When Light Breaks (13 page)

Often at night she had friends over, friends who wore long beads and beards, who smoked cigarettes that were thin and simmered sweet and heady compared to Daddy’s pipe.

Daddy often forbade me from going into Jack’s house, which Aunt Martha-Lynn called a den of iniquity, whatever that was. But I had enough friends, including Charlotte on the next street, for Daddy not to know where I was all the time.

I reached down and touched the back of Mrs. Sullivan’s head. She looked up at me. A ripe bruise, like an apple tossed on the road, covered the left side of her face, distorting her features. Her eye was swollen shut.

I’d seen other bruises on Mrs. Sullivan before: her arm, cheek, calf. She always told me the marks were from horseback riding, or a fall or clumsy motion on her part.

I gasped. “A horse again?”

“No,” she whispered, “there never was a horse. It was and always will be from Mr. Sullivan.” She stood and placed her hand on the side of my face. “Precious Kara, so sweet, so innocent. I’m sorry.”

“For?” A fear rose, a fear I had never felt before, one of unexpected abandonment. It was tinged with the fear I’d felt when Mama was gone, but that had been planned for, expected.

In my experience, people you loved were not allowed to leave unannounced before dawn’s light with a bruise covering one eye. Mrs. Sullivan wrapped her arms around me, pulled me into her patchwork shawl. “We are leaving today, Kara. I am taking my boys and we are leaving with what we can before Mr. Sullivan returns.”

“No!” I screamed and pushed her away.

“Dear child, I was hoping you would not awaken, but you are here, and of course you would be. Your sensitive spirit felt Jack leaving.”

“Where are you going?” I whispered.

“I don’t know.” She looked away.

“Yes, you do,” I said, because I saw it was true, in her eyes, in her glance toward Jack.

“Please try to understand,” she said without meeting my gaze.

Jack came up next to his mother. We had danced around our growing relationship all summer, touched hands and cheeks and legs more than was necessary on the beach, in the water, on the boat. The sensations and promise they held were too enormous to talk about. We’d been approaching our growing love quietly, like coming near a scared baby osprey in the nest without its mama. Gentle now, slow now . . .

There would be no more waiting. Jack stood behind his mother and I loved him, enormously, fiercely, openly, and desperately. Of course I did—I had for my entire young life. But there had been time then, huge swaths of time, in which to discover our feelings, to let them grow. Or maybe we love so profoundly when we know love is about to leave us, empty and alone.

Now Mrs. Sullivan had ripped time away—nothing remained but mere moments.

The sun rose. Its light landed on his face, revealed an age and a weariness I had never seen before. A cry grew behind my heart. Jack opened his arms and I went into them, buried my face in his shirt. He smelled like sweat and sleep combined. He’d been packing and loading the truck with his brother.

I’d dreamt about Jack’s touch during that summer, that summer of waiting. Now I knew the rush and release of all I’d held in some locked place in my middle. I have since come to believe this was why I had no patience in my adult life—the patient waiting I’d done for Jack when I believed I had all the time in the world was wasted.

The moving man slammed the rear door of the van, then backed out of the driveway. I held fast to Jack. “Where are you going?” I asked, the words mumbled into his shirt. He didn’t answer, but stroked the back of my head, ran his fingers around and through my sleep-tangled hair.

“Mama won’t tell us.” His voice came choked, full of pain.

“What?” I pulled back from him, looked up at his face.

“Kara, Father hit her for the last time. . . . I know we’ve never talked about what he does. Yesterday was a very bad day. She’s done with it and so are we. He’s gone, but we don’t know for how long. Mama packed everything she could. We’re leaving . . . now.”

“Why didn’t you . . . tell me?”

“I didn’t know until last night . . . when Mama started making us all pack up.”

“You weren’t going to tell me?” A sob tore its way up my throat.

“I knew you’d hear us in the morning. I knew you’d come. You always come at the right time. If you’d come before now you’d have made it . . . worse than it already is.”

“You can stay. You can stay here with us . . . your mama and Jimmy can leave. You can stay. You can.” I grabbed on to his arm, squeezed as though that would keep him there.

“You know I can’t leave her. There is no way. But I will call you as soon as I know where we are . . . as soon as I can. I promise I’ll come find you. . . .”

“If you don’t, I’ll find you,” I said, small and fading.

“I know you will. I know.” He touched my face, leaned in and kissed me. All the yearning was mixed with the pain of his leaving, with the dread of farewells. His lips touched mine and I understood the word “one.”

A screeching of tires erupted down the road, a ripping sound. Mr. Sullivan’s car careened into the driveway. Jack released me. “One more minute, we only needed one more minute,” he muttered.

Jack ran to his mother, who was shutting the trunk of the car, and stood in front of her as Mr. Sullivan staggered toward them.

Time and space stood still, like in the Bible story where God tilted the earth and paused time for a moment.

“Son.” Mr. Sullivan grabbed Jack’s shoulders, his voice level and low. “Get out of my way now. This ain’t none of your business.”

“Don’t touch her, Dad. Don’t touch her again.” Jack’s voice was older, deeper, not the voice of the boy I knew: a man.

“You have no idea who you’re messing with, son. You think you’re protecting your precious mother, don’t you? Do you know who she’s been sleeping with? Who she’s been messing around with while she pretends it’s all about the art, the painting?”

“Stop,” Jack said.

“You want me to stop? Maybe you should’ve told your mother that when she was—”

Now it was my turn. “Stop!” I hollered, and ran toward them. “Stop.” Then I turned toward my house and, using all that was left within me, screamed as loud as I knew how. “Daddy, Daddy!” My voice and face were raised to my home next door.

Mr. Sullivan reached his hand into the air, opened his mouth and released a gnarled sound of anger. The thick smell of bourbon came from deep within him, where it must live. I thought to duck, bend down away from his hand, but my astonishment at what he was about to do stopped me—a paralyzing disbelief.

