“More children are harmed by people they know—teachers, pastors, club leaders, relatives—than by those they don’t. The same is true for women. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the leading cause of injury for women aged fifteen to forty-four is domestic violence. It’s not the stranger who poses the danger.”
“You’re a poet and didn’t know it,” Nina said.
“Don’t,” I said. “No more jokes. Not today.” I surveyed them, one by one. “Do I have your attention?”
Nods.
“The best way to protect your children is to protect yourself. In homes where domestic violence occurs, children are abused one hundred and fifty times more often than the national average.”
No one said anything.
“Like your children, you need to know when something is wrong. Like your children, you need to believe you have the right to defend yourself. Self-defense is about self-worth, self-esteem, self-love. Self. We are worth fighting for.”
I watched Sandra, remembering my last conversation, years ago, with Diane, at Arkady House, a women’s shelter. I’d asked her why so many of these women didn’t do the sensible thing and prosecute. She had said, “These women are grown-ups. They know what they need. If a woman comes in here all beat to shit and I say, ‘Honey, you need medical attention, you need to leave that man right now,’ and she says, ‘Well, Diane, what I really need is a pair of shoes for my youngest,’ I give her a pair of shoes. You know why? Because maybe her youngest doesn’t have any shoes, because that’s how her husband controls them. And if the kid can’t walk out, then they can’t leave. So if she says what she needs is shoes, then what she gets is shoes. If she says nothing, then maybe it’s because she needs to, or maybe she’s still lying to herself. Don’t make her talk to you if she doesn’t want to. If she’s lying to herself, she’ll only lie to you. No one can change that woman’s life but her. Don’t try to do it for her. Down that path lies madness and despair.”
Madness and despair. She could have been talking about Sandra.
“. . . want to teach my kids to be scared of everyone,” Kim was saying. “Even their uncles, their daddy. I won’t.”
“No argument,” I said. “Teaching children more fear isn’t useful. They should be taught instead to understand what’s acceptable, and from whom. They should understand who they are: where their sovereignty lies, if you like, just as you’ve started to learn in the last few weeks. They should learn that if someone abuses them, make them stop. They should learn that it’s not smart to hand out information that may make you vulnerable. But what does that mean with regard to a ten-year-old?”
I thought of Luz, the ten-year-old I knew best: her avarice, her covetousness, particularly when it came to good leather and precious metals, her occasionally unfathomable combination of cynicism and naïveté, suspicion and trust. Ten-year-olds, in many ways, were far more capable of looking after themselves than teenage girls because they had not yet fully learnt the social imperative of fitting in, of being submissive.
“Here’s what I would talk to children about. I would tell them to never answer the phone and tell someone they were alone in the house. I would explain that they must never open the door without the chain being fastened, even if they’re expecting Santa or the Tooth Fairy. I would suggest that they never, ever get into a car with someone you hadn’t expressly told them they should go with. It doesn’t matter whether they recognize this person or not. I would tell them that if ever they were frightened to be in a room, any room, even with a relative, it’s okay to run from that room and come and find you. I’d make sure they had a phone with your own phone number on speed-dial.”
“Not cheap,” Katherine said.
“Kroger has those pay-as-you-go kind, three for forty bucks,” Kim said, in a What planet are you from? tone. “My kids bust theirs all the time. Carlotta even flushed hers down the john last week. You just give them another. Cheap compared to a kid’s life.”
“About touching,” I said, “you’ll have to work out the wording for yourself. ” No doubt there were as many coy euphemisms as southern women.
“Telling them don’t let anyone touch you where your bathing suit covers works pretty good,” Kim said, and this time the what planet tone was meant for me.
All the mothers nodded.
I wondered if Luz knew this. Of course she did. Didn’t she?
