You Have the Wrong Man

by Maria Flook

  The girl outside screamed for assistance. It was nothing new to Rick, who had lived in different women’s shelters with Carol ever since his father was first arrested. She had always found them a place to stay. She would meet a new boyfriend, which was to say she became someone’s mouse for a few months. When it fell apart, she left the man and took Rick to a new shelter, where he was attended to by grim, no-nonsense volunteers. These volunteers aided “women in transition,” and, together with the victims, they drew up “contracts” based upon their individual goals. The women signed the contracts, placing their names, written in cursive, alongside the signature of the counselor, also in cursive. The filing cabinet in his mother’s office had scores of these signed contracts.

  Carol had taken an entry-level position at the Stop Over Shelter, volunteering to do the cleaning. Then she made the casserole dinners and learned how to shop for an uncertain population, remaining prepared and flexible for the unspecified drop-ins. Carol began answering the telephone in the office, and she took on other clerical duties. She learned to help with the intake interviews and she typed up the monthly reports for the executive advisory board.

  Her professional duties quelled the tremors and aftershocks of her own violent history. By relating her personal experiences in a daily, instructive narrative for the benefit of the center’s vulnerable residents, Carol believed that she purged herself.

  Rick didn’t enjoy living next door to the shelter. He was never free of its heavy moral scheme. The two buildings were separated by a tight alley, and his bedroom seemed directly annexed to the flow of moods coming and going.

  The girl’s voice evaporated in the complicated stagings of his sexual fantasy, which was typically about an imaginary girl who exhibited the collective aspects of all girls, including some of the bruised visitors next door, whom he sometimes viewed as they crossed the lighted stairwell.

  He rolled onto his bed. He shuddered again, with a prolonged abdominal conclusion which radiated upwards from his pelvis and across the empty prairie where he had no tiny well, no navel to collect it. He lifted the corner of the shade to look out. The girl with the baby was being admitted into the house next door. His own mother was leading her by the elbow. Another volunteer took the squalling infant. He saw that the girl had beautiful blond hair like Darryl Hannah. Wavy sheets of platinum fluff, attractive for its unnatural tint, its supernatural loft. The baby wore a knitted cap with a gaudy pom-pom.

  Rick’s vigorous routine had provoked his asthma and he grabbed his inhaler. He took a few puffs from the plastic dispenser. His mother would be tied up for a while.

  He stood up and pushed his mother’s half-slip down until it circled his feet. He stepped out of it, and left it in a black ring on the floor. He pulled on his jeans and sweatshirt, remembering to return the slip to the hamper in the bathroom before walking through to Carol’s bedroom where a portable TV rested on a chair. He lifted the TV, jerked its cord loose, and brought it into his own bedroom.

  The baby was extremely agitated and Carol had difficulty appraising its general condition. Its eyes were puffy and its skin was blotchy from all its wailing. She opened a can of Enfamil and poured it into a plastic bottle. She put the bottle in a pan of water on the kitchen stove. The baby would quiet down with a feeding. There was something pitiful about the child which suggested some greater peril. Carol saw immediately that the young mother cradled her baby with the dumb ambivalence of a frozen peach tree holding a Sterno pot in its iced branches. The girl was already in flight, receding from her surroundings even as she sat there, across from Carol, writing her name on a form. Carol felt sympathy for the baby and for its mother, the other baby. Yet she had to write an accurate intake report. Iris’s blank response to the shuddering bundle in her lap had to be documented. Carol wrote down exactly what she saw before her at that very moment, at 10:35 P.M.: “Mother exhibits no positive feelings for the infant.”

  “Thank goodness you had the foresight to come here tonight,” Carol told Iris.

  Iris nodded.

  “You have made the right decision. It’s a first decision. You’ll have to make a lot more of them.”

  “Um-huh.”

  Carol said, “No kidding. It takes a lot of hard thinking, doesn’t it? This is only the beginning.”

