by Tara Conklin
Her sisters thought she was overreacting.
Yesterday Caroline had called Renee to tell her this. “Don’t you think Fiona would know if something was going on?” she’d said. Renee had not responded. It was true: Fiona and Joe had always been close, she looked up to him so much. These days Renee saw Joe infrequently. They were both so busy with their work. Even rarer was seeing Joe without Sandrine.
“I can’t come to the party,” Caroline continued. “I’ve got my hands full with the move and the new house. When would we even do this intervention thing anyhow?”
“As soon as possible. We need to act before it escalates,” said Renee. “You can’t leave me alone on this, Caroline. Not again.”
For a moment there was silence on the line. “I was having a baby, Renee. I did not mean to leave you alone.”
Renee recognized that her resentment was unfair. She knew that Caroline had wanted to help that last time. But still. Caroline pushed Renee’s most sensitive buttons. Because Renee did not have children or a family, she was always expected to step in when stepping in was required. Baking the pies at Thanksgiving. Talking to Noni about her will. Giving Fiona money for a security deposit on her apartment. And Joe. Always Joe. Once Renee had relished this responsibility, had prided herself on being the one in charge. Not anymore.
Renee closed her eyes, tilted the phone away from her mouth, and exhaled slowly. Noni had sent her an article about meditative breathing, how it calmed the central nervous system. Whenever Renee thought about her brother, a hectic thrum started in her chest, and now the thrum was galloping. Joe had been working brutally long hours. She wondered if he would be high at his own party. Probably. Ace would be there.
Renee counted to six, inhale, seven, exhale.
“Renee?” said Caroline. “Are you there? Are we finished?”
Renee opened her eyes. The breathing exercise was bullshit, she decided.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to him at the party. Just talk, and then we’ll see. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
They’d ended the call, but the thrum in Renee’s chest had persisted, an urgent staccato beat of Joe-Joe-Joe that followed her through the rest of that day and the next, and now, tonight, while she sat with her coffee in the ER, the beat grew louder as each passing minute brought her closer to the engagement party.
Jaypa sidled up to the nurses’ station and set his iPhone on the desk. He winked at Renee, then pressed Play. As the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth filled the space, Jaypa loudly cracked the knuckles on each hand and began to conduct. Eyes squeezed shut, arms pumping, a trail of blood faint on the front of his sky-blue scrubs. He’d almost attended music school, Jaypa had told Renee, but his parents would pay for school only if he switched to medicine. And so he’d switched.
Renee liked Jaypa, though she did not trust him. Once he had said to her, “Renee, you’re not like the other girl residents. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it in a good way.” Currently he was dating a nurse, a lovely twenty-two-year-old brunette from Arkansas.
Renee watched as Jaypa reached the first-movement crescendo. He should really be meeting with one of the residents or catching up with paperwork, she thought. The attending had responsibilities; he made more money than any of them. But Jaypa liked to put on a show. Renee knew this about him. The nurses, the residents, the EMTs, they all knew this about him, and so now they all stopped to watch. Renee saw Jaypa open one eye just a crack to assess his audience; then he continued with a dramatic flurry of hand movements.
Men, thought Renee. How many hours had she spent tolerating the ridiculous behavior of disappointed men?
The ER’s external doors slid open, and a gust of cold street air traveled through the waiting room, admissions office, triage, all the way into the examining rooms. Renee shivered and pulled on her cardigan.
“Help!” called a man’s voice. “Help my wife!”
Immediately the sleepy order of the late-shift ER splintered into a dozen different moving parts. A nurse rushed forward with a gurney. Jaypa switched off the music. A first-year resident grabbed her stethoscope and walked-ran toward the entry. Renee yawned again and checked her watch. Forty-five minutes until the end of her shift. Forty-five minutes until the party. She sat back and waited for the patient to arrive.
It didn’t take long. The door burst open with Jaypa and two trauma nurses pushing a gurney. On top lay a hugely pregnant woman, her legs striped with blood, stomach raw and exposed by the lift of her shirt. Holding the woman’s hand was a middle-aged man in jeans and a faded Nirvana tee, his face pale and drawn, eyes red.
