Tuesday Night Miracles

by Kris Radish

Olivia is determined to get back part of her day. She’s also determined to advance, to keep her eye on the southern horizon, her heart forward, even as her stomach swirls in anticipation of what is to come.

  The Tuesday-night babes aren’t going to like what’s coming up very soon on the class agenda. It’s a true test, a final exam, and if they can make it through that, maybe all of them, Olivia included, will be home free.

  And sometime this afternoon they should be working on the next assignment. The mere thought of it makes Olivia giggle as if she were a schoolgirl.

  41

  The Fourth Assignment

  Dear Grace, Kit, Jane, and Leah,

  I think it’s now more than obvious that I have been trying to get you to draw a new picture of your lives. Each one of you is an artist—the designer of your own happiness. I want to see what that looks like, and I know you do, too. So here we go.

  On Saturday morning a courier will be dropping off a package. There will be several sheets of paper—because you know it’s always okay to change your mind and your direction—paints, brushes, pens, and even some crayons.

  You can use your fingers, for all I care, and draw stick people. Have fun! Grace, I know you don’t work Saturday, so I’d like you all to clear the decks in early afternoon and spend some quality time working on this.

  See, even though you will be alone, you really won’t be. But I think you know that now, too.

  You know how to find me if you need me.

  And bring your masterpieces to class. We won’t laugh (will we girls?). But I can’t wait to see the designs of your heart.

  Sincerely,

  Dr. B.

  42

  Courage to Be Real

  It is thirty-five degrees outside when Kit’s furnace blows. She’s in the car driving home from the grocery store when the ancient, never replaced, antiquated machine grinds to a halt with one small click. Tucked away in the narrow basement, the metal giant dies so quickly that the small bits of heat it managed to produce during the past hour while Kit was shopping are sucked away in minutes.

  When Kit pushes into the kitchen through the garage door, she knows immediately that something is wrong. It’s warmer in the frigging garage than it is inside the house.

  “Shit,” she swears, dropping the bags in the middle of the kitchen and rushing to the basement. She tries the manual on-off switch, then the circuit breaker, then she kicks the big piece of rusted metal twice with her cowboy boots. The furnace is so dead she can’t get a whimper out of it.

  While the meat thaws on the kitchen floor, and the ice cream in the bag next to it tries to hold its own, Kit calls Peter. It’s after 5 P.M. and it’s Tuesday night. In two hours, three life artists and one Wizard of Oz psychologist are due in her living room.

  “This is a winter dream for the furnace repairman, who has been begging us to get the piece-of-junk furnace replaced for the past five years,” Peter all but sobs into the phone. “They wait for people like us to call so they can go holiday shopping.”

  “Is this my fault?”

  Peter laughs. “No, honey. This is one of many things that happen in life that is not your fault. I’ll take care of it and call you right back.”

  “Shit!” she says again. “Tonight’s meeting. Now what?”

  “Don’t worry, Kit. That’s my job.”

  She quickly puts away the groceries and locates a wool hat lying on the kitchen table. It’s amazing how fast the house is getting cold.

  Peter calls back in fifteen minutes with the good news and the bad news. The good news is that the furnace guy is more than happy to install the five-thousand-dollar furnace they should have put in three years ago. He’s got one in stock and he can start in about two hours.

  Two hours? Kit figures every plant in the house will be dead and the water pipes frozen by then.

  “We’ll have to put it on the charge card,” she tells him. “I don’t know what’s left in the checking account.”

  Peter tells her to stop worrying. They don’t have a choice, and apparently Kit has totally forgotten that she’s going to get a rather nice chunk of money from her parents’ estate. He sucks in a breath and informs her that her oldest brother called him to tell him about the estate settlement. They went ahead without her or Peter.

  Peter pauses and waits for an explosion.

  “Kit?” he says after a few seconds. “Did you hear me?”

  Kit is stunned, and it’s not because of the money. She’s not angry that her brother called Peter and not her. To hell with them and their men’s club. She’s a little angry that the damn furnace blew tonight, but it’s their fault for procrastinating. And the money? Holy bananas! She never even thought about it.

  “I’m here, honey. Just trying to soak it all in.”

  Now Peter is the one who is surprised. He should have made her go to anger class ten years ago. What is happening? He instructs her to set up space heaters in the bathrooms to keep the pipes warm and then warns her that the installation will take hours.

  Kit swings into action and decides to put on long underwear, her old wool cross-country ski pants, a down vest, and earmuffs under the wool hat. She cranks on the oven, opens the door, and then calls Dr. Bayer.

  Dr. Bayer doesn’t seem flustered by the cold house. What Kit doesn’t know is that the dead furnace is just one more reason Olivia realizes she should have gotten out of a four-seasons state a long time ago. She tells Kit to hang tight while she makes a couple of fast calls.

  While she waits, Kit reheats a leftover cup of morning coffee and decides to take a look at the picture she drew last Saturday. It’s hilarious, but she loves it. In spite of its childlike quality, Kit can’t wait to show it off and see what the others have drawn. In the meantime, there she is standing in the kitchen dressed like an Eskimo, about to toss five grand into a furnace, still jobless, still ignored by her brothers, hours away from a court-ordered anger-management class, and all she can do is laugh!

