by Kris Radish
And he was rarely home, rarely nice, rarely interested in anything but what an eighteen-year-old should be interested in—drinking, cars, other girls, anything but being a daddy and a husband.
It sounds like a movie. Leah realizes this and tells everyone that she was sort of living in two places at once. The real place, with a very mild hope of someone flying out of the sky to rescue her from what was on most days a kind of living hell, and the world she had created inside her own mind and heart.
Leah closes her eyes when she tells them what that world was like. Her face grows soft, her hands relax, and she lets her head drop so that it almost looks as if she’s falling asleep.
In that world, the one she dreamed about constantly, everything was different. She did not live there with him and she did not have to let his loathsome body slide against hers night after night. She was nowhere near Dunbar or Illinois but in a place filled with warmth, light, and searching minds. She could do and be and go and live how she wanted.
And she survived where she was by looking through and past all the people. She looked through the people who bought coffee and cigarettes from her at the gas station. She looked through the people who pretended they didn’t know her. She looked through the man who threw his lunchbox on the table every night.
And she started to look through herself.
By the time her classmates were literally running off to college, and away from the lives they feared they might fall into if they didn’t hurry and leave, she was about to go into labor.
That is when a live angel appeared. It was her high-school algebra teacher. A man who had seen some genius in the bright girl in the third row who passed every exam no matter how hard and who shared a very small slice of her anguish because he saw where she could have, should have, must someday go. He came into the gas station and asked Leah if she needed anything, if he could help her, if everything he had heard about her was true.
Of course it was.
The angel slipped her his phone number and said there were ways to climb onto dreams and ride them out of town. Leah memorized the number, burned it into the secret half of her world, and then she had a baby girl.
Kit can’t stand it. She has to say something, even though she’s ashamed that she’s still unable to reveal her deepest secrets. She knows there has to be more to the story, and she can all but guess at what that will be, but she is so angry that she has to say something.
“Dr. Bayer, I’m sorry, but this kind of thing gets me upset and I just have to say how appalled I am that in this day and age this kind of thing still happens,” Kit doesn’t so much say as spew through her teeth. “If I could write in my anger log right this second, I would be writing all about this. Monsters. Jackasses. Hurtful idiots. This is the stuff we read about when we were in college that happened to other people.”
Dr. Bayer doesn’t get a chance to say anything, because Leah pulls up her head and jumps right back into the story.
“Oh, I was going to leave and I had a friend or two who probably would have helped, but the first time the baby moved and I thought about that, about being a mother, and how the baby needed a chance more than I did, there was no leaving.”
No leaving. But suddenly this third person who needed the tender touch of a mother’s hand. A simple, sweet baby girl who triggered what would turn out to be nine more years of a kind of abuse that Kit and everyone else reads about on page two of the morning newspaper and is followed by severe swearing into coffee cups.
The husband got angry because what little bit of attention he was getting from Leah was now totally taken away. He hit her the first time when the baby was only two days old.
The baby was Jessica, or Jessie, and she was a girl and, husband and men be damned, this is when Leah’s secret world began to grow inside her so desperately that she called the algebra teacher. She did not mention the hitting or the lack of food in the house or the times she was forced to have sex before she was allowed to tend to the wailing baby in the next room.
All she said was help me. Help me get a diploma. The kind man paid for her to enroll at the community college, where she could take courses through the mail. He had everything sent to his house, and then took the lessons to the place where she worked, and Leah studied during her break and on the nights—thankfully so many—when the husband never came home.
Leah passed every exam and moved so rapidly through some of the courses that the instructors couldn’t keep up with her.
One day when the teacher came in she asked him why. Why do you help me? He was a married man with three daughters and a wife who worked, and Leah imagined they had the kind of life she dreamed about. The man looked at her and said, “Everyone deserves a chance.”
So Leah had a plan. It would take two or three years to get an associate’s degree while studying in the dark and sneaking and caring for the baby and working and making certain that he never found out. Because God forbid someone should excel or move beyond him, which is exactly what she planned to do.
Of course she could have fled in the night. When she talks about this, she looks directly at Kit. She could have packed up the baby and one diaper bag filled with clothes and taken a bus to Kansas. Better yet some tiny city in Oklahoma or Idaho, where no one would think to look for her. But then what? At least they had a place to sleep and the baby had clothes and Leah had her plan.
And no, Kit, why would he leave? He had a factory job and his buddies and his favorite sports bar and someone to do everything but talk for him. He also had his own father as a role model, and even though she willed him never to come home, to run away, to pack his own bag and leave, she knew that he didn’t have the courage to live his own life.
Yes, she thought of killing him. Leah drops her head and is ashamed. She is ashamed when she tells them how she wished he would die in his sleep or have a horrible car accident or get his head stuck in one of the machines at work. She thought of hitting him with the shovel, stabbing him with a knife, borrowing a gun from one of the men who came into the gas station.
