Hiding Out

by Tina Alexis Allen

  “I beat Faid when I heard what he did to your sister Helen, and sent him back to Jerusalem to live. And I would have damn well knocked the hell out of those boys, had I known.”

  I sit speechless, considering his reaction, rockets of memories firing. I never met Faid, the Palestinian boy Mom and Dad adopted from Jerusalem. He became part of the family until he molested Helen, and then Dad sent him packing, after a good beating. Luke and Simon were over eighteen and well over six feet tall when they started abusing me, so there’s no way in hell Dad was going to beat them, although it’s a nice thought. I look for our waiter, hoping another flute of champagne will flush this moment out of my system. Dad notices and gives him a wave. I watch the pianist settle back at the glistening ebony piano after a short break.

  “Do you have a request?” I ask Dad, attempting to avoid another Rehoboth-like meltdown. My watery eyes stay fixed on the elegant piano scene. I feel desperate to get up and walk around, to flex my legs. I feel like kicking off these sandals and running barefoot through Rock Creek Park all the way home. Dad looks at me with a sorrowful expression on his face. Reaching across the table, he takes my hand.

  “‘Look at me. I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree,’” he sings softly and beautifully, as uncontrollable tears plop down my face.

  Dad digs into his breast pocket, pulls out a white handkerchief, and hands it to me. As I wipe my eyes, the smell of him is overwhelming. There’s an antiseptic quality to all of Dad’s scents: Listerine, white wine, cologne, Binaca mouth spray, aftershave lotion, and multivitamins. A manufactured cleanliness consistently pours out of him and lingers on his linen handkerchief. It’s impossible to be this close to him and not be enveloped.

  I take my hand back. Still wanting to make a request of the tuxedoed pianist, I need to walk away from him. Take a moment. Take a breath. Something has changed, as if I’ve been wearing the tightest suit ever designed, and a few buttons just popped. Now there’s breathing room. As I glance back at him gulping his wine, I can’t pretend anymore that he’s not the real problem, the seed that started this mess.

  * * *

  After a few weeks at Violet’s, I decide to slip home while Dad is still out of town to pack up the last of my things. Next week, I’ll be starting my master’s degree courses and any minute now Luke might knock down every wall in the house. Mom cleared out her favorite religious icons from the dining room ledge and even her portrait above the fireplace, the one of her dressed in her black Knights of the Holy Sepulchre cape and black veil over her coiffed hair.

  Only Dad’s portrait remains, way left of center. Climbing down the third-floor steps, I carry a recent postcard from Dad that someone—probably Luke—left on my chest of drawers. The fact that my brother was in my room stirs a soup of anger.

  The glossy picture on the postcard is San Pietro in Vincoli—St. Peter in Chains, a Roman basilica, home of Michelangelo’s Moses. I’m pretty sure—if my decade of religion classes serve me—it went something like this: Peter, the head of the church, got thrown in the slammer by Herod and bound in chains. Then an angel came to him in the night, tapped him on the shoulder, and the shackles fell off, doors opened, and voilà, Peter escaped. I flip the postcard over:

  My Dear Christine,

  My love, prayers, and special blessings are with you always in the Joy, Happiness, and Peace you seek in Life—be not afraid. God’s love for you is far greater than mine could ever be. Remember always “Love isn’t Love ’til you give it away.” So keep giving!

  The Lord Bless you and keep you. The Lord make His Face shine upon you. The Lord give you His Peace.

  In my prayers for you today,

  Dad

  His Catholic gibberish bullshit—“Bless” this and “Lord” that, “peace,” “love,” and “joy”—pisses me off, and I toss the card down on the stairs.

  In the second-floor hallway, the air is still sweltering, and I stop to wipe a trickle of sweat off my face with my shoulder. On the paneled wall, Dad’s favorite wooden crucifix hangs crooked above the light switch just outside Simon’s room. The hypocrisy infuriates me. The sight of Christ’s splayed and abused body—half naked, oozing pain—ignites a pilot light within me. A swell of rage rises in my legs, and my hands fill with heat. I drop my oversized gym bag and suitcase and swing at the cross, which falls to the carpet with a quiet thud. I yank Simon’s bedroom door closed, not feeling like looking in there right now.