  Iris looked back at Carol. She didn’t try to conceal her rising sarcasm, which tightened her mouth into a hard pink bud. “Shit. I guess I thought it would be the best thing to get out of a place where they were trying to kill me.”

  “A wise decision.”

  “I don’t need to be Einstein.”

  Carol didn’t smile. She showed respect for the seriousness of the attack. She had learned of many peculiar weapons used for their immediate availability. Table forks; nail scissors; snow shovels; wall phones; cast-iron door stops; any small appliance that can be hurled across a room. Carol told the girl, “You have to be more than Einstein. You have to time-travel. The future isn’t something that waits for you. You have to walk towards it or else it pushes you around.”

  Iris nodded at Carol as if she suddenly understood the small feat she had accomplished. She had fled from her persecutors.

  Carol said, “You got up and walked out of that apartment before your baby got hurt.”

  Iris looked down at Terrell. Never once had she thought of his safety as a catalyst for her departure.

  A staff nurse had come back with a stainless-steel bowl of warm water to which she added a squirt of Betadine disinfectant. She pulled two gloves from a dispenser and their fine white powder drifted through the air. Wearing the gloves, she soaked a gauze sponge in the soapy water and dabbed it against Iris’s face. Iris winced, but she didn’t protest. The woman cleaned Iris’s face, leaving the orange tint of the medicinal soap across her cheek. “I don’t think stitches will help this.” The nurse pinched the two-inch cuts together with her latex fingertips to see if they needed suturing. “These are probably going to scar one way or the other. Do you think she needs to get these stitched?”

  “You won’t do it?” Carol asked the nurse.

  “No.”

  “I understand,” Carol said. Carol leaned closer to Iris’s face to look at her cuts.

  “Are you a doctor?” Iris said.

  “Do you want a doctor?” Carol leaned back in her chair.

  The nurse peeled off her soapy gloves.

  “I guess she’s too spooked to stitch me up. Well, I don’t give a shit about stitches,” Iris said.

  Carol reached up to her head and collected clumps of her wavy hair, pulling it behind her ear. “See what I have here?”

  Iris saw a raised scar at Carol’s temple. The scar looked like pink piping edging Carol’s hairline and upper cheek where her ear had been reattached, sewn a little off-center.

  “He ripped it right off of me,” Carol told her.

  “He tore your ear off?”

  “Just about did. I waited too long to get it fixed, that’s why it looks like it does, kind of messy. Because I waited. That’s a mistake. We’re asking you what you want to do about your cuts. It’s your decision. I told you, once you make the first decision there’s a string of them.”

  Iris looked at Carol’s ear. She turned back to look at the skittish nurse. “Well, don’t stitches leave those railroad tracks? Like Frankenstein?”

  “You don’t want to go to emergency?”

  “Not for now.”

  A resident came into the room looking for help. The nurse was relieved to have the excuse, and went out. Carol remained with Iris and walked over to the sink. She carefully emptied the sudsy water from the bowl and turned it under the tap. She saw her face smeared or constricted as she rinsed the shiny hip of the stainless-steel bowl. Her ex-husband assumed an important role in all her routine Stop Over indoctrinations. She brought him up at each intake interview, each time she pulled her hair away from her ear. The scars he had left her with were Carol’s “tools of the trade.” She pushed the cuffs of her sleeves
past her elbows to show the new girl the ruddy burn marks on her forearms. “I got these burns from some Scottie-dog andirons when he tried to push me into the fireplace. You should have seen the blisters.” She liked to describe these Scottie andirons to the girls—their absurd cuteness at that frozen moment. She opened her mouth to reveal a lopsided hump in the middle of her tongue. She had bit right through it when her husband slammed her against the hood of his car and her chin banged shut on the tough wedge of muscle. Repairs to her tongue required both internal and external sutures to reconnect blood vessels, nerves, and the pebbly surface where her taste buds were shunted, clustered on one side. She believed that this particular injury had a metaphoric resonance. She had to bite her own tongue before she could speak out against his infractions.