“Or if anything creeps them out, they should just yell,” Nina said. “Kids like yelling. Dan did that, my sister’s youngest. He’s eleven. His coach got him in the locker room one day and Dan yelled and another teacher came running, and they called his mom, only they couldn’t get ahold of her, so they called me, and when I had him in the car, taking him home, I asked him what had made him yell, and he said, ‘He was a bony-faced creepazoid! He creeped me out!’ And then he wanted to know if we could go to McDonald’s.”
“And they should run,” Kim said.
“Yes, but where?” Therese said. “You don’t want them running from the frying pan to the fire.”
“Walk the ’hood,” Pauletta said. “I did that with my nephews and nieces when they were staying after that big storm down in the Carolinas. I showed them the routes from home to school, and school to safe places. I introduced them around to the good folks and warned them about the bad.”
I thought of all those times I had moved: Oslo to London to Oslo to Yorkshire to London. I couldn’t remember my mother showing me the safe places. There again, I had assumed everywhere was safe. I had assumed the world would protect me.
I remembered the kittens.
During my first few years in uniform, my partner, Frank, and I got called in to deal with a lot of bodies. More than our fair share. It became a joke in the department: a citizen calls in something suspicious and it was always Frank and I who ended up being closest and discovering the body. One winter, during a cold snap, we answered a call from an old man’s neighbors who had not seen him for two or three days. Newspapers were piling up. We broke down the door. He had died on his bed. He must have been dying slowly for two days, because although the apartment was cold, he was still warm. At some point, his cat had crawled onto the bed and given birth to five kittens. She was a skinny thing, nothing but bone; she probably had not eaten for three or four days. But when we burst in, she stood over those kittens and arched and hissed, ready to take on the world. Frank left, said he’d find a box to carry them all to the cat-rescue place. And while he was gone, the coroner’s deputy arrived and told me to move the cat so he could get at the body. I refused, told him that Frank was going to get a box. I said we would wait: what difference did five minutes make? But the coroner’s deputy thought his time was too valuable to wait, and he reached to pick up the cat. She opened his hand from his wrist bone to the base of his thumb. The blood had been shocking, as were the frantic, blind wiggling of the kittens trying to find the nipples that were gone, and the wide-eyed, pointed-whiskered mother cat who was ready to die.
I blocked his access to the bed after that, and eventually he went away. It turned out that he was the brother of a city councillor, and that day was the start of my troubles with the department. But I didn’t know that then. He left and I sat on the floor, and watched as she settled down again and gave the kittens her teats, and tried to understand. It made no sense. It wasn’t logical. She must have known that if she tried to defend those tiny things against something human-sized, she’d die. And she did it anyway. Why?
I didn’t understand until last year, when I met Julia. And suddenly it was clear. I would protect her with my body against an army—I would drink fire to keep her safe.
And now there was Luz.
“. . . know all the commonsense stuff,” Kim was saying. “What about the other stuff, that no one talks about?” I blinked. “Like what do you do when some . . . some creep tries to use your kids against you? What if they try to snatch your kid while you’re there? What if they try to grab you both? What do we do?�
�
They were looking at me.
“It depends.” I forced myself to be here, now. “Give me an example.”
“I’m walking with my youngest, Carlotta, across the parking lot. Two guys come at us.”
“How old is Carlotta?”
“Five.”
I thought of the terror of trying to protect a five-year-old, the terror of the five-year-old; words wouldn’t be much use at that age. “In an open, unprotected space get into that instinctive, favorite position, the one that works for you.” She assumed it now: left leg back, right leg forward. “Get Carlotta to wrap both arms tight around your back leg, your left leg. That way you know where she is at all times, and she’s behind you, and no one can snatch her without your noticing, and, as a bonus, she’s helping to anchor you. Children like to help.”
I hadn’t known that until late last year when, as I sat in the Carpenters’ Arkansas bathroom, bruised and uncertain, Luz had offered to kiss it all better.
“For grown children, or another adult, you hold hands. Try it now. Hold hands.” Sandra was reluctant to take Therese’s, but did. “Christie and Suze, swap sides. You want to keep your strong hand free.” Christie, left-handed, on the left, Suze on the right. “If you’re touching, you always know where your partner is. You can’t get separated. You can do the fire technique, just charge, or you can stand your ground.”