Immediately Renee knew what had happened: an attempted home birth. The woman’s long hair was wet from a tub. The smell of sweat and incense came off the man in waves.
“You’re her husband?” Jaypa asked the man, who nodded. “Ma’am, how many weeks? Do you have any health conditions?”
“Forty-one weeks,” the husband answered. “And she’s diabetic.”
“Diabetic?” Jaypa stopped and placed his hands on the taut risen skin of the woman’s stomach. He pushed, assessed. “Macrosomia,” he said to Renee. “We need a C-section.”
Renee picked up the receiver on the wall to call upstairs to surgery.
The woman began to cry. “Don’t let them take me,” she said to her husband. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’ll stay with you,” he answered.
“Don’t let them take me—” The woman inhaled sharply as another contraction hit.
“I’ll find you,” the man said, stroking his wife’s hair. “I’ll always find you.”
Renee was on hold when he said this. She felt the receiver knock against her ear and realized that her hand was shaking.
“Hello? Hello?” said a nurse on the other line. “We’ve got a room, you can bring her up. Hello?”
* * *
I’ll always find you.
Renee never knew his name, she never saw him again after that night, but for many years she thought every day about the man in the car. Every quickening of her heart as she walked along a dark street; every surge of fearful adrenaline; every hiccup of tension or worry when she found herself alone with a strange man for however brief a time—on an elevator, in a waiting room, walking in opposite directions along a quiet sidewalk. All of this, her acute awareness of everyday vulnerability, she blamed on the man in the car.
That long-ago night, Renee stepped off the school bus and there it was, a car she’d seen before. Brown two-door, long and low to the ground, its hood shaped like the snout of a fox. She didn’t know about cars, couldn’t say what make it was, but the shape was distinctive enough that she remembered it from the week before, and possibly the week before that. When had Renee first seen the brown car waiting by the school bus? She couldn’t say exactly. It hadn’t seemed important.
The bus lights blinked ruby red in the early-evening dark. It was a few days into November, a week past Halloween. Fallen leaves dull in their colors lined the sidewalks in sodden drifts and clogged the sunken runoff grates. The trees were stark, empty birds’ nests stuck like clots in the veined webs of branches.
From the school bus, a creaky metal arm extended into the opposite lane, but cars kept right on going.
“You gotta stop, it’s the law,” the driver called weakly out the window.
Renee waved good-bye to Missy and Katie and Theresa, each of them hurtling off onto different streets toward home, shoulders pulled forward with their backpacks. Missy with her flute case knocking against a hip.
Renee, alone on the sidewalk as the bus pulled away. Across the street, the car. Lights off, but Renee saw a figure in the driver’s seat. A male silhouette. One elbow out the window. Sunglasses, despite the dark. She noticed the man, but she was not afraid, not at first. This was year three of the Pause. Renee was too busy to be afraid. Track practice, homework, Joe’s baseball, cooking dinners, running baths, washing dishes and clothes. Any childhood fears had been so fully
realized—darkness, death, solitude—that she saw them now almost as comforts. Obstacles she had surmounted. Fears converted to routine.
Renee began walking fast, she always walked fast, thinking of the frozen pizza she would put in the oven for dinner—or had they eaten that on Monday? She recalled also a box of mac and cheese, an orange the color of a highway worker’s vest. She was hungry. She picked up the pace.
It was then she heard his voice.
“Hey, baby. I’ve seen you before.”
The car was there, right beside her, inching along the road. His voice was not threatening, not loud. He spoke so faintly she almost didn’t make out the words. She looked ahead: No one on the sidewalk. No cars passing. It was dinnertime. Lights blazed in the windows of every house she passed. Each one its own private universe.
Renee turned her head and smiled—why did she smile? Smile at the nice man. It was an instinct, a directive from childhood, and she regretted it as soon as she felt her lips split.