  The knots in my stomach twist tighter as I’m pulled toward my parents’ bedroom. The bottom of my high-top sneaker meets the middle of their partly open door, and with one karate kick, I take the room as if I’m facing my opponent after a flagrant foul.

  The smell of Dad’s vitamins is nauseating, fueling my disgust with him. I fling open his closet door and shove his elegant suits up against the wall. I can feel the silk pulling against the rough skin on my fingers. Hanging in the corner, a clear plastic bag covers his Knights of the Holy Sepulchre cloak.

  “I don’t give a shit the pope knighted you. No one is infallible,” I mumble, slamming the closet door.

  Mom forgot to pack her powder blue slippers, the once fluffy heels now worn down flat. A dried-up pink facecloth rests on an old Ladies’ Home Journal, the cover now warped. I imagine her packing, fast and silent, and a dull ache climbs into the back of my throat. Was she really shocked when she heard the news? Did she escape from this nightmare in shock or did it only confirm what a woman must feel when her husband is constantly cheating? Didn’t Mom notice him flirting with all those waiters and priests and my godfather, for God’s sake!? If I weren’t so worried about hurting her feelings, I would ask her: “Mom, were you really that clueless?” Fact is, she missed all kinds of evidence. But, no more. Mom can’t pretend not to know the truth about her husband.

  I turn toward Dad’s side of the room. His immaculately laid-out rosary beads would be the perfect thing to strangle him with. Unless I wanted to crack his skull with the alabaster icon of Francis of Assisi standing guard next to his lamp.

  His prized wooden kneeler, with permanent imprints of his knees, begs to be cast out the back window straight into the pool. I jerk open his bedside drawer. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is bookmarked with the Lord’s Prayer. I toss the prayer card into the drawer.

  On Dad’s tall Danish dresser with small silver knobs sits the mission jar—the oversized ocher jar that used to sit on the dining room table, awaiting our pennies, now filled with hundred-dollar bills. Wishing he were here to witness my defiance, I stuff a few into my denim shorts.

  “Where does all the money come from, Dad?”

  With a swing of my forearm, I clear the dresser of everything. The ceramic bowl that Nic and I brought him from Santorini breaks against the wall, and sparkling cuff links and loose change fly across the room.

  “FUCKER!” I shout, ripping pastel shirts—custom made in Bangkok—out of a drawer, flinging them around the room, pulling at their seams. My chest and shoulders strain and shake as I tear at a sleeve. I grunt as I shot-put a summer sweater into the spreading disarray. I could give a shit that my elbow burns from a bad throw. Even if my right hand were hanging broken and limp from my wrist, I’d smack him in his clean-shaven, hypocritical face right now.

  Peeling strands of hair off my sweaty face, I pause before yanking his top drawer out of the dresser, heaving the entire teak box across the room. The sound of cracking satisfies something in me. The broken drawer lies beside his kneeler, a splinter jutting out. It would make the perfect spike if one were going to nail someone to a cross. Blood trickles from the side of my hand. I suck on it, catching my breath.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have dumped your secrets on me,” I hiss to his phantom presence.

  Moving toward the door, I nearly step on the plastic container packed with everyone’s baby teeth that Dad’s been saving since the first one came loose. He became obsessed with every shaky tooth, compulsively checking our mouths to see if one was ready to pull. As
suming none got lost over the years, there must be 260 little fangs enmeshed in there.

  I hate myself for putting up with him, for biting my tongue my whole life, for agreeing to be his confidant . . .

  I kick the plastic chamber, sending the rotting enamel nubs flying, and a shocking red passport catches my eye, peeking out from the overturned drawer. The cover has a familiar gold-embossed coat of arms. Inside is a Vatican passport. Who the fuck do you have to sleep with in St. Peter’s Square to get one of these? Hands shaking, I turn over page after page, all filled with crammed ink stamps—barely room for another trip. I turn to go, but find my foot connecting hard with the fallen drawer in the center of the room, splaying white handkerchiefs, undershirts, and more passports.

  Jordan. My head spins. That’s where he met the infamous Omar.

