Time Off for Good Behavior

by Lani Diane Rich

  And I’d probably still be unemployed.

  I sat down on the sofa and leaned my head back, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes and whining, “My life is a Lifetime movie.”

  And we all know they only get worse before they get better.

  ***

  The next day started out pretty well, considering how totally fucked it was by 11 a.m. I went to my mailbox promptly at ten for my daily verbal sparring with Manny the Mailman. There are three things in life you can count on: death, taxes, and Manny at ten o’clock.

  Manny’s a guy in his late fifties from the Bronx. Catholic, with a wife and like fifteen kids and a combative sense of humor. We met at the mailbox not long after I moved into my apartment. He had told me to move my fat ass out of his way; I’d responded that he could move it himself if he didn’t mind losing a hand. We’ve been buds ever since.

  “You got a real letter,” he said as he handed me my mail with a look of feigned disgust. “I never figured you for the type who had friends.”

  “Bite me, butthead.” It was a lame comeback, but I was more concerned with rifling through the junk to get to the letter. Thoughts of my mother, unrealistic as they were, skirted through my head. She used to write to me when I was in college and even a few letters after George and I moved to Tennessee. I caught sight of the letter, the familiar chicken scratch etched into the paper with the force of an angry pen, and my stomach turned.

  “Who’s George?” Manny asked. I didn’t respond. “Fucker’s got some scary handwriting.”

  I stared at it. I felt Manny’s hand on my shoulder.

  “You okay, Wanda?” he asked. For the first time since I’d known him, Manny looked concerned. “You’re not breathing.”

  I inhaled, shrugged his hand off. “Don’t touch me, skeeze-ball.”

  Manny’s face fell into a relieved smile, and he continued sorting the mail into the boxes. “They don’t pay me enough to deal with people like you.”

  I wandered back up to my apartment and sat at the counter, the letter lying unopened in front of me until I worked up the courage to reach for the letter opener. George didn’t write. George called. I’d gotten only one letter from him in my entire life, and that ended very badly.

  I skimmed the letter, then read it more carefully. I paced back and forth in my living room, getting jumpier by the minute. I went into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of Albert, then put it back. The last thing I wanted was to be drunk when George found me.

  When George found me.

  Jesus.

  I went into the bathroom, pulled Walter’s card out of the corner of the mirror, and dialed.

  “Walter Briggs.” His voice was professional. Businesslike.

  The voice of a person whose life had never been threatened by a psychopath. I was quiet. I almost hung up. Then, after a moment, “Wanda?”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I heard the television in the background.”

  “Lots of people watch television.”

  “I know.” He paused, waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he went on. “Is everything okay?”

  “No,” I said. “George lost his job.”

  “George?”

  “My ex-husband.”

  “Ah. The one you want me to sue for not being dead yet?”

  “That’s the one.” I gave a tinny, high-pitched laugh. “Apparently, someone overheard him threatening me on the phone at the refinery office, and he got fired, and he thinks it’s my fault. He’s on his way to Tennessee to make good on the threat.”

  Walter’s voice tightened. “What was the threat?”

  I paused, looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember that last phone call. “Slit my fucking throat, I believe.”

  Even tighter. “Wanda? Are you okay?”

  “Define okay.”

  “Is he there?”

  “No. It’s just... He wrote me a letter. A crazy fucking psycho letter. When he writes letters, he means it.” I put my hand to my forehead and began to babble. “You’re the only legal person I know. I have a restraining order, but those are really no good because when someone’s crazy, what the hell do they care about a restraining order, right? I mean, if you’re going to kill someone, violating a restraining order is like peanuts, right?”

  “Wanda. Take a breath.”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay. Really. I’m fine. I just... I’m wondering what I should do. Are you sure we can’t sue him for being alive? Because that would make me feel better. You know, make me feel like I’m doing something.”

  “Wanda. Listen to me. Are you listening?”