I held my hand out to an imaginary partner.
“If I need to kick on uneven ground, she can act as a counterbalance.” I mimed leaning. “And vice versa. You protect her as she helps you. You help each other.”
TWELVE
ON THE DRIVE FROM LAKE UNION TO WALLINGFORD, GARY CALLED ME BACK.
“I tried to reschedule Bingley, but he’s out sick.”
“All right.”
“Except, well, he’s not.”
“Oh?” I pulled over. The car threw a long shadow before me. I considered running the air-conditioning. It was very hot.
“Not that his assistant exactly said that. It was more a tone.”
“A tone?”
“You know. The assistant tone. The one you use when your boss is blowing chunks in the can and you say her conference call isn’t winding up on schedule.”
Blowing chunks. “Then call Turtledove. Have Bingley tracked down and questioned. Turtledove will know what to ask.”
“Would you like those other appointments moved to the afternoon also?”
Other appointments. Banks, attorneys. “Yes. Thank you.”
THERE WASN’T a single parking space on Kick’s street. I parked in the lot at Tully’s and walked the three blocks south.
The sky was as red as a forge; the sun seemed to compact the air as it sank. The heat had gone to Wallingford’s head: the neighborhood was a seething sea of urban humanity. People paused as they swung open the pub door, white teeth flashing and muscles sliding with unconscious animal health under elastic, sun-browned skin; many of the women seemed to be wearing flowing white muslin trousers and brief halter tops in intense colors. I could have been in Persepolis or Babylon or King Herod’s palace. Only the occasional Birken-stocked foot reassured me this was Seattle.
My pulse was as heavy as a mallet as I walked down Myrtle. The sky deepened from orange and cherry to hints of wine, and edged into dusk; the air glimmered around the edges. The voices of two adolescent boys sharing a cigarette as they walked up the other side of the road seemed gilded, hemmed with dream. Their smoke smelled of incense.
Kick’s front door was open and the screen door unlatched. Music, bone-hard rock, a woman’s voice, poured into the street, stopped abruptly. Then new music, a male voice: sharp cymbal work, insistent bass.
“Hello?” I rapped on the doorjamb. Nothing. “Hello?” Come in, the open door implied. I eased the screen open. “Hello?”
I took off my shoes. I don’t know why. The oak floor was smooth and hard under my feet, not quite cool. I didn’t recognize the music, but I liked it. My pulse rate began to edge up, but not from anxiety. From something else, as a child’s does when she is playing an enormously exciting game. Hide and seek.
The singer sang of dancing beneath a cherry tree.
“Hello,” I said again, and walked into the kitchen.
Kick was at the stove, a cutting board piled with stir-fry vegetables in perfect heaps by her hand. Orange carrots, enamel red peppers, spring onions greener than pine leaves. Garlic and ginger hissed and sizzled in hot oil. She was throwing the frying vegetables in a perfect arc from her wok, catching them neatly, throwing them again, in time to the music. Her hips moved, side to side, then a figure-eight weave, and her feet stepped this way and that, just a shade behind the beat, deliberate and sure. Salomé in the kitchen.
She looked dense with life. Full and secret.
“Kick,” I said, from six feet away, and she turned, and I saw her as though through a crystal-lensed scope, every grain and pore of her skin, every eyelash follicle at full magnification. I made some sound, low and hoarse, that neither of us heard, and reached out to brush a strand of oak hair from her forehead, but she moved, too, and my thumb plumped against the furrow between her brows, and the world split neatly into two, as lakes do, one layer warm and bright and light, moving easily over the older, denser, colder depths.
Kick spoke to me in two different languages. Her words, her lack of words, said, I don’t know if I forgive you, I don’t know why you’re here, I don’t know if I want to talk to you. But the rest of her body, her smell, her full lips and open hips, the music she’d chosen, was saying something altogether different, and saying it very clearly. I hung, poised, between two worlds, knowing I had to choose and that one kind of mistake would cost more than the other.
