Black and Blue (2 page)

The statue was taller than our little house down the block from
the bay in Brooklyn, taller than my in-law’s house or the last building where I’d lived with my parents, the one in Bensonhurst, where, in the crowded little bedroom, I’d dressed in my wedding gown, snagging the hem of my train on a popped nail in the scuffed floorboards. The sheer heroic thrust of the station made me feel tiny, almost invisible, almost safe, except that my eyes wandered constantly from the double glass doors to the street at one end to the double glass doors to the street at the other. Waiting, watching, waiting for Bobby to come through the doors, his hands clenched in his pants pockets, his face the dusky color that flooded it whenever he was angry about anything, which was lots of the time. I’d been waiting for Bobby to come through doors most of my life, waiting and watching to gauge his mood and so my own.

A finger of sweat traced my spine and slid into the cleft where my underpants began. The cotton at my crotch was wet, summer sweat and fear. I’d been afraid so many times that I thought I knew exactly what it felt like, but this was something different altogether, like the difference between water and ice. Ice in my belly, in my chest, beneath my breasts, between my eyes, as though I’d gulped down a lemonade too quickly in the heat. “Brain freeze,” Robert and his friends called it when it happened to them, and they’d reel around the kitchen, holding their heads.

“Wait on the bench by the coffee kiosk,” the man had said. He had driven us from New York to Philadelphia in total silence, like a well-trained chauffeur. As we got out of the old Plymouth Volare in front of the train station, he had leaned across the front seat, looking up at me through the open passenger door. He had smelled like English Leather, which Bobby had worn when we
were both young, before we were married. Bobby had worn it that time when I was nineteen, the first time. Or twenty. I guess it was right, Bobby’s voice in my head; I guess I’d just turned twenty, that first time. Maybe he was testing me then, to see how much I could take. Maybe he did that every time, until finally he had decided that I would take anything. Anything at all.

“What?” Robert had said, looking up at me as the man in the Volare drove away to wherever he came from, whoever he was. “What did he say? Where are we going now? Where are we going?”

And there was the coffee kiosk, and here was the bench, and here we were, my ten-year-old son and I, waiting for—what? Waiting to escape, to get gone, to disappear so that Bobby could never find us. I think Robert knew everything when he saw me that morning, cutting my hair in the medicine-cabinet mirror, whispering on the phone, taking off the bandages and throwing them in the trash, putting all the recent photographs in an envelope and addressing it to my sister, Grace, so that Bobby wouldn’t have good pictures to show people when he started to search for us. “Where are we going?” Robert had asked. “On a trip,” I’d replied. If Robert had been an ordinary ten-year-old he would have cajoled and whined, asked and asked and asked until I snapped at him to keep quiet. But he’d never been ordinary. For as long as either of us could remember, he’d been a boy with a secret, and he’d kept it well. He had to have heard the sound of the slaps, the thump of the punches, the birdcall of my sobs as I taped myself up, swabbed myself off, put my pieces back together again. He’d seen my bruises after the fact; he’d heard the sharp intakes of breath when he hugged too hard in places I was hurt. But he
looked away, the way he knew we both wanted him to, my husband for his reasons, me for mine.

It was just that last time, when he came in from school and I turned at the kitchen counter, his apple slices on a plate, his milk in a glass, my face swollen, misshapen, the colors of a spectacular sunset just before nightfall, my smile a clownish wiggle of a thing because of my split lip, that he couldn’t manage to look away, disappear upstairs, pretend he didn’t see. “Mom, oh, Mom,” he’d said, his eyes enormous. “Don’t worry,” I’d replied before he could say more. “I’ll take care of everything.”

“Mom,” he’d said again. And then maybe he remembered, remembered the secret, remembered all those mornings after the horrible sounds and screams, how his father would sit at the table drinking coffee from his PBA mug, how I’d come in from running and go up to shower, how everyone acted as though everything was just as it should be. So the wild light in his eyes flared, flickered, died, and he added, “Was it an accident?”

