by Kris Radish
She finally told her daughter that they would stay where they were for a while and not to worry about anything. “It’s all going to be just fine, my little warrior. Just fine.”
Leah knows some people—Jane, for sure—would wonder how she could be so happy with so little. She has no car, no savings or checking account, no computer. Her children have three sets of clothing, one tiny box of toys, and they share two bicycles with the other ten children who live at the shelter.
Now, when she is standing in the front hallway waiting for her children to get off the bus, she feels absolutely rich. There is not one thing Leah Hetzer takes for granted, and for several weeks she has felt safer each day. There is always food to eat, there are locks on the windows, an alarm system, women who would do anything to help her, and she’s taking tentative steps to try to recapture the one dream she has allowed herself to hold on to all these years: a normal life for her children.
Everyone at the shelter always seems busy. There’s a group session every morning, when the women discuss pretty much whatever they want. All the women have a job at the shelter, even the children, and Leah refuses to surrender her position in the kitchen. Once her children leave for school, Leah runs errands or takes the bus to the employment office. She’s still the newest member of this little community and the only woman who is not yet working outside the shelter.
Three times a week she meets with her own counselor, who keeps warning her that she needs to slow down. “Some of our women have been here for eight months, Leah,” her counselor advised. “You need time to settle, to adjust, to examine every angle of your life. You still have tons of issues to deal with. Slow down so you don’t trip.”
Slow down! Leah wants to run as fast as she can. She wants to get a job, go back to school, find an apartment, make new friends, stand in the window of her own kitchen and watch leaves twirl, snow fall, rain dance. There are other dreams to uncover and surely new ones to nurture, but for now Leah is trying to regain her grace, make amends, listen to whoever cares to share thoughts and time with her.
And sometimes the waiting and the necessary patience frustrates her.
Leah steps outside to wait for her son and daughter on the front steps and doesn’t realize that Sherry, the woman who has been giving her useful advice, is talking to someone on the short path that leads to the sidewalk.
It looks as if it’s Sherry’s mother.
Leah doesn’t know if she should go back inside the house or stay where she is. The two women don’t see her, and they are obviously mother and daughter. They are both standing with their hands on their hips in the exact same spots. They have matching features and almost identical dark hair, although the mother’s hair is streaked with gray.
And they are having an argument.
“You have no idea what it’s been like, Mother,” Sherry is saying through her teeth.
“I warned you. I did. But you never listen. You’ve never listened to me.”
“This is not the time or place. This is not what I need to hear now. Go away. Go away!” Sherry has raised her hands and looks as if she is going to shove her mother out of the way.
Leah reacts instinctually. She jumps from the small porch and screams, “Stop it! Just stop it!”
Sherry turns and faces her, and there is fire in her eyes.
“What the hell are you doing, Leah?”
“She’s your mother. Don’t hurt her.”
“This is none of your damn business!”
Sherry takes a step closer to Leah, and Leah raises her hand without thinking. Just then her counselor, Joyce, comes out of the house and shouts, “Leah! Back off!”
Leah drops her hand and immediately goes pale.
“Go into the house, Leah,” Joyce orders. “Sherry, you stay.”
Leah obeys as Joyce touches her arm and whispers into her ear.
“Sometimes walking away is the best thing to do,” Joyce tells her. “You’ve lived in fear and the self-protection mode a very long time, and not everyone who raises their voice is going to be violent. You must pause. Use this as a learning tool, not as a setback.”
Later, when the house is quiet, Leah slips out of bed, walks to the lone window in her room, raises the curtain, and looks into the dark heart of the night. And she weeps while she also looks into the blackness of a part of her heart that she has avoided for a very long time. When she finishes, much, much later, Leah holds up her hands and sees that in spite of the dishwater her fingernails aren’t chipped and her hands look lovely.
She smiles and turns her back on the darkness, and searches for a bright room so that she can write about what will truly make her happy.
20
The Blue Dot
Grace is pretty damn sure that her L5 is about ready to slip south and cripple her. Her back is killing her. The stabbing pain has lodged itself just above her left hip and she’s been sitting on an ice pack for the past twenty minutes and wishing she had smuggled a bottle of vodka into her desk drawer.
And wouldn’t that cause a new ripple in her half-dead life. She can see it now: Angry nursing supervisor already attending anger-management class caught slurping vodka while signing off on patient medications.
It’s closing in on 7 P.M. and Grace is exhausted. Three people called in sick, God knows what Kelli is up to, her back aches, her feet ache—every part of her body aches—and the headache that lately never seems to go away is dancing across her temples. At least the dance is not a full-blown rumba yet. There’s one for the good guys.
Evan had slipped into her office with a steaming cup of really good coffee, and that was at least a few minutes of relief and encouragement.
“Grace, you know you’re really good at what you do,” he said smiling, as he handed her the coffee.
“Really?”
That smile always makes Grace’s knees weak. “Oh, Grace! You help so many people, and I know you love what you do.”
He was right, but sometimes it’s hard for Grace to remember the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction she often gets after a hard day’s work.
