by Kate Manning
The lullabye of the waves and the wine and the Valium was making me sleepy out on the back terrace, lying in my chaise. I had my blanket and my glass for companions, but the porch lights were bothering me, too bright, giving me a headache. I lurched up and turned them off, lay back down, looking up, looking for constellations, consolation. The house was dead dark, but the sky wasn’t. It was the color of dirty paper, lit by the glare from the city, beyond the palms. Not moon light, city light. Light pollution. That’s called light pollution, I was thinking, rambling and inane now. There were no stars out that I could see. What will children wish on? I was wondering. What will I wish on, for that matter? I lay there listening to the waves, made a wish on something that turned out to be an airplane. Let Milo come home.
At some point, I called Claire.
“Hello!” I said. “It’s me.”
“Charlotte, are you okay?” She was groggy. “It’s three in the morning.”
“Not here it isn’t,” I said. “What time it is depends on where you are.” That seemed completely profound, to me.
“You’re totally wasted, aren’t you?” she said.
“Yes, dahhling,” I told her, in a Russian accent. “We’ve had a r-r-r-eversal of r-r-r-roles, you and I.”
“Are you okay?”
“If my husband comes home,” I said.
“I knew I should’ve stayed with you,” she said. “Never should’ve left. I tried to call you earlier to check in. A couple of times.”
“I was out,” I said.
“How’s it going, then? I’m worried about you.”
“Great!” I said brightly. “I got even with him.” I would not cry. I refused. “I gave him a taste of his own medicine.” Ice rattled in my glass and I chewed a piece of it, changing the subject. “How is your perfect husband? He’s home, of course, unlike other husbands. How is he? Faithful Tim.”
“He was asleep,” said Claire, “but since he’s not asleep now, he’s pissed.” I was disturbing them. I imagined Claire in her New York bed, with Tim. Her short hair would be poking up the way it did when she’d slept on it. Her mascara would be grainy under her eyes.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” I said.
“What do you mean, you got even with him?” she asked.
“I went out,” I said importantly.
“With a male?”
“Yes!” I said.
“Oh, boy,” Claire said.
“No, not a boy. A man. You will never guess who.”
“Paul Newman.”
“Jack.”
“Jack? Nicholson?”
“No, idiot. Sutherland.”
“Oh, God, Charlotte, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But you told me he went back to Japan.”
“Nope. Tonight he went back to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Claire said slowly, leaping to conclusions. “You had better not trumpet that around. Not to Milo, especially.”
“Oh, he knows!” I said. “I flaunted it right in his face. It’s fine. It serves him bloody right.”
I could hear Claire breathing. She was getting out of bed, I could tell, walking around with the phone. I lay on my long chair and listened to her three thousand miles away.
“Charlotte,” Claire said, “he knows where you were tonight?”
“Oh, yeah. And that’s not all,” I said. “He saw us.”
“That’s bad. That’s really bad, Charlotte.”
“Hey, what’s that?” I whispered. There was a rustling in the bushes. “Something’s here.” I listened. “Just an animal. Maybe a snake.” Maybe a person. I wondered if I forgot to close the front door after Marcy left. Did I?
“Charlotte, this is serious,” Claire said. “You’re making me nervous.”
“The snake will have whatever’s in the belly of the frog,” I said. “Did you know that?”
“Jesus,” said Claire. “Have you taken something, Charlotte?”
A light went on, inside the house. The front hall light. Maybe I forgot to lock the door, too, I thought. Or maybe it’s Milo! Of course it is.
“It’s him,” I said, with melodrama. “He’s home. The man of the house. I’m saved.”
“You’re really wasted. Don’t—What are you going to do now?”
“Fuck if I know,” I said. I was slurring and witless. The den light went out and the living room light went on. I couldn’t see inside from where I was, around the corner, through the leaves. I could hear Claire whispering to Tim. Then the light inside went out again altogether. Maybe Milo was leaving. He had just been retrieving something, his possessions, and now he’d be gone again, without a word to me. He was leaving. Bye, Milo.
I sat up on the chair and I was scared. Also determined. Get your glass, Charlotte. Get yourself together. “I am going in now to face the music,” I said to Claire. “Hup two three four.”
“Right now?”
“Yup,” I said. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
“No, listen. Wait,” she said. “You’re liable to fuck it up, you know that?”
“Tccch. Thanks.”
“You know how you get, watch what you say—”
“Watch what you say, Claire,” I said. “It’s not what you think. Just because he’s—I know what you think.” I was angry with her now, too.
“Charlotte, you know I don’t think that. Come off it. Look—”
I hung up.
It was dark inside the house. The sunporch was dark and also the living room adjoining it. I think I could hear the opening of drawers in the kitchen. “Milo?” I whispered. I pictured him. He would blink when he saw me. His eyes would be tired; we would smile sadly and sit down and we would figure it out. No. He would glare. Flames would come from his eyes and steam out of his ears and I would set my jaw against him, sharpening my words, and we would start. We would have it out, the whole truth, and then decide. So you saw me, so what? I would say, scathing, serves you right. Now you know how it feels. I would say whatever I damn well pleased, primed for it.
