How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  Emma didn’t sleep for more than ninety minutes at a stretch for the first several months of her life. At night, Amy would pace the halls, deliriously sleep deprived and weeping while she rocked and shushed the baby and Mike screamed from their bed, “Can’t you get her to sleep? Are you so stupid that you can’t figure out how to comfort your own child?”

  Her only solace, she says, was that he reserved this vitriol for her and spared their daughter. To both of them, Emma was perfection. He ran to her when he got home at night, barely glancing at Amy while he swooped up Emma into his arms. “Of course, when I was pregnant, I’d imagined this differently. I thought he would walk in the door at the end of the day and wrap us both in a family embrace, like on Donna Reed,” she says. “But he never announced his arrival with words. There was no ‘Honey, I’m home,’ no ‘Hey, how was your day?’, just the angry, banging sounds of the door slamming behind him, his briefcase being thrown on the floor. I stood in the threshold of the doorway between the kitchen and the laundry room feeling totally invisible as he talked to Emma in goopy baby talk: ‘Did your mother feed you well today? Are you sure? Did you spend enough time on your tummy? At least an hour, I hope? Are you a happy baby?’ He made me feel as if I was some unqualified babysitter, not the mother of his child.”

  Each day, she says, it chipped away at her, making her feel smaller and less competent, a flimsy whisper of the person she used to be. She’d never believed in the stereotype of the harried falling-apart mother, and now she feared that it was exactly what she was becoming. “Eventually, he just stopped talking to me altogether, save for the times when he was criticizing me. ‘I can barely look at you,’ he’d say while I was getting dressed. ‘If I’d known that you were going to be one of those women who packs on the baby weight…’”

  The whole thing was baffling, and finally, one day while Emma was napping, she decided it was time to face the problem head-on, with or without his help. She went to the guest-room closet, dug her psych books from college out of a box on a shelf, and began to comb through them.

  An hour later, deep in a chapter about postpartum depression, she discovered the treasure that she’d been looking for: While it was rare, new fathers could also suffer from the condition, and unlike mothers, whose depression typically manifested in the way you would expect, dads were more likely to become irritable, impatient, and even aggressive. Reading, she felt a ringing in her ears, a tingling in her gut. This was it. It had to be. “And in the same way that women with postpartum depression get through it, I thought that this would pass for Mike, too. I told myself that it was temporary, like a bad flu. So later that night, after I put Emma to bed, I sat down on the couch next to him and told him what I thought. He was quiet for a long time,” she tells me, still avoiding my gaze. “I kept squeezing his hand and telling him that I was going to help him get through it. Waverly…”

  “What is it?” I say, so stunned by what she’s said that I’m hardly able to get the words out.

  “That was the first time he hit me.”

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Amy, this has been going on since Emma was a baby?”

  “Three years,” she says. “It’s strange, but my very first thought the first time he did it wasn’t why he had done it or how he could have done it. What I wondered before anything else was whether the slaps would leave a mark.”

  They did, she says, along with the bruises that came later, sporadic and without warning. The one on her hip where he kicked her after she forgot to call his mother on her birthday. The marks on her upper arm from where he’d grabbed her one Saturday while she was cleaning out the freezer in the garage and didn’t hear Emma crying when she woke up from her nap.

  I can feel tears running down my cheeks but I’m too shocked to even wipe them away. “I can’t believe this,” I say. I’ve never felt the kind of outrage that prohibits your brain from forming a single coherent thought. My mind is a vast, foggy expanse of gray.

  “Waverly.” Amy looks into my eyes. Hers are deep and brown, her best feature, but right now they remind me of the mechanical, lifeless kind in the creepy vintage dolls that my grandmother displayed on top of the dresser in her guest room. I used to flip them in my hands, up and down, watching the lids flick open and closed. “I’m fine. I really am,” she says. “It’s over now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s been a while, first of all. When it started, you know…I was in shock. I never expected this to happen to me any more than I expected to wake up one morning to find unicorns grazing in my backyard, but it had happened, and it was almost as if it had spawned this entirely new person inside of me. I didn’t know who I was anymore, or what I believed, or how I should act. I felt crazy, which is a word that I’d stricken from my vocabulary when I’d taken enough psychology courses to know better. On the one hand, I knew that I should leave—intellectually, I got it. I kept thinking about the students I’d counseled who’d dealt with this: Jocelyn, one of the first teenagers I ever worked with, whose mother came to my office one afternoon with her eye swollen shut and a busted lip. And this kid Brad, whose father beat the shit out of him every time the varsity football team lost. I’d sat behind my desk with my hand on a stack of informational pamphlets from support groups and told them that there was a way out, that they deserved better than this from the people who were supposed to love them. But…”

  “What?” I say.

  “It’s different. Once you’re in it,” she says.

  “But Amy—,” I start.

