That stubborn streak remained strong with each bad relationship. I believed that I could fix it, that I could wait out the bad times and talk some sense into everyone. Of course, I also made secret plans to get away, saving money in my tampon box under the instructions for use, but the fact that my cash would fit unnoticed in my tampon box showed my level of dedication.
I stuck with most of these relationships a lot longer than I should have for a million small reasons that all felt big at the time. I’m stubborn enough to want to see something all the way through, and I believe hard work can fix things when they’re broken. My mom’s strong religious beliefs were another powerful reason I stayed even when it seemed unlikely I would come out alive. Stay and pray, she would say. Because divorce under the wrong circumstances was a sure path to damnation. Larger and more important than all of those reasons, I stayed because of a little old liar called fear.
My kids and I had spent years walking on our tiptoes, which was great for calf development but not so great for posture because of the way we had to duck our heads to avoid sharp, flying words. The bad moments had outweighed the good, but optimism had been pressing her heavy thumb hard on the scale. I would always be an optimist, but I had finally learned to recognize her in the mirror—the twelve-step process had begun. When I found myself alone and in a flattened, hopeless position that must be what addicts call the bottom, I finally believed that there was a top.
Matt and I divorced, and I believed that was a big enough step for the kids and me to rebuild our damaged family. But months later, Hope, the oldest at seventeen, still slept on the floor next to her door, listening. She had seen the most, and she felt the most protective of me and the younger kids. If anyone could prove the stereotype of an oldest child, it was Hope. Her long, dark hair and tiny nose made her a stunning beauty, model-perfect if she could add ten or twelve inches to her five-foot-two frame, but on the inside she had those extra inches and then some. Hope was an organized, calculating, determined force of nature. And somewhere along the line she had become a very angry force, too. Was that one of the twelve steps? Or maybe I was thinking of grief, not recovery. Then again, we were probably navigating the steps of a dozen different traumas at once, in which case, all emotions were justified. Even though Hope’s anger threw out stinging words at times, I preferred them to silence.
Fifteen-year-old Drew carried a shotgun shell in his pocket and a chip on his shoulder, but lacked the confidence to use either one effectively. He was the silent one, so much like me it hurt. I could see the things boiling under his surface, though I knew that no one else could. He was almost six feet tall, thin, with loose brown curls that he had kept short until recently. He was devilishly handsome, but lacked the self-assurance to use that superpower. I thought of him as my Mini-Me, but the optimism was weaker in his blood. It was a worrisome combination, the silence without the little voice to cheer him up. I needed a way past his well-structured walls, and I didn’t have much time to find it.
Jada and Roman were young enough to pretend they were unaffected, even though Jada’s sixth-grade poetry notebook was too full of sunshine and rainbows, too optimistic, when the truth was muddy and shadowed. My elf girl might be the most difficult to heal. I’d passed optimism to her full force, like a congenital disease.
Roman was tiny, thin, and stressed in the honest way only an almost-two-year-old can be—he wanted to be endlessly held and cared for.
Those four green-eyed beauties were my everything. Too many times my determination to give them a perfect life had included giving them a father figure. But I had finally reached my own last straw. I had a good job as a senior computer programmer systems analyst, and I was working hard to grow my side income as a writer. Still, I couldn’t afford the big house we were living in on my own, and more than one man had left me with his debt. Our finances were a mess, and the stash at the bottom of my tampon box wasn’t going to take me far.
We would have to sell the house. I told myself that was for the best, even though the kids and I had sacrificed for years to have it built. It didn’t feel much like a home anymore, and the older kids were afraid there, too. Maybe they had always been, and I had only imagined my silence protecting them. What a weighty little bitch optimism is.
Just after sunset on a cold November night, Hope whisper-yelled down from the balcony, “I swear I see him out there sometimes. Out back in the shadows or in the kitchen window at midnight.”
“Who?” I asked, and Drew stomped up the stairs, slamming his bedroom door before I could apologize. After so many years of being a pretender, I had trouble remembering to be honest.
Hope rolled her eyes in that way all seventeen-year-old girls have perfected.
“Who’s outside?” Jada asked, running behind Hope with eyes aglow and turban-wrapped hair dripping on her nightshirt, a holey Gumby shirt that I’d worn in junior high and she loved like a blankie.
I leveled a glare at Hope, and she threw her hands up. She hadn’t realized Jada was out of the shower. “We were talking about the FedEx guy,” I said, slipping comfortably back into my pretender skin.
Jada, the flightiest child I’d ever known, had already forgotten. She giggled, untangling Roman’s right hand from Hershey’s ear only to find his left hand with a firm grip. The commotion barely disturbed the Lab’s nap. We let her sleep in the dining room now, all of us claiming it was to keep her safe from a prowling coyote we’d heard screaming in the forest.
We had been afraid of more than one man over the years. Matt had been the most violent, but he was sane enough to know I had found my courage and bought a gun. After all the late nights of terror with his hands around my throat, Matt had become a very small, pitiful man in my memory. The man Hope saw or imagined out the window was the man we’d left before Matt. His name was Adam. He haunted us because he wasn’t sane enough to be afraid. He had been once. He had even been a genius. But there is truly a fine line between genius and insanity, and he had crossed over for good.
He was the weight that held us back from recovery steps. He kept us so tight in our own shells we couldn’t reach out, not even to one another.
We lived in virtual silence that fall, waiting for the house to sell, waiting for a new life to start, waiting for our fear to dissipate.