  I looked around the apartment, trying to focus. “Yeah.”

  “I want you to pack a bag, quickly, and get over to my house. Do you have a pen and a piece of paper?”

  I walked over to the kitchen counter. “Yeah.”

  He gave me the address. “I want you to meet me there in twenty minutes. Okay? Can you do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Twenty minutes. If you’re not there, I’m calling the police.”

  “Twenty minutes,” I repeated. I took a deep breath and hung up the phone, then went to my room to pack.

  ***

  Walter put the letter on his kitchen counter. I wrapped my fingers around the mug of coffee he’d poured for me. I couldn’t drink it—my stomach was too knotted up to allow for that—but the smell held a little comfort.

  Walter’s house was nice: wood floors, tile in the kitchen, refrigerator with an ice-maker and a water dispenser. Immaculate. Luckily, I was too freaked out to be embarrassed about the state my apartment had been in when he stopped by. Walter was a pipe dream, anyway. Right now I had bigger fish to fry.

  “What does this mean? This part about ‘I know you remember last time’?” he asked. He was watching me like a hawk, looking for signs of a lie.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. He watched me for a few seconds more, then reached for the phone. I jumped up.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa—what are you doing?”

  He paused before hitting the talk button. “I’m calling for pizza, Wanda. What the hell do you think I’m doing? I’m calling the police.”

  “No!”

  He froze, his face tight. “Wanda.”

  “The cops are not going to help this situation. You’re a lawyer. You gonna tell me you don’t know what happens when...” I trailed off. It didn’t matter what Walter knew or didn’t know. I’d sent George to jail once. I learned that lesson. I grabbed my bag, battling my shaking hand to keep my grip.

  “I’m sorry I called you. I’m gonna go.”

  Walter put the phone down and stepped toward me. “Where are you gonna go, Wanda? Back home, just wait for him to come and kill you?”

  I shrugged. It was a thought. I waved my hand dismissively at him, staring at the natural wood coatrack by the door on which he’d tossed my denim jacket, which looked horribly out of place next to his London Fog raincoat.

  Pipe dream.

  “This isn’t your problem,” I said.

  He shifted on his feet. “That’s bullshit. If you come to me because some maniac is going to kill you, you’ve just made it my problem.”

  Walter’s anger made my muscles go wooden. I felt George’s hands grabbing my arms and leaving bruises. I felt his hot breath on my face. I saw the fury in his eyes as he raised his fist.

  Walter touched my arm gently. I screamed and punched him in the chest. Hard. He took a step back and looked at me. I was frozen. I dropped my eyes to avoid seeing the look on his face, but I knew what was there: the same look that had been on the face of everyone who had gotten close to me only to realize that I was so much less than the sum of my parts.

  “I’m sorry.” I still didn’t look at him. I picked up my bag, which had fallen from my grip. “I’m sorry.”

  His hand was on my arm again. I stopped and looked at it, cursing every tear that fell on it as I crumpled to the floor. He moved slowly down to my si
de, eventually curling his frame around mine, which was hunched in a fetal position. He smoothed my hair as I cried, and repeated, “Shhhhhhh...,” until I regained my breathing.

  We stayed there, silent and still, for a long time. Finally, I heard a whisper in my ear. “What did he do to you?”

  I was silent. I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to lie there in the safety of Walter’s arms and go to sleep, which was exactly what I did.

  ***

  When I woke up, it was dark. I was lying on a bed under a flowery quilt, my head resting on a soft pillow tucked inside a clean white pillowcase. A small circular table covered in purple cloth and white lace sat next to the bed, supporting a phone and an alarm clock that read 7:18 p.m. On the wall was a picture of a baby surrounded by sunflowers. Good God. The place looked like Martha Stewart had puked all over it.

  I scanned the room, getting my bearings. The closet door was open a bit, and the only thing I could see in it was my duffel bag, slumping in defeat on the floor. I heard a gentle knock, and a tentative shaft of light crept into the room. I looked up and saw Walter leaning against the doorway, keeping his distance, being careful.