Because that’s what I’d said, year after year. An accident. I had an accident. The accident was that I met Bobby Benedetto in a bar, and I fell crazy in love with him. And after that I fell further and further every year. Not so you’d notice, if you knew me, although no one really did. On the outside I looked fine: the job, the house, the kid, the husband, the smile. Nobody got to see the hitting, which was really the humiliation, which turned into the hatred. Not just hating Bobby, but hating myself, too, the cringing self that was afraid to pick up the remote control from the coffee table in case it was just that thing that set him off. I remember a story in the
Daily News
a couple of years ago about a guy who kept a woman chained in the basement of the building where he
was a custodian. Whenever he felt like it, he went down the concrete steps and did what he wanted to her. Part of me had been in a cellar, too, waiting for the sound of footfalls on the stairs. And I wasn’t even chained. I stayed because I thought things would get better, or at least not worse. I stayed because I wanted my son to have a father and I wanted a home. For a long time I stayed because I loved Bobby Benedetto, because no one had ever gotten to me the way he did. I think he knew that. He made me his accomplice in what he did, and I made Robert mine. Until that last time, when I knew I had to go, when I knew that if I told my son I’d broken my nose, blacked my eyes, split my lip, by walking into the dining-room door in the dark, that I would have gone past some point of no return. The secret was killing the kid in him and the woman in me, what was left of her. I had to save him, and myself.

“Where are we going, Mom?” he whined in the station, but he did it like any kid would, on any long trip, and it almost made me laugh and smile and cry, too, to hear him sound so ordinary instead of so dead and closed up. Besides, he knew. He knew we were running away from his father, as far and as fast as we could. I wanted to say, Robert, baby, hon, I’m taking you out of the cellar. I’m taking you to where there won’t be secrets anymore. But that wasn’t exactly true. They’d just be different secrets now.

There are people who will do almost anything in America, who will paint your house, paint your toenails, choose your clothes, mind your kids. In Manhattan, at the best private schools, you can even hire a nitpicker if your kid gets head lice. And there are people who will help you get away from your husband, who will find you a new house, a new job, a new life, even a new name. They
are mysterious about it because they say it’s what they need to do to keep you safe; when she goes on television, their leader, a woman named Patty Bancroft, likes to say, “We do not even have a name for ourselves.” Maybe that’s why I’d felt I had to whisper when I talked to her on the phone, even though Bobby was long gone from the house: to keep their secret, my secret. There are people, Patty Bancroft had said, who will help you; it is better if you know no more than that.

I looked down at Robert, hunched over on the bench, bent almost double over a little electronic game he carried with him everywhere. Ninjas in glowing green lunged forward and kicked men in black masks; the black masks fell back, fell over like felled trees. The ninjas bowed. The number at one corner of the screen grew larger. Robert was breathing as though he had been running. I ran my hand over his dark hair, cut like a long tonsure over his narrow, pointed skull. My touch was an annoyance; he leaned slightly to one side and rocked forward to meet the ninjas, take them on, knock them down. He was good at these games, at losing himself in the tinny electronic sounds and glowing pictures. My sister, Grace, said all the kids were, these days. But I wondered. I looked across the station at a small girl in overalls who was toddling from stranger to stranger, smiling and waving while her mother followed six paces behind. Even when he was small Robert had never, ever been like that. Grace said kids were born with personalities, and Robert’s was as dignified and adult as his name. But I wondered. When Robert was three he sometimes sat and stared and rocked slightly back and forth, and I worried that he was autistic. He wasn’t, of course; the doctor said so. “Jesus, talk about making a mountain out of a whatever,” Bobby had said,
reaching to lift the child and never even noticing the way in which the small bony shoulders flinched, like the wings of a bird preparing to fly, to flee.

“We’re going on a trip,” I’d told Robert that morning.

“Where?” he’d said.

“It’s kind of a surprise.”

“Is Daddy coming?”

Not if we’re lucky, a voice in my head had said, but out loud I’d replied, “He has to work.”

Robert’s face had gone dead, that way it does sometimes, particularly the morning after a bad night, a night when Bobby and I have gotten loud. “Is that why you’re wearing glasses?” he said.

“Sort of, yeah.”

“They look funny.”

