It makes sense. Phyllis says, “One more thing. I need to know if you think you are in a life-threatening situation.”
“Do I believe my husband when he says he’s going to kill me? I do.”
“When is he violent?”
“When he’s drunk, depressed, or can’t get an erection.”
“Have you talked about divorce?”
“Let’s see. He says he can’t stop me from getting a divorce, but I won’t live to sign the papers. Then he tells me he loves me, promises to change, begs forgiveness, cries, tells me about his own brutal childhood, how his father beat him, says he will go to anger management, AA, we can go to therapy.”
“Couples’ therapy is useless if he’s hitting you. It isn’t about making you change, it’s about him stopping.”
“We tried it, but it only made it worse. We would have these calm, honest conversations with the therapist, and then when we got in the car, he would smack me around for dissing him in front of a stranger. Can you suggest anything I haven’t tried, other than poisoning him?”
“It’s always an option.”
There is no irony in Phyllis’s speech. She reminds me of Mr. McDermott, who can’t remember who he killed but said, “It does sound like something I could have done.”
“You’re serious.”
“No. You’ll go to prison. Jails are filled with women who thought they could kill in self-defense.”
“Then nothing will change. Until he kills me, right?”
“What about your children? You said you—”
“A boy. He’s ten. Lucas. He lives with my husband.” Of all my lies, my rehearsed fabrications, this one is the most depressing. It will be convincing, as it is closest to the truth. Lucas the son I have created to deceive Phyllis to make my marriage authentic is based on Sammy, my brother.
“My parents divorced when I was his age. It was devastating. I swore I would never put my son through that. The strange thing is my husband is a terrific dad.”
“Except when he beats you.”
“Still, Lucas idolizes him. What ten-year-old wouldn’t? He’s a cop, an ex-marine who went after the bad guys in Iraq. He talks about honor, patriotism, and the flag. He volunteers—Little League coach, Cub Scout leader—he can play video games, play guitar, go camping, and make his son hate his mother.”
“Has he threatened you with his gun?”
“Often.”
Phyllis stands up, puts her hand under my chin, gently tilts my face up to hers.
“When you are ready, I want to know your real name, and I want the name of your husband. In the meantime, we will keep you safe.”
In the meantime?
Chapter 25
I’ve been in the shelter long enough for my bruises to begin to fade. My ribs don’t ache when I turn over in my sleep, and I’ve been weaned off Amanda’s painkillers. My assignment as an undercover cop obliges me to look for information that might implicate one or more people in three murders. I need to listen, snoop around, find a roll of duct tape, see if it matches the one used on Ronald, a new handcart in case a corpse needs moving, but most important, make friends, get people to trust me, and then if they are legitimate suspects, betray them. Normal police work. I’m getting to know the women in the shelter; my notes mention April—Amanda and Frankie’s mother. She’s in her early thirties, overweight, always in sweats, brown hair with a tiny and unnecessary rubber-banded ponytail. I know the look; she does not want anyone to be attracted to her. She is wearing her wounds. There is Sofia, the former teacher: tall, slender, twenties. Paula, black Jamaican, early thirties, holds her one-year-old boy, Byron, in a baby wrap so she will always know where he is: close to her body. Gerri, thirties, she has a lined, weary face; her front upper teeth are missing, making her look older than her years. I learn later they are missing because her husband punched them out of her mouth. There is Haneen, Middle Eastern—it’s an easy guess from the name. She’s in her twenties with a flawless cocoa complexion and black hair, perfect except for her gnawed fingernails. She wears Ralph Lauren and designer jeans. What the hell is she doing here? She looks too young and well placed to be a victim. I’ll get her story. Last, Janice, Tiffany’s mother. She told me over coffee that her husband is in full-time therapy, completing anger management classes, and they have met outside the shelter. He pleads with her to come home; he claims to be a different man.
“Truth is, I’m terrified,” she says.
“Of what?” I ask.
“That I’ll believe him.”
Lieutenant Hagen has given me flexible duty hours that allow me to spend time on my other cases and then return to the shelter in time for dinner. It’s like being under house arrest without the ankle bracelet. Phyllis is used to me leaving for work and has stopped asking questions.
