her hand on the knob and turns to me before opening the door. “You must be on a lucky streak.”
If I am, it’s a first.
But, then again…A striking, silver-haired woman whose name I can’t even remember insisted that room be made for me and my children. A brown-eyed director I’d never met before shifted her charges to make it happen. And now sweet, nervous, well-meaning Leslie has said there is a place for us. A safe house. Tonight. Now. Just a few miles from here, somewhere in this lovely little town where the kindest people on earth live, there is room for us.
Maybe she is right. Maybe, at last, my luck is changing.
1
Ivy Peterman
Eighteen months later
Fight or flight? Until recently, it’s never been a question. Not for me.
Whenever I feel frightened or threatened, my first instinct has always been flight. I do it pretty regularly.
I was six years old when my father had a heart attack and died. The news sent me running into the woods in the back of our house. I could hear my mother calling for me, her voice raspy with tears and shock and anger, but I wouldn’t budge from my hiding place in the branches of a half-dead oak. Finally, she sent our neighbor, Pete, to find me.
Just after my sixteenth birthday, Mom was killed in a head-on collision and Pete, who was by then my stepfather, also became my legal guardian. He and I had never gotten along, but then again neither had he and Mom, not since about ten minutes after their wedding. After Mom died, Pete started to drink even more than before, so I ran away again. Farther this time, buying a one-way train ticket to the city. So far that Pete would never be able to find me, though now I realize he probably never tried.
And, of course, when I was twenty-four, I ran away from my husband. This time I took my two babies with me.
My escape wasn’t exactly well-planned.
The day began normally enough, with a trip to the department store and a new tube of lipstick, but by that night I was running. I had to. I was afraid, not just for my life but for the lives of my children. All I took were some clothes, a file with some personal papers, the kids’ baby books, some jewelry I later sold, and about $288 in cash, fifty-six of it from the spare change jar we kept on the kitchen counter. That’s all. I had credit cards, but I didn’t take them. I was worried that Hodge would be able to track us down if I used them.
When we could find an opening, we lived in emergency shelters. When we couldn’t, we lived in the car. That was the hardest time. The kids were cranky, and so was I. The things I’d taken for granted while living in a nice house in the suburbs, like being able to keep clean and warm, using a toilet whenever we wanted to, or eating hot food, were concerns that occupied my every waking moment. I had no reserve of time or energy to consider how I was going to get us out of that mess, only enough to survive the day.
One night, I was asleep on the front seat and heard a noise. I woke up to see a figure, a man, pressed up against the passenger side window of the backseat, where my kids were sleeping, trying to slide a wire hanger into the space between the window and the door. I didn’t think, just jumped out of the car and started screaming, “Get away from that door! Don’t touch them! Get away!”
Somewhere along the line I must have grabbed the metal flash-light from the side storage compartment in the door. Still screaming, I flung it at the intruder and it hit him in the head. He swore and ran off into the alley. The kids woke up and started crying. A tall, scruffy man with a four-day growth of beard—the clerk from the twenty-four-hour mini-mart where I’d decided to park that night, stupidly thinking it was a safe spot—heard the commotion and came outside to investigate.
He took one look at me, tears in my eyes while I tried to quiet Bethany’s and Bobby’s sobbing, and decided to call the police. Over my protests, he went inside the store to make the call. I got in the car and told the kids to buckle up. There was no way I was going to stick around and answer a bunch of questions from the police. If Hodge had filed a report saying I was a kidnapper, they’d lock me up and take the kids away from me forever. That’s what Hodge said would happen if I ever even thought about leaving him. He didn’t say that out of any kind of love, but just to make me believe that no matter what I did or where I went, he would still be in control. And I did believe it. I’d put hundreds of miles of road between us, but even so, I could feel his power, the menace of his presence, just like I always had. We had to get out of there.
My tires squealed as I peeled out of the parking lot, my mind racing. Did it make more sense for me to get on the freeway and go to another town? Or better to find a dark alley and park there until the coast was clear? I decided on the freeway.
In the backseat the kids were still crying. I swore under my breath, cursing traffic engineers who were too cheap or too stupid to put up any signs directing out-of-towners to the freeway entrance. Ten minutes later I was still lost. Bethany had stopped crying, but Bobby was still going strong.
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw his face, his chubby baby cheeks flushed and hot, his black lashes clumped and glistening with tears. “Bobby. Calm down, baby. Mommy is going to find a quiet place to park and then you can go back to sleep, all right?”
“Go home!” he wailed. “Go home!”
And for the first time, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. A few weeks before, my children had been living the relatively normal, scheduled lives of children in the suburbs: three meals a day, playing on the swing set in our fenced backyard, watching cartoons, baths at seven, bed at eight. Of course, when it was time for Hodge to come home, they’d get clingy and quiet, feeling my fear, perhaps, as I listened for the grind of gears as the automatic garage door opened and tuned my ears to assess the level of force Hodge used to slam the door of his BMW, a clue as to his mood and what the rest of the evening would bring.
But, I told myself as I drove through the darkness, he wasn’t violent every night. Only when I’d done something, or not done something, that made him mad. After all, I was the one he took his anger out on. Not the kids. Maybe they’d be better off if we went back. At least they’d be safe.
But a voice in my head reminded me that it wasn’t true anymore.
I remembered that last day, Hodge screaming and swearing and pounding on one side of the locked bathroom door, while we huddled on the other side. I remembered the swelling of my left eye, pain shooting through my bleeding hand, but worse, so much worse, was the memory of the angry red mark on Bethany’s pale cheek.
Bethany was used to his rages, used to seeing me holding ice packs on my bruises, or trying to cover up the marks of his fury with extra makeup, but he’d never hit her before. That day, he considered her fair game and I realized that from then on, he always would.
In the backseat, Bethany tried to calm her baby brother. “Bobby, don’t cry. We can’t go home. Daddy’s there.”
She was right. I couldn’t take them back. Not now. It wasn’t safe to go back to Hodge. Not for me and not for my children. But we couldn’t go on like this, either. We couldn’t keep running. I was tired and scared and broke. Somehow or other I had to come up with another plan. But what?
To say that I haven’t had a lot of experience with praying in my life would be an understatement, but that night, driving around in the middle of the night without the least clue of where we should go or what we should do when we arrived, I prayed silently, asking God for
