A Thread of Truth (2 page)

I look questions at her and she goes on to explain. “The Stanton Center is an apartment building just for women and children who have been victims of domestic violence, the home of our transitional housing program. You can stay there for up to two years while you're getting back on your feet. Initially it's free, but we'll encourage you to find a job as soon as possible and then we'll charge modest rent, a percentage of your earnings. While you're there, we can offer you vocational, financial, and psychological counseling, and child care.” She pauses, waiting for me to say something, but it takes me a moment.

“An apartment. A real apartment?” Tears fill my eyes.

She nods. “A real apartment. There's a community room where we hold meetings for the residents and a playground with a swing set and slide for the children. It's in a secret location, no sign in front, and has a good security system. Of course, since you're a widow, you don't have to worry about that so much, but the other residents have fled violent relationships and we do everything possible to make sure their abusers can't find them. It's like a safe house.”

I blink hard, willing back the tears, trying to stay composed, not wanting her to see the effect those words have on me—a safe house. It has been so long since I even dreamed of such a thing.

“So?” she asks cheerily, already certain of my response. “What do you say? Would you like to take the apartment and stay here in New Bern for a while?”

“Yes,” I whisper. “I would. Thank you.”

“Good!” She stands up, indicating that I should follow her. “We can finish the paperwork tomorrow, after you've had a chance to settle in a bit.”

Leslie opens the door and leads the way through the three right turns of the corridor that will lead us to the playroom that backs up to her counseling office, talking as she goes. I'm still in shock, able to offer only short responses to her commentary, the script she has been trained to deliver to new residents.

“You're not required to accept any of the counseling services we offer to residents, but I do urge you to take advantage of them as much as possible—especially the group counseling sessions. Your abuser can't hurt you anymore, but even so, the effects of domestic violence can stay with you long after the abuse ends. Counseling can help you work through that and I think you'll appreciate the chance to develop relationships with women who've dealt with similar problems.”

“Yes. I'm sure you're right,” I say, knowing that I'll never go to even one of those group sessions. I'm not going to get close to those women. I'm not going to get close to anyone. I can't take that risk.

“Good.” She looks back over her shoulder, pleased that I agree. Leslie is a good person. Part of me wants to tell her the truth, but I can't, especially not now, with an apartment on the line. An apartment! A real apartment just for us. I still can't believe it.

“Your timing was lucky. One of our residents, former residents,” she corrects herself, “decided to go back to her husband. That's why we have an opening in the Stanton Center.” She sighs heavily and shakes her head.

“After all she'd been through, you'd think that's the last thing she'd do, but it happens a lot more often than you'd suppose. It's such a hard pattern to break. Well, at least we don't have to worry about that with you, do we?”

“No.”

This is the truth. I'm not going back. There was a moment, one, when I wavered, but not now. In my mind, I see my daughter's face, a dark reflection in the rearview mirror, small and serious and too young to know so much. No. We're not going back.

“Good,” Leslie says again, even more firmly. She likes to speak in affirmations. “I hate to think of our other resident leaving, but I'm glad it's worked out so well for you. The timing really was fortunate.”

We have arrived at the playroom. She puts her hand on the knob and turns to me before opening the door. “You must be on a lucky streak.”

If I am, it's a first.

But, then again…A striking, silver-haired woman whose name I can't even remember insisted that room be made for me and my children. A brown-eyed director I'd never met before shifted her charges to make it happen. And now sweet, nervous, well-meaning Leslie has said there is a place for us. A safe house. Tonight. Now. Just a few miles from here, somewhere in this lovely little town where the kindest people on earth live, there is room for us.

Maybe she is right. Maybe, at last, my luck is changing.

Eighteen months later

F
ight or flight? Until recently, it's never been a question. Not for me.

Whenever I feel frightened or threatened, my first instinct has always been flight. I do it pretty regularly.

I was six years old when my father had a heart attack and died. The news sent me running into the woods in the back of our house. I could hear my mother calling for me, her voice raspy with tears and shock and anger, but I wouldn't budge from my hiding place in the branches of a half-dead oak. Finally, she sent our neighbor, Pete, to find me.

Just after my sixteenth birthday, Mom was killed in a head-on collision and Pete, who was by then my stepfather, also became my legal guardian. He and I had never gotten along, but then again neither had he and Mom, not since about ten minutes after their wedding. After Mom died, Pete started to drink even more than before, so I ran away again. Farther this time, buying a one-way train ticket to the city. So far that Pete would never be able to find me, though now I realize he probably never tried.

And, of course, when I was twenty-four, I ran away from my husband. This time I took my two babies with me.