No one would ever call Grace Collins a slacker, except probably Grace Collins. She’s able to see her life only in bits and pieces, and she refuses to acknowledge the miles she has under her belt. She works hard and, in spite of her misgivings, has managed to keep her house, stay on top of most of her duties as a mother, and rise through the ranks because she is a gifted nurse.
And she’s pretty much gotten to this exact spot alone. Her parents all but disowned her when she divorced, and she has always felt as if she were running to catch a bus that has just left without her.
Her days are managed and outlined by her work schedule. The one blessing is that as a supervisor she can work the first shift because she is the top of the totem pole, with tenure, and because she has an advanced degree. But she doesn’t even consider that. She does consider the extra shifts she tries to pick up to help cover her attorney’s fee and the Tuesday-night class and the fact that Kelli is mostly useless and she has to handle most of the household chores herself.
Her mother would have a major fit if she saw Kelli’s room or the kitchen at this very moment. It’s not as if Her Highness would drop in, what with her and Grace’s father being out of the country again, but the one time her parents did drop in unexpectedly it launched three months of such verbal abuse that Grace considered going into hiding.
“How can you live like that?” her mother exclaimed, after they found the house in what she thought was a shambles. Her father remained silent, which was mostly normal.
“Like what?” Grace was coming off a second-shift emergency assignment, both her daughters had decided they were allergic to washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and brooms, and she was barely making ends meet.
“The beds weren’t made. There were dishes in the sink. Your kitchen floor was disgusting. I did not raise you that way.”
Grace wanted to reach through the phone and slap her mother really, really
hard. Instead, she calmly told her off.
“This is my reality show, Mother dearest. I work fifty hours a week. No one helps me. I am a single mother. I just put myself through graduate school one frigging class at a time. My daughters are not in jail. They eat and sleep and have clothes. I’m sorry I’m not the beauty queen you wanted who married a rich banker. Get over it.”
The only good thing that came out of that conversation was that her mother didn’t speak to her for two months. Two lovely, angst-free, serene months.
Some things never change, Grace reminds herself, finally closing her file folders, turning off the light, and not so much walking as sliding out the door.
When she finally pulls into the garage, the first thing she notices is that Kelli hasn’t bothered to set out the garbage for tomorrow morning’s pickup. It smells like dead cats and dogs, and there are at least five bags seeping into the already filthy garage floor.
She can hear some loud and absolutely ridiculous rap music playing before she even pulls open the door that leads into the kitchen. She’s been trying hard for months to hear something besides “I wanna hump you” every time Kelli has her iPod stoked to the max.
When she walks into the house, Grace is already five speeds beyond overdrive. Hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and, in a qualifying round for a six-week spa vacation from her life, the last thing she needs is to see the remains of Kelli’s previous three meals on every counter in the kitchen.
She snaps.
Grace drops her bag, hobbles down the hall in her old white work clogs that should be out in the garage with the rest of the garbage, and pounds on Kelli’s door.
“What?” Kelli yells from behind the door.
“Get out here. Now!”
Grace thinks she hears “fuck you,” but she isn’t sure if it’s Kelli or the asshole on the iPod. It really doesn’t matter. She’s absolutely fried.
Kelli pulls open the door and her jaw is set, the music is still blaring, and from what Grace can see it looks as if a car has driven through the room.
There’s a moment when either one of them could back down. Grace could be an adult and say something like “Hi, I’m home,” or Kelli could be an almost-adult and say, “Mom, I didn’t hear you. Hi.” But instead Grace goes to the place she always goes, and it isn’t pretty.
“What the hell? You didn’t do the garbage. The kitchen. Your room. It looks like a pigsty in here, and I just worked twelve hours.”
“I was just going to do it.”
“I bet.” Grace sprays, so that Kelli has to brush her mother’s spit off her face.
“You have no idea what I do so you can have a roof over your head, clothes, that damn music blaring. You could care less.”
“Mom, seriously, chill,” Kelli says, backing up, a line of fear beginning to parade across her eyes.
“I’ll chill. Someday. I’ve had it. I have just had it.”
Grace turns to leave, but not before she sees that Kelli has started to cry. She turns away. Ashamed, and now even more exhausted, she storms into her own bedroom.
“What is wrong with me?” Grace whimpers into her hands, with her eyes closed.
When she opens them, she sees the notes of happiness she has been working on for Dr. Bayer. She bends down, touches the few pieces of paper, and then turns to run and find Kelli. And when Kelli falls into her arms and Grace apologizes, she knows exactly what she will write as soon as she gets back to her room.
21
The Green Dot
Kit is alone so much of the time that she has started talking to herself. The conversations are more like quiet mumblings. She supposes that this is what happens to lots of people when their lives are thrown up into the air and then land in a million different places or get stuck on the ceiling fan.
“Geeze,” she says, wiping off the kitchen counter for the third time that morning. “How did I ever have time to do anything when I worked and had a real life?”
Kit hates how her days have dissolved into a boring routine that revolves around the three main events in her life: Peter coming and going, the next mysterious assignment from Dr. Bayer, and a potential phone call from her faraway daughter.