On this Friday morning, I walk with Amanda and Ben to school. They take different routes in case their fathers are stalking them. Ben walks slightly ahead of us, never joins in our conversation. As we walk, I get bits and pieces of Amanda’s life.
“My mother was a bookkeeper in a wholesale flower business. The owner, Mrs. Bartolini, taught me how to make rose bouquets. When I got good at it, she paid me twenty-five cents a bouquet. My father was a chef at the Waldorf Astoria—it’s, like, a big hotel in the city. Then he quit and he and another chef opened their own restaurant in SoHo. But it went out of business and he lost a lot of money, so he had to go back to hotel cooking, which he hated. He was working all the time and he got into coke and stuff turned bad between him and Mom. He was always blaming her for things. Mom says he started hitting her when they got into arguments. One night he banged her head against the wall so hard she had to go to the hospital. He was supposed to go to jail for six months, but he got time off for good behavior, did community service teaching disadvantaged children how to cook, and got his job back. But he’s looking for us, and my mom says he is not well. He could kidnap us, so we have to be really careful. My mom has double vision—she can’t use the computer or concentrate on numbers, so she can’t work.”
“Your brother, Frankie?”
“He likes to stay in the bathroom, where he reads and does his homework. Why? Because he can lock the door. But we’re lucky: we could be on the street, or in a homeless shelter, where we were before we came here, or back in our own home. If you asked me, I would say the homeless shelter is bad, street worse, home with Mom and Dad the worst.”
“Do you cry?”
Amanda stops. “That’s the first interesting question you’ve asked me. I know babies cry for lots of reasons—they are tired, hungry, maybe something hurts them, like a strap is too tight, or their diaper is full—but you won’t ever know because they can’t talk. It’s always a mom who hears the crying and knows what to do. They get a hug, kiss, bounce, loosen a strap, change a diaper. But what about when she’s crying? All of us . . . let’s see, that’s me, Frankie, Ben, Tiffany, Byron—not Byron, he’s only one year old; he was too young to understand what it meant when his daddy punched his mommy—we all have to deal with mommy crying. We grew up with it. We used to cry when she cried, but we stopped doing that. It didn’t seem fair. We learned to stop crying and try to take care of her after daddy hit her, or yelled at her, or like Ben’s daddy, who liked to throw food at her if he didn’t like it—he thought it was funny, so he laughed while she cried. No, I don’t cry.”
“The future?”
“Mom says my dad might get a job in Miami, which would be a solution. He would get out of New York, and we could move out of the shelter, take charge of our lives again. Mom says he can take out his craziness on somebody else. Best of all, we’ll always know where he is.”
“What’s the worst part?”
“It’s when Daddy promises. Promises never to hit Mommy again, or promises not to do drugs anymore, and Mommy promises us that Daddy is going to be nice to her, starting right now, and she won’t make him angry because he has such a bad temper. Then we all hug and laugh, and we go to
Chili’s or even a fancy place where Daddy knows the chef. Mommy says Daddy loves her and she loves him and Daddy loves Frankie and me, so from now on we are going to be a happy family and we feel good. It’s the same for all of us here. I know. I asked Ben, Tiffany, and they said the same thing: under feeling good, we feel real bad. We know it’s all going to happen again. Mommy and Daddy are fucking liars.”
“You sound older than twelve.”
“I listen in on group. There are a lot of messed-up people in this world, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would say.”
“Most of them are men, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would say.”
Ben waits for us to catch up to him.
We take turns cooking dinner; it’s mine tonight. There are recipes in the shelter cookbook, a loose-leaf binder. My co-chef will be Amanda. Before she left for school, we went through the recipes, decided on roast pork with brown rice and creamed spinach. Normally, groceries are delivered to the shelter via Myra’s house, but I can leave the shelter, so I’ll shop for this meal. For the women who can’t leave the shelter because of the danger, cooking is a diversion from boredom. The result is meals that verge on gourmet, the kids rebel, and extravagant French food is tossed and replaced with mac and cheese. The instructions say the chef is supposed to prepare a vegetarian alternative, but Amanda tells me there aren’t any at the shelter.