When his hand came down and across my face, I was still screaming for Daddy. The sting of pain was shrouded by incredulity, shock. I fell to the ground, not from the pain, which I barely felt, but from the force. My knees buckled and my palms stopped my fall. I felt the sting of pavement more than the slap that had forced me to the ground.

Jack’s howl was animalistic, raw against my open heart. He lunged toward his father and pummeled his face with clenched fists just as my daddy came running full speed toward us. His feet were bare, his striped pajama bottoms tied at the waist, his mouth moving with words I had never heard him say, ones I did not know were within his cultured expressions.

Daddy pulled Jack from his dazed father, who was now on the ground. I jumped up, ran toward the confusion, toward Daddy and Jack. Jack lifted his left foot, reached it back and kicked his father in the ribs. A loud crunching sound made nausea rise to the back of my throat, just as the pain from the slap ascended to my face, to my cheek. I turned and bent over.

Jack grabbed me, pulled me to him, and the sting of the slap, the emptiness waiting just past me with a vortex of loneliness, faded. He reached into his pocket, withdrew his hand in a fist, then held his hand out to me and opened it. On his palm lay a round gold ring—one I distinctly knew was a Claddagh ring. “I meant to give this to you for your birthday next week, but now is as good a time as any. Not the way I meant it to be.”

Mr. Sullivan groaned behind us, words garbled and empty of meaning. Jack looked down at him. “Not the way I meant it to be at all.”

I lifted the ring—words gone, emotions churning. Jack took the ring from me, then slipped it onto my right ring finger. “I’ll call you when we get . . . somewhere.”

Then I heard Mrs. Sullivan screaming, “Get in the car. Get in the car. Get in the car.” It sounded like a mantra from a deranged lunatic.

Mr. Sullivan stood up then, his fists clenched at his side, blood leaking from his mouth. “You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you.” He lunged toward my daddy, who sidestepped him. Mr. Sullivan fell to the ground with the momentum of his delirious anger.

Sirens screeched across the road. Flashing lights joined the rising sun, and dizziness enveloped me as I heard my daddy tell Mrs. Sullivan to get in the car and go, go now, he’d take care of the rest.

Jack turned from me, then back again. He touched my cheek, kissed me one more time, a long, beautiful kiss.

“I’ll find you,” I said as the dizziness became complete and I let go—released the control to stand.

When I awoke, I was in my bed with Aunt Martha-Lynn standing over me, clucking, holding ice to my cheek. I looked up at her, swiped at the ice pack, which hurt more than the leftover ache of the slap.

“Are they gone?” I meant to say, but no sound, no voice came out.

“Shhh. Shhh. You’re fine.” She leaned toward me, a tear falling down her cheek. “You’ve lost your voice from screaming for your daddy. He probably saved poor Mrs. Sullivan’s life.”

I shook my head. “Jack did.” I mouthed the words.

“Yes, child, so did Jack. You both did. Now Mr. Sullivan is in jail . . . and they’re gone.”

“Gone,” I mouthed again, then rolled over and let the sleep take me where I needed to go: oblivion.

 

In those young years I doubted if anyone else had ever experienced such an amazing memory of joy mixed with such staggering pain. How could both be present in the same moment, exist together in the same space and time? I wrote about it: poems and letters. When Mama had died there had been grief without joy. But when Jack had kissed me good-bye, there’d been both.

I still didn’t understand it, but I didn’t know anyone who did. And, truly, I’d stopped thinking about it.

I swung my feet over the dock, and water licked my toes. The tide had come in during my remembering. It was incredible to me that I could still, after all these years of forgetting, bring up details. Or maybe I had changed some of them, colored over parts. I didn’t know. The only way to know would be to ask Jack.

No. I cracked my neck, stood. This was insanity. I needed to stop by the florists and double-check the flower order, call the dressmaker and check on the progress of the bridesmaids’ dresses, call in the menus for the golf event, and, of course, find a band.

A band: the Unknown Souls.

CHAPTER NINE

I
avoided all thoughts of Maeve’s myth of the Claddagh ring, of a good-bye on a dawn Lowcountry morning, and plowed through my work for the remainder of the day. When I settled into the library that night to read over the list of things left to do for the tournament, the bruised fatigue of the flu pulled at my eyelids. I lay my head back on the leather chair, took a deep breath of Daddy’s pipe tobacco.

The warm, yearning feeling for Jack that had once sat directly in my middle awakened. Sweet Jack. He, his mother, and Jimmy went to Arizona. He finally sent me a letter, which arrived a month after he left. This was an interminable length of time for a girl in love, twisting her Claddagh ring around and around until a raw spot appeared on her finger.

Eventually high school started, but my heart didn’t. We wrote back and forth, back and forth until life sped up, until high school and dates and dances and cheerleading filled the emptier moments of missing Jack, and the picture of our good-bye became tattered and faded.

Mr. Sullivan eventually disappeared into a pit of alcoholism and unemployment. The last I heard of him was when I was in tenth grade, and he was found asleep on Main Street. He’d lost his house, his wife, and his family. Although people murmured clucks of regret and said, “Poor Mr. Sullivan, his cheating wife up and left him with nothing,” I had no sympathy for him. I felt nothing but contempt for the man who took Jack away from me and slapped me to the ground.

Daddy didn’t let us talk about what had happened that early morning, and there began the slow process of denial. He’d deemed the Sullivan family trashy and was relieved when they’d left.

A thump startled me as my files fell to the floor. I opened my eyes. “Shit,” I said, and leaned down to pick up the papers, then lifted my gaze to see Charlotte standing in the library doorway.

“Hello, girlfriend,” she said. “You look like hell.”