The Best American Essays 2015 (34 page)

When the older policeman saw the swelling, the black-and-blue, and the toes like little sausage links, his expression turned to dismay. “That's bad. That looks broken,” he said. “Ma'am, does your husband have a phone number we can reach him at? We need him to come back.”

They waited outside, and I called Caleb. “I'm sorry,” I said. “They are going to arrest you.”

He said he already knew.

He left his phone on while they arrested him so I could listen. I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop myself. “Did she hit you?” one of the officers asked. “Because we can arrest her, too.”

Caleb answered honestly. He said no.

We were together for almost two years before he was violent with me. First he pushed me against a wall. It was two more years before he hit me, and another year after that before he hit me again. It happened so slowly, then so fast.

While the older policeman arrested Caleb, the younger one waited with me for the paramedics to arrive. “Is he going to lose his job?” I asked.

“No, probably not,” he said.

“Is he going to leave me?” I asked.

“You didn't do anything wrong,” he said.

I wanted him to hug me so I could hide my face in the folds of his black uniform. I crumpled into the rocking chair instead.

“He's going to leave me,” I said.

When our elderly neighbor developed dementia and one night thought a boy was hiding under her bed, Caleb stayed with her. When the child of an administrative assistant in Caleb's department needed a heart transplant, Caleb went to the assistant's house and helped him put down wood floors in his basement to create a playroom for the little boy. When my dad needed help installing new windows in the house, or mowing the lawn, or chopping wood, Caleb was always ready to help. I was so grateful to be married to someone so generous with his time, so loving.

The young policeman called for an ambulance. The EMTs looked at my foot. They didn't ask about what happened. They just told me it looked bad, that it could be broken. They asked me if I wanted to go to the emergency room, but I declined, so they instructed me to see a doctor and made me sign a waiver saying they weren't responsible if I didn't get follow-up care. And then I was alone in our home.

Two years after we moved, I started graduate school and finally made some friends, but it was hard to spend time with them. I had to lie: I shut my arm in the door. I tripped on a rug and hit my face on the table. I don't know where that bruise came from. I think I did it in my sleep. I think I'm anemic. I just bruise so easily.

Once Caleb said to me, “You probably wish that someone would figure out where those bruises are coming from. You probably wish someone knew, so that things could change.” He said it with such sadness.

After the arrest, I hobbled around in denial for a few days until a concerned friend pushed me into getting the foot examined.

I was embarrassed at the urgent-care center. I told the nurse, “It's okay. He's already been arrested. I don't need anything. I'm safe,” but he didn't seem to believe me. The nurse put me in a wheelchair even though I insisted I could walk, and the doctor touched and turned my foot with such care that, out of some sort of misguided impulse, I almost blurted out, “Mom!” But I was thirty-four years old, and the distance between my mother and me was punctuated by so many mountains that she couldn't have saved me.

Caleb wanted to change. He got therapy. He went to anger management. He did everything right. We were allies. Together we were going to fix this problem.

He started taking medication shortly after our sixth anniversary. Every time he was violent with me, he would go to a psychiatrist who increased his dosage. I thought the psychiatrist could fix him.

He wasn't supposed to drink on the medication, but he did. One night he was in a stupor and staring at something. “What are you looking at?” I asked.

“Myself,” he said. “That's me sitting in that chair.” He pointed at an empty chair across the room. “That me is laughing at me.” His eyes were confused, sad.

“Are you manipulating me?” I asked, worried.

“I'm not the one who manipulates you,” he said. He gestured toward the chair again, his voice quickening, earnest almost. “He's the one who manipulates you. It's not me.”

I was so tired. I didn't know what to say. “You should go to bed.”

His eyes turned from sadness to rage. He stood up and went to the stairs, then turned back to me and said, “I hope you get chlamydia and die.”

Shortly before I left him, I told a counselor that my husband was hitting me and showed her the bruises. She held me while I wept in her arms. I then told a close friend that he yelled at me and called me names, but I didn't yet tell her he was beating me.

My counselor said, “You are taking everything he says and playing it on repeat over and over again. You have to stop the tape.”

But I couldn't stop the tape. I heard over and over:

You are a fucking cunt. You are a fucking cunt. You are a fucking cunt. You are a fucking cunt. You are a fucking cunt. You are a fucking cunt. You are a fucking cunt.

And then his voice became my voice:

I am a fucking cunt.

“You can't hold the things I say when I'm mad against me,” he said. “That isn't fair. Those aren't the things I mean.”

At the urgent care, the doctor said, “This will take a long time to heal. It will change color over time. It will look like a sunset.” As I drove home, I heard the words over and over:

It will look like a sunset. It will look like a sunset. It will look like a sunset. It will look like a sunset. It will look like a sunset. It will look like a sunset. It will look like a sunset.

I could never bring myself to leave. Instead I was a regular at the Travelodge. I always returned home before morning, keeping the hotel key card just in case, then climbing into bed and wrapping my arms around Caleb's back. All of the usual suspects drew me back—concerns about our six-year-old, money, where we would live, and love. I still loved him. I told myself he would get better.

In sickness and in health.
Those were my vows in that little church in Idaho where we held hands while sunlight filtered through stained glass and spring lilacs bloomed outside. Caleb was sick.

He only hit me in the face once. A red bruise bloomed across my cheek, and my eye was split and oozing. Afterward we both sat on the bathroom floor, exhausted. “You made me hit you in the face,” he said mournfully. “Now everyone is going to know.”

A month or so before his arrest, I thought I was losing my hair from stress. In the shower, red strands swam in the water by my feet. Chunks were stuck to my fingers. It didn't matter. I hadn't felt pretty in years.