“Milo?” I assumed it was him.
There was no answer. “Milo?” I turned the corner into the kitchen.
It happened then.
He tackled me and choked me. His fingers were on my neck. He throttled me so viciously the larynx smashed, the hard cartilage crushed against my heavy necklace and his hands. He smashed a wine bottle down on the granite edge of the counter, leaving him holding the jagged neck of it. He brandished it at me and cut me with it, my neck and hands. Blood was all over the kitchen. By the oven, by the sink, spattered on the cabinets, on the tablecloth. He cut my bare arms where I held them in front of my face. I fought him and fended him off and he cut my hands. He sliced a flap of skin off the tip of my middle finger so they had to sew it back on.
I don’t remember any of it. Nothing. It’s what I’m told.
He floored me. I do remember that, only that. The feeling of the breath forced out, the weight of someone, and the rage but not whose.
I came around the corner. Who I saw, what he was doing, what we said, how it started I don’t remember.
A neighbor heard arguing but she said she often heard arguing.
Claire says she called me back, maybe fifteen minutes after I hung up on her, and when the line answered then went dead, she did what she did. Called the cops.
Things, fragments of it are vivid.
Hallie’s plaster handprint on the wall. For some reason I remember a flash of its nursery school colors hanging by the refrigerator. I saw it from the floor. Just that. I remember looking up and seeing it. Hallie.
I know but can’t know.
I was tackled on the floor, grappling. Sharp pains bit my back, from rolling on glass. Or was I told that. I remember the smell of wine and wetness, blood on my clothes, my hands. Pain like teeth in my neck. I remember trying to get up. Getting up and falling. I got out, outside. I must have. He chased me, grabbing my hair, my dress, was he? I say h
e but don’t know who. I was falling again. I saw headlights on the road, turning in. Were they? I do remember headlights. Help me. I ran, I must have. They found me outside on the porch.
I can’t tell you. The pills have that effect, alcohol does. I have had alcoholic amnesia before, blackouts. Or should I say whiteouts? I have no useful memory of what happened. Trauma has that effect, also, wiping out details the way light obscures stars, so we don’t recall the specifics of violence or pain, the moments leading up to catastrophe. I don’t. I remember squat, as Milo would say. Blank blank blank. I know music was on. I know what I was wearing. I can picture just how I looked.
37.
Right now the California sun is shining idiotically outside my window. The late-afternoon sky is blue as you’d expect. The sea is also blue, and bland, and perfectly calm except at the shoreline, where the waves are hurling themselves hysterically. I am up here in our room, seeming to look out but not really seeing the real estate dream where I live, the spectacular ocean views, the bluff falling to the beach, the white peel of sand curling away toward the big city. I have been here all day, just crying, without being able to stop. It’s been more or less like this for the four days I have been home. Before that I was in the hospital for five weeks, nearly dying, but then, not dying.
Downstairs, in the rooms and wings of the house, I hear Hallie playing and crying, singing and running. I hear my mother calling her, the way she called me when I was little, drawing out the syllables of her name. Haaaa-leeeee. Hallie’s name, her noises, are like electric shocks to all the dead nerve ends of my interior wiring, cattle-prodding me to get up. But I can’t. I can walk around but I can’t make myself go to her. The first day I came home from the hospital she stared at my neck, reached to touch the bandage, to inspect with her fingers. “It will get better if you kiss it,” she said, and puckered her lips toward me.
Don’t! I mouthed the word and pushed her hands off, held her away, and went back to my bed. I heard her crying. Marcy soothing her. I can’t explain. How could I?
All I can manage is sitting still and listening. I hear the faint occasional horn of a car out on the road. I hear the wind and the relentless hush of waves from the shore. Inside, the faucet drip from the bathroom is too loud. I hear carpeted footsteps, someone approaching, the doorknob complains a little when it’s turned, and somebody—my mother, Claire, the doctor, a therapist, twice that detective—comes in to check on me, asks, Do you want anything? How are you feeling? Do you remember anything after that? Do you remember any unusual cars parked in the neighborhood? Can you begin to work through the anger? It requires incredible will and concentration to answer, to shrug or nod or move my lips, my pencil. This morning my mother came in. “Would you like to get dressed?” she asked. I didn’t move or look at her. She thought I might like to get dressed. She had something for me.
She has been here since it happened. She was at the hospital. My father and both the boys, my brothers, apparently came. My sister, too. They all went back home when it seemed I would not die. I have no real idea of how much time passed, from the night—that night—how much time till I began to be conscious of what was happening around me, the doctors and nurses, floral deliveries, injections and IV drips and the sound of the television, my mother crying softly as the doves outside the window in the morning. I woke thinking it was doves, and there she was, her head down next to me on the bed. I moved my hand to her hair and thought to say Mommy, but no sound came out. Her hair was brittle to the touch. She turned and saw me and stood up. She leaned over me and pressed her face against me so I felt her cheek was wet. “Darling,” she whispered.
