Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  “We were very compatible,” he was saying. “We were both vegetarians. We both loved the country. And downtown. We loved riding our bikes around. We both loved jazz. We loved to dance. To fuck. To talk and debate. No subject was taboo. You knew her—she had the quickest mind of just about any woman I’ve ever known. It was the negative dovetail that got in the way.”

  “The what dovetail?”

  “The negative dovetail. We fit together in a way that reinforced all the negative stuff we each had inside.”

  “Oh, you mean bringing out the worst in each other.”

  “Yeah,” said Curtis. “That too.” He paused. Then, “She was fuckin’ crazy.”

  “What were you doing with her then?”

  Another pause. “I was attracted to the woman.”

  “Is that all?”

  “She was smart. She could make you believe black was white and up was down. She was in fuckin’ denial.” He was scornful. And full of admiration. In spite of himself, it seemed. “What can I say? She turned my crank.”

  “Sooo,” I drew out the word, hesitating. But I could feel Curtis waiting for me to speak. He liked me to challenge him. In this, too, he was a rare male. He didn’t often change his mind, but at least he listened. I could see how this might have driven Lucy crazy. Someone listens, you think maybe they’ll get your point, give one over to you. I had a feeling Curtis had rarely given one over to Lucy. He’d never given one over to me in all the weeks we’d been calling each other or getting together. But he let me talk.

  “What were you going to say?” he prompted now. He was enjoying this. I could hear it in his voice.

  “Well, just that you’ve given me compelling reasons why you got involved with Lucy. You made a choice. You can’t blame her for that.” Our argument about victims was ongoing.

  “I agree there’s no point in blaming anyone,” he said. “I agree everyone is responsible for their actions. But I won’t agree no one is a victim. I could drive down there and throw you across the room and you couldn’t do anything about it, because I’m stronger than you.”

  “Yes, but you wouldn’t,” I said calmly. I was used to this violent example by now. It no longer shocked or worried me. I wasn’t sure how I knew. But there was a certainty inside me that he was just blustering, theorizing, as disturbing as it was. “Anyway, you and your victims,” I added. “You sound just like the minister at the memorial service.”

  “Why? Because you thought you were at a service for a woman who’d died of breast cancer?” I could hear the amusement in his voice.

  I grimaced. “That and her assumption that Lucy had been a helpless victim. I didn’t know Lucy very well, but she didn’t come across to me as a victim of violence.”

  Curtis gave a laugh that had no humour in it. “Lucy was not a victim of violence. You’re right about that. But there was violence. I think she was born with it. She surrounded herself in it.”

  I felt a kind of excitement rising in me. Had I been right that yelling and fighting had been a normal part of her interaction with people? But why?

  “Lucy wasn’t a victim of violence,” he repeated. He made the most of his sentences. He would have made a good stage actor. He paused to make sure I was listening. Then he let fly the zinger: “She was the perpetrator.”

  *

  THE FIRST PERSON SHE EVER hit was her mother. She hadn’t meant to. It was six o’clock. Her father was in the sunroom with his paper. Her mother was in the kitchen. Anna was in her room, her stuffed animals arranged on the bed as if on a boat.

  She ran downstairs to the kitchen. She wanted to help. She wanted to make her favourite süti—cookies—the ones that were actually two stuck together with jam.

  “I want to make legényfogó,” she said to her mother’s back.

  It didn’t come out right. She’d meant to ask nicely, not demand.

  Her mother’s back remained turned to her. “I’m making your father’s dinner.”

  She ran up to the counter. She almost touched her mother’s skirt. She looked up with a big grin on her face. Playful. “Not mine too?”

  No response.

  “Not mine? Not Anna’s?”

  There was a sigh from her mother. She wasn’t supposed to sigh. She was supposed to laugh, to get the joke.

  “Mine too,” she insisted. “You’re making my dinner, too. Right? And Anna’s. Right?”