  I paw through his meticulously pressed boxer shorts and catch a flash of another passport, then his native British passport, and an American passport on the bottom. Panicky, I flip them open, scurrying through the pages until I see his picture. Despite minor age differences in the photos, his clear skin and flattop are consistent. Staring at his image, I wonder what he does in all these countries. Does his secret work for the Vatican allow him to sweep through customs with a wave of his red handkerchief? His blank green eyes looking back at me bring a swell of pain into my chest. My body collapses into the carpet; I tip to my side and roll into a ball. Tears fall despite a bellyful of anger at all that he withheld from me. And all that he didn’t.

  Climbing to my knees, I pick up an unopened box of white handkerchiefs—a gift I gave him for Christmas the year we began our secret life together. Despite Dad’s strict refusal of gifts, he accepted mine. I open the chic black box, pull out the fine linen, and clean up my face, then throw it into the pile of shit and walk out. My hand drips blood as I shut my parents’ door, out of breath. I want to go. But the entrances to Luke’s and Simon’s rooms stop me. I can’t remember every detail of every single time. There were so many encounters throughout the house with both Luke and Simon. But way too many are perfectly clear.

  Standing breathless in the hallway, spent, I could run a marathon. Move to the other side of the world. Walk across the country. Get a fake passport and disappear. Kill someone.

  “It’s time to leave,” a voice inside commands.

  My adrenaline wants more fighting, more revenge, but I listen to the stillness instead.

  “Leave, now.”

  I hate being told what to do, even by me. Whoever this me is.

  I walk past my parents’ door, giving it a final look. On the hall floor is the crucifix, looking sad and raw. It wasn’t Christ’s fault he was abused and nailed to a piece of wood. Staring at his nearly naked body, I wonder if Christ ever felt ashamed of being so exposed, so helpless. The Gospels preach forgiveness. Not sure I’m ready for all that, though.

  I place the crucifix back on the wall and carry my bags down to the first floor, leaving behind bad boy behavior, and a bad marriage, and all the pain it leaked into our family. My baggage is heavy enough without taking theirs with me.

  Landing in the foyer, I plunk down my bags. Reaching into my jean pocket, I pull out the house key, dangling from a silver basketball chain, and place it on the china cabinet next to Dad’s leather gloves—his only winter outerwear. “Real men don’t wear coats,” Dad would brag as he’d step out into frigid air in a sport coat and these gloves.

  Our house, which had once vibrated with energy morning, noon, and night, now has no pulse, like the Roman catacombs, only a few signs of Christianity remaining. I linger on the only female statue left in the place—a sculpture of the Virgin Mary resting on an alabaster pedestal.

  I open the front door, pausing, bags balanced like a giant scale. Then I step out.

  Click.

  Standing outside on our blue-gray porch, I see the edges peeling, the dust underneath the railings piled high from intrusive carpenter bees. Climbing down the front steps, I see the initials of all my siblings faintly etched in the cement from many moons ago.

  Sitting on one of my suitcases on the redbrick sidewalk, awaiting Violet’s arrival, I am happy that the high humidity is a thing of the past, that the summer has ended, and that I am no longer the last one home. I’ve been protecting adults since I was a child. It’s time to grow up, time to face their ugly truths. And mine.

  24

  Purification

  2005

  Clutching crumpled, disintegrating wet tissues in my warm fist, I try to get a grip. I’m stuffed up beyond being able to smell the floating incense. It’s taken me until now—in my early forties—to stop faking the words to prayers that I don’t know. Uninterested, I don’t even bother opening the mass book. Instead, I stare at shreds of my Kleenex lying on the ancient stone floor by my high heels. The three-inch black stilettos look out of place inside the modest Church of the Pater Noster on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus—probably barefoot or in sensible sandals—prayed to his father. To my right, Peter, my devoutly Catholic nephew, puts his hand on my shaking shoulder, then hunts down more tissues from family members sitting in the pews behind us.