My escape wasn't exactly well-planned.

The day began normally enough, with a trip to the department store and a new tube of lipstick, but by that night I was running. I had to. I was afraid, not just for my life but for the lives of my children. All I took were some clothes, a file with some personal papers, the kids' baby books, some jewelry I later sold, and about $288 in cash, fifty-six of it from the spare change jar we kept on the kitchen counter. That's all. I had credit cards, but I didn't take them. I was worried that Hodge would be able to track us down if I used them.

When we could find an opening, we lived in emergency shelters. When we couldn't, we lived in the car. That was the hardest time. The kids were cranky, and so was I. The things I'd taken for granted while living in a nice house in the suburbs, like being able to keep clean and warm, using a toilet whenever we wanted to, or eating hot food, were concerns that occupied my every waking moment. I had no reserve of time or energy to consider how I was going to get us out of that mess, only enough to survive the day.

One night, I was asleep on the front seat and heard a noise. I woke up to see a figure, a man, pressed up against the passenger side window of the backseat, where my kids were sleeping, trying to slide a wire hanger into the space between the window and the door. I didn't think, just jumped out of the car and started screaming, “Get away from that door! Don't touch them! Get away!”

Somewhere along the line I must have grabbed the metal flash-light from the side storage compartment in the door. Still screaming, I flung it at the intruder and it hit him in the head. He swore and ran off into the alley. The kids woke up and started crying. A tall, scruffy man with a four-day growth of beard—the clerk from the twenty-four-hour mini-mart where I'd decided to park that night, stupidly thinking it was a safe spot—heard the commotion and came outside to investigate.

He took one look at me, tears in my eyes while I tried to quiet Bethany's and Bobby's sobbing, and decided to call the police. Over my protests, he went inside the store to make the call. I got in the car and told the kids to buckle up. There was no way I was going to stick around and answer a bunch of questions from the police. If Hodge had filed a report saying I was a kidnapper, they'd lock me up and take the kids away from me forever. That's what Hodge said would happen if I ever even thought about leaving him. He didn't say that out of any kind of love, but just to make me believe that no matter what I did or where I went, he would still be in control. And I did believe it. I'd put hundreds of miles of road between us, but even so, I could feel his power, the menace of his presence, just like I always had. We had to get out of there.

My tires squealed as I peeled out of the parking lot, my mind racing. Did it make more sense for me to get on the freeway and go to another town? Or better to find a dark alley and park there until the coast was clear? I decided on the freeway.

In the backseat the kids were still crying. I swore under my breath, cursing traffic engineers who were too cheap or too stupid to put up any signs directing out-of-towners to the freeway entrance. Ten minutes later I was still lost. Bethany had stopped crying, but Bobby was still going strong.

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw his face, his chubby baby cheeks flushed and hot, his black lashes clumped and glistening with tears. “Bobby. Calm down, baby. Mommy is going to find a quiet place to park and then you can go back to sleep, all right?”

“Go home!” he wailed. “Go home!”

And for the first time, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. A few weeks before, my children had been living the relatively normal, scheduled lives of children in the suburbs: three meals a day, playing on the swing set in our fenced backyard, watching cartoons, baths at seven, bed at eight. Of course, when it was time for Hodge to come home, they'd get clingy and quiet, feeling my fear, perhaps, as I listened for the grind of gears as the automatic garage door opened and tuned my ears to assess the level of force Hodge used to slam the door of his BMW, a clue as to his mood and what the rest of the evening would bring.

But, I told myself as I drove through the darkness, he wasn't violent every night. Only when I'd done something, or not done something, that made him mad. After all, I was the one he took his anger out on. Not the kids. Maybe they'd be better off if we went back. At least they'd be safe.

But a voice in my head reminded me that it wasn't true anymore.

I remembered that last day, Hodge screaming and swearing and pounding on one side of the locked bathroom door, while we huddled on the other side. I remembered the swelling of my left eye, pain shooting through my bleeding hand, but worse, so much worse, was the memory of the angry red mark on Bethany's pale cheek.

Bethany was used to his rages, used to seeing me holding ice packs on my bruises, or trying to cover up the marks of his fury with extra makeup, but he'd never hit her before. That day, he considered her fair game and I realized that from then on, he always would.

In the backseat, Bethany tried to calm her baby brother. “Bobby, don't cry. We can't go home. Daddy's there.”

She was right. I couldn't take them back. Not now. It wasn't safe to go back to Hodge. Not for me and not for my children. But we couldn't go on like this, either. We couldn't keep running. I was tired and scared and broke. Somehow or other I had to come up with another plan. But what?