  “No, no,” she says. “Listen: Mike has agreed to start seeing a counselor. We had a big talk just last week, after we got back from Florida. I’ve found someone who seems really great.” She nods. “Really.”

  “But Amy, he hit you.” I correct myself: “He hits you.”

  “You don’t know what he’s been through,” she says. “It’s a disease.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything sooner?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” She shakes her head. “It just wasn’t right. I can’t explain it. The thing is, I always knew that he would come around again. I always had faith that we would work it out, and I was sure that if I said anything, people would try to convince me otherwise.”

  Wait, did she just say that she knew that he would come around again? Were those really the words I’d just heard? I slap my hand down on the bar. “But, Amy—”

  She cuts me off: “Wave, I know. Believe me, I do. But Mike’s getting help and we’re really working as a team. I know that I’ve mentioned that Mike had a less than idyllic childhood, but believe me when I tell you that none of us can even begin to imagine what it was like. His mother had this endless stream of boyfriends when he was growing up. Several of them hit her, and Mike, too. His mother packed them up every few months, moving them to a new town whenever she lost a job or a boyfriend. None of us can fathom what he went through.”

  “But, Amy, that might be a reason, but it’s not an excuse. What about you?”

  “I’m fine,” Amy says again. “I really am. You don’t have to worry. Listen, Mike and I are talking about this. I knew we were right for each other from the beginning because we’ve both always wanted a family more than anything in the world. While other boys grow up dreaming of becoming professional athletes, Mike grew up wanting to have a family. It’s still our dream. This is just a rough patch.”

  She sounds like she’s been brainwashed. This is not the confident, kindhearted former guidance counselor I’ve talked to almost every day for more than a decade. It’s ludicrous that she wants to help a man who treats her like something he wants to destroy—and already obviously is. I clear my throat. “Amy, I know that you know your relationship with Mike better than anyone else in the world,” I say. I know that my tone of voice makes me sound like I’m trying to talk her off of a ledge, but fuck it. I am.

  Amy nods.

  “And I know that you love him.”

  “I do
.”

  “But are you really listening to yourself?” I reach out and touch Amy’s leg. “Physical violence is—”

  “He’s my husband.” She blurts it before I can finish, like she’s lobbing a tennis ball back over a net.

  “Amy, I think you should think about this. You might not be safe there.”

  “What, you think I should leave him?” she says.

  I nod so hard that my whole torso wobbles.

  “Just run off Thelma and Louise–style?” Amy laughs.

  She laughs. I’m even more alarmed that she’s not taking this seriously. “Well, yeah, Ame.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s just hard for you to understand. You’ve never been through it, and I’m sorry, but you’re not married and you don’t have kids. Those things create a bond that you can’t fathom. I would never just leave him. We’re a family.”

  It takes a moment for me to choose what I’m going to say before I say it. I can’t believe that she’s justifying this horror by telling me that I don’t get it because I’m single. It stings, but, more than that, it’s more evidence that I need to be extremely careful with what I say, because Amy is quite obviously so deeply involved in this that she can’t see what’s happened to her. “Amy, I may not be married or have children,” I say cautiously. “But I do know that it’s not okay for anyone to put their hands on you, whether it’s a stranger or a family member or whomever.”

  “Waverly, listen.” She shakes her head. “I have dealt with this situation lots of times as a counselor, and I know how to deal with it now. We are getting him professional help. There is absolutely nothing for you to worry about.” Her words are careful and clipped, like a robot’s.

  “Amy, people always say that once somebody is an abuser, he’s always an abuser.”

  She rolls her eyes. “That might work for after-school specials and Dateline, but I’m telling you, that’s not how it is in the real world. Don’t forget what I used to do for a living. Mike is serious about getting help.”

  “Amy, we’re not talking about helping him come back from a broken leg or something!” I really can’t believe what I’m hearing.

  “But he’s sick, Waverly. He really is. This is a disease, just like having cancer or…or….” She looks up at the ceiling as she searches for another analogy. “Or being an alcoholic. Would you tell me to leave him if he was going through chemo? If he’d just gone into rehab?”

  “Amy, this isn’t the same thing,” I plead.

  “Listen to me: I am fine. Really.”

  I just stare at her. I am dumbfounded.

  “Have you told your family?” I ask. That will get her. She tells them everything. If she hasn’t at least told her sisters, then I’ll know just how poorly she’s handling this.

  “No, I haven’t,” she says, resigned. She knows exactly what I’m doing. “Waverly, I told you because I know you can trust me. My family would never understand. I’m telling you because I know you can believe in me. I know that you have faith in me.”

  I feel like I’m being manipulated. I wish I could remember one single, helpful thing I’d read on those websites. They’d said not to give unsolicited advice and not to badmouth the abuser…but what am I supposed to do? “Amy, you know I’ll always support you, but this is different. I mean, have you thought about what could happen if he—I don’t know—has a relapse? What if things go back to the way they were? Or get even worse?”