  “That bottle’s ready for your baby,” Carol told Iris. Carol took the bottle of formula from the pan of tepid water and handed it to Iris. Iris followed Carol upstairs to one of the bedrooms. The hallway smelled of Murphy’s Oil Soap and somebody’s hairspray. Iris recognized the scent, a light alcohol odor laced with a sweet varnish smell. It was oddly reassuring; although she didn’t use hairspray herself, she liked the fact that the other residents were far enough along in the game to be primping instead of swabbing facial cuts. Over and above the hairspray scent, the smell of fresh dough from the bakery, two doors away, added a sickening expectation to everything.

  “In here,” Carol said.

  The room was small, with one single bed and a tiny baby crib, not a full-sized model, but good enough. “I get a private room? Why?” Iris was stung by her exclusion from the rest.

  “You don’t need to meet the other residents tonight. There’s time for that tomorrow at Morning Meeting.”

  Iris didn’t plan on attending any “meetings” or putting forth any effort.

  Carol said, “Diapers are there. I think these are his size, right?”

  “I guess he’s wet. I should change him.” Iris didn’t move to check the baby’s diaper. Terrell was already working at the bottle. His sucking was strong and consistent as if he were not only drinking the formula but losing himself again in its familiar contents. His shoulders heaved once, twice, until his back wasn’t arched. His tiny hands opened and closed across the fat neck of the plastic nurser. His eyes were still dewy from his brutal course of tears.

  Carol watched Iris to see if the girl herself took comfort in the infant’s respite. The teenaged girl looked down at the baby with only a mild acknowledgment of the baby’s level of comfort, which waxed in direct correspondence to the diminishing amount of formula left in the bottle. Carol saw that Iris had little available kindness after her turmoil and with the consistent stinging of the soap upon her bizarre cuts.

  After another moment, Carol left Iris in the room and went down the stairs and out through the front door, leaving the house to the night attendant. She walked next door and climbed to her second-floor apartment. She heard the television going in Rick’s room. When she looked in, he was asleep. The TV movie was reaching its conclusion and police sirens increased to a remarkable, sharp crescendo. She turned off the set. The abrupt evaporation of decibels caused her son to stir but he did not wake up.

  Saturday morning the women had assembled in the downstairs parlor for their meeting. Terrell was happy in his crib, batting bright, felt zoo animals which hung from a dowel duct-taped to the railing. Carol brought Iris down to join the group. “If he cries you can hear him on the baby monitor. We’ve got two speakers downstairs.” Iris followed Carol into the front parlor, where there was a coffee urn on the sideboard. Carol gave Iris a coffee mug. “This is your personal mug.” Iris saw that each woman was holding one of these oversized cups with the S.O.S. logo printed in red script across the white ceramic. “Just wash and dry it for yourself and keep it with your personal possessions. Take it with you when you leave. It’s a reminder,” Carol told her.

  Iris looked at the new cup in her hands. It was a token she didn’t think she would cherish when she was ready to leave the shelter. She walked over to the coffee urn and turned the plastic handle. She filled her mug and spooned sugar over the lip, spilling the silky granules into the waffle place mat, where she couldn’t sweep it up with the palm of her hand.

  A woman named Leslie was explaining her week to the group, reviewing the final days before she came to the shelter to get away from her husband. She listed events in the order of their specific chronology rather than for their shock value. Her husband had whacked her across the chops on Monday—but he never touched her again. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, he refrained from using his brute strength.

  “You were waiting for him to hit you another time? You came here when you couldn’t stand it anymore?”

  “No. I think he was finished hitting me.”

  “Then what?”

  “He started to say things,” Leslie said.

  “He said things,” another resident underscored the detail.

  “Sure he did,” a third woman said. “The episode’s not over without his verbal say-so. She’s cornered and he can say whatever comes into his head. She can’t get her back up about it.”

  “She’s knocked down.”

  “He hates seeing the damaged goods.”

  “Yeah, with her tail between her legs.”

