Kate and I look at each other.
“When I was in the hospital, he called me the evening after he got out on bond. He was so happy when I told him that I was coming home. He told me how strong I was, and how thankful he was to have me to show him what true strength was all about. He said he needed to learn from me. And then—the look on his face when he saw me after Mom and Dad brought me home showed how sorry he was. He started shaking, and then sobbing, and then he stumbled onto the bed next to me and begged for my forgiveness. I remember I rubbed his back, trying to comfort him. I kept thinking, For better or for worse, in sickness and in health. I kept thinking that he was far sicker than I was, worse off than I could ever be. I thought that he needed me. But then today…” She shakes her head. “Oh Lord. Today.”
“What happened?” I say, my voice barely a whisper.
“Well, the phone started to ring again. Emma and I were watching the movie. She was playing with the bandage on my arm where my IV had been inserted, drawing shapes on it with her fingertip. She kept saying how much fun she was having.”
Tears spring to her eyes.
“Suddenly, Mike barged into the room. Both Emma and I jumped, and then, before I could figure out what was happening, he threw the cordless phone at the wall behind us like he was aiming for us. His eyes were…the way that they get. He started screaming: ‘Your fucking friends and your fucking family need to stop calling here!’”
Oh God. It wasn’t me—I hadn’t called today—but it still makes me feel awful.
“He had never done this in front of Emma before. I could feel her tensed up against me. She was scared to death. He was saying ridiculous things. About how I hadn’t explained to everybody that he could take care of me. About how I had no faith in him, just like his mother. I grasped Emma’s hand under the covers and she squeezed back hard. I tried to get him to stop. I kept looking at Emma to try to signal to him that he couldn’t do this in front of her. He said, ‘It amazes me how incredibly stupid you are.’ Emma turned herself toward me so slightly that Mike couldn’t notice, but I could feel it. Every muscle in her little body was trembling. And then…” She shakes her head and takes a deep breath. I look worriedly at Kate.
“It was so…just crazy. You know that I hate that word, but that’s what it was,” she says. “He took the teddy bear off of the bed that Mom gave me in the hospital. Emma picked it out for me one day while she and Claire were at Target. He asked me where I got it, like he was accusing me of something. I told him that Emma gave it to me. He started screaming: ‘Emma got you this? Our three-year-old? She went to the store? Drove there herself? With her money?’ He was shaking the stuffed animal at us and his voice was getting louder. It was absurd. He started calling me other names, saying I was a stupid whore…And then, out of nowhere, Emma peeled away from me. Her tiny voice pierced the air. She started screaming, ‘Daddy, no!’ and swinging at him, grabbing for the teddy bear. She was lunging for him, up on the bed in her cupcake-print pajamas with the blueberry stain on the front, screaming for him to stop.” She gasps. “And somehow he did. He left the room, as if he’d never been there at all.”
“We sat there listening as he left the house. I pictured Mike leaving. I’ve watched him from the window so many times before that I could imagine every move. I asked Emma if she was okay, kissing the top of her head over and over again, like I was stamping her. Do you know what she said?”
Kate and I both shake our heads, stunned at everything we’ve heard.
“She said, ‘I want to watch my movie, Mommy.’ I turned it back on and watched her, noticing the way her eyebrows subtly twitched with the action on the TV screen. Now I have no doubt that Emma’s understood what’s been going on for far longer than I ever could have imagined. Or maybe I was just in denial.
“I can’t blame anyone but myself for that. I swear, I feel like I just took my little girl and sat her on a raft and pushed her off of the shoreline, waving good-bye while I watched her drift, stuck and helpless. Say what you will about the beatings not being my fault, but it was my choice to keep Emma in that house and pretend that nothing was wrong. I realized a few hours ago that I can’t do it for another second. We were supposed to be a family. That’s what kept me at home with him. But I’m realizing now that that place was nothing like a home, and we were as far from a family as anything I can imagine. I need to rescue Emma. And if I’m so far gone that I could do this to my daughter, then a tiny part of me also recognizes—finally, I guess—that I need to save myself.”
I wrap my arms around her. “Oh, Amy.” Her name stumbles out of my mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” she moans.
Kate embraces her from the other side.
“No, no, there’s nothing to be sorry about,” I whisper. “Nothing at all to be sorry about.”
“You’re going to be okay,” Kate says. She grasps my hand behind Amy’s back.
“We’re going to figure this out,” I say. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Amy had brought several plastic shopping bags to our house. She says that when she was in the midst of leaving, moving as quickly as she could and yanking things at random as if she was participating in a timed scavenger hunt, she had a strange realization: This was the answer to the “What would you take with you if your house was on fire?” question. This was the fire. And even though it’s been only three days since she left, she’s discovering now that leaving—the physical act of getting up and walking out the door—is the easiest part. “It’s everything that happens before and after you cross over the threshold that could kill you,” she says.
