The whirl of red and blue lights against the side of the house is like a beacon, and some of our neighbors—people I’ve never spoken to and rarely see—step outside to see what all the commotion is about. What these people must think of us. Cops here all the time, the constant screaming within these walls . . .
I know at any minute that Rosie’s going to regret calling. When she appears at the door—I’m already on the front steps—she gives me a panicked look. But this is for the best. The cops need to know what’s going on.
“I would’ve called,” she whispers. “You could have given me some time to get myself together.”
“Wait. You didn’t call?”
She shakes her head.
“Well, I didn’t call,” I say.
“Good evening.” An officer approaches. “Joshua Michaels?”
The way he says it, I expect to hear you’re under arrest for . . .
My heart speeds up. What could this be about?
Did Aiden get pinched? Would he rat me out? Tell the cops I recently made a drop for him? No, he wouldn’t . . . But I never paid him for it, never gave him the hundred from that girl with the tattoo. Would that piss him off enough to tell the cops?
Or is this about the rave? I didn’t do anything illegal that night, but maybe just going to one of those things is illegal.
Or . . . I’ll bet Damien called and told them I charged at him earlier today. He probably did it as a precaution, so he could say holding me by the throat against the wall was a practice in self-defense.
I clear my throat. “Yeah, I’m Josh.”
“We’re responding to a tip that you were assaulted earlier tonight.”
When the beam of a flashlight crosses my face, Rosie turns the swollen side of her face away.
The officer turns off and stows the flashlight. “Seems there might be some truth to it.”
“My stepfather,” I say. “Ex-stepfather. Damien Wick.”
“Can we come in and talk to you about it, Joshua?”
He keeps calling me Joshua. Chatham. She must have been the one to make the phone call.
Of course she did! She’s going to tell them about the photographs, too.
Rosie opens the door, and while she doesn’t necessarily invite the cops in, she holds the door open just long enough to indicate the two of them can come in.
The girls’ rainforest soundtrack filters down to the foyer, a reminder that they’re asleep, and after a long, hard day, they need it.
Maybe this is why my mother leads us all down the stairs to my realm of the house, the basement. “Have a seat.”
Chatham isn’t in the family room, which is dim, lit only by a table lamp in the far corner. I turn on the fireplace and glance down the hallway. The light in my bedroom is on; she must be in there, changing out of her dress.
I sit first, and the cops follow suit, but Rosie lingers in the shadowy outskirts of the room, her arms crossed over her chest.
“We’re going to need pictures of the bruises,” one of the cops says.
“He hit me in the face, and he had his hands around my throat.” I unfasten another button on my shirt. I haven’t looked at it yet, but my neck aches, so I’m pretty sure it’ll bruise.
Rosie flips the light switch, and the overhead fixture buzzes to life, washing the room in the harsh tint of fluorescent bulbs. “He’s going to say my son provoked him. It’s what he always says. He’s going to tell you I deserved this, too”—she drapes her hair aside, allowing a clear view of her shiner—“and this.” She twists and lifts the hem of her shirt so we see the bruise I suspected was on her back.
“And this.” Then, she turns to reveal a gory splash of black and purple fist-sized contusions on her abdomen. Not one or two. Several. Like he pummeled her repeatedly.
“Mom.” Instantly, I’m on my feet. Tears cloud my eyes, but I don’t care who sees.
“This,” she says, “was his reaction when I told him I’m pregnant. I’m not anymore.”
Pregnant? The word blows me back, and its shrapnel embeds in my flesh, cutting and burning.
The cops are on her now, asking questions, and she’s answering.
The events of the past few weeks come at me like a fast-forward stream of images: the inexplicable bouts of crying, the ring he tried to give her, the incident with the stairs . . . her constantly telling me I don’t understand her predicament, insisting he’s changed.
The image of her bruised abdomen keeps flashing in my mind. It’s now joined the other haunting pictures—Damien coming at me with a knife, Caroline dangling from his hands over the loft, Rosie using Margaret as a human shield—and will I ever forget the fear in Margaret’s voice on the other end of the line tonight?