To say that I haven't had a lot of experience with praying in my life would be an understatement, but that night, driving around in the middle of the night without the least clue of where we should go or what we should do when we arrived, I prayed silently, asking God for a sign or at least a hint.

Lost in uncharted territory, I accidentally turned onto the northbound freeway entrance instead of the southbound. By the time I figured it out, I was crossing the state line into Connecticut. And that's how I ended up in New Bern.

After three weeks of living in a tiny studio apartment in the emergency shelter, we moved into a much larger two-bedroom unit in the Stanton Center. The counselor talked to me about putting down roots, finding a job, and putting Bethany in school. I nodded, mutely assenting to everything she suggested, but in my heart, I knew we'd stay in New Bern only as long as it felt safe to do so. That was more than a year ago and, believe me, nobody is more surprised than I am that we're still here. If not for Evelyn Dixon and a log cabin quilt, I'd have put New Bern in my rearview mirror a long time ago.

Evelyn owns Cobbled Court Quilts in New Bern. She runs a free quilting class for the women at the shelter. Initially, I didn't want to take the class and had a suitcase full of good excuses for not doing so:

But none of those was the real reason I didn't want to take Evelyn's class. The truth is, I just didn't want to find one more thing to fail at. There had been so many already.

But Abigail decided to change my mind for me. That's Abigail Burgess Wynne, a volunteer at the shelter as well as a big donor, the woman who insisted that they find room for us at the shelter. Abigail is something of an oddball. Beautiful, in a nineteen fifties movie-star kind of way, all long legs and perfect diction, but an oddball.

She comes off as a snob but, for some reason, she took a liking to Bethany. Out of the blue, Abigail made this gorgeous pinwheel quilt for Bethany and they've been fast friends ever since. She's become not quite an adopted grandmother to my kids, but more of an indulgent great-aunt. And I have to say she's grown on me. Anybody who loves my kids is okay in my book and when she gave that quilt to Bethany, I was so grateful that I started to bawl. I couldn't help myself.

Anyway, Abigail is really very sweet deep down—way deep down—but she's also used to getting her own way. She wouldn't listen to any of my excuses about passing on the quilting class, just knocked them all down in that way she has, huffing and puffing out words like “Nonsense!” and “Rubbish!” like the big, bad wolf on a mission, not stopping until your little house of sticks is lying in a heap and there you stand with nothing left to hide behind. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in a room with six other students, listening to Evelyn Dixon explain the techniques for constructing our first project, a log cabin quilt.

It's an easy pattern, just row after row of rectangular strips nesting round and round a center square, stacking one upon the other like those wooden log toys I used to play with when I was a little girl. A simple pattern, maybe the simplest of all. I never expected it to change my life.

Evelyn brought a selection of light and dark fabrics for us to use for the “shady” and “sunny” sides of the house, but for the center of each block, the “hearth,” she told us to find our own fabric, to cut the center squares out of something that had a special meaning for us. I chose the outgrown clothes the kids had worn in their pictures with Santa the year before, a red cowboy shirt for Bobby and the red corduroy jumper for Bethany, and cut out little squares, making them as even and perfect as I could, to place in the center of each block.

And then, something strange happened. As I sewed that quilt, stitching strip after strip around those red squares that had lain next to my children's skin and hearts, I started imagining each sunny and shady strip as a piece of a protective wall that was guarding my little ones and somehow, in a way that all my counselors' repeated affirmations never could, the idea that I could keep us safe, that I could make a real home for all of us, started to sprout in my mind. As I sewed, the idea became a belief and the roots of that belief pushed their way through all my doubts and muck to take root in my heart.

I
would
keep my children safe, no matter what. And we
would
have a home, a real home, not sleeping in a car, or bouncing from shelter to shelter and town to town like a bad check, not continually looking over my shoulder, ready to pack up and run every time I had a bad dream or heard a grinding of gears that sounded like a garage door opening. We'd be a family. Everything would be all right. I
would
make it happen.

As this…this torrent of conviction flooded my heart, my eyes began to flood, too. I sat at the sewing machine, not sewing, scissors open in my hand, a silent baptism bathing my cheeks.

Across the room, Evelyn was bent over another student's machine, helping adjust a too-tight tension. She saw me but made no move toward me, just looked at me for a long moment, as if trying to see into my real meaning, questioning the reason for my tears but not my right to them.

Seeing her, I sat up a little straighter in my chair and gave her one quick nod. She smiled, as if knowing and approving that there, among the soft, steady whir of needles passing through fabric and the silent concentration of other women crouched over their sewing machines, bent on making something beautiful and useful out of the discarded scraps of their lives, I had made my decision.

I was done running.