While the pork is roasting, we cook the spinach, turn on the rice cooker. Meals are sometimes served buffet-style since there are too many different schedules to allow for a regular sit-down meal. Amanda makes extra money babysitting when any of the three mothers must leave the shelter to visit various social agencies, welfare offices, or meet with lawyers or doctors.
I notice simmering tension between the women regarding rooms, their proximity to bathrooms, size of closets, and windows. The walls are thin; conversations, babies crying, children arguing with mothers, and mothers losing it with children—all this is shared. People are living under incredible strain. Women are worried about their children, their lives, money. They are angry, away from their homes, powerless, and it all tends to put people in bad moods. The kids pick up on it. Feeling safe is important. So is missing Daddy when he’s being a nice daddy. Not having your own room, not having your toys, your dolls, your books, and sharing a TV and a bathroom with five other kids isn’t fun, either.
As a result, a lot of Phyllis’s time is spent keeping everybody calm.
“We didn’t escape a prison to create one of our own. We need to cooperate, act collectively in the interest of one another by making the best of a bad situation. We’re all stressed, but we have to live together, and the friendlier we can make it, the better it is for us and the children.”
She leads meditation sessions, yoga, exercises in the yard, whatever helps to keep tempers, frustrations, and despair on a low flame. And tonight, after dinner, when the children are asleep, will be our group discussion, or “group”—my first one since I came to Artemis.
“Friday nights there’s a kind of group discussion after dinner,” Phyllis said.
“Attendance required?”
“I’m afraid so. But talking isn’t. See how you feel.”
After dinner, we assemble at the dining room table in front of a teapot, mugs, and a plate of cookies.
Phyllis says, “We can call it ‘group’ but not group therapy. I’m not a trained psychologist. I haven’t had any shrink training. Most of what I know, I learned from watching Dr. Phil.” She gets a few smiles; the joke is for me. I’m the only one who hasn’t heard it. I am being observed by the women in the shelter, even as I observe them. No one knows my story except Phyllis. I am simply the “new arrival”; wounded, frightened, and guarded. The women are kind and don’t press me for information; they know it will all eventually come out.
“I know we can learn a lot from each other. You may think you are the only one struggling—but you’re not. It helps to know you’re not alone. So. There are two rules: April?”
“No bullshit.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve heard enough from our husbands.”
The women nod.
“You got that right, girl,” Paula says.
“The other rule?”
“No interrupting,” April says.
“Good. Who’d like to begin?”
Silence. Phyllis looks at me; she’s inviting me to speak. I lower my eyes, avoid hers. I’m not jumping in. I’m the new arrival. My bruises have faded, but I feel uneasy in this place. I have nothing about me to share yet.
I observe the women around the table: on my right is Haneen. Then Amanda and Frankie’s mother, April, sitting ramrod straight in her chair. I see her daughter, Amanda, in her face, but the eyes are different. Amanda’s eyes are always searching, exploring; she’s a bumblebee. Her mother’s eyes find a place, her neatly folded hands on the table, and they will rest there, uncurious and safe. I remember April’s husband liked to grab her by the back of the neck and bang her head against the wall.
Next to her is Gerri, Ben’s mother. She leans forward to Phyllis.
“Can I talk about my family first?”
“You can talk about anything you want,” Phyllis says.
Gerri speaks quickly, anxious to get it out before someone tells her to shut the fuck up. No one will, of course. But she has been well trained by her husband. “Yeah, well, I’ve been remembering how he made me separate from my family. He said I had to choose; it was either him or them. They hated him, so it was a question of my loyalty. He was right: my parents got it about him; they saw through the charm and thought he was a phony. I wish I had listened. I was young. I was still rebelling.”
“Making you sever ties with your family is a typical abusive technique,” Phyllis says. “You become dependent on him. He’s got you where he wants you.”
