Scratch, page 4
“I don’t know.” Holly smudged her canvas with her thumb. She stood back to appraise her work. “He seems okay with it. He hasn’t really said much one way or the other.”
“How is he?”
“You know. He has good days and bad, although he seems to be getting better now that spring is here. I think the winter doldrums just made the whole thing worse for him. He’s been going out for walks, and making jokes more often. He’s still pretty down, though.”
“Has he looked for work yet, or is he still just sponging off your success?”
“Mom!” Holly barked. “You know it’s not like that. God knows I ‘sponged’ off him until I started getting some success with my art.”
“That’s different,” Carol said. “A man should be working.”
“You sound like you’re from Appalachia, Ma.”
“Oh ha-ha,” Carol said again. It was one of her favorite phrases, the one that convinced Holly that her mother had nothing resembling a real sense of humor.
“Besides,” Holly continued, “he doesn’t know what he wants to do, what he can do. It’s a pretty safe bet that he won’t be able to get another social work job after… the incident.”
“Oh, it’s an ‘incident’ now, is it?” Carol said.
“And I don’t think he wants to,” Holly said, ignoring her mother. “I think the worst part of his depression is the disillusionment he feels. He spent a lot of his life wanting to help people, now he doesn’t know if that’s possible in his line of work, not with all the bureaucratic bullshit that gets in the way.”
“So now what?” Carol asked. “He has, what, six years of school behind him that he’s just going to throw away? Does he plan on going back to college and start all over, or does he plan on becoming a coal miner once you get to Canaan? Most of the mines are played out, you know. Maybe he can go on Welfare. That’s an honored profession down there.”
“Mom,” Holly sighed. She started to say something in Adam’s defense, but changed her mind. “We’ll figure something out. But the bottom line is I’m going to take the old house and move into it whether you like it or not.”
“I won’t come visit,” Carol said.
“Mom, you never come visit me here, either.”
“Is my granddaughter there?”
“No. Mike’s out with Adam.”
“Michaela is such a pretty name,” Carol said, beginning yet another of her favorite routines. “I don’t know why you insist on calling her a boy’s name.”
Holly rolled her eyes. She wiped her fan brush on a rag and then dipped it in an old peanut butter jar filled with murky turpentine.
“So when’s the move?” Carol asked.
“Not for a little while.” Holly squeezed some cobalt blue onto her palette and began to fold it into a patch of white. “We have to arrange for some movers to get our stuff. I’m thinking at the end of the month. That’s the earliest we can get out of our lease here, anyway.”
“Let me get movers for you,” Carol said. “I know some people here who will do it cheaper than anything you’re going to find in Pittsburgh.”
“Okay,” Holly said. This was the closest thing to approval she was going to get, so she allowed Carol to feel useful.
“Do you have to go with them?” Carol asked. “Let them into the house, or anything?”
“No.” Holly was surprised her mother hadn’t been told the details, but then Carol had made it clear since Gran’ma Dora died last summer that she didn’t want anything to do with the estate. If the body hadn’t been shipped to Appleton she wouldn’t have gone to the funeral. In fact, that was the only reason Holly could think of why the funeral wasn’t in Canaan. She was sure that Gran’ma would’ve wanted to be buried with her husband, even though he had died when Carol was a little girl.
“No,” she repeated. “A guy named Jack Hardy has been taking care of the place since Gran’ma died. He has the keys. I spoke to him on the phone about it. He said everything was ready, just to let him know when we’re coming.”
“Jack Hardy,” Carol mused. Holly heard her light another cigarette. “Now there’s a name I haven’t thought of in years.” After a pause Carol added, “Don’t trust him.”
“Why not? He seemed like a nice old man.”
“Yeah, well, you just listen to me about that, okay?”
“Whatever. Mom, I gotta go, I’m losing my light here. I’ll keep you posted.”
“You and Michaela will stop here for dinner when you’re on your way down there,” Carol said. “Stay the night, too.”