  From the front row, I breathe in the echoing sounds of my siblings’ sniffles and soft cries, which ricochet off the hard surfaces of the church. The lone piece of fabric—a lace altar cloth that lies underneath Mom and Dad’s urns—doesn’t have a prayer of absorbing the heavy sounds of our loss. The thick stone chapel walls protect us from Jerusalem’s hot November sun but not the pain of having lost our parents, whose ashes we will leave on this holy ground—arguably the most sacred place on earth. Dad had said for years that he would be buried in Jerusalem, but we have no idea how he secured a place in this fourth-century church—behind gates, where the founder of the church is the only other person buried—and for our mother, too. To be laid to rest on the Mount of Olives, somebody at the top must have had to pull some serious strings. This is where Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples, after all.

  As the Worthington clan and a small group of mourners conclude the hymn, and my longtime partner, Gina, gracefully mills around, capturing the service on our mini camcorder, a thought grips me: I’m an orphan. Death may close a door, but burials lock it. No way, nohow, no matter. It’s over. They are gone. I may have spent much of my life acting as if I was on my own, but now it’s real. Thank God for Gina’s ease with me, my family, my past, my edge. She’s supported my healing while exploring her own. I guess what has kept us together for so long is the deep acceptance of each other. We first met while we were still in our early twenties, neither ready for a commitment. But then, as if we were acting out the final scene from a Nora Ephron movie, we bumped into each other six years later on a tree-lined West Village street and learned we lived on the same block. We had never stopped thinking about each other. Within a month, we were cohabitating in my co-op. She became my number-one fan when I decided I should throw away a six-figure fashion job to begin an acting career. Her kindness, ease, and goodness are a balm to my deep scars. Her artistic, take-it-as-it-comes vibe and head-turning Mediterranean beauty a constant pull.

  Mom passed first—in 2000—then Dad five years later. The doctors were right when they found the large mass on her pancreas and told her, “You have about six months to live.” In L.A., pursuing a brand-new acting career and a healthy lifestyle by then, I received a call from Margaret with the bad news. Gina took the message while I was at class. When I walked into our apartment, I saw that she had absentmindedly doodled the word cancer, along with other strange words, on scrap paper next to the phone.

  I knew instantly it was Mom.

  For the past six years, since moving to the West Coast, I’d been distant with both of my parents—taking space in order to heal. Soon after arriving I stopped drinking and made a vow not to be in Dad’s presence when he was drunk—a sort of atonement to myself. I’d travel home from L.A. but avoid him, turning down his invitations to dinner or lunch because I knew they meant booze. I
was starving for sober relationships, despite their intense awkwardness, after so many years of equating socializing with lots of alcohol.

  He would say, “Would you like to go out for a drink?”

  I’d say, “No, Dad, I don’t drink.”

  He’d look at me like I’d just broken his heart.

  I stayed away from Mom, too, finding it hard to accept her decision in 1995 to get back together with Dad. He was having some heart issues, had blown through most of his money from his half of the sale of 5 East Irving Street, and had been calling Mom for years with his intoxicated serenading of “Edelweiss.” She finally succumbed to his sound of music, and they moved into a modest rental in Kensington—the poor man’s Chevy Chase, albeit a sweet upscale neighborhood. He moved Holy Pilgrimages into the basement of the brick rambler to save on rent. Mom insisted they have separate bedrooms, yet he still treated her too often like his verbal punching bag. From my siblings, I knew she’d learned to have her own busy and fulfilling life, separate from Dad’s, and even set boundaries when he got ugly. Knowing I disapproved and was deeply immersed in therapy and a new acting career—both of which I was getting a very late start on—Mom trod lightly with me, sending loving cards but never pressuring me to come home. She tried to soften my judgment of their reconciliation, explaining that she and Dad shared a deep faith and prayed the rosary regularly; but mostly, she believed in the sacrament of marriage, her vow of for better or worse.

  Their relationship didn’t belong to me; it was none of my business, really, but I still struggled with both of them for different reasons. I blamed her for not protecting me, him for everything else. To her credit, a year before her diagnosis, she flew to California and spent Christmas with Gina and me—an incredibly loving gesture. I think it was her way of trying to make things right. To my credit, I stayed away while I cleaned up my act, doing my best not to lash out at either of them, trying to learn how to see them as people and not just my parents. But, no matter, I never stopped adoring Mom.