  Kit is rubbing her hands together when Dr. Bayer calls back and tells her that they’re going to meet at Leah’s shelter.

  “What?” she asks, as if she hasn’t heard the location properly.

  “The shelter, down the street from you, where you picked up Leah a few weeks ago,” Dr. Bayer says again, certain that Kit heard her the first time. “They have a nice, large living room and it’s close for everyone. Is there anything I can do to help you with the furnace mess?”

  Kit says thank you, but no, and she can feel her mood slip south a bit. The women’s shelter? Well, she thinks, walking from the kitchen to make certain the space heaters they always keep handy for moments just like this do not start the towels or the walls or the toilet paper on fire, the new location should make the evening very interesting. Who knows what will happen?

  By the time she sets out to walk the few blocks to the shelter, the furnace guys have backed their huge truck into the driveway, given her the, “I told you so” speech, and started ripping the furnace out of its dead bed.

  Leah is waiting for her at the door and quickly ushers her in, because Kit looks like a piece of frozen fish.

  “You must be freezing,” Leah says, pulling her by the arm and through the entryway. “I’m sorry about your furnace.”

  Leah, who has no home, one bag of clothes, two children, and a will to thrive, is sorry because Kit’s furnace conked out. This puts things in perspective in such a way that Kit feels as if someone has just driven a nail though her collarbone. She thinks Leah is amazing.

  She smiles a thank-you and follows Leah into the living room, which is actually quite large and, thank heavens, warm. Kit is surprised to see that Dr. Bayer is already there, as are Grace, Jane, and four other women. What is going on?

  Dr. Bayer is beyond shrewd. When Kit called her, she immediately knew what to do. The women don’t know it yet but they’re going to be required to do forty hours of community service after she releases them. She’s going to use this meeting as a way to encou
rage them to do something for the shelter, but she also wants Grace, Jane, and Kit to hear the stories of the women who are currently living with Leah.

  Dr. Bayer was almost glad when Kit called to tell her about the furnace. She had been trying to come up with a clever way to let them know about the sixth assignment—sixth because the fifth was already planned. Wait until she had to break that news to them!

  One thing at a time, Olivia!

  When she explains about the community service and what she hopes to accomplish this evening, everyone but Leah remains immobile. Dr. Bayer can only imagine what the other three women must be thinking. But no one gives away any inner feelings. Leah, who is taking notes, stops writing and says that community service makes sense.

  Jane finally uncrosses her legs, and Dr. Bayer notes that she’s dressed conservatively for a change. Low-heeled black boots, dark slacks, and a simple dark blue sweater. Is it possible that she really has had a transformation? “Think positive,” she tells herself as she shuffles papers.

  Somehow she needs to talk with Grace and Kit alone before the evening ends to see if they received her emails with Dr. Pierce’s information. She has promised them one session if they want it, although she encouraged both of them to move forward without her. Her own progress during the past three days makes her heart skip a beat.

  Now, how to begin? Dr. Bayer looks around the room at the eight faces—four women from her class, and four of Leah’s roommates—and sees a world of struggle, hurt, and loss. She could almost recite the stories of Leah’s housemates without hearing them say a word. She knows their lives and stories all too well.

  “First of all, these four women volunteered to talk to you, show you their rooms, answer any questions you might have because they understand where you are and why you’re here,” she explains, trying hard to make certain none of the women is intimidated. “We use only first names under this roof and, believe me, the women who live here want to be as discreet as possible. They understand confidentiality.”

  Dr. Bayer has already explained about the secret location of the house, and she couldn’t imagine that meeting there would be a risk for any of the women. The director had agreed, thinking that the women in the shelter might also have much to gain by telling their stories.

  And what stories they were.

  Dr. Bayer watches Grace, Kit, and Jane as the first woman begins to talk. She assumes Leah has already heard the stories from the other women and she’s hoping that the power of the night for Leah will be in realizing that she isn’t alone in any aspect of her life.

  Grace and Kit are looking intently at the first speaker, and Dr. Bayer thinks they look interested and open. Jane, however, is so expressionless that Dr. Bayer is a bit worried. But she also knows that visiting a shelter, and coming face-to-face with the reality of domestic violence like this, isn’t an easy task.

  If Jane and the others can hold on through this session, and they understand the importance of the assignment she will soon reveal, they will all be as free as birds—well, minus the forty hours, and what she hopes will be a life of continued soul-searching, liberation, and good behavior.

  There’s always a chance that Jane has listened to her husband and gone for some outside counseling. Maybe that’s why she looks so serene. Dr. Bayer decides to believe the story she has just made up, and she finally turns to listen to the woman who is sitting across from her, elbows resting on her thighs, while she talks about how she was raped by her grandfather when she was eleven.

