Nick looks like a dimmed version of himself. He’s paler and his voice is thinned, higher, he sounds squeezed. Even his familiar combination of arrogance and menace is watered down. One thing hasn’t changed. His eyes are still bloodshot.
He sits across the room from me and his presence doesn’t upset or intimidate me anymore, nor does it elicit any hatred or anger. I look at my first husband and feel two things: sadness and pity.
His first tactic in the case was to refuse any responsibility to pay for psychological care related to the abuse, as court ordered, because he never abused Mia in the first place. Sorry, Mr. P, that case has already been tried and the judgments stand.
His next position was that he wasn’t obligated to pay for treatment because no one ever informed in all these years that Mia ever had any problems at all related to him.
“Is this your handwriting, Mr. P?” my attorney asked in deposition.
Ooopsie. Claire kept your letter asking her to stop writing to you about Mia’s emotional difficulties. I’d kept him very well informed since the divorce, and sent bills for Ella and Colleen, which he never paid. By the time Mia was twelve, well, he’d just heard enough of Mia’s “problems and therapy.”
Okay, then, he doesn’t have to pay because he was never contacted by professionals. But the order never stipulated that, Mr. P; your wife’s notification wasn’t enough?
Claire could be lying. She could have made up all those invoices.
But there are canceled checks, Mr. P, going back years.
It’s still a possibility these bills aren’t legitimate, he claimed.
Then he argued he shouldn’t have to pay because Claire found someplace too costly. He’s read about teenagers in state institutions that are doing pretty darn well.
State institutions are for indigent people, Mr. P. Are you saying Mia’s indigent?
Well, he doesn’t exactly like the word “indigent.”
Then, he tried saying he was never notified that Mia had any problems recently.
But, Mr. P, we’re all here because you received notification six months ago.
But he had no clue in the world that all those dates and names of doctors and psychologists and institutions and treatments meant that Mia was getting treated for anything.
You’re telling me that you don’t know what the phrase “medical and psychological expenses for Mia Fontaine” means, Mr. P?
It’s a falsehood, he announced, there is no Mia Fontaine. (She hasn’t used his name since the divorce.)
Round and round we go. “The girl’s” problems had nothing to do with him. It’s not a treatment program, it’s just a private school.
I cannot force him to apologize to Mia. Nor can I force him to pay, even if we win the case. Because, as I expected, his financial affidavit shows a man with no assets except a pension fund. And that’s untouchable. Because our government feels that no child, abused, unsupported, or otherwise neglected, should afflict a man’s golden years.
But I can ask the court to hold him responsible and accountable. Even if all he pays is a dollar a month, that dollar will remind him of his crime every month. A judgment would say that you, Mr. Nicolas P, are accountable for the pain and shame Mia’s felt, for the nightmares and self-loathing and fears.
There’s a synagogue nearby that I stop in for a moment before meeting old friends for dinner. I pray for Mia to be safe and know happiness, for God to watch over Paul, my mother, all my loved ones, over children everywhere. That last one’s always a sticking point. How could God create a world where children suffer so much?
God doesn’t create suffering, Claire, we do. We make the world and then we break it. It occurs to me for the first time that I don’t think you pray to change the world, you pray to change yourself. That you may change the world.
I remember something I read in Samantha Dunn’s moving memoir of her spiritual awakening after her horse nearly severed her leg. She wrote that when God wants your attention, first He throws feathers. After that, He starts throwing bricks.
I obviously missed the feathers, God. But, let me make of these hard clay lessons not a wall but a staircase to climb, to lift me out of blindness, anger, judgment, ego. To see more clearly and deeply, within myself and others, so that I may live what I’ve repeated in a hundred yoga classes, Namaste: the God in me sees the God in you.
And, so, before I leave, I pray for Nick, too, that he may know peace.
I’m picturing my father in court, a man I know nothing of but his own personal demons, and I see a haunted man. The feelings he instilled in me, self-hatred, anxiety, sadness, he must feel these every waking moment. And having lived and felt as he must—and then had the chance to change—I feel sorry for him. Sorry that he was too weak to face himself and change, that his pain was so great it poisoned him and he chose lies instead of me. Sorry that the only legacy he left with me was one so dark.
And it hurts all the more because I understand it. Because I know how it feels to only be able to operate from the shadowy part of you that feeds off pain, because it’s familiar and it makes itself available in such abundance.
Sometimes I wonder if I was attracted to the streets, to those darker places, as a way of getting to know him, of feeling some connection with the man who half put me on this earth. I knew nothing of him but that black hole he left inside of me. There were times I would wake up in so much pain it felt like the world was crying in my ear as I slept. It was a sadness I wasn’t equipped to handle and I did it the only way I knew how. Maybe diving in was my way out. Maybe this is what I had to understand to let him go.
I spend the next day driving around the places we lived. I drive by the complex where I rented my first apartment with Mia. Where a policeman sat in my pink velvet chair and forgot the English language.
I walk around the university in a light rain, enveloped by the smell of wet sidewalks, the quality of the light, the heaviness in the air. All at once, the sense of it floods me. Of my life here, of the craziness of being in the system, of him whispering threats in the courthouse elevator; and of the memory of Mia behind me on our bike, giggling as her red helmet bobbed up and down with the bumps, of the hours in the library while she slept in her stroller, of singing in our campus apartment in the dark, of the anticipation on her face at the word “beach.”
The sky clears as I drive there, to where we built sandcastles and she made me chase her in the sand, saying catch me, Mudder, catch me! I can see the image of us running along the water’s edge and it almost takes my breath away—how young I was! Barely six years older than Mia is now. I see my young face and I feel such tenderness for that girl. She did the best she could with what she knew at the time. And I wonder: what if in looking back no one were to say bad Mommy, bad Claire? What if I didn’t? What if I forgave myself completely and saw her smile back at me?
I walk until I find the place I slept with Mia on a hot day under an umbrella. With her tied to my waist so she couldn’t run away while I slept. In the end, she did run away, when I was asleep in my own life, when I wasn’t looking because I didn’t want to see. She untied the knot between us and ran as far and fast as she could. Because, I now believe, she knew, she always knew in her heart, that her mudder would catch her, still.