Now she stays here and helps Marcy, tries to help me. This morning she brought me one of Hallie’s flowery rainbow drawings with a prayer on it. The Lord is my Rock and my Fortress and my Deliverer, it said, but in Mom’s writing. She laid the drawing on the table next to my chair. “For you,” she said. I looked at it and thought that in another life I would’ve wondered, Why would I need a rock? What was the Lord delivering? But now I didn’t care what she was teaching my daughter about the Baby Cheese. I cared about holding still. I cared about swallowing without choking. I cared about the jagged cuts stitched together all along my neck, the itching of the new raw skin.
My mother crossed the room, opening the curtains, the windows. She got a hairbrush and brushed my hair. The spikes of the bristles felt good and painful on my scalp. She finished and kissed the crown of my head and then hesitated, as if deciding something. She put her hand in the pocket of the apron she wore and pulled out an envelope.
“This came,” she said, “just now” and put it down, grimly.
The sight of it got me right away. His handwriting and my name Charlotte H. Robicheaux across the front of it. It made me nauseous to see it. I began weeping quietly again, and I have not really stopped, not yet today.
Dear Charlotte.
They arrested Milo. They found him leaning over me on the porch. My blood was all over him. On his hands and face. His clothing. He resisted arrest. He punched a cop. He fought with them and was acting deranged, the police said. He was drunk. They beat him but he kept shouting That’s my wife, and fighting to get at me, they said, raging to get me. He’s in jail now. The judge denied bail because he was considered a danger to me. Not to mention a flight risk.
“You don’t need to worry about him coming back and hurting you,” Detective Phelps said, putting his hand on my arm. “He’s locked up.”
The police terrify me. They scare me with their navy blue questions and the silver badges of their likely scenarios and their evidence. When the detectives come to ask about that night I pull the blankets up around me. I have been naked or mostly naked in front of entire rooms of photographers and people staring at me, and never minded, and yet with these detectives, in my hospital nightgown, or home in my robe and slippers, it’s as if I were completely nude, or hairless. It’s not a feeling of having something to hide, but of wanting to hide. That I have no cover. The police saved me, saved my life, but now they watch me. For days they waited outside my hospital room, but I was in no shape for them, as I was sedated with a tracheostomy tube in my neck. When they were finally allowed in, I could sort of sit. They asked for all the details and I told them I didn’t remember. I hardly moved my face, just mouthed the words, wrote them. I remember nothing. I could hardly look at them. They kept saying Try. I tried but I couldn’t think of anything that happened.
They came to my house, just after I was released from the hospital. In all the rooms they picked things up, handled photographs, the trophies on the bookcase. Milo’s medals. “Mind if I use your bathroom, Mrs. Robicheaux?” Phelps asked, and when I shrugged, he went up the stairs! I know he was rummaging in the medicine cabinet. He was reading prescriptions and opening plastic bottles and sniffing their contents. He was bloodhounding through the rooms, with his camcorder eyeballs and wiretap eardrums. It’s as if they suspect me, as if I have done something wrong.
Perhaps I have.
I have left parts out. Big parts. The fact that I was kissing Jack. That Milo saw. What did Milo see? Claire asked me. But I’m not sure if what he saw is a good thing for anyone to know, or not. Knowing would just confirm what everyone thinks about us anyway. They would picture the parking lot, me and Jack, with Milo in the shadows, and they’d think: The trashy white slut, and the jungle jealousies and appetites of her black husband. They would. And then the rabid newspapers would have it along with their pictures of my husband and his Other Woman. The police would have their motive. He savagely attacked her in a jealous rage. The investigative reporters would find Jack and point their TV cameras at that restaurant, Spago, their lurid lights illuminating, what? A parking lot.
It’s nobody’s business. It’s private.
Claire says I have to tell them. She flew back here from New York right away. When she came in my hospital room and saw me finally awake, the state of me, she said, “It looks like you’ve been a little too int
imate with a helicopter.” I smiled for the first time, I think. She sat down on the bed and hugged me. “I love you, Charlotte,” she whispered. “If it weren’t for you I would have jumped off a bridge a long time ago.”
It set me off again, crying. I love Claire. She has been with me the whole time, flying back and forth, advising me. I’d be lost without her. I would have died. She is the one who called the police that night from New York, who gave the address, saved my life. She provided a description, told them it was my husband. They came and found him there leaning over me. They arrested him right away, due to the blood on him, Claire’s description. The fact that he hit a cop.
On the news, I saw the cop they said Milo hit. Officer something Paladino. His eye was swollen purple, with black dried cuts scabbing in the flesh. He turned his face to show the camera, and you could see a splotch of bright red on the white of it, blood in his eye. Good for you, Milo, I thought fleetingly. Good, but then began to cry again.
Because I am not sure it was Milo who did this to me. And I am not sure it wasn’t.
Most of what I know comes from television.