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WORRYING ABOUT Cissie’s injuries kept me awake past 2 A.M. I found it impossible to understand how a man justified hurting anyone, let alone the woman he claimed to love. What kind of perverted worldview permitted him to cross that line?
I’d been lucky enough to marry a kind and caring man, who, fortunately, stayed that way. Initially, Ronald must have been kind and caring, too; but since his sort of behavior required a woman he could overpower, control, and ultimately abuse, he must have deliberately selected a woman with insecurities he knew he could exploit.
And what about his daughter? Would Caroline someday become his victim, too? The very thought made my skin burn.
To comfort myself I fingered Fideaux’s fur as his ribcage gently rose and fell with sleep. Sadly, I knew much of his devotion was rooted in gratitude, for it was quite likely he had also been abused. While I will never understand, nor forgive such cruelty, one thought provided me with a thin hope. Fideaux had found me. With luck Cissie would find a rescuer, too.
Perhaps she already had someone in mind.
***
I AWOKE the next morning with Fideaux’s head on my foot and pins and needles in my toes. Through the open window I could smell dewy grass and sunshine.
New day. New perspective. Life was made up of contradictions, I reminded myself. Highs and lows, flowers and children, sickness and Ronald Voights. Since Cissie had rejected my best advice, which she had every right to do, my only option was to back off and mind my own business. But, damn, it was hard.
At least it was Friday, and I would be busy with Jack. He scarcely fussed anymore when Susan left for work, and my efforts to expose him to new things appeared to be paying off. I especially loved how his eyes sparkled with mischief when he was trying to make me laugh.
Crossing the Dannehower Bridge toward Norristown, I noticed a wide stripe of jet stream spanning the soft blue sky. It had begun to separate into fluffy white clumps, but no one born after Wilbur and Orville Wright would have mistaken it for a natural cloud. For sure, George Washington would have been intrigued.
"Jet exhaust," I imagined myself educating Washington’s ghost. "From above it looks black."
A tilted white eyebrow.
"From an airplane."
Blank stare.
Oh, right. "We have machines now that carry people across the sky like birds. Well, not exactly like birds. The wings are metal and they don't flap."
Machines?
Out of deference, I allowed George the last word.
Now I was ready for a day with a toddler.
***
I TOOK Jack to Produce Junction. Originally a regular grocery store, the gutted building was now open space where customers shunted past help-yourself tables of colorful, prepackaged vegetables. At the wooden checkout tables two vendors swiftly grabbed the rest of what you wanted from bins stacked behind them. Because of the bulk quantities, I hadn't shopped here for a couple of years; but I figured potatoes and onions would keep until I could use them up.
"And leeks," I decided at the last second. I would make potato/leek soup. "And cilantro," for salsa I added, as the man behind me began to fidget.
Jack held my hand, but he was itching to run. “No, no. Stay here," I begged. With a second’s head start he would be lost among the many shoppers.
"Zat?" he asked, pointing.
“Red peppers,” I answered as I collected my change.
"Zat?" This time rutabagas.
"Rutas," he repeated. And so it went all the way out to the car—me carrying my heavy box of vegetables and naming everything at Jack's eye level.
What I’d really come for was a flat of white impatiens, but that involved another line outside. When that purchase was settled into my trunk, I freed one of the three-inch seedlings from its plastic compartment to show Jack the roots.
"See these little white things? When it rains, they drink the water and send it up the stem to the leaves and flowers. It's like you drinking with a straw."
Jack grinned. "Again," he said, so I obliged.
"Again," he repeated, and so I did. This was the good stuff of our day. That and the cuddling while I read him his favorite picture books—over and over.
After a lunch of noodles and peas, I began to carry him upstairs for his nap.
"Oo-ett," he said as he played with a strand of my hair.
"What's that kiddo?" I'd been daydreaming, a sign that I could use a nap, too.
"Oo-ett."
"You're wet? Wow! What a smart boy you are." Throughout the diaper change I reused the word and praised his burgeoning brilliance. I could scarcely wait to tell Susan about the breakthrough.
Yet when Jack's mother arrived home, twenty minutes late, she wanted to share doctor's-office gossip. Jack woke during a juicy tale about somebody's date gone wrong, so Susan gestured for me to follow her upstairs. A hasty reunion hug and kiss as she finished the story, then the young mother finally fell silent while she changed her son.
"Tell Mom what you told me," I urged the boy.
He met my eye but held his tongue.
"Wet," I whispered.
A flash of recognition. "Oo-ett" he responded with a giggle.
No reaction from Mom.
"Did you hear that?" I hinted.
"Hear what?"
"Jack said ‘wet.’ He knows when he needs a new diaper." Now that it had been pointed out, surely Susan would recognize how precocious her child was. Surely she would praise him to the sky and back.
"Um hum. Mike is talking about moving again. Do you know anything about that?"
Thrown by the abrupt change of subject, I stepped back and folded my arms across my chest. "About your moving? Why would I know anything?"
"Oh, I don't know. Mike's been acting strange, and sometimes he asks about you."
"Asks what about me?"
"If we talk...what we say when we talk..."
"But we don't. This is more than we've said to each other in two weeks."
"Yeah, I know. Sometimes Mike's a little paranoid."
I thought of the day George and I saw a black Chevy like Mike's driving slowly past the dairy farm and rubbed down the hair on my arms. Only yesterday I got spooked by a sleeve disappearing behind a tree. When I'd indulged my curiosity about the Swenson's various moves, all I'd learned was that they had made peculiar, potentially suspicious, choices. Yet if Mike really was running from something and viewed me as a threat...
But why on earth would he think that?
Jack securely on her hip, Susan fixed me with a loaded expression.
"You're not like, interested in him, are you?"
"Romantically?" I nearly choked on my laugh. The age difference alone made the thought laughable. "Is that what you mean?"
Susan smiled, but without mirth. "I didn't think so. I mean, you look really young, but...but what do I know? Stranger things have happened."
I placed a reassuring hand on the woman's shoulder. "Let's sit down and think this through."
With Jack in his high chair occupied with a handful of Cheerios, Susan and I settled across from each other at the kitchen table.
"Mike isn't the least bit interested in me, nor I in him," I stated, because it had to be said. I might have added, 'perish the thought.' "But lately I've felt that someone’s been watching me. Does that sound like Mike to you?"
Susan rolled the corner of a paper napkin between her fingers. "Maybe. Like I said, he can be a little paranoid."
The way my pulse raced, I had to work to sound unaffected. "Really?"
"Yeah, that's why we've moved so much."
"Because he's paranoid?"
Susan nodded, and auburn hair bounced against her cheeks. "His ex-wife is a real bitch. He's terrified she'll find us."
"How come?"
"Money, of course. He owes her a bunch, and we just don't have it." Susan glanced around the room. "Hard to imagine living any tighter than this."
Yet many people do, I might have said, but I desperately needed to leave this woman's house before I snatched up her delightful, thoroughly unappreciated son and took him home with me.
"Oh, look at the time," I remarked to grease my exit.
I gave Jack's cheek a loving pat and reached for my purse.