“Yeah, baby,” the man said. “You’ve got a pretty smile. Want me to drive you somewhere? Come on, get in. It’s cold.”
Renee shook her head. “No thanks,” she said. Home was still four more blocks east, then three north, up the hill, second house on the right. Her brother and sisters were waiting for her. They had not seen Noni for five days. Or was it six?
“I think you should get in. I think you want to get in. Come on. You’re pretty, does anyone ever tell you that? You’re such a pretty girl. I like pretty girls.” His voice was almost soothing in its repetition. But beneath his words, Renee felt more than heard an electricity of purpose. An urgency. The drip, drip of a faucet into a sink that has only just begun to overflow.
Renee didn’t look at the man. She pulled up her backpack, thrust her hands deeper into her pockets, walked faster. The car matched her pace.
Later she couldn’t say why she decided to run. Something flipped, a chemical reaction, a flight instinct, a realization that she was in fact in danger.
Running was something that Renee did very well. Cross-country was her event. She loved the variety of it, the spills and jumps. Now she sprinted, imagining that this was a course, the rutted sidewalk and slippery leaves, a jump from curb to street and back again. Backpack banging against her lower spine, lungs firing with the cold. She ran and turned, and the car turned with her, tires squealing. It was like a movie, unreal, absurd. She heard the car brake hard, and she glanced behind to see the man open the door, hurl himself onto the sidewalk. He was shorter than she was expecting, scrawny, except for a ball of a stomach that strained the white button-down shirt he wore. His hair neat and brown as the car. He looked like a banker or a teacher, utterly benign. He began to chase her.
Renee ran faster, ducked into a yard, crossed that one, then another. She should have stopped to knock on a door—of course that’s what she should have done. She would spend months, years really, wondering why she hadn’t, but in the moment, as she ran, it seemed impossible to breach those closed front doors, the warm glow of those windows.
Renee’s breath came in an urgent white column from her mouth as she ran. Behind her she heard the man’s footfalls, his labored, reckless breathing. One house was dark—the Hunters, out of town for a family wedding—and it was here that she turned. Into the front yard, around to the back, to a yard that looked like their old yard at the yellow house. A swing set, a rectangular sandbox, the lawn lined with flower beds that now lay dormant, clipped to the sleepy essentials to wait out winter. Sometimes Renee babysat for the Hunter twins, girls with brown ringlets. She liked to play with them out here, no matter the weather.
Now Renee looked for somewhere to hide, under the swing, behind the shed. She crouched beneath the low, sloping plastic slide, trying to make herself small. Invisible. The man entered the yard, still breathing hard. He slowed, stopped. There was no easy way out of here, Renee realized. The man roamed the yard, his eyes scanning. How long did it take? The yard was small. Of course he found her.
The man from the car grabbed Renee’s arm and pulled her from beneath the slide. She turned her head, and—bam—he punched her, his fist glancing off the left side of her head. The force made her lose her footing. How did it happen that he was on top of her? Her backpack had come loose, spilling pens and stickers and erasers across the lawn. A note from her friend Dawn, folded into an origami star.
“Don’t run from me,” the man was saying. “Don’t you ever run away from me again, do you understand? I will find you. I will always find you.”
Renee was fighting, but his hands were on her shoulders and he was strong, his breath in her face. “I will always find you,” he said again, and spit rained onto her face, into her eyes. He was hurting her, she was blinking, blinking, trying to clear her sight.
And then she heard Joe’s voice.
“Renee? Renee!”
“Joe—” Renee tried to yell, but she couldn’t. The weight of the man compressed her chest, her stomach, and she couldn’t speak, but she saw him, her brother, Joe. He was standing behind the man.
“Get off her,” Joe said. He growled the words, a sound Renee had never heard before and would never hear again. He kicked the man hard and then again, kicked against the man’s body as though it were a locked door Joe was trying to open. At ten years old, Joe was shorter than the man but stronger from all the baseball workouts. And he was wearing his spiked cleats, the ones for baseball practice. One more kick and the man’s weight rolled off Renee.