  It was a joke. She wanted her mother to laugh. And it was true. She wanted her mother to say yes!

  Still no response. Her frustration escalated. “You’re making my dinner too! And Anna’s. And yours. We’re all eating!”

  Her mother turned and stared down at her.

  She waited. She held her breath. She had yelled, so now her mother was supposed to get mad. She was supposed to smack her. That’s what happened in other people’s houses.

  But not in her house. Her mother just kept staring. As if she wasn’t there. Or as if her mother wasn’t there.

  Her mother was supposed to be there. She reached out to touch her. She wanted to make sure her mother was really there. She was so anxious, her hand extended faster than she intended. And in a fist. Right in her mother’s stomach. Hard.

  There was a soft thud. A groan from her mother. An expulsion of air. Her mother’s hand gripping her own stomach. And then the air was suddenly charged with tension, fear, excitement. The kitchen door was swinging with it; her father was in the room.

  This was it. He was going to come over and wallop her for sure. And she’d be able to kick and punch and yell. And then it would be over. And everyone would feel better.

  But her father just stood in the doorway. Newspaper folded in one hand.

  “What is going on, Susan?”

  Everything was in slow motion. The way she turned her head to look up at her mother. The way she had to wait—fear, hope, fear, hope—for her response. The way her mother removed her hand from her stomach and took in a long breath.

  “It’s alright, Michael. Lucy just wanted to help.”

  Disbelief. Disappointment. Rage. “I did not! I did not!”

  She threw herself down on the floor, where she could kick and punch and yell. If only the floor would fight back. If only she would feel better after.

  When she was spent, tear-stained, bruised, she found herself alone on the kitchen floor. Everything was still. Even the kitchen door had stopped swinging.

  The floor was hard. She pressed herself against it. She wanted it to yield. When it didn’t, she picked herself up and took her bruised bones up to her room. She threw herself face down on the bed. The bed yielded only a little.

  She couldn’t believe she had punched her mother. That no one had punched her back. She thought about her fist sinking into her mother’s stomach. It had been softer than she’d expected. Her fist had gone in deeper than she’d expected.

  It was the first physical contact she could remember ever having with her mother. She replayed it over and over in her mind. She slowed it down. She made it gentle.

  She put her hand on her own bare tummy and pretended it was her mother’s tummy. Her mother’s stomach got even softer. It pulled her fist in gently, surrounded it with softness. It loosened her fingers and made them relax, so there was no more fist. There were just her fingers caressing her tummy.

  It felt good to have her hand on her tummy. She pretended her hand was her mother’s hand. Stroking. Comforting.

  And then the hand slipped farther down her tummy, to the place where things started to tingle. And even farther down, to the place that created the warmth and the tingling. She crawled under the covers and pulled them up around her chin, and stroked herself to sleep.

  *

  QUINN’S FINGERS STROKED ME AWAKE. They knew their instrument. They played it delicately, eliciting a ye
arning song of sensation from every nerve ending. Warmth spread from my groin to my whole body. And then I was burning up.

  I opened my eyes and found myself in my own bed. Alone. Soaked in sweat. There were no sensitive fingers on my groin. Not even my own. The heat was from the duvet I must have pulled over me sometime in the night. It was still night. Four a.m.

  I got up, exchanging my damp T-shirt for a dry one. It wasn’t the first time I wished I had the nerve just to go down to the river on a hot night and jump in. This August was a hotter one than usual, even the nights. A shower would have to do. A cold one.

  The face in the dream had been Quinn’s, but the touch … I had to admit, the touch had been Marc’s. I put the dream out of my mind and returned my thoughts to my conversation with Curtis.

