I forgot all about leaving.
My life was Boots and the babies. I became grateful for being allowed to have this life. Grateful that he tolerated me. Grateful that he didn’t hit the girls. I took my beatings when they came to me. Took the time my husband deigned to share with me.
Of course there were other women. Why wouldn’t there be? I was damaged goods, no longer beautiful. Nobody else would want me, and yet he continued to love me. I believed this. Sitting here, thinking back on my years with you, Walter, it occurs to me that I should find a way to tell you how you have healed and restored me. Given me back my soul and a sense of myself as having worth. But these are things I can never bring myself to say. That part of me will always be broken, I guess.
It’s funny how life spins, how we go on for long stretches of time and nothing changes, and then all at once, in a single moment, everything is altered.
Things had gotten a little easier. The twins were two. They were sleeping through the night, potty-trained, able to feed themselves. I was sleeping at night. No longer breastfeeding. And as my body returned to being my own, as the haze of fatigue cleared from my head, I grew restless. I had glimmers of understanding that my relationship with Boots was wrong.
Those were dangerous glimmers. It was like he could see them in my eyes and immediately felt the need to take me down. It was during that time that he started breaking bones. My collarbone. My ribs. Both casualties of a brand-new pair of shiny boots and his brand-new addiction to cocaine.
Where he got the money to use, I don’t know. He never held a job for longer than a few months at a time. Maybe he was dealing. I didn’t ask those kinds of questions. But while he was away doing whatever it was he did, I began to do things. I got my GED, for one.
And then I landed a job, almost by accident, answering phones in an office for a female attorney.
Boots wasn’t happy about me working. What about the babies? What about him? Did I really think he couldn’t bring in enough money to support his own family? Maybe he knew in his head the answer to that one, because I kept the job and all I suffered in payment was a black eye.
My new boss was a woman, novelty number one. She was a lawyer. She dressed in power skirts and jackets, and nobody was beating her, that’s sure and certain. Her name was Hetty Johnson, and she became my idol. Thanks to Hetty I came to understand some truths.
Not all women are beaten. They can be smart and independent and make their own decisions. They can live in this world without a man.
Of course I didn’t believe that woman could be me. I never did come to believe that, Walter. I found my way to you instead. And I don’t regret it. I never wanted to go to college or run a business. But she made me think.
It wasn’t Hetty that set me free, for all that. It was one of her clients.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tony sits in his pickup in the dim, predawn light, wrestling with his conscience and his courage. The entire fabric of his careful control, the balance of penance and duty and family, is coming unraveled, and Maisey Addington is the unraveler.
What he wants to do is start up his truck and drive directly to her house, be sitting on the doorstep when she wakes, like a stray cat asking to come in. He’s tired, not just from lack of sleep, but from his constant vigilance.
Remember who you are, Tony.
Remember what you’ve done.
But that remembrance is fading around the edges. He keeps seeing himself in a different light these days, as if maybe he’s the sort of man who could be with a woman like Maisey. As if he might even be good for her.
He’s been to the shooting range twice this week, but his ritual with the gun is apparently not enough to keep him on the straight and narrow.
So he’s come to create a new level in his own private circles of hell.
The sun hasn’t cleared the mountains yet, and in the dim light, the graveyard looks bleak and otherworldly. He’s not given to fears of ghosts, but a little shiver tracks its fingers up his spine. If there were a time for ghosts to walk, this would be it.
“Coward,” he mutters to himself. “Do what you came here to do.”
The morning air is cool enough to raise goose bumps on his bare arms, and the mosquitoes are hungry and find him in seconds. He ignores both cold and insects and marches himself between the rows of headstones until he finds one that looks right.
It’s not his father’s, of course. That grave is across the mountains in Seattle. But he chooses a headstone that looks similar, and when he closes his eyes, it’s easy enough to see the inscription that reads:
ANTHONY MEDINA
BORN 1945
DIED 1990
And that’s it. No Beloved husband and father. Not even May he rest in peace. Not so much as a clue carved into the granite about the man who was Tony’s father.
But Tony’s body remembers. Twenty-seven years since his father’s grave was dug. Twenty-seven years since the last time Anthony Medina Senior let a bottle fuel his always-simmering rage. And still, Tony can feel the blow that broke his nose. Can taste the warm salt of blood filling his mouth, pouring down his throat, remembers gagging and choking on it. He can hear the sound of fists on his mother’s flesh, hear his sisters screaming, taste the sharp smell of gunpowder.
This is why he came here, to make himself remember.
Who he is. Where he came from. All the times he failed to protect his mother and his sisters. All the anger that built up in him during the years both before and after his father’s death. Holes punched into walls. Fights with boys at school. Endless hours chopping wood and hammering nails into building projects, his mother’s solution to managing his rages.
He wants to run away now, as if he is twelve again and about to be beaten, but his legs don’t seem to belong to him. His hands are shaking. And his heart, oh, his heart is definitely his, beating out fear and pain and regret against his ribs.
The pain is physical, a deep ache that nearly doubles him over.
Not a heart attack, he reminds himself over and over again. Just panic. Just memory. It will pass.
But there’s a new intensity to the familiar pain. He’s already let Maisey under his skin. He’s tired of his rituals and rules, and holding the barrier is so hard. Years ago, he swore he would never risk becoming his father, would never risk exposing a woman to that sort of treatment.
He’ll hold to his vow. If he can help Maisey, he’ll do it. Protect her, support her, the way he protects and supports his mother and his sisters. But nothing more. No matter what his traitorous heart tells him. No matter that his body responds to thoughts of her, even now, with desire.
“I am the son of my father,” he whispers. “I swear on his grave that I will not forget it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
No hiding this time.
We have a table at the Emerald of Siam, right out front and center, where Marley can’t help but see us. Once again we show up plenty early to claim our table and order our food.
The waiting is purgatory for me, but everybody else seems contented.
Mia and Elle sit across from me, heads together, chattering. The two of them are dangerous, and I don’t want to know what they’re planning this time. I’m sandwiched into a bench seat between Dad and Tony, my heart rivaling the rapid tempo of the music playing through the speakers.
Dad is vague and confused tonight.
“Long way to come for Thai food,” he says, trying to navigate chopsticks with moderate success. “Why didn’t we eat in Spokane?”
“Marley,” I tell him. I like to say her name. It makes me feel sorrowful, but also real. Not my imagination. Not a thing I made up. “We’re here to listen to Marley sing.”
And to make it up to her for being left behind, if we can. But that I keep to myself.
Tony’s bulk beside me doesn’t help much. A little shiver of fear runs through my body. Not a shiver. A frisson. Such a wonderful little word. So underused.