The man lay panting in the dirt beside the swing set. “Hey, kid,” he said, and held up his hands. “What the—” Joe kicked the man once, twice in the stomach, and then in the head. Again and again and again.
“Joe!” Renee screamed. She pulled herself to standing and ran to her brother.
“You can stop now,” she said. “Stop.”
The man’s face was bloody. In her memories Renee would never recall what the man in the car looked like. She would remember only a bloody blur, nose smashed, chin collapsed.
Joe was shaking.
“We have to go,” Renee said. “Leave him.”
“Is he okay?” Joe asked. “Is he—” His voice had returned to normal. It was again the voice of a boy.
“It doesn’t matter. We need to leave. Let’s go home.” An essential calm took hold of Renee then. Her heart beat solid and cold inside her chest. Her fear of the man was immediately gone. Nothing bad had happened, nothing worth mentioning. The only true thing was that she needed to remove herself and Joe from this yard, from this place beside the bloodied man. They needed to leave no trace of themselves behind.
“Help me clean this stuff up,” she said to Joe, and they began to collect her school things: the purple zippered pencil case, the red binder, two notebooks, her geometry book, a plastic protractor. The star note was muddied, torn by Joe’s cleat. Carefully Renee refolded the note and slipped it into her back pocket.
And then Renee took her brother’s hand and they walked to the front of the Hunters’ house and to the sidewalk. The brown car was pulled to the curb, its driver’s door open, headlights on, a tiny electronic beep alerting its owner of things gone awry. Joe and Renee walked past the car at a normal pace. They did not hurry, they did not call attention to themselves. They walked three more blocks east, then three more north, then up the hill, through the front door of the gray house. Home.
When they crossed the threshold, Renee finally let go of Joe’s hand.
“Where were you?” I was the first to ask. “We were so worried!” Caroline sat on the couch with wide, frightened eyes.
“We’re fine, everything’s fine,” Renee said. But then she told us to close the blinds, to gather in the kitchen.
Renee told us half the story, as calmly and clearly as she could, but she did not tell us everything. She knew with an insight beyond her thirteen years that we would always remember this night. The lesson she wanted us to retain was one of caution. Of fear, but not terror. Of a lesson learned,
a near miss, so that we might avoid what had happened to our sister. Renee bore the brunt of it so that we wouldn’t have to.
This was how Renee saw it. And I was grateful to her, I am grateful to this day. The man in the car is the reason as a young woman I always carried Mace in my purse, the reason I learned self-defense in college, a class taught by an ex-marine who called us “ladies” but taught us how to gouge a man’s eyes and punch out his windpipe. Caroline and I both learned Renee’s lesson well.
And Joe? When no one was looking, he stuffed the cleats into the trash. He took a long shower that night and went to baseball practice as usual the next morning. He’d lost his cleats, he told Coach Marty, probably left on the bus, and Marty shrugged and said, “Okay, Joe,” and found him another pair. For Joe there was no lesson from Renee, only her gratitude. He was her savior. She thanked him later that night and again the next morning. In a way Renee thanked Joe every day for the next sixteen years.
But not once did she worry about what the man in the car had done to Joe. She never wondered what those kicks required of him. What that bloodied face told our brother about himself.
* * *
“I’ll never leave you,” the man said again to his wife. “I’m staying right here.”
Renee hung up the phone. “They’re ready for her upstairs,” she called to Jaypa.
Jaypa nodded at Renee and then waved her away. “I’ve got this,” he said.
Renee fell back to the nurses’ station and let Jaypa get on with it. Her thoughts had moved past the man in the car, that episode banished from her mind in a self-preserving efficiency she’d perfected years earlier: the ability to replace one strong emotion with another. Now a familiar frustration rose up. The blood, the urgent fear in the man’s voice, the pregnant woman’s screams—all so easily avoided. You want to give birth at home? Try time travel. Try a return to colonial America, where one in ten women died in childbirth. For most emergencies there was no warning, but for this one they’d had forty weeks of warning.