“And Adam,” Holly added.
“Of course,” Carol amended.
“No smoking while Mike is there,” Holly said, using the nickname on purpose.
“It’s my house.”
“They’re her lungs.”
“Okay, I’ll smoke outside,” Carol relented. “I’ll call you with the mover’s information.”
“Love you, Mom,”
“Un-huh,” Carol responded, then hung up. She never said good-bye at the end of a conversation.
Holly smiled and hung up. She stretched her neck, muscles sore from bracing the phone there. She stood back from her canvas to appraise her work; comparing it to the photograph of a moth she had tacked to the easel, trying to decide if she needed more viridian.
The doorbell made her jump. For a moment she was disoriented, not sure what to do. She got like that when she was working. She was putting the palette on a table and wiping her hands on a rag when the bell rang again, longer and more insistent this time.
“Coming!” Holly yelled. No one ever visited in the afternoon. She hoped it wasn’t the landlord, not that they were late with the rent, or anything, or worse yet, a Jehovah’s Witness. She tried to be tolerant, but those people… She tried to remember if she had ordered supplies recently. If so, it might be UPS.
“Okay, okay,” she said as the bell rang again. “I’m coming.”
Her breath caught in her throat when she opened the door, and she felt her palms grow damp. Something in her heart opened and allowed a cold gust of fear to blow through her guts.
“Hello, Holly,” Billy Haught said. She hadn’t seen him since before Michaela was born. His hair was shorter, almost a buzz cut – finally got rid of that silly ponytail, she thought – and the glasses had been replaced by contacts. He looked bigger to her as well, as though he had been working out recently, though that could be her fear’s perception.
She started to slam the door, but he put an arm out and held it open.
“Is that any way to treat an old lover,” he said through a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He pushed past Holly and stepped into the apartment.
“Where’s my daughter?” he asked.
“Not here. Get out! You can’t be here, there’s a restr…”
“Restraining order,” he finished for her while he looked into the kitchen. “Yeah, I know. Long since expired, baby. Those things don’t last forever, and I’ve been a good boy. Besides, it was just a piece of paper to keep me away from what’s mine.”
“You never wanted her,” Holly said.
“She’s my child, Holly, being raised by another man. A man, who I hear is unemployed due to a violent streak. How’s that for irony? Didn’t get a restraining order for him, did ya?”
“Get out!” Holly said again, hating the quiver she heard in her voice.
“Not until I see my daughter,” he said, then yelled up the stairs, “Michaela!”
“I told you, she’s not here.” Holly struggled to keep her voice even. The phone was still in the studio, but she was sure Billy wouldn’t let her get near it.
“Adam will be back any minute,” she lied.
“Good,” Billy said. “After I kick his ass I’ll take Michaela out somewhere nice. She like Chucky Cheese?”
“I’ll scream,” Holly said, grasping at straws. “I’ll call the police. You’re in violation of the restraining order.”
“Only thing being violated here are my rights,” he snarled.
“Should have thought of that when you were violating me,” Holly said, her anger grabbing the reins of her fear. It was the wrong thing to say. Billy moved like a cobra, quick and accurate. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her against the wall.
“Like you didn’t want it,” he said, his mouth against her cheek. She could smell alcohol. She pushed against him, but he was a rock.
“You wanted me to abort her,” Holly said, unable to stop saying the wrong things.
“You still owe me the money for that, too,” he said. “At the time you threatened to report me for rape if I didn’t give you money for one.”
“I did no such thing,” she said. “I told you I was pregnant and you shoved the money at me and said to never bother you again. I didn’t report it as rape, though I should have. Maybe you’d be in jail now, instead of here.”
His hands clenched tighter against her shoulders. There would be bruises tomorrow.
“I want her now,” Billy said. She saw it then, the same cold animal look he had the night he raped her, something inhuman.
