“I think a car followed us out of the parking lot and all the way until I turned on the gravel drive.” She swallowed hard, hugging the shopping bags hard enough that bread or eggs would have to be salvaged as French toast. “I should have gone another way. I should have tried to lose him.”
Drew leaned forward, arms waving. “Don’t you ever drive around like a maniac trying to lose someone. You did the right thing. Stay inside. We’re calling the police.”
Jada let go of her bags and ran upstairs. It was time for me to talk to her. Tell her some hard truths. Not everything. The big kids didn’t know everything, or even half of everything, but enough that she would stay alert. She had been a toddler when I’d married Adam and his mind was attacked by schizophrenia months later. He had turned into someone so terrifying that years after the divorce we still viewed the world through peepholes and rearview mirrors.
I hooked my arms through Hope’s shopping bags. “We’re fine. No one can possibly know where we are.”
“You can’t know that!” she yelled.
“I made the reservation from a coffee shop and paid by check with a new account. We didn’t pack a thing until the day we left, and I didn’t even tell you guys where we were going. You didn’t know until we pulled up and unloaded the car. I stopped several times along the way in remote locations where I would have seen anyone following.” Instantly, I regretted telling them so much. “We’re safe.” They were wide-eyed and still, processing what it all meant. Calculating our level of danger. Code red. Severe.
Roman tugged at my pant leg and I hoisted him onto my hip. As much as I wanted to believe he was immune, he could sense the fear and anger flowing thick enough around our ankles to float his little boat.
By trying to reassure them, I had let them know that we really could be in danger and, more important, had made hiding feel necessary. Was there such a thing as too much truth? I believed there was, and I had just crossed a dangerous line. Then again, if they didn’t know about the danger, they wouldn’t be on guard. Life had gotten too complicated, too gray. I missed the good old days when I was young, I knew everything, and the world was drawn in stark lines of black and white.
Drew and I carried the groceries to the kitchen and loaded the fridge.
“I bought ice cream,” Hope said, “and a brownie mix. Let’s pig out tonight and drown the fat in holiday food tomorrow.”
“I’m dying for ice cream,” Roman said with a dramatic hand to his forehead. The surface tension broke with our laughter even if the wires underneath were still tight with fear.
I went up to talk with Jada while they finished stowing the groceries and started baking the brownies. When we came down, with Jada more quiet and subdued than any free-minded hippie child should ever be, I noticed that all the shades and curtains were closed. The kitchen window was covered with a sheet of newspaper.
I wanted to scream and rip it all down. My kids shouldn’t have to be afraid. They shouldn’t have to hide like criminals. They deserved to feel safe in a Thanksgiving cabin in the woods. They deserved to feel safe at home. I squeezed the nail in my pocket until it dug a hole in my palm. Next I’d be fashioning a crown of thorny sticks. I didn’t want the nail to turn me into a sacrifice, a victim; I wanted its magic to save us. But what if there wasn’t enough magic in the world to keep us safe?
Four bottles of white school glue lined the edge of the table by our model house. Jada sat down and piled tiny twigs into a stick figure. I ripped a napkin into the shape of a dress. She took it without meeting my eyes. If her tiny people had faces, they would be weeping.
Drew sat next to her, his eyes alight, anxious to try out the glue. Instead, he flipped to the upstairs page of our mutely drawn house plans, pointing out Jada’s initials on a bedroom. He sketched a tiny bed in one corner, then sketched a huge circle next to it and wrote, “Hot Tub.” She nodded, and stretched her lips sideways in what she may have thought approximated a smile, and then went back to her stick figures.
I ripped out a piece of Hope’s notebook paper and handed it to Jada with a bottle of glue. “We’ll have to clear this away for our feast tomorrow. Anything you want to keep will have to be glued to something mobile,” I said.
She nodded, silent and no doubt imagining scenes I didn’t want to see. She made globby white lines and began moving her stick person to the paper. I found scissors in the kitchen and gave them to her with a floral paper towel that would make more fashionable dresses than the plain white napkin I’d started her out with.
Drew began gluing the stick house together in an exact replica of our plan while I stacked firewood into a crude newspaper-filled pyramid in the fireplace and lit it. I had the impression we were in for a long, sleepless night. The fact that we were about to load up on peanut-butter ice cream and brownies with fudge swirls would barely contribute to the insomnia, but we would all blame it on that in the morning.
Honesty was a skill we’d all have to work to master. It was as big a challenge as banishing the ghosts.
–4–
Fall
What I Learned in First Grade
It takes years to build a mind-set of defeat. Girls are at a higher risk with lower pay, lesser jobs, and even many gods declaring them a step or two lower than their male counterparts. But if you toss a few bullies in the mix, anyone can declare themselves powerless.
My brother and I grew up swinging wildly from the branches of young pines on forty acres in rural Wisconsin. John was three years older than me, so he was allowed to do more things. But he was never a match for kids his own age, always a step or two behind in strength, lessons, and social behavior.
None of that mattered to me before I joined him at elementary school, though. We were Tarzan and Jane with our black poodle mix, Snoopy, running along the forest floor beneath us. Forty acres was Mom and Dad’s claim, but—land titles be damned—John and I staked out hundreds of country acres as our personal playground.
For practical and survival reasons, our most prized possessions were matching pocketknives. Dad had melted our names into the fake bone handles in crooked cursive. With these sharp little marvels we whittled spear tips, sawed ropes, and dug animal traps. And when the blades bent sideways, we hammered them flat on the anvil behind the garage. Occasionally, when our adventure demanded a larger blade, John snuck a rusty hatchet into our afternoon picnic satchel.