Black and Blue (23 page)

And Jason Illing’s father had taped the whole thing. While we were dropping off the boys, explaining to parents what had happened and assuring them that all of us were fine, he went to the local news station and sold a copy to them. Six months of being
careful, dying my roots, talking about goddamned Delaware, feeling my breathing quicken at the sight of a patrol car and feeling it slow as my son slept silently in the next room. Six months, and that idiot, that moron, that fool maybe ruined it with his sorry little Sony, that he loved to hoist on the palm of his hand. “Weighs less than a sack of sugar,” he liked to say.

We went to Cindy’s house, where she brought out tortilla chips and salsa, perhaps in a salute to Mr. Castro, and beer in deference to the aftershock of the day’s events. When we turned on the television, we were the lead story on the evening news, and there I was in the center of the film clip, a red flag to Bobby’s bull.

The fear I felt as I watched was worse than it had been while I worked over those children. There was the little girl, her leg bent at a horrid acute angle, and there was Beth Crenshaw, using a brown leather belt as a tourniquet. You could scarcely see my face, except for once when I turned to look back, straight into the big eye of the camera. I was glowering the way I always did when I concentrated, so that a nursing professor had had to take me aside once and tell me that it was important not to look as though I was going to throttle the patient while I was threading an IV line. I could imagine someone watching the television news, someone channel-surfing in a motel room at Disney World or in the living room of a time-share in Delray, some cop’s wife, some friend of Ann’s from Sodality at St. Stannie’s, seeing me in that instant and saying, “My God, that woman looks a lot like Bobby Benedetto’s wife, doesn’t she?” I closed my eyes and let my face fall forward into my cupped hands.

Bobby, I could hear them saying, I saw Fran on the news in
Florida. Some little town up north, what was the name? At a carnival ride, taking care of some kids, a terrible accident. What’s Fran doing in Florida? Lakota, that was the name of the place.

“You didn’t look so bad,” Cindy said, patting my arm. “Considering.”

What a ghoul Illing was. He’d panned the crowd and come to rest on Chelsea, her eyes dilated, her mouth ajar. But the terror I’d seen there for a moment was gone, and in its place was a great overwhelming calm. Probably anyone else watching would have thought the child was in shock, but I had no doubt that she was at peace, having seen that she was not crazy or strange but in fact prescient, correct, that the world was indeed as frightening as she had always believed and that it was possible for children to eat funnel cake, stand in line, wave to their friends, and then simply fall out of the sky. And the look on Robert’s face, when the ambulance finally wailed off down a dirt track and into the distance with a dust cloud behind it, was just as easy for me to read. He might as well have said it aloud: Daddy was right. Daddy was right.

“Are you okay?” I’d asked him in the car on the way to Cindy’s house, and he’d nodded. Of course. Of course. He’d seen worse without ever admitting to fear, giving way to nightmares. The blank eyes again, the blank stare. My heart sank. It was like he’d traveled back in time, to a place where he wouldn’t let himself feel a thing. “Those kids who fell will be fine,” I’d said.

“I know,” he’d said.

When I went upstairs to use the bathroom I found him in Chelsea’s bedroom, Cindy bent over him, her arm around his shoulders. Sobs shook him and made it hard for him to talk, so
that the words came out in the funny little burbles he’d babbled as a baby. There were tears and dirt mingled into a streaky mess on his face, and a wad of tissues in his hand. Cindy patted his back twice and then slipped past me and out of the room. She patted me, too, on her way out, and I took her place next to Robert and held him as he sobbed some more. Finally he managed to say, “It was just so scary. It was so scary.” I held him and rocked him and my heart was so light, laughing almost inside me, because my boy knew to be afraid, to be frightened, to cry at blood and guts and pain. It was like he was normal. It was like something was alive inside him, something that could see terrible things and know them for what they were. It had been a real accident, this one, but he hadn’t even used the word. He could tell a bad thing when he saw it, and I admitted to myself that I thought he’d lost that simple gift forever, until that moment.