  “He can be as vile as he wants. Isn’t that the long saga?”

  “That’s right.”

  Carol was pleased by how well the group was running itself. She no longer had to prod them. Yes, their mates have said terrible things. Neutral words, words that normally have useful and productive meanings, can be defiled. An ordinary verb can be transformed by an act of violence. Rick was just a toddler. She had not yet cut his hair, ever, and it fell to his shoulders in golden ribbons. She brought a scissors and a fine-toothed comb outside to the wading pool where the hose was still filling the tiny luscious circle on the first hot day of June. Just that morning Carol had purchased the plastic wading pool at Kmart, tugging it loose from a nested stack of preformed plastic shells. She set it up in the narrow, fenced backyard of the duplex. The surface of the water shivered as a light breeze shifted directions. Its chalk-blue disc looked irresistible against the newly seeded grass which already needed mowing. The water churned from the hose until the bright vessel was brimming.

  Carol decided to let the water heat up in the sun before she let the baby get in, so she started to cut Rick’s hair, saving a few of his long curls in a number-ten envelope.

  Her husband came outside. He had been sleeping in the dark living room and the bright sun annoyed him. He visored his eyes with his hand, in a frozen salute to his wife.

  “What the hell is this?” he said, looking at the wading pool. “That’s got to be bad for the grass.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “It’s too full. That’s a lot of weight on my grass.”

  It was Carol, herself, who had sprinkled the seed mix over the shabby patches in the lawn. “Oh, you think it will hurt the baby grass?”

  “Dump it,” he told her.

  Her husband had no landscaping interests. Carol recognized his mood; he was going to pick a fight if he could find a reason. The novelty of the little pool was an easy target.

  “I’m not going to empty it yet. Rick hasn’t been in it.”

  “Let’s put him in for a second.” He went over to the sand box and lifted the toddler.

  “Wait, the water’s still too cold,” she told her husband.

  He lowered the baby into the pool, until he was immersed to his waist; when he sat down, the water was up to his collarbone. The toddler squealed with the abrupt sensation. He started to wail, then changed his mind. He splashed his hands and chortled.

  Carol glared at her husband.

  “What’s the matter? You have a problem?” he said.

  She kneeled by the side of the pool and sifted the water through a plastic strainer to engage the baby. Her husband walked over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “G
ot a problem?” he said. She didn’t answer his question. Her lack of a comment finalized her husband’s half-formed idea. He pushed her face into the water and weighted her neck with his forearm. She struggled. He kept her head under the water. She opened her eyes and saw her baby’s chubby legs and bottom.

  He let her up once.

  “I can’t breathe,” she screamed.

  He pushed her under again.

  She tried to sit up but he had his weight against her. She saw her husband’s hand reach for the strainer and he stirred the water near the baby. Carol took a little water down her windpipe. She coughed and took in more. “Breathe,” she heard him saying.

  “Go ahead. Breathe,” he told her again.

  The water in her ears didn’t entirely cushion his voice, and she tried to gauge at what point he was in his typical arc of madness. He allowed her to turn her cheek to the side to gulp air, before shoving her under again. The baby tugged her wet ropes of hair whenever it drifted near him. She reached for his tiny foot to reassure him.

  Rick strolled into the room with two boxes of doughnuts. He opened the boxes and put them on the sideboard, slamming down some loose dollars. He flipped open the boxes and stole two crullers before going outside.

  The women closed in on the sweets and returned to their chairs.

  “My husband said terrible things,” the woman named Leslie repeated.

  The circle drank their coffee and nibbled the sweets with the unselfconscious, let’s-get-down-to-brass-tacks poise of NASA specialists or a corporate think tank as they initiate the critical phase of a serious discussion.

  But Iris sipped the metallic coffee and shrugged. She said, “Well, what did he say?”

  The women turned to look at Iris. She was rushing into it. She should give Leslie’s problem a little more skirt. “I mean,” Iris said, “if you want to tell us what he said—we’re all ears.”