  She is speaking almost as if she were having an out-of-body experience. The physical and sexual abuse continued for years, until she married a man who treated her only slightly better. Twenty years later, she was still walking with her head down, still being abused, still thinking that was just the way life is.

  “You get numb,” she says. “No matter what other people say to you about how wrong it is, you’re so embarrassed, so frightened, so worried about what might happen, that you stay. I stayed and stayed.”

  The woman says that at first she stayed to protect her children—both boys, thank heavens. Then things were better for a short while, but when she began to gain a little weight the verbal abuse started, and pretty soon he was smacking her all the time.

  “One night he came home and he kicked the dog so hard that blood came out of its nose,” she recalled, talking softer, with her head lowered. “I loved that sweet dog. I knew that if I stayed I was going to be next. I lied the next morning and said I would be late from work because I had a meeting. But I went to my doctor’s office because I had seen a pamphlet about domestic violence. I’ve been here for six weeks.”

  The next woman’s story wasn’t as textbook violent. The woman reveals right away that she is a professional, and she looks as if she could be a professor, a corporate vice president, or an attorney. The abuse from her husband, all of it physical, had erupted like sudden gunfire after five years of a fairly reasonable and normal—whatever that means—marriage.

  Her husband had become so suddenly vicious that she thought he might have a brain tumor. Three weeks ago he held her at gunpoint, told her he never loved her, he’d been seeing someone else for four years, and if she didn’t leave him he would kill her.

  “I’m staying here until he’s sentenced, and then I’m selling everything and starting my own business,” she says. “There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would have killed me.”

  The next woman had been shot. Twice. She’d also been stabbed with a kitchen knife, nearly strangled, and then pushed out of a moving car.

  “When the violence is going on, it’s almost as if it isn’t even happening,” she explains without hesitation. “I kept telling myself that if I could survive just one more day it would all stop. Then I would tell myself that it really wasn’t so bad to be battered like that while the pot roast burned and the neighbors played football in the backyard.”

  Her son finally held a gun on his own father while she dialed 911 with a bloody hand. The best thing that happened, she finishes with a smile, is that her husband threatened her in front of the police officers, stupidly recited a litany of his past attacks, and then bit one of the officers on the arm as they were dragging him out of the house.

  “I’m safe here,” she says. “I can’t go back to that house, and I’m learning how to live with respect for myself and with the dignity that was taken away from me one day at a time all those years.”

  Dr. Bayer has watched as even Leah’s eyes have gotten bigger with each story. Perhaps she didn’t know all these details, perhaps she is also remembering how she lived all those years, perhaps she is simply expressing disbelief that none of these women took out a hidden gun and blew their men’s special body parts into Canada.

  The last woman to speak is clearly the oldest. She must be close to Olivia’s age or maybe younger. Abuse surely ages people. It drags down the skin of their faces, causes eyelids to droop, hair to turn gray years sooner than it normally would, diseases that might otherwise bypass a woman under stress.

  She starts out by saying that she has been married for forty-three years. Even Dr. Bayer turns to look at her. Sweet Mother of God.

  “You all look astonished,” she says, almost laughing, knowing what kind of reaction she would get to her story. “I had to wait for my mother to die before I could run away. She finally had a heart attack last month. I took care of the funeral, asked my brother Ronald if I could see him for a moment in front of the funeral home, and I had him drive me right to the front door of the police station.”

  This woman had kept her own form of the women’s journals. She had taken photographs of her scratches and bruises. She had written down pages filled with the verbal assaults she had endured and noted the time of day when she had been abused, the weather, what her husband was wearing, what she was wearing, and what she had been wearing that had been ripped off her body. She had somehow managed to get her three now grown children through those bad years and into their own saf
e worlds by taking the brunt of everything her husband had to offer.

  Kit can’t help herself. One of the jokes she has always wanted to use in her stand-up comedy routine is the one about the ninety-year-old man and the ninety-year-old woman who get divorced. When a neighbor asked them why, they both said they were waiting for the children to die.

  “Why did you wait so long?” Kit blurts out.

  “Because I loved my mother so very much.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He said if I left him, if I told anyone, that he would kill my mother. She’s the only person in the whole world who ever loved me. My children don’t even love me, because they think I’m useless because I should have left him. They don’t know what he would have done. He had it all planned. He would have done it. I know that with all certainty.”

  This woman looks as if she bakes bread every Tuesday, sings in the church choir, and bounces grandchildren on her knees.

  Dr. Bayer has to admit that even she is blown away by this last story. She shouldn’t be. She has heard just about every imaginable and unimaginable sad life tale in the world. It’s a wonder she has been able to tuck them safely into a make-believe suitcase she has placed alongside her own heart, lest she let such great sorrow and loss invade her own soul and take over her life.

  But it’s not as if she forgets. It’s impossible for a woman of compassion to forget how cruel and inhumane the world can sometimes be. Impossible to erase all the weeping men and women from your memory. Impossible to forget how haunting a sad pair of eyes can be. Equally impossible to think that anyone with even half a heart doesn’t sometimes need to extinguish her own anger at the sight of others being treated so cruelly.