Later, when Mike took us home, the telephone was ringing. “Let it go,” I said, “let it go.” But Robert picked it up, then handed it to me. “Irving and I saw you on the news,” Mrs. Levitt said. “Next time you are being a hero, don’t wear a dress so everyone can see your tushie. Your fanny. Ah, you know, your rear end.”

“I know what a tush is, Mrs. Levitt.” Mike Riordan was standing in the doorway, laughing.

Robert had gone upstairs. I could hear the water running. “He’s fine,” I said to Mike. “He’s upset.”

“It’s good for him to get it out now. Better than bottling it up, you know?”

“I know,” I said. “I know.” He stood up and moved to the door. “You were good today,” I added.

“So were you,” he said. “You were great. Unbelievable. Plus I’m happy to hear you know what a tush is.”

“I’m sorry I was so snotty about the CPR thing. There are just a lot of people who think they know how to do it from watching TV.”

“I was a community ambulance volunteer for five years.”

“I didn’t know that, see.”

He took a step toward me, with a funny little embarrassed smile, and took my face in his hands. Then he kissed me, very softly, the way a boy I’d liked in eighth grade who had braces top and bottom had once kissed me, as though he was afraid something harder would hurt me, or him. There were footsteps from upstairs, and he dropped his hands and moved away, toward the door.

“Boy,” he said.

T
he phone didn’t ring for three days, and when it finally did my hand lingered over it as though I was afraid the receiver would give off an electric shock. My heart pounded as I listened to the electronic tympani:
clink, bang, rattle, buzz, buzz, clink
. I was surprised that it had taken so long for Patty Bancroft to come looking for me. I had become her bad child, her prodigal daughter, the kind of person, like Maeve Banning at Queen of Peace, who always wound up in the principal’s office, in the hot seat.

“Maeve Banning,” Sister Eucharista would say over the intercom after morning prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance, “please come to the office.” And we’d scarcely look up. Maeve Banning, the mothers would whisper, would wind up—well, you know. She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. Grace told me she was a lawyer now, a partner in a big law firm, helping corporations stay out of trouble.

I was Patty Bancroft’s Maeve Banning. I made unauthorized phone calls. I wound up on the evening news.

“Elizabeth?” she said.

“Beth,” I said again. She could never remember that that was the name I went by, and suddenly it occurred to me that it might be because they made us all Elizabeths, that huddled in apartments and small houses and trailer parks around the United States
there was a great community of Elizabeths, like one of the medieval religious communities, committed to poverty and obedience. And silence, of course. Patty Bancroft was our public face, our voice, our leader. You could tell that she enjoyed that, that it made her feel good, to have gone from being powerless in her own home to being powerful in the world. I realized that that was what had always bothered me about her, that she enjoyed her work so much.

“We’re working on relocating you to another part of the country,” she said. “Perhaps next week, if we can set the arrangements in motion.”

“What?”

“I gather that you were on television. That was a very, very foolish thing to do. And that your picture was in the newspaper. The impulse to be a Good Samaritan must be deeply ingrained in someone from your professional background, but I beg of you, not just for your own sake but for the sake of your own child and many others, don’t yield to it in a public place ever again.”

“Next time I see a kid bleeding to death I’ll remember that.”

“There’s no point in sarcasm. You’ve only made things difficult for you and your son. Someone will let you know next week about the relocation.”

“My name wasn’t on TV. My name wasn’t with my picture in the newspaper.”

“That’s not the point.”

“We’re not leaving. I’m not uprooting my boy again.”

“I’m afraid that’s the price you will have to pay. It is not unusual for us to move one family three or four times during as many
years. Particularly if they call attention to themselves or are not assiduous about breaking off their ties with the past.”

“Let me tell you something about myself, Mrs. Bancroft,” I said. “I like to take care of my own business. I’m someone who’s made her own way all her life.” And the moment I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew that my feeble minimum-wage jobs had only been a pathetic hedge against the unpredictable life my parents made for Grace and me, a life of settling but not settling down, of moving around but not up. And my life outside of the home we shared, Bobby and I, had been a stage set, a sham. The real Fran Flynn hadn’t been the woman everyone saw in the hospital, in charge, in control. She’d been a punching bag, a marionette. And now I was one of Patty Bancroft’s puppets, a woman scared to run around the block, scared to let her son go alone to soccer games, a woman who’d take what she could get.