  “How ya feeling?” he asked. His face was half-lit by the hallway, and his expression was kind, without a hint of pity or condescension. I sighed. Assholes were so much easier to deal with than Jimmy Stewart types.

  I pushed myself up to sitting and ran my hand through my hair. “Never better.”

  He nodded. He had his hands in his trouser pockets, and the top two buttons on his white shirt were undone. I pulled the quilt up around me, covering my torn jeans and Bangles T-shirt. I ran my finger over the purple flower design on the quilt, took a deep breath, and summoned up the courage not to be flippant.

  “I’m sorry I hit you.”

  He held up his hand and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay. I was just freaked out.”

  “I know.”

  “You can come in if you want.” I gave a feeble laugh. “I probably won’t take another swing at you.”

  He gave a small nod and walked in and sat on the edge of the bed, holding his hand out palm-up. I hesitated, then put my hand in his, feeling the warmth ride up my arm as his fingers closed around mine. I stared out the window and started talking.

  The first time George hit me, he broke my arm. It wasn’t long after we’d moved to Tennessee, and I’d gone to a movie by myself—he’d driven off all my friends by that point—and he was convinced I’d been out with another man. Not long after that, we got married, proving once and for all that I was far stupider than I looked. On our first anniversary, I told him to stop drinking, and he hit me in the face so hard that my right eye was swollen shut for two weeks. I told everyone at work I had been in a car accident. Some of them even believed me. I learned that by smiling and nodding and agreeing to everything that George wanted, I could control the situation. He would still get drunk, call me names, grab me and shake me, but as long as I played the game right, he wouldn’t hit. For a long time, I thought I could live that way. I convinced myself it was a life.

  George started working for an oil company on the North Slope of Alaska about two years into our marriage. It was a two-weeks-on, two-weeks-off deal; they would fly him back and forth from Anchorage, and my job was to make sure a ticket was waiting there for him to get back to Tennessee. His plan was to move us both up to Anchorage, but I stalled. Every now and again a fight would erupt. He’d want to know why I hadn’t quit my job, sold our house and bought one up in Anchorage. I managed to convince him I was trying, and eventually, he would calm down, and then it would be time to drive him back to the airport for his two weeks on.

  At first, I stayed in the house and tried to convince myself I missed him when he was gone. I told myself that I looked forward to his daily calls, that I thought it was sweet how he’d grill me on where I’d been if he got the answering machine. A few months into it, I started to venture out. The first place I ventured to was Molly’s.

  Molly was the traffic manager at Hastings Channel 8. About five years before I met her, her ex, a paralegal named Joel, had stabbed her in the abdomen twelve times. She could smell what was going on with me and George. She gave me books. She told me whom to call. And when I finally packed up and left, she took me in.

  For the first six weeks after I left, George went back and forth between the devastated lover who couldn’t understand what had happened and the vicious, violent freak who had to control every move I made. It all depended upon the mood and circumstance of the day, and I had no way of knowing whether it would be flowers or dead cats on my doorstep.

  Until now, I’d received only one other letter from George, and it was during that time. One afternoon he followed me back to Molly’s and cried on the other side of the door, begging me to let him in, to give him one more chance, swearing he didn’t mean to hurt me. The next day he slipped a letter under the front door while we were at work. The letter was short; it simply said that he would be back to “cut both you bitches into little pieces.” Molly called the police, and they picked George up in a bar two blocks away. He punched the cop and was put in jail; I filed for a restraining order.

  Two days later he was out. He bashed down Molly’s door and dragged me across the living room by my hair. Molly came down the stairs. Her voice was shaky. She called him Joel. George dropped me on the floor, slamming my head against the wall, and headed over to Molly. He hit her, knocking her down and, as I found out later, breaking her cheekbone. Then he dragged me back to his place, where he kept me trapped with him for three days. He waved a gun in my face, telling me he was going to blow my head off. He burned my things in the fireplace. I still have a scar on my left ankle from the nylon rope he used to bind my legs so I wouldn’t run.