  I had never experienced the kind of anger and frustration he had described. Thank God. I thought back to the few times I had been the target of Lucy’s wrath. It wasn’t anything to take personally. It warranted sympathy—for the little girl inside Lucy who was only looking for a sign, any sign—a slap was as good as a hug—that she was loved. But over the years, all anger had brought was disaster. Unfulfilled relationships. Physical and verbal abuse heaped on her head. The stripping away of her money, her dignity. Regret, possibly, that she’d ever left Curtis. A slow road to hell. Was that all there had been to the last year of her life? All the evidence pointed to it. All the evidence, at least, that I’d gathered so far.

  It was, I decided, as I cooled my frustrated flesh under the shower, time to call Trish.

  *

  SHE WAS READING OVER AN ad he’d put together to advertise his handyman business. It was full of spelling errors. She had a red pen in her hand. Circling them, she felt like her father. Exacting. Relentless. But she couldn’t help herself.

  Tim was looking over her shoulder. “Give me a fucking break! I can’t do this right, I can’t do that right. You’re a fucking nit-picking bitch. Curtis should get a prize for putting up with you for so long.”

  She was on her feet, coming at him with her fists. How dare he call her a bitch. How dare he bring Curtis into this.

  Tim knocked her fists away from him as if they were flies. She stumbled and he grabbed her hair and pulled her back to her feet. Flung her back into the kitchen chair.

  She was so enraged she picked up a glass from the table and aimed it at him. It went whizzing past him and smashed against the fridge.

  Tim pulled her to her feet again, his hand a vice clamped around her wrists. He held her away from him. “Now cool down.” She didn’t see him reach for his can of beer. The next minute, she was gasping as cold sticky liquid came pouring over her head and down her face and shirt.

  She kicked at him. “Fuck off!”

  “You fuck off!” He held her farther away and poured the rest of the beer over her head.

  “There—now you don’t need to lay into me anymore. You’re all calm and cool.” He shoved her away and stormed out the door.

  She picked herself up off the floor and took herself into the bathroom. She turned on the shower and stepped in. Water, beer, and tears ran together down the drain. She peeled off her clothes, item by item, and let them fall in a sodden heap in the bottom of the tub. She wished she could keep peeling off the layers, the layers of self-importance, of self-righteousness. She was disgusted with herself—with her sanctimonious attempts at “improving” Tim, her lame wrist-wringing, her holier-than-thou nit-picking. Who was she fooling? It wasn’t Tim’s behaviour she couldn’t stand. It was herself. She wasn’t where she wanted to be, or who she wanted to be. This relationship was supposed to get her there, but it only seemed to be getting her further and further away. None of it made sense. She had chosen to be healed through this relationship but didn’t want to accept the medicine she was being given.

  She gave a sudden yank on the taps, turning the water from hot to extreme cold and made herself stand under it until she had become a numbed mass of ice.

  Dressed in clean dry clothes, her insides warmed by a mug of tea, she swept up the glass and got on her hands and knees to mop up the beer. She deserved to have beer poured over her head. She deserved to be cleaning it up. She couldn’t believe she was having these thoughts. The realization hit her with a shock: she was being abused.

  She wrung out the rag into the bucket one last time, wincing at her sore wrists. She resolved to let Tim be. Not to react to the things that bugged her. To let him speak and act in his own way. It wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t speak about the more philosophical things in life; he had never had the luxury of such thought. She would focus on the good things: his affection, his optimism about the money he was going to make, his willingness to help out around the house.

  Even more, she resolved to be gentle with herself. That was going to be the hardest of all.

  19.

  TRISH AND MARNIE SHARED A condominium in a high-rise on Queen Elizabeth Drive. The condo was spacious and luxurious, with hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a panoramic view of the canal and the city beyond.

  “Marnie’s the reason we can be here,” explained Trish when I admired it. “She works for Nortel.”

  We smiled knowingly at each other. The high-tech company was doing exceptionally well.

  Trish took me through the living room to her massage and counselling rooms. Next to the modern scarcity of furniture in the living room, these were small, intimate, carpeted rooms. Both were decorated in warm colours, with Native art on the walls and New Age music playing softly, with a mild background hiss, on a tape deck in the massage room. The rooms were warm as Trish was warm. I could imagine Lucy coming here to relax (as much as she was able) and bare her soul in safety. There was a vaguely familiar aroma in the air.

