats in the too-small room, leaping over the bags everywhere from the outlet mall the day before, the boxes of Vans and the piles of shirts, soft with that smell all new clothes have now of rainy forests. Down to the car and onto the highway, music blaring the way it always is, all of us laughing, singing along, darting between cars on the way to the beach.
And then we’re there. And the beach is everything it is to everyone: rescue, respite, relief. Wide and white, the water pounding against the shore the way it does in SoCal: extravagant, ornate. I watch as the kids run in and out of the cold surf, laughing. And it’s then I notice it, how happy they are. How they laugh. How they don’t have a care in the world. How it took me ten long years to deliver them this ease.
Grayson, who has picked up a shitty plastic football down to the Walgreens along with the bucket and castle set Avery and I chose and the mountain of snacks, magazines, drinks, and sunscreen we paid a fortune for, is trying to get the kids to throw the ball with him, but they’re not biting. He holds the ball above his head, catches my eye, and shrugs his shoulders up in that motion that means, Will ya? So I get up and run down to the water’s edge.
And despite the last eight years of fighting back from traumatic brain injury, despite being told I’d never walk without aid again, never read again, never teach again, never write again, I continue to every day find one more thing that I can do that I thought would probably never happen. Today, that thing is throw a plastic football by the Pacific with my son. And fuck if I’m not good at it. Grayson and I launch that football back and forth as the sea rushes cold and sweet over our feet again and again and again, back and forth, back and forth. The look in his eyes shows me he’s as amazed as I am that I’m able to do it.
When Liam strangled me and oxygen was cut off to my brain, I developed a seizure disorder, which caused the seizure that made me fall and sustain my brain injury, a coup contrecoup with diffuse axonal shearing of the brain: you don’t think about the ways domestic violence can kill you in slow motion. But recovery from traumatic brain injury is also slow motion, painstaking, but constantly moving forward the way a football arcs and spirals across a white blue sky, the way a seagull does, the way sometimes it just hangs there, standing still. But eventually it will move. And just like that, I move forward. Every year, I get better: teach a class, take a trip, write a book, take my kids to the ocean.
Things fall to pieces: things fall back together again.
The ball arcs across the sky, spinning, and Grayson is laughing and I glance left and see Avery and Aidan up to their necks, swimming, and this time my throw is a little off, but that’s okay because this time Grayson’s not diving into a bathroom terrified but into the ocean, free.
It turns out sometimes extraordinary things happen on very ordinary days. It was mid-August, scorching, at a public beach: there must have been a thousand people there. We had four cheap towels from the Walgreens spread out in a row, anchored with fashion magazines and a six-pack of Pepsi and a pink bucket full of sand and a pile of flip-flops dug in straight like rubber roses. Next to us, two women in their eighties with floral-skirted one-pieces sat in low-slung chairs and sipped tiny bottles of rosé from straws and held hands. There was a big family behind us that had put up a tent with a striped top, like a circus tent—they had a table to one side with food, and the men were in the middle, singing and playing guitar while the kids buried each another in dark, muddy, funeral-like mounds. Teens walked through all day, back and forth, sand kicked up from their smooth heels as they went. I imagined somewhere in the endless crowd was someone just like me, who carried the ghost of fingerprints around their neck. Somewhere was a mother who’d taken her children and run. Somewhere was a trio of siblings who knew what cruelty meant. Somewhere was a family who’d lost it all. Somewhere, maybe in the concession stand line, was someone who’d stood in court and told someone they’d loved once why they no longer existed in their heart before they watched them walk away for good. But today all we had was sun. All we had was sand. And the wild sky above holding us all there in our chapel made of scars. And all I had was music rising from a tent and waves crashing against the far back corner of my heart and my children finally laughing without being struck through with fear. And all at once, I could breathe again. Be again. Live again.
Finally.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALICE ANDERSON’s work has appeared in literary journals, including Agni and New Letters, and is featured in anthologies such as American Poetry: The Next Generation and On the Verge: Poets in America. Her second bestselling collection of poetry, The Watermark, was published in the United States, and in the UK, her first, Human Nature, was published to critical acclaim. The recipient of the Plum Review Prize, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award, and the Great Lakes Colleges Best First Book Prize, she also received the Haven Foundation Grant from Stephen King. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One: Smithereens
How I Learned to Shoot a Gun
Calamity
Heck on Wheels
The Maxi Pad
For Whom the Belle Tolls
Go Oman or Go Home
Diving into the Wreck
The “I”s Have It
So Much Calamity Smoke
Mac Daddy
So Help Me God
Part Two: Oblivion
Let the Pot Boil
Timber
Welcome to the Circus
Pretty Pictures
Be Sweet
Empty
Pink Flamingos and Quantum Physics
Three Little Birds
Pajamarama
Part Three: Badlands
California Dreaming
“Family” Court
Tinseltown
Stormé Weather
The Mark
Handguns, Hard-Ons, and the Headless Horsemen
Things Lost
Every Second Saturday
And Just When
Finally
Dream a Little Dream
About the Author
Copyright
All the names in this memoir have been changed, apart from my immediate family and public figures. Some locations and identifying characteristics have also been changed.
S
OME BRIGHT MORNING, I’LL FLY AWAY. Copyright © 2017 by Alice Anderson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Young Lim
Cover photograph © Kristin Manson Photography
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-09496-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-11185-2 (ebook)
e-ISBN 9781250111852
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First Edition: August 2017
Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away Page 25