“Let me ask you this,” Patty Bancroft said. “Do you want to stay alive?” It was her trump card; I could tell by the way she said it. The fact that Patty Bancroft and Bobby Benedetto so often said the same things, so often made me feel the same about myself, made me hate Patty Bancroft at that moment, no matter how much good she’d done me and Robert. But she was playing out of her league when she conjured up the worst that could happen. I’d heard it all before. I’d heard it from the master. I’d heard it when he found the card of a matrimonial lawyer in my pocket two years before I left. He’d driven across the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge from a wedding reception at 2:00
AM
dead drunk, snaking the car in and out of the lanes while I held onto the edge of the seat, the sullen gray of the water framed by the slender silver cables that
held the roadway miraculously aloft. “You want to get home alive, Fran?” Bobby had said over and over, like there was a right answer and I hadn’t gotten it yet. The next morning he made me waffles for breakfast. Waffles and pancakes, that was all he could cook. But he made good waffles, even hungover and pissed off. Death threats and Belgian waffles with bacon. What a life.

“What I’d like,” I said to Patty Bancroft, “is to start paying rent on this apartment. I don’t like being a charity case. I’d like to pay my own phone bills. I’m putting some money away. I don’t need handouts anymore. I need the name and address of the landlord.”

She was quiet for a long time, and for some reason I thought she was on an airplane, flying over her empire, the hidden world of women who had ceded the right to speak for themselves, even fend for themselves, to a woman who took the podium and the microphone to speak for them, fingering her pearls. Patty Bancroft talked about herself wherever she went, of how she had been married to a prosperous banker in a town in Indiana, of how he mostly beat her about the body, not on the face, so that no one ever saw when she was wearing a suit to a country-club lunch or a cocktail dress to the club for dinner. I’d realized, hearing her tell it at that hospital, that it sounded less like a life than a story. If Patty Bancroft had ever been a victim, it was long, long in the past. She enjoyed being on top. The way I was enjoying, at that moment, demanding custody of my own life for the first time since I started living it.

“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” I added, “but we like it here. My son is settled in, I have a little bit of money put away. Just tell the landlord to come see me and I’ll pay for this place.”

“You make me very nervous, Beth,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. But I’d heard that before, too. I’d heard that from Bobby. “I don’t know if you understand this,” I finally said to Patty Bancroft, “but I can’t worry anymore about how I make other people feel about me. I have to worry about how I feel about myself.”

“You have to worry about staying safe. And keeping your child safe.”

“That, too,” I said.

Chastity is the other vow nuns take. Maybe that was why I was scheduled to go to another town, another house, another school, another identity, because Patty Bancroft, who said over and over again that she had finally been beaten senseless by her banker husband until her face had had to be rebuilt by one of the plastic surgeons who worked for her now pro bono, had never remarried. Maybe she knew about Mike Riordan. Maybe I’d known about Mike Riordan all along. Maybe I’d tried not to notice how awkward it was for him to look at me, even in the school library or on the sidelines of a game. Maybe I’d convinced myself that I wouldn’t be seduced by how comforting it was, just to know that someone bigger than me was looking out for my son. That’s what had first gotten to me about Bobby, the idea that someone would keep me safe and sound, look out for Frannie better than Frannie could look out for herself. The feel of his arm around me. The way he held my coat. Jesus Christ, the illusions you manage to sell yourself, better than any car salesman. I’d done it again with Mike Riordan, except that instead of convincing myself that he was everything, the way I had with Bobby twenty years ago, I’d convinced myself that he was nothing at all.

There was no lake in Lake Plata, just a sluggish reservoir and a
community pool, but Mike took us to the ocean the Saturday after the trip to the carnival. He came with a cooler full of soda in the back of his Toyota, and an armful of old blankets; I made fried chicken and potato salad.

“Can Bennie come?” Robert asked.

“I think it would be better this time if it was just us,” I said.

“Just us, like me and you?”