Pheromones are scentless. Their molecules slide past our conscious notice and snick home on the waiting receptor sites in the nasal epithelium, triggering a cascade of information. The body knows.
When an ovulating woman offers herself to you, she’s the choicest morsel on the planet. Her nipples are already sharp, her labia already swollen, her spine already undulating. Her skin is damp and she pants. If you touch the center of her forehead with your thumb she isn’t thinking about her head—she isn’t thinking at all, she’s imagining, believing, willing your hand to lift and turn and curve, cup the back of her head. She’s living in a reality where the hand will have no choice but to slide down that soft, flexing muscle valley of the spine to the flare of strong hips, where the other hand joins the first to hold both hip bones, immobilize them against the side of the counter, so that you can touch the base of her throat gently with your lips and she will whimper and writhe and let the muscles in her legs go, but she won’t fall, because you have her.
She’ll be feeling this as though it’s already happening, knowing absolutely that it will, because every cell is alive and crying out, Fill me, love me, cherish me, be tender, but, oh God, be sure. She wants you to want her. And when her pupils expand like that, as though you have dropped black ink into a saucer of cool blue water, and her head tips just a little, as though she’s gone blind or has had a terrible shock or maybe just too much to drink, to her she is crying in a great voice, Fuck me, right here, right now against the kitchen counter, because I want you wrist-deep inside me. I hunger, I burn, I need.
It doesn’t matter if you are tired, or unsure, if your stomach is hard with dread at not being forgiven. If you allow yourself one moment’s distraction— a microsecond’s break in eye contact, a slight shift in weight—she knows, and that knowledge is a punch in the gut. She will back up a step and search your face, and you’ll try to recover but she’ll know, and she’ll feel embarrassed—a fool or a whore—at offering so blatantly what you’re not interested in, and her fine sense of being queen of the world will shiver and break like a glass shield hit by a mace, and fall around her in dust. Oh, it will still sparkle, because sex is magic, but she will be standing there naked, and you will be a monster, and the next time she feels her womb quiver
and clench she’ll hesitate, which will confuse you, even on a day when there is no dread, no uncertainty, and that singing sureness between you will dissolve and very slowly begin to sicken and die.
The body knows. I listened to the deep message—but carefully, because at some point the deep message also must be a conscious message. Active, not just passive, agreement. I took her hand and guided the wok back down to the gas burner. Yes, her body still said, yes. I turned off the gas, but slowly, and now she reached for me. I pushed the chopping board to one side, lifted her onto the counter, and slid my hand beneath her waistband.
She was hot and swollen and I held her close, her face against my neck and she groaned. The singer pleaded to his baby to not sing yet, but before the track was over she kissed me in triumph, slid off the counter, pulled her trousers the rest of the way off, planted her feet on the floor and her palms on the top of the stove, laughed that shimmery glad laugh, and said, “More.”
After a while, I remembered that the door was open, but I didn’t care.
And a while after that, when I was lying on the floor smiling at the ceiling, she finished cooking the stirfry, and we ate it, properly clothed, at the dining room table. The windows were open but there was no breeze.
“That song you were playing when I got here—”
“Salomé.”
“Interesting words.”
She looked puzzled, then stared up at the ceiling as people do when they rerun lyrics or conversations in their head, and laughed. “All that stuff about dancing beneath the cherry tree. Poor Aud. Did you think I’d chosen it especially?”
“The subconscious can play interesting games.” I put my fork down, took a breath. “I am sorry about your tree. It was wrong of me.”
“It pissed me off so much, that beautiful tree. Baobab the Bold.”
“Baobab?”
“Better than Fred.”
It was a tree. But this time I kept my mouth shut.
“She was beautiful. Oh, I knew she was going to have to come down, but she was my tree. My tree, my decision.”
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