Promises of Home (31 page)

My face felt hot and a slow throb of headache started a surging pain in my temples. My mind felt dizzy, trying to trace the web of Trey’s life. I stepped inside and shut the door.

Clo sat with Mama in the living room, avidly watching a talk show with the sound turned real low. Mama doesn’t like noise much anymore. Clo glanced up at me.

“I wasn’t about to let that white trash in this house,” she proclaimed. “Be mad at me if you want.”

“I’m not mad at you. Where’s Mark?”

She jerked her head toward the kitchen. “Back porch, I think. How’d his therapy go? He feeling better?”

I didn’t answer her, heading out to the porch. It was empty, the rain the only sound, tapping like fingers on foil.

“He’s not there,” I called back to Clo, stepping into the kitchen.

“Well, he called Bradley Foradoiy and chatted with him a minute. Then he said he was going out on the porch and listen to the rain.”

Bradley. Oh, God, and Mark was so single-minded about discovering what was going on at the Foradorys’. I phoned Davis’s number. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. An answering click.

And then the screams.

I IGNORED THE STOP SIGN AT THE INTERSECTION OF Heydl and Fifth where the Foradory house sat, screeching to a stop and spraying water. Mark’s bike lay sprawled in the yard, glistening wetly. I ran across the grass, vaulting his bike and leaping up the steps in two jumps. The front door was unlocked and I shoved it open, hollering for Mark. I heard a piercing cry from the back of the house.

I tore through the immaculate living room, ignoring the muddy trail I left in my wake. I burst through the kitchen, which opened up into a breakfast nook. And ran into a scene I hadn’t quite expected.

Mark, grimacing, was trying to drag a struggling Bradley back toward the porch door. Bradley kicked at the tiles, scuffing them with his cowboy boots, wailing and flailing his arms. The phone receiver, still off the hook, dangled above the floor and slowly revolved on its cord. Cayla Foradory, her eyes wild and her hair straggling in her face, held a metal broomstick in her hand, blood dotting one end of it. She was whacking the hell out of something on the floor. It was only after I’d taken four more steps in that I saw that she was beating the tar out of Davis, curled in a fetal ball on the kitchen floor.

“Uncle Jordy! Help us! She’s gonna kill him!” Mark screamed at me. I rushed toward Cayla and Davis. He didn’t appear to be moving.

I came up behind Cayla and grabbed the broomstick when she brought it back to have another go at her husband. I yanked it away and she spun toward me, her eyes filled with such blinding fury that I took a shocked step
backward. She swung a fist at me and nearly connected with my jaw. Stunned with surprise, I seized her arms and shook her hard.

“Cayla! Stop it! It’s me, Jordy!” She struggled against me like she’d never seen me. I shook her again and she calmed, the berserker rage fading. She took a long, hard, shuddering breath and gasped, “Get out. Get out of here.”

“What did he do to you? Did he hit you? Hit Bradley?” I glanced at her son, but he seemed more upset than injured, crying and mewling in Mark’s arms.

“Hit her? Bullshit!” Mark screamed. “She hits him! She beats
him!
”

Mark’s words oozed in. I glanced over at Davis; slowly, like a snake awakening to warmth, he uncoiled himself. I saw bruises on his forearms, his neck, and a vicious cut above the left eye. His tortoiseshell glasses lay broken by his elbow. He looked at me like a whipped dog, awaiting the next kick. This wasn’t my friend—this was someone else. Someone I didn’t know.

“Get out!” Cayla rediscovered her voice. “Get out of my house right … this … minute.”

I pushed her away from me and knelt by Davis’s side. He flinched away from my touch, burying his face in the crook of his arm.

“Get my boy out of here. Take Bradley and go,” he muttered into his arm, his voice barely audible. “Please. I don’t want him to see me this way.”

“She’s crazy, Uncle Jordy!” Mark hollered. Bradley wrestled free from him and crawled to his father’s side. I blinked up at Cayla; she didn’t look at any of us except for her son. She tried to take him by the arm, gently, but he squirmed away from her, holding his father’s hand. Bradley’s face was contorted with tears, his lips curling in anguish. Oh, God, what had this boy seen in this house?