“I hated those thoughts, but they came all the time,” she says. “They invaded my dreams when I did sleep and sometimes made me wonder if I was going insane.”
Leah’s honesty is almost frightening to the other women. Leah is the baby, the quiet, lovely toddler of the class, and she is baring her soul. Kit, Grace, and Jane look down at their own hands, thinking about what they should have shared—and still can—as Leah continues.
Somehow, Leah explained, because she knew they would want to know, she had managed to avoid sex. Mostly, but not always. The stress of the way she was living began to affect her menstrual cycles, and one night when she couldn’t fight him off, and was too tired to try, they created her son.
Something strange happened after that—something Dr. Bayer could explain in just a few minutes as control, ego, and something akin to testosterone-driven eminent domain—and the husband became nice. He surely wasn’t loving, but he expected the baby to be a son, and for all those months while she carried Aaron the husband backed off.
This wasn’t an easy pregnancy, and Leah fell behind in her studies and toward the end stopped altogether. She told herself that she would get back to it as soon as possible, and that ended up being two years. And the next time she started a class it was so much harder.
They were barely making it financially, and he forced her to let a friend watch the babies so that she could work full-time. And then a few years became a blur.
Grace and Kit know about that blur. It’s like watching a three-hour movie in five minutes. There is no time for anything but an occasional good cry in the bathroom while sitting on the toilet seat. The days and nights become so endless they bump into each other until everything feels, looks, sounds, and appears the same. It could be morning one minute and late night the next. Dishes never get washed and there seems to be dozens of people eating, drinking, and sleeping in a place where before there were just three.
Of course,
during those hard, long years, women who are mothers sometimes disappear. They are still walking around inside their clothes. There are bones and skin and blood inside the shoes, socks, and pants, but the person who once helped form those items into a woman with a personality and a life beyond what she does for everyone but herself has vanished.
It’s as if there is a secret airport in Virginia or, better yet, in the middle of Alaska or rural Mississippi, where specific parts of these mothers have gone to hibernate. In one hangar there will be rows of laughter. Two hangars down there will be the sounds of women rolling over and sleeping until they are no longer exhausted. Around the corner, the drive and energy that could propel dozens of women to open businesses, finish graduate school, or complete a marathon is stretched out on long planks that seem to go on forever.
Those years are a time of great sacrifice, when the babies need everything and if you love them you give them everything and then a little bit more of everything.
Leah can’t actually remember what happened while both children learned to walk and while she lost that part of herself that had been paving a road to freedom one small brick at a time.
Her next confession hits all of them like a new slap on the face. Once, she left. She left her babies and she was never going to go back.
“I’ve never told anyone this part,” she continues, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. “This is so hard for me to admit, but one night I did leave, and I drove and drove and I had no idea where I was going, but I ended up outside the town and when I turned to look all I saw was a blur of lights.”
Leah pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. She thought about what it might be like for her son and daughter to wake up and find her gone. She thought about what he would do and how they would live. And still she lingered.
“I hate myself for that moment—for lingering, and for thinking I could even do it. I went back and sat on the steps, and when he found me I just said that I couldn’t sleep. How could I even have thought of leaving them? What is wrong with me?”
No one says a word. Finally, after Leah wipes her eyes, Dr. Bayer says, “It’s okay, Leah, go on. No one is judging you.”
After that Leah said she grew tired of hoping. But one day the teacher came back and all he did was set down some coursework on the counter, where there were stains from spilled soft drinks, lottery-ticket stubs, and the greasy handprints of toddlers who had wiped their hands across its surface.
“It’s time,” he whispered. And then Leah looked down and on top of all that crap she saw the beautiful white pages of typing paper that held assignments for sophomore English.
“I started back with a vengeance,” she says. “The kids were six and four, and in all those years I had never seen my mother or my father. I may as well have been living in France.”
This makes her laugh. France! Leah tells them that one day, out of the clear blue sky, the husband came home and told her that they were moving closer to the city. He said pack up, we’re moving, and Leah asked him if they could move to France instead.
“He hit me hard on the face that night,” Leah said, her smile vanishing as fast as it had appeared. “He wanted to remind me who I was, and I couldn’t help it but I started smiling and I couldn’t stop, which infuriated him.”
His plan, she found out later, was to get her closer to the city so that he could finally disappear. He was worried that his father would stop him, and that’s why he found a new job at a new factory, which in his father’s eyes would be a kind of promotion. He would start the job, save some money, and then maybe take the boy and leave.
But the money didn’t come so fast and another year went by, and Leah was designing her own plan of escape. She was two classes away from earning the associate’s degree that would get her into a state-school program with an internship. The angel teacher was still helping her and, in fact, had gotten her a new job working part-time at a small bookstore, where it was easy for her to study and soak up even more of the knowledge she craved.
If she wanted to, Leah could stop now and not share the rest of her story. Grace, Jane, and Kit could finish it for her. In an amazement of predictability, considering where Leah now lives, they could guess what happened next. And they would be absolutely correct.
