In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  “Can I call you tomorrow?” A muscle was working in his jaw and his eyes seemed edgy.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  He took his coat from the rack near the door, clearly tortured at the thought of leaving me this way.

  “Thank you for . . . Thank you for saying it, Scott. It means . . .” How could I tell him what it meant to me? “It means a lot to me.” I hoped he could distinguish my sincerity behind the layers of fear and distress and pain.

  He nodded, slipped into his jacket, and with a final, laden glance, he left.

  I wasn’t sure how long I lay on the couch, flooding the silence with inconsolable despair. I had found a friend in Scott, a kindred spirit, a source of comfort and contentment and challenge and joy. And in my ignorance, I’d hurt him. I’d let him imagine the impossible and dismantle my reserve. I’d crushed us both. And the desolate places in my heart groaned in solitude and grief.

  I’d spent my life until then clinging to God while I’d raged against the people at the root of my brokenness. But on this night, my world had shifted and I found myself railing at God as I clung to the people I loved—like Scott, who deserved so much more than I could give him, and Shayla, whose innocence I feared crippling. Why had I been born into a destructive vortex that had made the thought of loving so intolerable? Why hadn’t God intervened? Why hadn’t he stilled the forces that had rendered me powerless and damaged? Why couldn’t I trust myself enough to love sufficiently? How was I supposed to live the rest of my life in this paralyzing fear of personal failure? My anger was opaque and rough, craggy and raw and frantic.

  It was nearly 4 a.m. when I woke. My eyes felt bloated and my limbs impossibly heavy. The numbness in my mind was a relief. There was nothing else to do but pick up the phone and dial.

  “Hello!”

  “Trey?”

  “Shelbers! What time is it over there?” He’d become a pro at time-zone calculation, but this middle-of-the-night call had made him doubt his expertise.

  “Nearly four.”

  There was a beat while he made note of my tone of voice and came to conclusions. “What’s happening, Shell?”

  I sighed. I couldn’t find the words.

  “Is it Shayla?” His voice was sharp, his worry audible.

  “No. She’s fine, Trey. Really. It’s not her.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “I need a Rolo.”

  “That bad.”

  “Yup.”

  “Have the Germans been nasty to you? ’Cause I can fly over there and give ’em a piece of my mind, if you want. Really. Just say the word.”

  “We got a Christmas tree today.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then we went to the toy museum for supper.”

  “Strange, but I’ll allow it.”

  “And we came back and had prayers with Shayla.”

  “Always a good plan. Just a question, though—who’s ‘we’?”

  I moaned a little. “Scott and Shayla and me.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just waited, my ever-patient brother who would read between the lines and understand the source of my dysfunction without need for explanations.

  “He’s great, Trey. You’d like him.”

  “And you like him.”

  I sighed. “And he told me tonight that he’d like to pursue me.”

  “What—is he Victorian?”

  “Trey.”

  “Sorry.”

  “He’s so careful. So . . . noble.”

  “And you said . . . ?”

  “I pulled a Shelby on him.”

  “Shell . . . why?”

  “I don’t know. I panicked. Told him he shouldn’t care about me. That I can’t care for him—not that way.”

  “How many times are you going to do this?” There was a hint of anger in his voice. “How many times are you going to sabotage something good because you’re too scared to risk it?”

  “I don’t know, Trey; how long are you going to keep at it?”

  “We’re talking about you!”

  “Well, I don’t know! It’s not like I set out to be this way!”

  “I know.”

  I knew he did.

  “There should be a switch somewhere,” I said. “Some kind of existential breaker that allows us to disarm the past. Seriously.”

  “It’s looking for that breaker that landed me in the hospital,” my survivor-brother said.

  There was no arguing that point.

  I allowed myself to think about my parents for a while—something I rarely did—but it seemed appropriate, as they were so entangled in the moment. “When do you think Dad turned into . . . well, Dad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, Mom wouldn’t have married him if he was as bad then as he was later, right?”

  Trey thought about it for a moment. “Probably not,” he said. “I hope not.”

  “So there’s a good chance that he was a nice guy at one point in his life—nice enough for Mom to fall in love with him.”

  “I guess it’s possible.”

  I sighed. “It’s more than possible. She told me herself—with pictures and letters to prove it.”

  “When was this?”

  “Right after her stroke.”

  “And I’m just hearing about this now because . . . ?”

  I shook my head in frustration. “Because I didn’t like it. The part about Dad being romantic and lovable. I tried to forget it, actually.”

  “But she said he was.”

  “Yup.”

  “So . . .” I could hear his reluctance in the hesitation that preceded “We have to believe her.”

  I sighed again, more wearily this time. “Yeah, I guess we do. But maybe he was just faking being nice to get the girl. Whatever it was, she believed him.”

  “And you think Scott’s a nice guy too,” my brother said with intimate understanding.

  “And more.”

  “And your point is that you think he could turn into Dad, since Dad was probably all sweetness and light before we knew him.”

  “Yup.”

  “And the other half of the point,” he continued with unerring accuracy, “is that you could become Dad.”