“You stay away, Mom,” Bradley cried. “Stay away.”

Cayla straightened up and, without a word, turned and stumbled out of the kitchen.

“I saw it all,” Mark gasped, squatting by me. “She was
whaling on him with that broomstick and also tried to hit him with a skillet. You want me to call the cops?”

“No! No police!” Davis seized my arm, pressing hard. “Promise me, no police.”

“Davis. You have to tell me what’s happened here.”

“I
told
you, Uncle Jordy—”

“Mark, please! Let Davis talk.”

Davis couldn’t look into my eyes. He ran fingers across his head and left a trickle of blood in the thinning blond hair. “Um, nothing really, it was just an argument—”

“For God’s sake, Davis, she was about to beat you unconscious. Now, what did you argue about? What did you do to her?”

“Nothing. I wouldn’t hurt her. Please, just take Bradley and go. Please.”

I took Bradley’s frown-locked face in my hands. “Bradley. Listen to me. What happened here?”

Bradley blinked back more tears. His breath came in ragged, aching gasps. His chin wobbled against my fingers, spittle smearing my hand. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. Finally he found his voice and whispered, “Ain’t supposed to tell. Mom said never tell. Never tell, never tell, never tell!”

“You can tell me, Bradley. You know you can.” I kept my voice low and soothing. If violence held sway in this house, God only knew what this poor kid had witnessed.

Bradley fixed his eyes on the floor, the unspeakable secret weighing hard on his heart. After a long minute he spoke, his fingers drawing nervous patterns on the tiles. “Mom. She gets mad. She hits Daddy. She hits him, and she hits him again.” He raised his face again, anguish painting his features. “I ain’t supposed to tell!” He collapsed against Mark, who looked at me with an accusing glare.

“Mark. Take Bradley back to our house,” I said.

“Won’t go! Daddy—” Bradley protested.

“Son. Do as Jordan says.” Davis still wouldn’t look at me. Slowly, Mark got Bradley to his feet and led him out
of the kitchen. Bradley was bent with walking, his feet shuffling like a prisoner fettered at the ankles.

I felt thoroughly sick. “Davis. Look at me. How long has this been going on?”

He, like his son, stared at the floor. He rubbed at a spot of his own blood that had dripped from his nose to the tile. More blood leaked between his teeth. I seized his jaw and turned his face toward mine, hot with anger toward him.

“Davis, damn you, answer me! How long has she been battering you?”

He closed his eyes, shamefaced. “Since we found out Bradley was retarded. I guess about thirteen years.”

“
What?
”

“She can’t help it. You know what a temper she’s always had. She just gets upset when Bradley messes up and she, well, she can take it out on me,” His voice sounded soft, reasoning, the tone of long justification of terrible wrong.

“For God’s sake! Takes it out on you? She was going to beat you to a pulp, Davis!”

“Well, she couldn’t hit Bradley, could she?” Davis said.

I closed my eyes in nausea. “But Mark saw bruises on Bradley’s arm—”

“She got upset with me last night. Bradley tried to stop her and she hurt him. She hurt him for the first time.” He finally looked at me. His blue eyes were streaked with bloodshot sorrow. “I couldn’t believe she hurt him. So I figured, it can’t go on, I can’t let her hurt my boy. So I went to go see Steven Teague, I thought he’d know what to do, what I could do to make her better.”

“Oh, Davis, Jesus. You can’t fix what’s wrong with Cayla. She has to do that.”

“We got back and Bradley told her he’d seen Mark. Cayla wanted to know where’d we been. I told her I went to Teague’s office and she went crazy.” He made a horrible snuffling sound of sickness and sadness long buried.

“Davis. Why didn’t you leave her?”

“I can’t. I love her.”

“I don’t understand you at all.” My own voice sounded
near the breaking point. “Why didn’t you defend yourself, fight back? Why’d you let her do this to you?” I was so mad, so frustrated, I wanted to shake him myself.

“Good God. You don’t hit girls, Jordan. I could never hit Cayla.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t let anyone know. Hell, you don’t think I see how you look at me right now? A man that lets a woman beat him. It’s wives that get beaten, not husbands. What kind of man do you think people would say I was?”