Of course Rosie would insist he’d changed. She’s trying to wish it true, trying to convince herself of the impossible.
I keep wiping tears away, but my eyes keep filling up, and I keep playing the scene in my mind: fist after fist after fist pounding into her flesh. And she’s so thin . . . there’s no protection, no barrier. He probably damaged her insides. Could have broken her bones.
And to think he was doing it with intent! Not only to hurt her, but to kill the mistake they’d made together . . . to kill the baby.
Now, I’m remembering him waling on her when she was pregnant with the twins, and I damn near throw up.
I cover my mouth and breathe through it. It’s in the past. It’s over.
And maybe it wasn’t really over until tonight, but now she’s finally breaking. She’s finally telling the truth.
“Mom.” I want to go to her, but I can’t make myself take the necessary steps. I’m angry with her for putting herself in this position, but I know I shouldn’t be.
I hear, in the periphery, the cops’ questions, my mother’s answers—
“How far along were you when Mr. Wick hit you?”
“Have you been to the doctor?”
“Do you have documentation to prove the pregnancy terminated after his assault?”
—but it all seems so far away and distant, like I’m listening from the bottom of the ocean.
I sink back to the sofa, and I drop my head in my hands.
My ears are ringing.
My hands are wet with tears.
My chest is heaving with sobs I’m fighting like hell not to unleash. Have to stay strong. For my mother. For my sisters.
“Mom.”
Was the dickweed trying to kill the twins before they were born, too? Is that why he’d walloped her back then? This tremendous sense of loss pours into my heart, and it hurts. I can’t imagine life without my sisters.
“Mom!”
And the next I know, I’m holding her, and I’m holding her so tight, and she’s crying on my shoulder.
My mom.
My mother. She’s so small. Damien could snap her in half, and she stood up to him tonight. She’s strong. So strong.
She tells the police everything, answers every question.
I fill them in on what happened at the Churchill, about Damien watching Chatham climb in bed with me. I tell them about old shit, too, about how I got the scar on my forearm.
They question Chatham, too, in my bedroom, and for the first time ever, Rosie and I have a third party to confirm things happened just the way we said they did.
When they ask for it, Rosie gives the police the photograph Caroline found at Damien’s place.
Chatham obviously filled them in about it.
The cops are there for an hour, at least, before Rosie agrees to medical attention, which I turn down. Someone has to stay and watch the girls.
This—when the cops have gotten the last of their statements, the last of their pictures, and when Rosie is on her way to the hospital in a squad car—is when I let loose.
I can’t help it. It’s like a decade of suppressed frustration and hurt and anger comes pouring out of me all at once. Like the floodgate opened, and I can’t close it again.
Chatham emerges from my bedroom, wearing my spare jersey and a pair of my sweats.
I let her watch me fall to pieces. I’m like the tiles on the Scrabble board. Fragments. Impermanent pieces of indeterminate wholes, which could easily dissect and scatter. But somehow I know she’s going to scrape it all up and rearrange the letters so they make sense.
Or at least I hope that’s what’s going to happen.
She’s on my lap now, holding my face in her cold hands. “It’s over now. Everyone’s safe.”
It’s true. We’re safe.
“But we’re also changed,” I say. “I can’t undo what he did to them tonight.”
“Is that what you think you’re here to do? Sweetheart, no one can do that.” Her lips meet mine. “No one expects you to rewind time.”
I wrap my arms around her, hold her close, and trace the letters on the back of the jersey.
“This isn’t who you are,” she whispers between kisses. “It’s only where you’ve been.”
Next, I feel her fingers working the buttons on my shirt.
“And we’ve all been there from time to time. Locked in a closet, scared we’re never getting out. But we come out. Stronger.”
I nod, and hiccup over tears when I try to verbally agree.
Her hands splay against my chest. “I love you,” she whispers against my lips.
I love you, too. I try to form the words, but I can’t make it happen. I dip a few fingers into the waistband of the sweats she’s wearing and trail my fingertips over the scar on her hip.