It isn’t the way she’d imagined it. In her lowest moments, like on the somber, silent mornings she’d spend dotting concealer over the marks his knuckles had left on her temple, she’d crafted a mental list of the things she would need to take with her should she ever decide to leave: the numbers for their bank accounts, her passport, Emma’s birth certificate, their social security cards, Emma’s medical records, her address book, the folders from her old job and the few she kept from college, the locket her mother gave her on her sixteenth birthday, the charm bracelet she started when she was pregnant with Emma, the cameo her grandmother left for her, Emma’s baby book, photos from her twenties, her high school yearbook. Emma’s favorite toys—the worn Elmo doll, a cheap teddy bear from the drugstore that had become her favorite despite its scratchy fur, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Her wedding album. She didn’t know why, but her wedding album. As she was racing around the house, wondering whether Mike was going to come in and catch her, she realized that this was not the big production she’d envisioned, with a U-Haul van backed up to the garage while Mike was at work. “When Emma found me in the kitchen stuffing my phone charger into my bag and asked what I was doing, I told her that we were going to stay at Aunt Waverly’s for a little while. The smile that came across her face was all the confirmation I needed to know that I was doing the right thing,” she says.
We’re pulling into Amy’s driveway.
Even though it seems like Amy’s been on the phone with the police ever since she showed up at my house, and they fully support what we’re about to do, I’ve driven here reluctantly. I thought that we should at least have somebody accompany us, but Amy insists that it’s unnecessary. Nobody’s seen or heard from Mike—not the police, who came by the house after Amy’s initial call to let them know that she wanted to move forward with prosecuting Mike; not the neighbors; not his coworkers; and most frightening of all, not even Amy. In a way, it’s almost worse that he’s just vanished, because it’s impossible to guess what he might be plotting or where he might be. Amy wants to take out a restraining order—it’s the first step of many to protect herself—but the police can’t serve him with the paperwork if they can’t find him.
Kate’s car pulls up behind ours. It’s an unusually cold May morning. Steam escapes from our mouths as we get out of the cars and greet each other.
&
nbsp; “So what are we going to do if he’s here?” Kate says, glancing over at the house.
Amy shakes her head. “He’s not going to be here. The sheriff’s office has been twice to try to serve him with the papers.”
We decide to enter the house through the utility door on the side of the garage. We can check to see if his car is here and make a quick escape if it is. Amy unlocks the door and pushes it open. “Not here,” she says.
“Thank God,” Kate and I say simultaneously. The three of us walk through the darkened, empty garage—first Amy, then me, then Kate—to the door that leads into the house, and then into the kitchen.
It’s difficult to explain what I feel when we step inside and Amy turns on the light, but I have to grab Amy’s shoulders from behind, and I don’t know whether it’s to steady her or brace myself. The house has been ransacked. Every dinner plate and drinking glass has been smashed onto the kitchen floor. The contents of the refrigerator—gallons of milk and juice, leftover dinners, containers of ketchup and jam and mustard—have been thrown against the cabinets. The room is saturated with the smell of rotting food.
“Oh dear God,” Kate whispers behind me.
Amy doesn’t say a word. She steps methodically over the piles of broken glass and trash and mess and walks into the living room. I follow behind her.
“Be careful, Amy,” I say. She should be recuperating in bed. We’re all worried about her recovery, but she’s insistent on pushing forward. Larry and I theorized last night that she’s acting this way because it’s the only way she’ll survive. She has to be purposeful if she’s going to get through this without falling apart.
Every picture in the living room has been smashed. The TV is pulled away from the wall. The couch cushions are strewn across the floor.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Amy says.
We follow behind her. No one says a word. The only sound is our footsteps up the creaky staircase. In her bedroom, she finds the contents of her jewelry box on the floor, along with most of her clothing. The bathrooms and guest room are equally destroyed. The only room that remains untouched is Emma’s. We breathe a collective sigh of relief when we discover it.
They use the spare bedroom as an office. Amy sits down at the desk and opens the drawer where they keep the checkbooks for their various accounts. Everything’s gone.
“I need to check something online,” she says. I stand behind her as she goes to click on the computer.
“Unbelievable,” she says, tapping the mouse repeatedly. “The Internet’s out.” She picks up the phone on the corner of the desk and tries it. “The phone’s out, too.”
“Can I use yours?” she asks me. Yesterday, when she tried to use her cell, she discovered that she had no service. She’d said that Mike probably did it. Now we’re all sure of it.
Kate and I watch as she calls information for the number for her bank, then starts punching keys, occasionally muttering words like “accounts” and “check balances” as she moves through the automated menu. Then she hangs up, hands me the phone, and bends her head to her knees.
“He took everything,” she says through her hands. “All of the accounts are empty.”
She begins to cry. To be honest, it’s a relief. She’s hardly shown any emotion since that first night at my house.
“How did this happen?” she says through her tears. “How did this happen to me?”
I want so badly to be able to give her an answer. This never should have happened to her. Not Amy. Not when this—a home, a family—was all she ever wanted.
