up the back stairs into the kitchen. I paid the baby-sitter for the evening and watched her through the window as she walked to her parents’ car, parked at the front curb. I paused in the kitchen for a glass of ice with water, walked quietly upstairs, and kissed each sleeping boy as he lay in his bed.
Weldon, then eight, was in his room decorated with a sports theme, his favorite Goosebumps books lying on the floor where he had thrown them. Brendan, six, and Colin, three, were asleep in their beds in the room with the bright red farmhouse my sister had made for them. They looked small and peaceful, their blond hair brilliant as moonlight as the hall light shone on them.
I went to my room to put on my nightshirt and get ready for bed. Reliving the laughter Mariann and I had shared, I opened the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, reaching for contact lens solution. The glass and oak cabinet door, one in a triptych, came loose in my hand and fell on me, heavy and blunt, sudden, unprovoked; a thunder hit above the cheekbone and against my chest. My arms strained to keep it from crashing to the ground. I laid it slowly on the floor, against the gray-tiled wall.
Then, the past erupted of its own volition, memories I could not contain, like rubber snakes in a trick cannister.
The panic I knew from years of rehearsals raced through me, triggering that familiar fire drill. Ice. Stop the swelling. Will anyone see? My face roared in pain, my chest throbbed. How will I camouflage it? Is there a cut? How big is the red mark, and is the white epicenter smaller than a dime, bigger than a golf ball? I knew the routine well.
If I get the ice on it right now, this second, I can hold it down, I can fool the skin, I can pretend it never happened. Have I been able to deny a blow this big before? Concealer, blush, the thick matte foundation, maybe powder; the Chanel foundation won’t work, it’s too thin.
Desperately checking the red marks in the mirror, minutes fresh, I moved down the checklist, a path grooved from experience. Fingering the ice cube in a glass of water I had filled just moments before, I placed it cool-stinging on my face, grimacing at the stunning, frigid solution. I can let the chest and arms go for now. I must hide what is on my face.
And so I relived each hurt there that night, remembering who I fooled and where I was, congratulating myself on how clever I was to be such a master of disguise and deceit. This isn’t so bad. He isn’t so bad. If no one sees what he has done, then no one will think he is a monster and I am a fool.
The time in 1986 when he punched me on the chest in Dallas (he was just trying to stop me from walking away,
and his hand accidentally was formed into a fist, he said), I wore high collars. The bruise on my arm from his bite after we had moved to South Bend, Indiana (when he was so angry at the progress of his own therapy he became infantile, the counselor declared), was simple enough to ignore in winter. In 1991, with two boys under two, I saw no one else during the day, filing stories for newspapers by my computer’s modem. Play group with other mothers in the area was only once a week. I was away from my family. No one would see.
Also during our time in South Bend—during his first year of law school in 1990—we flew back to Dallas during his spring break. We attended the wedding of the sister of a close friend. We mingled, eating carefully fashioned hors d’oeuvres from silver platters served by young men wearing white gloves. We danced only hours after he gave me a black eye (the time, you know, when he just momentarily lapsed because we were staying with friends and our son was so young and law school was so stressful). I was quite sure our hosts had overheard, and Weldon, then one, was terrified, crying and clutching me. But no one had asked.
That night, I danced with the priest from Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Father Lou, who had counseled us in the Pre-Cana requirement before our own wedding. Even he did not know the pain filling my brown satin shoes. “Weldon hit me with the toy phone accidentally,” I told him, I told them all. They all believed me. That my handsome, witty, charming, loving husband would act violently was absurd.
No one would believe me. I can’t ruin our vacation. It will be fine. It will never happen again. Ever.
At his family’s Christmas party in 1992, his oldest sister joked about my lip, swollen and blue-black from a blow he gave me December 24, after an argument about the Christmas rituals of our families. “Did he hit you?” She laughed at the insanity of the prospect and went into the kitchen to get me a glass of white wine, with ice. “No, Brendan threw a toy train, aiming for the toy chest, and I was in the way.” This was my practiced response. “He is so strong,” I said. “I bruise easily.”
But just so you know, I wanted to say, your brother did this because Christmas with our families is so tense. “Can you pass the dip? Did you melt the cheese with the salsa or stir it in after? These egg rolls are so good.” Will you still love me if I tell you what your brother has done?
And then there was the aftermath of the last time in 1995—though my husband did not know it was the last—when he came to me in our bed, the bed we had bought for our new home. It was four days after the last assault and two days before the morning in domestic violence court that changed our lives, the morning I stood up and spoke the truth about the man I married. Just before 6 a.m., he was dressed for work in one of the white shirts (medium-starch, boxed please) that I picked up at the cleaners dutifully every week.
He sat near me on the bed as I laid there, not having slept much or well, dreading another day with him in our house. He said impatiently, “Just write an apology for me. Anything you want me to say, and I will sign it.” He refused to be the architect of his own contrition. I didn’t do it, of course, but the wisdom of that choice often strikes me—in court mostly—that it would have been a great document for the file.
Only seconds had passed since the cabinet fell, but each memory was vivid and searing, demanding to be acknowledged as if it had happened just now, just then. And then I remembered where I was. It was my birthday, and he was gone. He had been gone for almost two years. Exhausted, I stopped reciting the excuses and reliving the fallout, the cover-up, and the victory of concealment.
There was no need to keep throwing the dice with a memory of another injury, long healed. This time it was innocent, an accident. The medicine cabinet fell. No one was to blame. He did not hit me this time. He was gone.
I cried loud and strong, the tears dropping fast and full on the floor, my voice making a sound of anguish so powerfully hoarse and deep it didn’t feel as if it came from me. I thought that after he left our home and our daily lives, I would never be forced to walk through the checklist again, grabbing for ice, wondering who would see and whether they would know. I hadn’t planned to ever feel this hurt again.
I sat on my bed, the same bed we bought together, but now in a new house and covered in all white: a new white duvet cover, all-white pillows, even a white canopy. I was claiming purity for myself, though I could no longer claim innocence.
So the boys wouldn’t hear or be afraid, I closed my door and I kept crying. I cried for all the nights when I came into a room singing, only to leave hours later performing a triage dance of camouflage, spreading leaves and branches over a dark hole so no one would know it was there. I cried for all the women I met at the battered women’s shelter, Sarah’s Inn, where in our weekly group sessions, we shared the stories of men who seemed to be the same person. I cried that I had needed to take my children to a sanctuary for battered women, for help, for relief, to understand, to heal. I cried for the women on this Saturday night rushing for ice, hurrying themselves through their own checklists.
I was one of them, they were part of me: a sorority of good, kind, smart, trusting women who loved men whobused them. I cried that I knew a quick way to hide a black eye and that I had once thought love meant forgiveness was mandatory and unconditional, as it is with children.
My shoulders pulsed up and down as my insides released a howling, jailed horror. And then I knew that this hurt I was feeling would always be there, making itself known in the cabinets that fall innocently or the balls and toys the children throw that land here and there and hurt nonetheless.
I realized I was still wounded, like a soldier, and that loud noises or the sudden bruises