No, that wasn’t true, not inhuman. All too human, the same look of desperate hostility that had dulled the eyes of men for thousands of years.
“What are going to do?” Anger infused her voice with cold needles. “Rape me again? Is that the only way you can get what you want? By taking it from others?”
She thought he was going to. She saw icy fire in his blue eyes, but then it faded. Maybe she had struck a nerve, or maybe the fear of actually going to jail this time was enough.
“This isn’t over.” He released his grip and stepped back. Holly stood straighter in defiance. Her shoulders ached, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had hurt her. He backed away from her toward the door. He saw a framed picture of her with Adam and Michaela on the wall, grabbed it and slammed it to the floor. The glass shattered into the carpet.
He knelt and picked the picture out of the glass, cutting his fingertips as he did so. He stood and scowled at the happy family he saw.
“Give me that,” Holly said, but the quiver was back in her voice.
Billy tore the picture, carefully around the image of Michaela, liberating her from Holly and Adam. Billy looked at his daughter, and Holly thought she saw something that resembled regret. Billy placed the ragged image in his shirt pocket, then held the rest of the photo up for Holly to see. With the polar fire of rage in his eyes again he tore it, ripping the image of Adam in half. The two pieces fluttered to the floor like wings torn from an angel. His gaze locked on Holly, the threat plain.
He backed out of the doorway and was gone.
Holly was frozen for a moment. Then, like a statue come to life, she bolted forward and slammed the door shut. She turned the lock on the doorknob and then latched the deadbolt. She turned and stared at the torn picture and the broken glass, trying to stay calm and focused. The glass glittered with the same blue iciness as Billy’s eyes, catching shards of fire from the late afternoon sun.
“Glass,” she muttered. “Broken… Gotta clean that up before Mike gets home… so she doesn’t get cut. . . Gotta clean…”
She slid down the length of the door and clutched her knees tightly to her chest. Her fear and anger rolled down her cheeks in a cleansing flood.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Take my hand, Mike.” Adam reached down to the little girl beside him. Michaela clutched Buggly in one hand; the other remained at her side.
“C’mon, Mike,” Adam said. “I need to hold your hand to cross the lot. We need to pick up the pizza.” Mike still didn’t raise her hand. Adam sighed, stooped and picked her up. She held on tightly as he carried her over the pavement. Mike was going through an afraid-of-cars phase – a good phase for a four-year-old to go through – but he was also aware that he had lost some of her trust in the last few months. He had been mean to her at times, inadvertently maybe, but mean just the same. He thought they would get through it, with some work. He loved her too much not to, but it hurt him to know he may have damaged their relationship. He guessed that the meanness came from the same place as the violence, a place he had been unaware of for most of his life.
He had spent the winter trying to understand that place. He went there a lot in his mind on the long dark nights when his shame wouldn’t let him sleep, reliving his last day at work over and over, replaying the events and wondering what he could have done differently.
He regretted the punch. That had been true from the beginning. It was a violation of his principles, a base response that he should have been able to rise above. He still believed that the anger that prompted it was justified, but there had to have been a better way to deal with it. He had felt a sense of vindication when he heard through the grapevine that Jones had been fired, but he knew it was vindication tinged with vengeance. Still, that shouldn’t lead to violence. Adam was determined to never let it happen again. He couldn’t imagine anything that could push him that far a second time.
What he was coming to realize was that he didn’t regret losing his job. The truth he had been reluctant to face was that he felt trapped by it. Trapped by the whole mental health care system, actually. He eventually ran into the same problems at every job he had. His sense of what was right continually butted heads with the bureaucracy. It was the system, yes, but he was bringing problems with him as well. He wasn’t willing to make the compromises necessary, and he was beginning to realize that in the end, that hampered his efficacy as a therapist.
For the first time in years, he felt free. He had chained himself to a career path in college, long before he knew what that career actually meant. It had been a long time since he had even considered doing anything else. After the years of school and study it took to get his Master’s degree he didn’t know he was just pulling a cart with blinders on. His path had become a rut, and it had taken an act of violence to jar him out of it.