  “There are no guarantees, Trey. We were raised with him. We absorbed some of him in all those years. We had to.”

  “Or maybe we had such good seats at the Jim Davis horror show that it scared us straight. Ever think of that? Maybe we’re not going to become him because we’ve seen him up close and personal—and because he was so revolting to us.”

  Something cold trickled through the marrow of my spine. “I hate him.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You’ve never said that before,” Trey said quietly, with no reproach.

  I sighed and squeezed my eyes shut. “I’ve never felt quite this derailed before.”

  “It’s . . .” He paused. “I don’t think it’s a good thing for you to suddenly decide you hate him, Shell.”

  “Maybe I’ve spent too much time making excuses for him. That’s what you used to tell me, remember?”

  “But refusing to hate him is what kept you sane.”

  “No, Trey, it’s what kept me barely functional. And there aren’t very many upsides to that. Not for me, anyway.”

  He understood. I could hear it in his sigh. “Don’t hate him.”

  I remembered Scott’s face when he’d left my apartment and couldn’t quell the heat of fury in my blood. “Dad did this to me,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he’s not around to fix it. So hating him isn’t going to do anything except wear you down.”

  I wasn’t sure I could withstand more wearing down. There were enough other factors in my life competing for the honor. Still, I hated him just then with a very childish passion.

  “Hating people bleeds a person dry, Shell. It does. You’re better off using that energy to figure yourself out.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

&
nbsp; “I think you should try.”

  The international connection hummed as we fell silent, me with my pain and Trey with his compassion. “Have I told you I love you, Trey?”

  “Uh—that’s a bit of an abrupt topic change, there, Shelby.”

  “There’s a line in the play where Joy finally gets to tell Lewis she loves him—right before she dies—and I’m worried I haven’t told you often enough.”

  “You’re not dying, are you?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Good—then I’ll allow the comparison with Lewis and Joy, but only because you’re emotionally distraught. And I know you love me. There isn’t a moment in my life that I haven’t known that. So it’s okay that you haven’t said it as much as you wanted to. It got said other ways.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” We let a pause lengthen. “Think you can sleep now?” he asked.

  “Probably not, but I can give it a shot.”

  “How undoable is this Scott thing? Can you reverse the engines?”

  “Not sure. I need to decide first if it’s worth the risk.”

  “Well, take it from someone who’s lived through your worst PMS and gone jeans shopping with you. Any guy would be lucky to have you.”

  “I’m damaged goods.”

  There was a tense silence. “Okay, now you’ve made me mad. Don’t ever say that about yourself again, Shell!”

  “Okay,” I said in a very small voice.

  “Jim Davis might have been your father, but you’re worlds apart from him. Planets. Don’t give him the power to make you damaged goods—not even in your head.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now go to bed!” There was a smile in his voice again and it warmed my innards.

  “To the brotherhood, buddy.”

  “And the Davishood, Sis. For better or for worse.”

  We hung up.

  In the quiet that followed, God spoke. I didn’t hear a voice. I didn’t sense a presence. But a revelation blossomed in the space between my heart and mind, so elemental in its simplicity that it blanketed the ragged edges of my anger with gossamer appeasement.

  God hadn’t been idle while my father’s words and actions had threatened my sanity and bruised my dreams. He hadn’t been passive when rage had battered me and fear had shackled me. He had given me Trey. He had given me a living, breathing, comforting warrior whose devotion had mirrored his own. It wasn’t he who had so wounded me—it was he who had rescued me. And though the consequences of my father’s depravity were still mine to bear, I knew at that moment, more clearly than I had ever known, that God had been faithful. And it was because he’d been there that the horror had been survivable.

  The thought quelled my anger but not my grief as I walked slowly, heavily toward my bedroom.

  16

  NOTHING MUCH HAD CHANGED in the house. It still smelled of fried onions and laundry soap, and it still seemed cluttered with the overflow of too many lives lived in too small a space. Mom sat in her La-Z-Boy, her feet propped up and a glass of water within reach. She hadn’t moved much from this position since her return. We’d made her as comfortable as we could, and I’d spent a couple of nights in the overwhelming perkiness of my old room just to make sure she was really all right. The doctors had called it a ministroke, which sounded a little too cheerful for something that had left Mom temporarily without a memory, weak, and confined to a hospital bed.

  But she was feeling better now. Her eyes weren’t as scared and her skin looked a little less like Marcel Marceau’s. She’d called me earlier and asked me to come by, so I’d swung over after my day of student-teaching and found her sitting there, Oprah blaring from the TV set and a book open on her lap. I had to agree—Oprah was a lot more bearable diluted with some reading. It crossed my mind that Mom had her own version of Oprah’s Book Club going on.

  “Sit down, Shell,” she instructed, her voice as rice-paper thin as her skin. “And hand me that box, will you?”

  I fetched a small, ornately decorated wooden box from the coffee table and laid it in her lap. Mom turned watery eyes on me and seemed to dig into her brain for a prepared speech she’d stored there. “My . . . episode . . .” She halted, reaching for her glass with unsteady fingers.

