“Shhh,” she croons to him. “Stop now.” Rosa turns to look over her shoulder at Patricia, who can see where he’s gouged bloody strips down his wife’s cheeks with his fingernails. “Please, Mrs. Lane. Please. Inside.”
Patricia’s brain flips the switch from anger to fear, and she hurries for the door, goes inside, and fumbles with the lock. For a moment, she stands there watching through the glass as Rosa struggles with the crazed man, trying to capture his arms against his sides so he can’t scratch her again. He looks through Patricia as if he doesn’t even see her.
The rage she sees there—the fury, the hate, the absence of humanity—it makes her step back and clutch her heart.
A man looked at her that way once, a long time ago. He slapped her.
Once.
And she slapped him back and called him every foul name she could think of and smashed in his precious TV with the broom, and then she walked out of his tidy white apartment full of pictures of Jesus, penniless and alone and pregnant with his child. But there’s no reason for Miguel to hate her like that, to see through her, to have that look that says he wants nothing more than to tear her apart for what she’s done to him—or not done for him. She hasn’t defied him or denied him something he thinks he’s due, hasn’t belittled him or emasculated him.
She takes good care of Miguel, pays him well enough. Sure, it’s all under the table because the Estrellas are undocumented, but Randall has some plan in place to help them become citizens one day when there’s a president who supports that sort of thing. Miguel should be thankful.
And that’s when it clicks.
The Violence.
Patricia has heard things, here or there, but honestly, who has the time? She’s not going to spend all day poking at a computer like Chelsea, looking for things to worry about. If it was important, Randall would tell her to worry, but so far everyone around the courthouse seems to think it’s all a bunch of baloney, people without means using some nonexistent disease as an excuse for getting up to trouble. Randall got into one of his grooves the other night, after a few bourbons, comparing the Violence to some odd old occurrences where everyone thought laughter or dancing was contagious and therefore just spent days or weeks laughing or dancing.
People are stupid, he often reminds her. That’s why I have a job—because someone smart needs to send them to jail to pay for their stupidity and get them off the street. When the president is worried, I’ll consider worrying. And he ain’t worried.
Rosa is carrying Miguel now, step by step across the yard, back toward the pool house. He’s still fighting just as hard, kicking and scratching and punching, and her arms are just torn to ribbons, bruises already showing, but Rosa isn’t stopping. If he were a bigger man, the situation would be far more dire.
Patricia touches the lock again to make sure it’s engaged and picks up her phone to get some information about this Violence thing. The first search result is for the CDC’s website about it, and it lists the symptoms.
Sudden, violent rage.
Attempts to hurt one particular target that, if unstopped, will result in their death.
Constricted pupils.
High heart rate.
Fever over a hundred degrees.
Excessive salivation.
Well, Patricia can attest to only two of those symptoms, but it’s good enough for her.
She dials 1-555-ALERT-US as Rosa disappears into the pool house, dragging Miguel with her.
It’s the patriotic thing to do, after all.
11.
Chelsea sits on the front porch step, a throw blanket tossed over her shoulders despite the fact that it’s a warm spring night in Florida and she’s sweating. One of the EMTs awkwardly wrapped the blanket around her after they checked her out. They took a million pictures, asked a million questions, put tiny Band-Aids on her cuts, looked inside her mouth, assured her that if she stuck to soft foods for a few weeks, her loosened teeth would resettle in her jaw. All that tender care took place only after the officers cuffed David and wrestled him out of the house, kicking and screaming, drunk and slurring and threatening Chelsea in a hundred ways that were now recorded on the cops’ bodycams.
“I’m gonna kill you for this, you lying bitch!” he’d shrieked. “You did this!”
Like he hadn’t been promising to kill her for years.
But it didn’t count if he was drunk, he always said. That wasn’t him. That wasn’t who he was.
And he wouldn’t talk that way, anyway.
David always brings up how much he respects women.
“What’s that?”
Ella sits on the stair beside her and points to a card that’s apparently been in her hands for some time, turning over and over between her French-manicured nails under the moth-ringed porch lights. Chelsea looks down at it, a clean rectangle, whiter than white, with contact information for the government’s Violence Task Force. The disease has changed how they do things: Now they can drag people off and ask questions later. They said she could call in a few days, after David has been processed, if she wants to know which quarantine center he’s been sent to.
Like she cares.
Chelsea might be a beaten dog, but she doesn’t plan to lick that hand again.
She’s pretty sure the cops and EMTs all knew it wasn’t actually the Violence, that it was just regular old domestic abuse, but no one questioned that part of the story. She could see the pity in their eyes—well, except maybe for the older cop, who looked like he wanted to grind her under his boot. It’s a shame, that these people have seen enough situations like hers to assume that she’ll run back into his open arms, that she’s already planning for him to return home again.
She crumples it up and shoves it in her pocket.
“Someone’s business card.”
Ella hands her a cold seltzer from the fridge, and for a moment, they just sit that way, together in the dark, not quite touching, the night lit by streetlamps and passing cars and the cracked blinds of curious neighbors. Chelsea sips her seltzer, swatting at the mosquitoes as they land on her hand. One leaves a fat red smear, and she flicks it away and stands up. She’s seen enough blood for one night.
Chelsea drifts inside, and Ella follows and locks the door behind them. The house feels big and empty. All the lights are on—they did that, when they broke down the door—and Chelsea flicks the switches until things seem less revealed.
It’s funny. How many times has she imagined this moment over the years, what it would feel like to finally do something about David, to speak the truth about his violence, to have witnesses and evidence? She’d always imagined it in the daytime, somehow, even though nighttime is when his monster comes out. A bright-blue day, airy and cool, and she would twirl in the foyer like Maria on that Austrian hillside in The Sound of Music.
But it’s dark and hot and humid, and the quiet is a beautiful thing except for the part where she feels like she needs to fill it.
What does she say to her daughter about what happened tonight? How much of the truth is necessary? How does she apologize for everything that came before?