In the station he looked up from his video game and stared at me as though he was trying to figure out who I was, with the strange hair, the glasses, the long floaty dress. The ninjas were all dead. He had won. His eyes were bright. “Tell me where we’re going,” he said again.

“I will,” I said, as though I knew. “In a little while.”

“Can I get gum?”

“Not now.”

Around the perimeter of the station were small shops and kiosks: cheap jewelry, fast food, newspapers, books: the moneychangers in the temple. The voice of the train announcer was vaguely English; there was a stately air to the enterprise, unlike the shabby overlit corridors of the airports. No planes, Patty Bancroft told me when we first talked on the phone two weeks before. Plane trips are too easy to trace. The women she helped never
flew away; they were not birds but crawling creatures, supplicants, beaten down. Trains, buses, cars. And secrecy.

When I’d first met Patty Bancroft, when she’d come to the hospital where I worked, she’d said that she had hundreds of volunteers all over the country. She said her people knew one another only as voices over the telephone and had in common only that for reasons of their own they had wanted to help women escape the men who hurt them, to give those women new lives in new places, to help them lose themselves, start over in the great expansive anonymous sameness of America.

“What about men who are beaten by their wives?” one of the young doctors at the hospital had asked that day.

“Don’t make me laugh,” Patty Bancroft had said wearily, dismissively.

She’d given me her card that day, in case I ever treated a woman in the emergency room who needed more than sutures and ice packs, needed to escape, to disappear, to save her life by getting gone for good. “Nurses are one of my greatest sources of referral,” she’d said, clasping my hand, looking seriously into my eyes. It was the most chaste business card I’d ever seen, her name and a telephone number. No title, no address, just a handful of lonely black characters. I put the card in my locker at the hospital. I must have picked it up a hundred times until, six months later, I called the number. She remembered me right away. “Tell me about this patient,” Patty Bancroft had said. “It’s me,” I said, and my voice had faltered, fell into a hiss, a whisper of shame. “It’s me.”

“Where are we going?” I had asked her when we spoke on the phone two days before the man in the Volare had picked us up at
a subway stop in upper Manhattan, two weeks after Bobby had beaten me for the last time. My voice was strange and stiff; my nose and jaw had begun to heal, so that if I didn’t move my mouth too much the pain was no more than a soft throb at the center of my face.

“You’ll know when you get there,” Patty Bancroft said.

“I’m not going away without knowing where I’m going,” I said.

“Then you’ll have to stay where you are,” she’d replied. “This is the way it works.” My hand had crept to my nose, pressed on the bridge as though testing my resolve. I felt the pain in my molars, the back of my head, the length of my spine. I felt the blood still seeping from between my legs, like a memory of something I’d already made myself forget. “The bleeding will stop in a week or so,” they’d said at the clinic. Pack plenty of clean underpants, I thought to myself. That’s what it comes down to, finally, no matter how terrifying your life has become. A toothbrush. Batteries. Clean underpants. The small things keep you from thinking about the big ones. Concealer stick. Tylenol. My face had faded to a faint yellow-green in the time it had taken me to plan my getaway. Bobby had been working a lot of nights. We’d scarcely seen one another.

“What will happen if you leave and then your husband finds you?” Patty Bancroft had said.

“He’ll kill me,” I answered.

“He won’t find you if you do what we say.” And she’d hung up the phone.

The station public-address system bleated and blared. “Mom, can I have a Coke?” Robert said, in that idle way in which children
make requests, as though it’s expected of them. The video game and his hands lay in his lap, and he’d tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling.

“Not now,” I said.

A line of people in business suits had formed at the head of one of the stairways leading to the tracks. Two of them talked on cellular phones. A woman with a handsome leather suitcase on a wheeled stand left the line and walked toward the coffee kiosk. Her heels made a percussive noise on the stone floor. “Café au lait, please,” the woman said to the girl behind the counter.

She looked at her watch, then turned and smiled at me, looked down at the floor, looked up again. “You dropped your tickets,” she said. She handed me an envelope she stooped to pick up from the floor.

“Oh, no, I—”

“You dropped your tickets,” she said again, smiling, her voice firm, and I could feel the corner of the envelope, a sharp point against my wet palm.