But now that he had slipped the reins, he wasn’t sure where to run.
He was making progress, he knew, just by the fact that he was out today, and enjoying it, instead of staying in bed all afternoon. Three months of sullen introspection was enough. The introspection would continue, but he, and certainly Holly and Mike, could live without the sullen part of the equation.
Holly had said, one night in January when they were enjoying each others warmth and he had been more communicative, that she thought that maybe this was a phase he needed to go through before being reborn as something new. He was like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, waiting to sprout colorful wings and fly into his future.
It was an insightful thing to say. Holly would have made a good therapist. The butterfly imagery was hers, of course; she had been painting them for days. But it didn’t completely ring true for him. He never felt light enough to fly. He told her that, in his mind, he was more like a hibernating bear. His beard and sleep patterns reinforced the image. Holly said his cranky mood was pretty unbearable as well. After that she started calling him Buggly whenever he started getting too low. It worked to lighten his mood, most of the time.
The metaphor stayed in his mind however. He started to read a lot about bears, not that he was doing much else. The more he read, especially about their symbolic meaning, the more he thought it fit. Bears represented introspection in many belief systems around the world. Groundhog’s Day, celebrated in nearby Punxatawney, appeared to be a modern version of ancient bear mythologies, wherein the bear went into the underworld during the winter to fight the darkness and bring light back into the world. If he saw his shadow (very Jungian, Adam thought) then the darkness was still clinging to him and he needed to go back to fight a while longer… say, six weeks.
Now that spring was arriving Adam felt like he was waking from his own long hibernation. He was still fighting the darkness, but for the first time in months he could see a flicker of light.
He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do, though. He thought of himself as a healer, and he still wanted to be one. Not a doctor, he didn’t have the time or patience for that, but it had been his identity for a long time. Ironically, healing was also associated with bears.
He needed to figure that part out. He scratched at his long, black beard and smiled.
The pizza wasn’t ready yet; ten more minutes according to the bored teen at the counter. Adam and Mike sat on orange, molded plastic chairs to wait. Now that they were away from the cars Mike had loosened up a little.
“Ready for pizza?” Adam asked. She nodded, then put a thumb in her mouth. Adam tousled her hair, pretty sure she would be asleep long before they got home.
“How about Buggly?” Adam asked.
“Buggly doesn’t like pizza,” Mike said. Her voice rose toward the end in a way that made everything sound like a question.
“Not even with bugs and honey on it?”
“Nooo!” Mike said seriously, then made a face and giggled as she thought about a pizza like that. She got out of her chair and climbed onto Adam’s lap and leaned back into his chest. He felt her weight against him, could feel the absolute sense of safety she felt with him, in spite of everything. Mike was a perceptive child, easily influenced by the mood of others. It was one more reason for Adam to get out of his funk.
Her right leg swung back and forth as she sat. Adam looked at it, amazed by how long it was. Mike had grown a lot over the winter, losing a lot of her baby look and stretching into the contours of a little girl. She looked up at Adam, a serious look crinkling her brow.
“I love you, Adam,” she said. It was spontaneous, and serious as a heart attack, as the saying goes. It was also the first time she had ever said it to him. His heart melted in his chest. He hugged her tightly and kissed the top of her head.
“I love you too, Michaela,” he whispered,
“Pizza’s up!” the teenager yelled, and shoved the box across the counter.
“Yay!” Mike yelled, and jumped off Adam’s lap, suddenly full of energy.
“Yay,” Adam confirmed.
Once Michaela was safely buckled into her car seat (she was getting too big for it, Adam noticed), and the pizza was stowed on the passenger’s side, Adam started the Ford Taurus and headed for home. He turned his mp3 player to a Jonathan Richman album. It was one of Mike’s favorites.