  Amy just shakes her head. “Waverly, with all due respect, you’re not in my house. You don’t understand.”

  I want to scream. I want to yell to the bartender to call 911, do something! But I can’t.

  “I know my husband and I know our commitment to this,” she says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, no, Amy. I just want to be sure that you’re okay,” I say. The last thing that I want is for her to feel like she shouldn’t have said anything—then she never will again. “I’m so glad that you told me. Just imagine what it’s like to hear it from my perspective. You’d immediately be protective, too. I trust you, though. I know that you can handle yourself.” I’m lying, of course, but it’s the only thing to do until I figure out how to deal with this correctly.

  “I really am fine. There’s nothing for you to worry about.” She reaches around to the back of her barstool for her purse and pulls out her wallet. I don’t want her to leave now. I’m not convinced that she’ll ever speak to me about this again, and most of all, I now know what she’s going home to.

  “Will you promise me that you’ll talk to me about this?” I put my hand on her wrist. “That you’ll be open with me about what’s going on?”

  “Of course.” Amy smiles at the bartender while she hands him her card. I watch her dig into her purse, pull out a lip gloss, and start to unscrew the cap.

  “Amy,” I say again. I can taste my dinner in the back of my throat. My chest aches from heartburn.

  She swivels her stool so that we are sitting knee to knee. “Waverly,” she says pointedly, my name sounding like a declaration. “For the last time, I’m fine. I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I sit in my car in the restaurant parking lot and watch Amy’s taillights disappear down the road. I have a horrible foreboding sense of doom, like I’ve just watched her get on a plane that I know is about to crash. I fiddle with the falling-apart rabbit-foot key chain I’ve kept on my key ring since I was seventeen and wonder whether I ought to follow her home. But what would I do, stand watch from the front curb and search the windows for shadows? Well, yes, half of me screams. Obviously! And you’ll call the police while you’re at it! The other half of me, the deep-down part that knows that this is a situation I can’t fix, turns the key in the ignition and starts to drive home.

  Amy.

  Amy, who never forgets a birthday, who always ends phone calls with “Love you,” who signs her emails with a ribbon of Xs and Os. Sweet Amy, who is always giving little gifts that she picks up just because she is thinking of you—a bag of candy, a small tube of hand cream, daisies from her backyard. Amy, who from the time we met and long before, has single-mindedly cast all of her hopes and her dreams on a white picket fence and a family. How could he do this to her?

  When I get home, I slam the back door behind me and throw my bag on the counter beside the fridge. I can hear Larry in the shower upstairs, singing “Ophelia” along with The Band on the shower radio he’s suctioned to the tile. I stand there, listening to the growly, familiar tone of his singing voice, and consider going straight upstairs to tell him. Instead, I get a glass of water and go to the living room.

  I lie on the couch, cradling my head on a needlepoint pillow that my mother made when she was pregnant with me. God, I wish I could call her. She’d know exactly what to do. Amy’s voice rings in my ears: “It really started just after Emma was born.” Three years. How could this have just slipped by?

  I turn into the couch and close my eyes, searching my memories of Amy and Mike as if I’m digging through the old card-catalog files at the library. There have been dinner parties, baby showers, birthdays, holiday parties, happy hours. There were the nights that I took dinner to them just after Emma was born, when we’d stand over her bassinet and marvel over the cooing sounds she made while she slept. There were Saturday barbecues in their backyard, where Mike stood at the grill flipping burgers while Amy led all of the neighborhood kids in games of tag and kick-the-can. There were so many opportunities for me to have noticed.

  And I hadn’t.

  Maybe it would have been easier if the four of us spent more time together. The few times we tried, back when Larry and I first got together, it quickly became obvious that double dates weren’t going to work. Mike and Larry couldn’t connect, so the evenings became too composed and strained, with the two men moving food around their plates while Amy and I overcompensated, talking too much to fill the silence.

  Now when Mike comes to t
he house with Amy, I don’t bother to ask how work is going or whether he is up to anything new. He’s met my questions with one-word answers too many times over the past few years, so I just give him a beer as soon as I can get one into his hands, to keep him occupied. I should’ve paid closer attention. I try to remember the last time I saw him touch Amy, and whether the memory could have—should have—told me anything.

  There has to be some way I could have known.

  I suppose I’ve always assumed that if something like this were to happen to a friend, the signs would be more obvious: long shirts in the summertime, sunglasses to hide a black eye. Amy has been less herself in the past few months, but three years? What must have she been going through all this time?

  I guess I’ve always assumed that if a friend were being abused—the word abuse sounds so hard, so formal and final—she would immediately leave. I wouldn’t have to fish for signs because any friend of mine would be smart enough to get the hell out as fast as possible. Then again, I’m realizing now, I probably also assumed that it wasn’t possible for a friend of mine to fall into something like this. Things like this just don’t happen to people I know.