She hasn’t so much been living during the past few months as existing, and she’s been lying through her teeth to her husband about what she does all day. She tells him she’s looking for work, making calls, taking care of things that she’s never had time to take care of before, but mostly she’s not doing any of that.
Mostly she’s playing around on the computer, sleeping too much, eating junk food, watching daytime television, and fertilizing her paranoia by ignoring anything that might help her move in a positive direction. She’s too embarrassed about what she’s done to call any of her friends.
One glance around the kitchen, which never really has a chance to get cluttered or dirty because Peter has been working so much and their daughter—well, who knows when they will see her again. Sarah’s off living her own dream, but Kit can’t help but think her temper and her possessiveness have helped drive her only child away.
“It’s normal for a grown daughter to leave home, Kit,” Peter has told her at least twenty times. “Stop being so hard on yourself. You’re bad, baby, but not that bad.”
Kit stands in front of the refrigerator for a moment and tries to remember the last time she had a conversation with Peter that lasted longer than ten minutes. A meal together? Was it two weeks ago? Three?
Kit does think about Ronnie and how reconnecting has added something wonderful to her life. There’s that and her new comedy-club pal, Val. But there’s only so much relationship energy right now, and she’s thinking she needs all that energy for herself. And what if she really is just an angry middle-aged woman who’s a bad friend?
Kit pushes herself away from the refrigerator and wonders if something has possessed her. Maybe some evil person cast a spell on her and made her angry and overreactive all the time. Maybe it’s the tail end of menopause biting her in the ass and then swimming up through her mouth.
During these long and always quiet mornings, Kit can’t even imagine what she’s going to do the rest of the day. She decides to head back upstairs and make the bed, maybe clean out the bathroom sink. Boy, that will be a pretty exciting morning.
She makes it as far as Sarah’s bedroom door when she is struck with such a pang of loneliness and aloneness that she staggers just a bit. “Oh, Sarah,” she whispers into her hands.
Even though she has promised herself over and over that she won’t call her daughter, that she will let Sarah be, let her live her life, let her come home when she’s ready, Kit walks down to her bedroom and picks up the telephone beside the bed.
Next to the bed just in case Sarah calls at night. Just in case she needs her mother.
Kit dials and her call immediately goes into voice mail.
“It’s your mom. Just checking.”
She hangs up.
Then she dials again.
“I mean, you could call. Sometime. Just a call.”
The house is so quiet that Kit can hear the people next door talking in the kitchen, which faces her bedroom. People talking and living and enjoying each other. Isn’t that just absolutely wonderful?
Kit stands for a second to look out the window. She keeps the phone in her hand. The neighbors probably hate her the way everyone else hates her. Sarah must really hate her. Peter always told her during Sarah’s teenage years that she was too hard, too overprotective. Too everything.
But isn’t that what a mother is supposed to do? Isn’t a mother supposed to make sure that her daughter is never harmed, that her daughter is safe and protected? No matter what? No matter who?
Kit suddenly wishes she had a private assignment from Dr. Bayer. Maybe that woman would have her bake a cake or go sing to the monkeys at the zoo, anything but sit in this room with a phone in her hand feeling sorry for herself yet again. Kit looks at the phone and then sets it down. Dr. Bayer would be appalled. Sh
e should be appalled.
Forget about Jesus. What would Dr. Bayer tell her to do?
There’s the happy-face log, but something has to happen before she can write in it.
Kit starts bouncing on the bed as if she’s a bored little girl locked in her room. Well, why not bake a cake? She jumps up, forgets about the phone call, and within thirty minutes the entire kitchen looks as if a bomb went off. There is flour everywhere, and Kit is actually whistling.
Then she takes a risk, boldly calls Val, and invites her over for coffee and cake, and can’t believe it when Val doesn’t even hesitate but says, “I’ll be right over.”
22
The Red Dot
The one afternoon Jane dares to sit down in the living room and turn on the television, it’s like National I Love My Girlfriend Day. This female-friendship thing has gotten way out of hand. Every talk show she flips to has some woman or a group of women talking about girlfriend getaways, shopping trips, the helping hands of sisterhood. It’s like a flipping lovefest.
Jane was feeling pretty snappy until she took a break from job searching, real-estate comparisons, and online browsing of the latest winter fashions that she could no longer afford to buy. She was even drinking tea, which didn’t taste half bad.
Is this what the world has come to? All this junk on television, with even the male talk-show hosts who have to jump in and talk about how they wish they had the wonderful kinds of relationships their wives had with their girlfriends? What is wrong with these idiots? Guys want boyfriends like girlfriends?
“Grow up,” she snarls, switching channels and looking into her teacup.
Jane wonders what her mother would think of her sipping tea in the afternoon while still wearing her pajamas and one of Derrick’s old bathrobes. She has taken to wearing as few clothes, and changing as seldom as is humanly possible to save on dry-cleaning costs. When she had to dismiss the young woman who came to do her wash, clean, and stock the refrigerator—pretty much everything most other women do all the time—it was as if she had to learn how to function as a domestic adult again.