If this was his reasoning and logic, he was a far sorrier lawyer than I ever suspected. “I would have respected you for getting out of this hell, Davis.”

He buried his face in his hands. “I’m so ashamed. So ashamed. My boy—”

“Listen to me. We’ll get you and Bradley out of here. You can stay with us, as long as you need. We’ll see if we can get Cayla to go to counseling. No one has to know what’s happened.”

Davis Foradory turned away from me. “No. People will know. They’ll find out. Like Clevey and your sister.”

“Sister? She knows about this?” I managed to keep my jaw off the blood-specked tile, but it wasn’t easy.

“She came over—the morning Trey was shot. We had been having breakfast and Bradley spilled his milk all over the table, all over the paper. Cayla got upset with me about it. She was hitting me, telling me that Bradley’s clumsiness was my fault, I shouldn’t have put so much milk in his glass—and Arlene walked in. She tried to stop Cayla, and Cayla belted her. Gave her that shiner. I’m awful sorry about that. So’s Cayla.”

Oh, God have mercy. “Your wife hit my sister?”

“Yeah. Knocked her to the floor. Cayla got upset and ran upstairs, so I took care of Arlene. She was so surprised she could hardly say much.”

Although I could imagine Sister being shocked, I could hardly picture her at a loss for words. “She told me she’d fallen down some steps and blackened her eye.”

“I begged her not to tell. I said Cayla didn’t mean it, she
just had been awful upset. She was hankering to go wallop Cayla, but I talked her out of it. For Bradley’s sake.”

“I don’t understand why my sister was here.”

Davis sniffed. “She wanted me to be her attorney. Get a restraining order against Trey, keep him from Mark.” He wiped his dripping nose with the back of his sleeve, the carefully cultured lawyer gone. “I told her if she didn’t tell about Cayla, I’d represent her for free.”

I sat back down on the floor. Free legal services for her silence. And she’d done it, knowing that a boy was in an abusive household. Suddenly I wasn’t real happy with my sister.

He saw it in my face, “Oh, she don’t know the whole story, Jordan. Don’t be mad at Arlene. Please, I made her promise. I told her it was the only time that Cayla hit me.”

“And Clevey? He knew, didn’t he? You said so.”

Davis nodded, misery clouding his face again. “He found out about a year ago. He saw a bruise on my arm when we were out at Lake Bonaparte fishing. He kept at me about it, and I finally told him. I confided in him. He kept his mouth shut for months, but then he wanted money!” Davis quivered with rage.

“How much money?”

“Oh, God, thousands,” Davis leaned against the wall, face contorting in pain. I’d been so floored by this series of revelations that I hadn’t even thought about getting him to a doctor. I made him sit, went to the sink, and dampened a washcloth. I handed it to him and slowly, he cleaned his face, blinking at his blood on the cloth.

“Clevey said if I didn’t pay, he’d feature us in a story he was writing about domestic violence.” Davis stared at me, eyes rolling. “I couldn’t let that happen, oh no. It’d ruin me. I’d have lost my law practice. And if I lost that, I’d have to sell my partnership in KBAV.”

I held my breath. “Did you kill him, Davis? Did you?”

He gave a shuddering breath. “No. I didn’t. I wanted to; God, I even thought about it. But I was too scared. And he promised that the money would be just that once. I could get on with my life.”

As though you could, I thought. Davis couldn’t get on with life while Cayla beat him. He and his son would forever be caught in a loop of bitterness and twisted love, manifested with fists and clawing fingers. And Clevey would have taken his place at KBAV. The humiliation would have been utter.

“You believe me, don’t you, Jordan? I swear, I’m not a killer.”

No, I didn’t think Davis was. He hadn’t roused himself to flee the hell his house had become; he wouldn’t have shot Clevey Shivers in cold blood. I had to get him to take action now, though.

“Never mind Clevey now. We’re gonna get you and Bradley out of here.”

“No.” He shook his head violently. “I can’t leave my house. How do I explain it?”

“We’ll say you and Cayla are just having some problem. People don’t have to know the specifics.”

“Then why wouldn’t Bradley stay with his mom? Kids stay with moms. Folks’ll know, they’ll find out, and I’m ruined!” His voice rose in a whiny shriek.