“It was crazy. I rejected my family for him and he accused them of rejecting me. They don’t love you like I do. They abandoned you. I’m all you have. I’m the one who loves you. He kept saying that. I’m the one who loves you. He said it when he hit me, when he choked me until I passed out, when he accused me of having affairs, when he showed up at work, when he accused me of dressing sexy for other men. It went on for three years. The beatings got worse. I felt I had nowhere to turn; I couldn’t face my parents.
“I took out a restraining order on him, like, he couldn’t come within four hundred feet of me, then he started harassing my parents, telling them I had become a prostitute, calling my boss, telling him I was dealing drugs, until I lost my job. Then my father had a heart attack and died. I felt it was my fault. I was afraid to go to the funeral. My brother helped me move out, and my husband was afraid of him, so he didn’t try to stop me. I was starting to get my life back, but he found out where I was living. I came home one night, there was a note on the bed: I’m the one who loves you. He told me he could always find me, and the next time he would kill me. The police said they couldn’t do anything unless they could catch him in my presence. I finally called my mother. She wouldn’t see me; she said I’d caused my father’s death. I write to her every week, Phyllis—a real letter, not an email.”
Haneen says, “She’ll come around. I’m sure. Just give her time. The thing is you’re safe here until then.”
Janice, Tiffany’s mother, raises her hand, then lowers it as she remembers it’s not a classroom, it’s a group of women sitting around a table swapping stories about men who beat them.
“Motormouth. That’s what he called me just before the slap. Not a hard one. Just on the wrong side of affectionate. Wait. Is there such a thing? An affectionate slap? A love tap? A punch on the shoulder to get my attention? A slap on the back of my head as he walks by while I am at the computer?
“Sit up straight, motormouth. You’ll hurt your back. My head is still ringing. So it got to be a thing, him slapping me on the head. Then, like it was something he discovered, it gave him pleasure. Slaps became punches
, at first on the shoulder, then to the stomach, like he was seeing how far he could go and how much I would take. Obviously, a lot.”
“Why?” Phyllis asks.
“Why did I stay?” Janice says. “Where was I supposed to go? I had no money. I had nowhere to live. He had control of the credit cards, the bank accounts, everything.”
Gerri waits a moment and says, “My husband did the same thing. He transferred all the bank accounts to his name. He owned the house, the business, the cars. The credit cards were in his name. He gave me cash for shopping and demanded receipts. I had to account for everything.”
Phyllis says, “I know that game. You’ve got nowhere to go and no way to pay for it if you did.”
Gerri nods and continues, “Before I married Tom, I built an online business making personalized picture frames of deceased pets. The bereaved owner would send in a picture of their dog or cat, then I’d make a carved wooden picture frame with the pet’s name and dates engraved on it. I did it out of my home on a small laser-engraving machine. I met Tom on a Christian dating site. He had recently retired from the military with a disability pension. At first, he wasn’t involved in my work. He was developing his own Internet business, but that didn’t go anywhere, so he started working with me. I liked the idea of us working together. He was smart, had lots of ideas. We expanded the business into other kinds of pet mementos: charm bracelets, pendants, statuary. After a while, it was like he was making all the decisions, taking over, and before long I was feeling like we weren’t working together, I was working for him. When we needed capital to expand, buy better laser engravers, advertise, I was the one who borrowed the money. At the same time, we owned the business together. I was taking on debt while he was keeping the assets. It wasn’t fair. He said he had lousy credit and it would be ours in the end. I loved him, trusted him, I wanted to keep everybody happy.
“Tom liked to ‘fake fight’ with our son, Ben. That’s what he called it, ‘fake fight.’ They would shadow box, you know, not hitting him hard, Tom was faster, stronger. He was an adult, and Ben was just a kid. Tom said it was good to teach him how to fight, said he never really hurt him—he did. A slap, a punch, a mistake. Tom always said, ‘Oops, sorry, kid, got too close, you okay?’ Ben said he was okay, but I knew he was on the verge of tears. He didn’t like ‘fake fighting.’ I told Tom he should stop. His reply was ‘I will tell you this once: You never criticize me in front of my son, you understand? I want Ben to learn how to fight, to learn how to defend himself.’
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