When I rubbed the shampoo into my scalp, the skin was tender, and I realized I wasn't losing my hair. He had ripped it out, and I hadn't even felt it.

I went into a cave when he hit me. I curled into my body like a slug, then traveled into a deep darkness where I felt nothing. I heard his voice, his fists, the blasts in my ears from the blows to the side of my head. I heard my own screaming.

Deep in that cave, it wasn't real, even as it was happening.

What was real was when we lay in bed, our son between us—my head on my husband's shoulder, his head resting on mine—and our son said, “The whole family is cuddled up.”

“I'm not the type of person to hit a woman,” he said. “So it must be you. You are the one who brings this out in me. I would not be like this if I was with a different woman.”

The same night that Caleb pulled out my hair, he punched me in the spine with such force that my body arched back as though it had been shocked with electricity. I was jolted out of my cave. He did it again. “No,” I screamed. I could not protect myself.

My only protection was the darkness—the dissociation. I hadn't felt him ripping out hair, but when he hit me in the spine, the pain was too intense. That part of my body was too vulnerable. I couldn't curl up. I couldn't wrap my arms around it.

I was present for what was happening. I stopped breathing for a moment. He paused.

It was as though he, too, felt that I was present, and he stopped.

I couldn't have been human to him in those moments.

He never raped me, so there's that.

I left him two days after he was arrested, but I wasn't ready. I still wasn't ready.

We were one of those couples that others liked to be around. We laughed a lot, respected each other, and supported each other's work. We loved the same things: cooking Thai food, impromptu dance parties in the living room,
Friday Night Lights
marathons. We always found time for date nights. We vacationed in Greece, New York City, and Glacier National Park. We emailed each other silly videos during the day when we were at work. He phoned me from the car, five minutes after leaving the house, just to talk.

The day that I left him, I called Rebecca, a kind and accepting friend whom I knew would help. It wasn't an easy call to make.

She lived with her partner, and they let my son and me stay with them for a month until we had our own place. She and I had only known each other for a little over a year. I told her about the beatings, how Caleb broke my phone when I tried to call for help, how he pulled me out from underneath the bed by my ankles, how I hid shaking in the closet while he raged, how he always found me, how there was no safe place for me.

When I saw the fear in her eyes, I understood the magnitude of what was happening.

Of everyone I had dated, he was the gentlest. I loved his soft hands, his embraces, his kind heart.

He wrote me love letters, rubbed my feet, took me out to lunch, got up first in the mornings with our son so that I could sleep in. He took care of me. He was more often kind to me than unkind.

Sometimes, when I'm cooking dinner by myself, I can feel the way he would lay his head on my shoulder while I stirred a pot, the way he would turn me around and kiss me, tell me how much he loved my cooking, how beautiful I was, how lucky he was.

On Thanksgiving Day, Caleb took our son to his family's annual Thanksgiving dinner. While they ate turkey and dressing around the oak table I had eaten at so many times before, I returned to my home with Rebecca and threw as many things as I could fit into laundry baskets, then stuffed them into the back seat of my car. I packed my son's Legos, enough blankets for us to sleep on the floor, and my work clothes, but I left behind anything sentimental. Our wedding photo was on a table, the glass broken. I had thrown it on the ground.

After packing, Rebecca and I ate at a Chinese buffet attached to a casino because it was the only place open in three counties. The future loomed before me like a buffet full of hungry, lonely people.

My favorite photo of Caleb and me is a self-portrait taken on a beach at Ecola State Park on the Oregon coast. We had hiked down a steep trail, stopping to lunch on smoked salmon and bagels, and ended up on a beach. The tide was low, and sand dollars dotted the shore. We scooped them up like prizes. We ran into the surf. We hugged. In the photo we are both smiling, our heads pressed together.

When I look at that photo now, I wonder,
Where are those people? Where did they go?

Just to the right of us was a cave. I had wanted to go in it, but the tide was coming in, and I was afraid of getting trapped and drowning.

Six months after I left Caleb, I went home to Idaho for the summer. After that I was moving to another state. It was over. The counselor at the domestic violence shelter was proud of me. So many women never get out. I didn't feel proud. I didn't want to get out. I wanted to keep dancing with Caleb, keep sending funny emails to each other, keep cuddling with our son between us.

There are days when I still wish that he would beg me to take him back, promise to change, actually change. This will never happen. Even if he never hit me again, my body will always remember that fist on my back.

In Idaho, the state where Caleb and I met, where we had our son, I drove the sun-baked streets. There was the apartment where Caleb sat next to me on the couch, nervously wiped his hand across his forehead, and said in a halting voice, “Kelly, I want to marry you.”

There was the house where our baby slept in a basket by the bed. When he cried, I nursed him while Caleb draped his arm around my waist, nuzzling his head into my hair.

There was the riverside trail where we pushed the stroller and fantasized over which fancy house we would buy if we ever had any money, where our toddler threw sticks into the river, where Caleb scooped him up and held him upside down while we all giggled.

There was the river where, in winter, our dog slid out onto the ice and into the cold water. Caleb stretched out on the ice and reached his hands out to our dog while I watched, terrified. “I can't lose you both,” I screamed.

I wondered if it would have happened if we had stayed in Idaho.

But then there was the house where he first pushed me up against a wall, where he backed me into the corner, where he threw our baby's bouncer. The neighbor watched, worried, from her stoop while he put the broken pieces in the trash can on the curb and I cried in the window.

The same house where my mother took me into the backyard and said, “Listen to me. I have friends who have left their husbands. I have seen it on the other side. It is not better on the other side. Try hard. Try hard before you give up.”