Over the next hour, Kate and I stand around, quite helplessly, while Amy goes room by room, trying to determine what she wants to bring with her. In her bedroom, she puts a couple of stacks of clothes into a bag. In the bathroom, she opens and closes drawers, ultimately taking nothing. When she gets to Emma’s room she sits on the floor and begins flipping through the pile of books in a basket next to her bed. It’s horrible to watch her, cross-legged on Emma’s sunny yellow quilt, like she’s a girl herself.
I stand in the threshold of the door, still wishing I knew what to say. Kate’s been back in Amy’s bathroom, picking up the smashed eye shadow boxes and powder compacts that Mike destroyed. She walks up behind me and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“I mean, what do I do now?” Amy says, tossing aside Emma’s Guess How Much I Love You. “Do I pull Emma out of school? Do I hire a moving company? Who takes what? What if he doesn’t pay the mortgage? How do I go about selling the house?”
Kate rushes to her before I do. “Listen, listen,” she coos, sitting down next to Amy. “I know that the particulars of our situations are different, but it was just a few weeks ago that I sat in my bedroom doing this very same thing. Except, well, I was the one who’d trashed the room,” she jokes.
Amy actually smiles. It’s barely a grin, but it’s a smile. I walk across the room and sit down on the floor in front of them.
“I think that the first thing you ought to do is talk to someone,” Kate says. “I had Waverly. She’s pretty good.”
I gently nudge her foot with mine.
“You don’t need to figure out any of this logistical stuff yet,” Kate says. “That’s all going to take care of itself.”
“It’s just that this was my home. My family.”
“I know, Amy. I know,” Kate says. I watch her pull Amy toward her. Amy puts her head on Kate’s shoulder and starts to cry. I have never seen Kate so tender.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. What am I doing going through all of this stuff? What am I hoping to find?” she says.
“I know. It’s awful,” Kate says again. “I know you can’t look at it this way now, and I know that it’s horrifying to see everything you know fall apart, but I promise you that it’s ultimately a good thing.”
“Everything I know and everything I have is broken.”
“That’s the beauty of it, though,” Kate says. “I know it’s hard to see, but that’s really the most wonderful thing about all of this. I know that our situations are so, so different, Amy. I understand that. But I have this sense of relief now that I think you’ll also experience. It’s not easy—I’m not going to lie to you. I often feel sad, but I feel right. Does that make sense?”
Amy doesn’t say anything.
“The one thing that I can tell you,” Kate continues, “is that now, when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, I feel like I see myself again, not this…” She circles her hand in front of her face. “Not this image of what I’m supposed to be. I’m learning who I really am, I guess, or I’m coming back to her. And I think you will, too.” Kate grabs Amy’s hand. “You’re going to get through this,” she says.
“Well, I know that I was trying hard to hold on to what I wanted to be; that’s for sure,” Amy says. “Or what I thought I needed to be. To be happy.”
“That’s exactly it,” Kate says. “But you’ve told the truth now, and that’s the hardest part. That’s what I’m learning. You have to be honest with yourself about what you really want, who you really are, and what’s best for you. Once you’ve done that…” She shrugs.
“Yes, except”—Amy chews on her bottom lip—“where do I go from here?”
“Wherever you want,” Kate says. “Now you get to go wherever you want.”
Amy rubs her eyes and looks over at me. “Hey,” she says, reaching for me. “Thank you. For everything.”
“Don’t,” I say. “It’s what you would have done. It’s less than what you would’ve done.”
“That’s not true at all,” Amy says. She looks around the room. “Let’s get out of here,” she finally says. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
As we walk down the stairs and through the house to the door, each of us holding a bag or two of the things Amy’s chosen to carry into her new life, I think, looking around at the mess, that before I knew what was happening with Amy, I thought of her home as such a haven. That was the way that she made it look, and I always
compared: Would I ever have a family like hers? Would I get the white picket fence, too? But now I know better. I know because in our own particular ways, we all did the same thing: faked it. Amy pretended that she had a happy family. Kate embraced a role that wasn’t right for her. I lied to everyone who’s important to me, thinking all the while that I could never be happy until everything was perfect.
Later that night, Amy relents and takes a sleeping pill. Emma’s still at the hotel with her grandparents, and Larry is upstairs getting ready for bed. I walk to the back door in the kitchen and bolt the dead bolts. I check the lock on the window over the kitchen sink. It’s not that I believe that Mike is bound to show up, exactly. It’s just that I want to be ready in case he does. It’s like that old superstition about carrying an umbrella so that it won’t rain. If I take all of the proper precautions, maybe he’ll stay away.
A few minutes later, after I’ve finished the dishes, Larry finds me scrubbing at the sludge that has built up on the stove top.
“Hey,” he says, kissing the top of my head. “Want some help?”
I shake my head. I can see the faint outline of his reflection in the tile backsplash. He needs a haircut, as usual. He’s wearing his ancient Ramones T-shirt.
“She’s lucky to have you guys,” he says, kissing the top of my head again and rubbing his hands lightly over my back.
I nod and stop scrubbing, and then turn to him. “Thanks for everything you’ve done to help,” I say, wrapping my arms around him. “With Emma. With everything.”
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