“They don’t know.” Sean shrugged. “Six months? A year? Might be longer, but the health care’s not that great, you know?”
“Do you expect me to feel sorry about that?” I snapped.
“Of course not. C’mon, Alison, I’m not the enemy.”
“No, you just want me to talk to them.” I stood up and shouldered my purse, heading for the door. Sean came after me, touching my arm. The lightest touch, but it stopped me. He didn’t grab me; he’d never do that.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said without turning, trying to steady my voice. “I can’t.”
“Okay, I know, it’s okay.” He moved his hand to my shoulder, a gentle squeeze. “But don’t leave, not like this. Please?”
It was the sadness in his voice that made me come back to the table and sit down once again. We disagreed fundamentally on this issue, but I knew it was as painful for him as it was for me. He was my big brother. He was the one I’d reached for when I was little and scared and he’d never failed to return that trust, his hand always closing protectively over mine.
He rubbed a hand over his cropped brown hair and smiled, trying to start over. “So if you didn’t come here to talk about that, then why did you come?”
I cleared my throat, fiddling with my purse straps. “I wanted to ask you about a friend of mine. I think she’s being abused by her spouse.”
Sean’s face registered surprise for a second before he frowned, hands clenching into fists. “Is this really a friend? Is Michael hurting you?”
“No, it’s not Michael—how can you even think that?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew how foolish that sounded. He shot me a look that said as much. “It’s not Michael,” I said. “I’m not the one being abused.”
“Swear,” he said. “Swear on the kids that you’re telling the truth.”
I held up two fingers like a Boy Scout. “I swear on the kids.”
He looked only slightly mollified. “What’s going on with your friend?”
I filled him in on Heather’s situation and he listened, asking a few pertinent questions. When he asked for Viktor’s name, I shook my head.
“I can’t tell you that—I promised not to.”
“If I knew who it was, I could call the Sewickley police and they’d send someone to talk to him. They wouldn’t say it came from you—it could be an anonymous tip.”
“She’d know it was me. I can’t do that.”
He nodded, running his hand over the fake grain in the laminate table. “It doesn’t work most of the time anyway. It might even backfire—he might hurt her worse for telling someone. There are a lot of shelters she could go to.”
“I know, I’ve given her all that information, but she won’t leave him.”
“Does she know she can file a restraining order against him if she does? Because that’s what I’d advise her to do.”
I shook my head. “She won’t do it; he’s got a prominent job and she’s afraid of losing her stepson.”
Sean shook his head. “There’s not a whole lot that can be done if she won’t take that initial step. She’s got to leave and file a restraining order. Even if someone else called the police on him, you know as well as I do that victims usually won’t press charges. And you can’t force them to leave—it doesn’t work. She’s got to make that decision.”
He changed the subject after that, talking about the holidays and what he wanted to buy the kids, and whether he’d make it to Sewickley on Christmas day itself or the day after, depending on his work schedule. As he walked me out to my car he brought up Heather again. “Cheer up, sis. She could leave him—she might be stronger than you think.” He shrugged, shaking his head in a knowing fashion. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job it’s that people can surprise you.”
I tried hard to believe what Sean said, to convince myself that Heather would find the strength to leave Viktor and everything would be okay. It didn’t work—I’m not that optimistic by nature.
Christmas came and went, a flurry of decorating and gift buying that seemed more frenzied that year than ever before, but maybe it was because I couldn’t focus, jumping every time the phone rang, expecting the worst.
On New Year’s Eve, the four of us met at Crazy Mocha in the afternoon for a quick get-together without the kids. I left Michael at home staring at college football on TV with the dog sprawled at his feet, while the kids ran in and out of the house, setting up sand buckets and plastic cups on the back porch to catch enough lazily falling snowflakes to “make snow cones.”
“Have you told him about the pregnancy yet?” Sarah asked Heather when she waved away the gingerbread man that Sarah offered, saying it made her queasy.
“Not yet,” she said, “I’m planning how to do it.” She’d been the last of us to arrive, hurrying in looking pale and wan, buying only bottled water. She’d lowered herself carefully into her seat, but she had no visible marks that day. Of course, with her high-necked sweater and jeans, there wasn’t much skin to see.
“You’ve got to tell him soon,” Julie said. “You’re going to start showing.”
“I know, I already am,” Heather said, and she smiled at that, looking around to make sure no one was watching before lifting the hem of her baggy sweater so we could admire her nonexistent “baby bump.”
“That’s not a bump, it’s barely a burp,” Sarah said, and Julie and I laughed weakly, but Heather looked kind of offended.
“What do you think of Abigail?” she asked. It was only when she added “Or Zoe?” that I realized she was talking about baby names.
“Those are pretty,” Julie said, nudging me, and I nodded, trying to summon a smile, though my own stomach felt suddenly queasy.
“It could be a boy,” Sarah said, tearing off the gingerbread man’s head. “Daniel might like a brother.”
Heather ignored her. “I really like Emma, but it’s been used too much, don’t you think?”
I thought the whole conversation was surreal, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to upset her. She reminded me of a child at that moment, sitting there talking about this name or that, while nobody spoke about what we all feared would happen when her husband finally found out about the baby.
As I walked home through the snow, I had a sudden memory of another New Year’s Eve, long ago in Braddock, when my mother had let Sean and me stay up past midnight, handing us wooden spoons and pans to bang. “It’s going to be a good year,” she’d said to us after the ball dropped, her eyes wide and painfully bright. “It’s going to be so good—just you wait and see.”
I spent the New Year and every day for the first few weeks in January dreading that phone call telling me that Viktor had killed Heather. Yet the night the call finally came I wasn’t at all prepared.
Buzzing. In my dreams I waved at my face, chasing away a wasp, but the noise persisted. I woke in the dark, disoriented. My cell phone buzzed again. I fumbled for it on the nightstand, answering without looking to see the ID of the caller. “Hello?”
“Alison?” The voice was panicked; my name ended on a high-pitched sob. “Help me!” A shriek.
I sat straight up, looking toward Michael, but he took a sleeping pill most nights and didn’t stir. “Heather?” I whispered. “Is that you?”
Instead of answering, she sobbed again. “Help me! Please, I need you to help me! Hurry!”
“I’ll be right there,” I said in a low voice, slipping from my bed to the closet, struggling to change out of pajamas while balancing the phone. That son of a bitch had finally gone too far. “Have you called the police? Call them right now, Heather.”
“I can’t.” Her breathing was ragged and hiccupping. All I could hear was her wild sobbing, as if she had her hand cupped around the phone.
“I’ll call them,” I said. “I’ll call them and I’ll come over.”
“Don’t!” she wailed even louder. “No police; just you!”
Michael made a snorting sound and I froze, looking back toward the bed, but he’d merely been rolling onto his side, his breathing once again deep and even.