  I wanted to say, “Your episode was a stroke, Mom. ‘Episodes’ are what make incredibly obtuse shows like Dynasty into palatable televisual bites. ‘Strokes’ are what nearly kill people. Get it right.” But she appeared to be gathering courage, so I didn’t interfere. A lifetime in the Davis household had taught me that courage was rare and precious. It got us through the tough stuff. Like Rolos and wit.

  “My episode,” she resumed, “made me remember this box.”

  Strange—it had made her forget everything else, at least for those first couple of hours.

  I observed in silence as she lifted the lid off the box and rummaged around inside. It struck me that her hair had gotten grayer—much grayer—and I wondered when that had happened. She seemed older than her years, and for a very brief moment, I couldn’t remember what had caused her premature aging. A framed photograph on the mantel slammed me with the answer. Jim Davis. Absent husband. Abusive father. Immortalized in a pewter frame. But Mom was unaware of the bitter nostalgia in my mind. She pulled from the box a stack of envelopes tied with a red ribbon, their edges yellowed by time but still intact.

  “I want you to have these,” she said.

  “Mom . . .”

  “Hush, Shelby.”

  Mom wasn’t prone to giving orders, so I obeyed.

  “While I was in the hospital . . .”

  There was a strength to her voice, a purposefulness I’d seldom heard before. She was trying to be bold, for one of the few times in her life. I found it disconcerting.

  “While I was in the hospital, I had a lot of time to think.”

  What with the being catatonic and all.

  “And I remembered this box. And . . .” She blinked hard to disarm her tears. “Shelby, I want you to have these. And the rest of the things in here.” She put down the letters and took from the box a dried rose, a blue garter, and a handful of dog-eared pictures. “I need you to promise me that you’ll keep them.”

  “Mom, what are they?”

  “Even if I die, you promise me you’ll keep them.”

  There was something in her eyes that frightened me. Where they had been a bit befuddled moments before, they were now laser clear—focused and demanding and damning.

  I pulled my chair closer to hers and took the stack of letters from her lap. The ribbon gave easily, like it had been undone before, and I glanced through the envelopes. They were addressed alternately to Jim Davis and Gail Sanders. As I fanned through them, the scent of White Shoulders, like wisps of memory, drifted up to me. It was the aroma of young love and middle-aged heartbreak, of tentative hope and obliterated dreams.

  “You and Dad?”

  “Five months of correspondence while he was still in the Navy.”

  “And the pictures?”

  “The two of us when we were young. Dancing at the prom, waterskiing, our engagement party . . .”

  She held the stack of pictures out to me, but I shook my head and moved back in my chair. “Mom, I’m not sure I’m the right—”

  “He was your father, Shelby. And the man I loved. And if you don’t keep these, no one will know him after I’m dead.”

  There was a stubborn set to her chin and, again, that obstinacy in her gaze. This meant enough to her that she was willing to fight for it—and I’d never really seen my mother fight for anything before. It made me angry.

  “Why do you want to keep these, Mom? What difference does it make if everyone forgets him?”

  “He was my husband.”

  “He was a jerk.”

  “He—was—my—husband.”

  I was stunned. “Yes, Mom, your abusive husband. Your screaming, offensive, and brutal husband. I should know—he was my father too.”


  “But he was a good man once,” she said, pleading. She shoved the sheaf of letters toward me. “Read these, Shelby. Read them and tell me that he wasn’t once kind and romantic and—”

  “I don’t want to read them, Mom.”

  “Then look at the pictures. They’re—”

  “Mom, no.”

  “He was another person once. He was good enough for me to love him, Shelby. He was funny and engaging and . . .”

  The lights seemed to dim as the walls around me regurgitated their embedded memories. My dad’s voice crashed across the stillness, his words slashing at my fragility with sadistic precision. His savagery overwhelmed my defenses and annihilated the child in me once more, reducing her to an empty shell, swollen with bravado but translucent in her pain and helplessness. I felt the room tilt a little as my mind fell deeper into the remembered vortex of a merciless destruction, a calculated obliteration of all that was strong and soft and yearning in me.

  When my mom pushed up to the edge of her chair and covered my hand with her own, it was all I could do not to fling it away along with the letters I still held and the nauseating powerlessness crushing the resolve from my courage.

  I rose and moved to the window across the room, the letters falling like dead leaves from my hand to the blue carpet. I stared at the tree where Trey and I had swung as children, and I tried to remember the happy moments but found them all marred by my father’s contempt. I breathed—and in breathing found solace. I was still alive, despite his murderous rages. He hadn’t destroyed me.

  “It wasn’t entirely his fault—the way he was,” my mom said quietly, her voice a little raspy. “His father was a drunk who abandoned the family when he was nine. How was he supposed to know how to be a good parent to you?”

  I shrugged. There were no valid excuses.

  “He grew up poor. Had to work hard—too hard for a boy his age. But he made it to college, got a good job, started his own business. . . . He made sure you and Trey would never be as poor as he was.”

  “Hurray for Dad.”

  “He tried, Shelby. It . . . it just wasn’t in him to be sensitive.”

  “His problems went well beyond insensitivity, Mom.”

  “Yes,” she conceded. “They did. But—”