  “Shall we sit in here?” asked Trish. She gestured to the couch in the counselling room. “If you can forget it’s for counselling, I find it the most comfortable room in the house.”

  She bade me sit down while she went off to make a pot of tea.

  “What’s that scent?” I asked when she came back with a tray. “It’s driving me crazy. I can’t identify it.”

  “It’s patchouli,” said Trish with a smile. “I used patchouli massage oil on my last client, and it’s still permeating the air. I used to use patchouli on Lucy, too; it has relaxing properties in it.” She set the tray down on the coffee table and poured tea into two mugs and handed me one. Her hands were elegant but looked strong.

  I thanked her and cupped my hands around the mug. “That’s why it smells familiar then. Lucy sometimes had that aroma around her. And it was in her bathroom too. I never knew what it was.”

  Trish smiled again. “It’s not that common anymore. It was a sixties thing.”

  “Lucy was pretty hyper, wasn’t she?” I took a sip of the hot tea.

  Trish nodded. “She used to tell me she wished she could sit still for five fidgetless minutes. Her coffee-drinking habit didn’t help, but she said it woke up her brain and got the ideas crackling. But it got her body crackling too. She had a love-hate relationship with coffee.” She gave a soft laugh. “I sometimes felt like I was doing battle more with the caffeine in Lucy’s veins than with Lucy.”

  “The stillest moments she ever had were probably right in the next room, lying on your table.”

  “I had to work hard to get her to those moments,” said Trish. She herself sat very still, her hands in her lap. She projected the same aura of serenity as she had at the church.

  “Was it….” I hesitated. Now that I was here, it didn’t feel right to be asking her about Lucy. It felt like it might be breaking a counsellor’s confidence. I looked at her. “I have a zillion questions, but I don’t want to put you in a compromising position. I’m not sure what’s appropriate to ask, or how much you feel you can tell me.”

  Trish nodded. “I’ve be
en thinking about that since you called. If Lucy were still alive, it would be an entirely different matter, but under the circumstances … well, I know you knew her and it doesn’t feel like you’ve come here to smell out a sensational story.” She angled her head to one side, looking at me. “And now that you’re here, I sense it will help you in some way to hear about Lucy. So I don’t mind telling you what I can.”

  Her words echoed Curtis’s. Was my need so obvious? And what was behind it anyway? If asked, I wouldn’t be able to explain why it all seemed so urgent to me. “I appreciate that. Though I don’t know where to start.”

  “What were you just about to ask me?” She picked up her mug and took a sip. Then the mug went back to the coffee table and her hands back into her lap.

  I shook my head, trying to think. Then I remembered. “Oh, I was going to ask you whether Lucy’s jitteriness got worse towards the end—or even after Tim got out? I guess what I really want to know is what happened in that last year. I’ve been thinking about how stressful it would be to suddenly be sharing your house—your life—with someone who’d lived so many years in prison.”

  Trish was nodding. “It was extremely stressful—for both of them. Tim had no idea how to live in the outside world. And by that time Lucy was so used to living alone it would have been an adjustment for her to live with anyone, let alone someone just out of prison. She had to show him how to do everything, even things like using debit machines and bank machines.”

  “I remember Lucy telling me. I hadn’t thought about how much technology would have changed by the time he got out.”

  “A huge adjustment,” nodded Trish. “For Lucy too. I don’t think she realized just how huge it would be. They were on completely different schedules. She had no time to meditate or do yoga, which were the main things she did to centre herself. Tim didn’t want her out of his sight. He was so insecure and afraid in those first weeks. And they had to keep the light on in the bedroom for a long time. He hadn’t slept in the dark in fifteen years. So that deprived her of sleep.”