  On the third day, while I was sleeping, George destroyed what was left of my belongings, then packed up and left. It was another year before the divorce was final.

  “Anyway, Molly called a few days after that and told me that she couldn’t help me anymore.” I reached for the glass of water Walter had gotten for me when my throat started to go dry in the middle of the story. “She never pressed charges against George. I went back to work two weeks later, and she was gone. That was the last time I saw her.”

  There was a long silence. I guess Walter was waiting to be sure I was done. Finally, he spoke.

  “You need to call the police.” His tone was low and dead serious. He got up from the bed and grabbed the phone off the night table. Instead of making the call himself, he held it out to me. I stared up at him.

  “I think it’s something you need to do,” he said. His eyes were kind yet firm, so unflinching in the face of the Jerry Springer nightmare he’d just heard. Not too surprising, I guess. The guy was a lawyer. Surely, he’d heard worse. Probably not from anyone sitting in the middle of his regurgitated Martha Stewart guest room, but still...

  “I’m not ready,” I said, not taking the phone from him. I couldn’t. The muscles in my arms were shaking. I didn’t want him to see that.

  “Wanda..

  “Walter,” I said, “the guy’s in Alaska.”

  Walter shook his head. “Three days ago. If he even sent that letter himself. He might have given it to a friend to put in the mail. He could be anywhere now.”

  “I need a shower.” I didn’t know where the hell that came from, but it was as good a change of subject as any. I got up and knelt down by the closet, poking through my bag. No toothbrush. Crap. I stood up. Walter was watching me, the phone still clutched in his hand. I sighed.

  “Look, Walter, he’s lazy. Really, really lazy. He never did a damn thing in his life that required any effort, and coming down to Tennessee from Alaska requires effort. When we were married, if I didn’t purchase his ticket for him to get back and forth, he couldn’t do it himself. Really. Totally helpless.”

  Walter’s jaw tig
htened. “How helpless was he when he broke Molly’s cheekbone? Or when he put you in the hospital?”

  My stomach heaved. I tossed my clean clothes on the bed. “Right, you’re right. Fine. But if I’m gonna be killed, I’d rather do it with clean hair. I’d hate to look like crap in all the crime scene photos.”

  Walter glared at me. An honest-to-goodness glare. Just when I thought I felt about as bad as I could ever feel, I got a glare from Jimmy Stewart. It damn near killed me.

  That didn’t mean I was going to make anything easy for him, though. Leopards and spots and all that.

  I grabbed a sheet of paper from the night table and found a pen inside the drawer. I scribbled a number down and handed the paper to Walter.

  “That’s his number. Call. If he answers, just hang up and it can wait. If he doesn’t, then I’ll call the police. Tonight, I promise. But I need to go get my toothbrush.”

  Walter looked up from the paper in his hand and studied me. “You’re not going home,” he said finally.

  I sighed. “Fine. Where’s the closest grocery store?”

  ***

  I stood in the express line with a toothbrush and O, the Oprah Magazine in my hands, feeling slightly dizzy. The truth was, George could have been anywhere. The truth was, he might have been the laziest son of a bitch alive on an average day, but when he was pissed off, he got very motivated. The truth was, this thing between us probably wasn’t over.

  The truth sucked.

  My exhaustion took over for a minute, and a dizzy spell hit. My balance faltered, bumping me into a guy in front of me. He turned around and helped me steady myself. He was an older guy with a trimmed white beard. Very Miracle on 34th Street. He looked kind. And he was wearing a stethoscope.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  He looked down at the stethoscope, then back at me. He smiled. “So they tell me.”

  I pointed at his doctor’s coat. “I probably should have known by the white coat.”

  His eyebrows furrowed. “Are you okay?”