The husband found out what Leah had been doing all those years behind his back. Here she was getting smarter and more educated than he was while he busted his hump paying the rent and feeding them and she did nothing but raise a couple of kids he didn’t want anyway and earned a little money so he could make his truck payment.
The night he set the apartment on fire, both of the children had horrible early fall colds. This was just weeks ago. He came home late, thought they were all sleeping, drugged up with some of that over-the-counter cold medicine he had so thoughtfully brought home. But Leah wasn’t asleep. She was in the bathroom studying, and that threw him into a rage.
And when he started hitting her it was Leah’s turn to rage. She fought as if her life depended on it—and it did. She struggled and clawed and then crawled into the bedroom, where her son and daughter were sleeping when he started the couch on fire with what she would later learn was charcoal starter fluid.
While Leah called 911, he doused the carpeting and set that on fire. Then he tried to get into the bedroom, where she was huddled with the children, and finally, when sirens were rounding the corner, he ran out the door and was caught before his feet hit the sidewalk.
Leah finishes by dropping her hands on top of each one of her legs and then leaning forward as if she is about to send a team out of the huddle.
“You know what happened next, because that’s why I’m here. I lost my tempter one night at the shelter and hit my children,” she concludes, dropping her voice in a way that makes everyone know how ashamed she remains. “And don’t say it, please.”
“Say what?” Grace asks, absolutely shattered by what she has just heard.
“Don’t say I could have left. Don’t say I was just as much to blame. I was there. I know what was and wasn’t possible. Now I have to run as fast as I can. Now there is absolutely no time to waste.”
While Jane, Grace, and Kit reassure Leah that they aren’t thinking that or about to say anything except that they’re sorry, Olivia is thinking about the word love. Throughout Leah’s long, revealing, and terribly sad story, the word love was never once mentioned. It is a word that must be as seductive and intoxicating to Leah as Jane’s dwindling wine collection is to her.
Leah would be so easy to love, and Olivia hopes that will happen someday as soon as Leah can reach in just a bit further and learn to love herself. She’s close. There is a hint of forgiveness glowing behind her eyes, and how Dr. Bayer would love to see the glow radiate everywhere.
Leah sits back, finally finished, and all the Tuesday-night anger clients look exhausted and emotionally drained.
Then, before she can continue, something wonderful happens, something that Dr. Bayer will think about for a very long time, something that will make her forget her own buckets of self-doubt.
The women get up one at a time—first Grace, then Jane, and then Kit—and walk over to hug Leah. They each whisper something in her ear, and it is Jane who holds on to Leah the longest. Dr. Bayer doesn’t get to hear what they share, and that’s a good thing. They all deserve this moment.
And so does she.
39
Reflections of Change
No one is moving when what seems like a marathon Tuesday-night meeting finally ends a record-setting three and a half hours after it started.
Dr. Bayer is startled when she looks at her watch after Kit finishes speaking and realizes it’s closer to eleven o’clock than to ten. The women have even managed to share what they like about themselves. All four of them look as if they have just pulled an all-nighter. Dr. Bayer jubilantly exclaims that they have done fabulous work and if they keep it up she may be able to release them all in four weeks, before Thanksgiving.
When Dr. Bayer rises, and Kit invites them back to her house for next week’s session—if they are indeed meeting the following week—Jane, embarrassed by her emotional reaction to Leah’s story, jumps up so quickly that everyone is startled.
Dr. Bayer can tell by the drooping faces and loose limbs that the women have actually tried this evening and are not just physically but emotionally exhausted. She’s not surprised that everyone wants to get the heck out of there and process as soon as possible, herself included.
But before anyone else can get up, Dr. Bayer stops them all.
“Wait, girls! You didn’t think you’d get away without a white envelope tonight, did you?”
Olivia hands each of the women an envelope, decides at the last moment to have them meet again before she announces their graduation projects, and says, “Good luck. See you next week. I can’t wait to see how you handle this assignment. And—”
“And what?” they all say in unison.
“We are going to talk about the assignment in class. Out loud. Like big girls.”
This should be a good one, they all silently agree.
The other women scurry to rise as Jane grabs her coat, says a quick thank-you, and exits as if she just remembered she forgot to turn off the stove.
Leah’s story, Dr. Bayer’s discussions on life, and some very genuine conversations about change have obviously affected everyone in interesting ways. As Jane streaks out the door, Dr. Bayer also realizes that everyone deals with emotional issues differently. Jane may simply need to be alone or something struck a very raw nerve.
Jane pulls into her driveway, clicks the garage door open, and then slowly moves into her designated parking spot. She’s absolutely thrilled that Derrick isn’t home, and doesn’t even bother to worry about where he might be at close to midnight in the middle of the week.
Exhausted, Jane sits in the car while the heat slowly evaporates. What just happened? Why did she embrace Leah and bother to ask questions? Could the other women see that she was visibly moved by Leah’s story? How did this all happen?