a question.
Janine gave a short nod. “But it wasn’t just that. I realized I was shrinking. Literally. Because I was always hunched over, trying to protect myself. In other ways, too. Nobody knew me anymore. After you left, for a while your father got more and more possessive and paranoid.”
“I didn’t know he could get more of either.”
“It seemed to multiply every week. I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without him, not pick up a library book or a quart of milk. My set of car keys went missing one day, and I never saw them again. And even leaving the house with him was rare. Strangers looked right through me when I did, like I wasn’t there.”
Harmony’s throat was raspy from unshed tears. “Nobody who ever really knew you would have looked through you.”
“I’m afraid your father made sure nobody had that chance.”
“You said you had to have a plan?”
“Women like me are most likely to die after they try to leave the men who abuse them.”
“I know it’s not perfect, but wouldn’t the police have protected you?”
Janine gave one emphatic shake of her head.
Harmony didn’t know why she’d asked. She’d seen too many stories herself about abused women who had been killed on the way to the courthouse to get restraining orders, or even inside the courthouse itself.
Janine said the rest in a rush, with more energy than she’d shown to this point. “One day I realized I could barely get out of bed in the mornings, that even being afraid of what he might do if the house wasn’t clean enough or the dinner perfect enough didn’t motivate me anymore. I knew I had to do something or else. The agency was having its New Year’s open house, and it was one of the few things your father still expected me to attend. It would have looked bad for him if I didn’t go. I met a woman there. She...she suspected. She told me to call her the first moment I could.”
“And she helped?”
“She knew how.” Janine didn’t go on.
“She’d done this before?”
“It took a while...to trust her. You can understand. I was putting my life in her hands. We decided on steps to follow. I was supposed to obey your father’s orders and act like whatever he told me was just meant to protect me from a cold, cruel world. To pretend I didn’t want to go out, that I was afraid of my own shadow, that I needed his guidance. Little by little.”
Harmony tried to remember how her mother had behaved when she was still living at home. Janine had made a point of not arguing with Rex, true, but sometimes she had found clever ways around his edicts. And despite everything she had still smiled, still laughed, still shown a certain joy in living that he hadn’t been able to extinguish.
There had been moments, days, even weeks, when their lives hadn’t seemed that much different from those of other families. Janine had known how to diffuse her father’s anger. Or make herself the brunt of it. But she had been actively involved in life. The spark inside her had never been extinguished.
“Did he go for it?” Harmony asked.
“It seemed to be working. He was still violent, erratic, but after a while he...well, he was different. I made mistakes and he didn’t always notice. At first I thought he believed I’d changed, that I had finally become the wife he wanted, and he was cutting me some slack. Then I realized he just didn’t seem to care that much. I wondered if he had figured out my acceptance of our life together was a lie, and he was just waiting for me to prove it.”
“Do you still think he knew?”
“No, I don’t.” Janine bit her lip. “Because if he had figured out I was going to leave him...” She didn’t have to finish.
“Then what? Frustrations at work, maybe? Something else going on?”
Janine turned both palms up, as if to say Who knows?
Harmony thought this replay of the past had gone as far as it could. What her father felt about anything, or what had gone on in his life outside the home, was of no interest to her. Rex Stoddard might think he was the center of the universe, but that wasn’t a universe she wanted to inhabit again. She changed direction. “Before, when we were outside, you said he didn’t come home the night of the fire. But you don’t know where he was?”
“It had happened before, some kind of game he played for years, leaving town without notice. He had all kinds of ways of checking on me while he was gone. Sometimes he would line up repair men to conduct roof inspections or clean out our septic tank. Then they were required to report what they found by phone immediately. The first question Rex always asked was ‘And my wife was there to show you around?’ I heard their answers, so I knew.”
“I never realized.”
“Sometimes he was watching the house, testing me. Sometimes he was really out of town, but he didn’t tell me ahead of time in case I used the opportunity to leave. This time I don’t know what happened. But I knew I might not get a chance like it again. And even if I wasn’t prepared completely?” She swallowed hard, audibly, as if the fear was still there waiting to choke her. “I was ready enough,” she finished.
“What about the fire? Did you set it to make escaping easier?”
Janine looked shocked. “Oh, no.”
“Then what happened?”
“It was stupid. Impulsive. As I was leaving, I burned all the photos on the downstairs table. I took them out of their frames, and I burned them. Whenever he finally came home, I wanted him to know how I really felt about our life together.”
Harmony stared at her. “Wow, he loved those photos.”
“You called that table the zoo, remember? You said we were like caged animals on display.”
Harmony did remember. She had despised every attempt to portray them as the all-American family. The photos in the entryway. The four of them sharing hymnals in the same pew every Sunday. Cheering together from the bleachers the year Buddy had been a linebacker on the high school football team.
Then going home together after the team lost and listening to her father criticize every play her brother had made.
“How did the fire start if you didn’t start it on purpose?”
“I can only guess. I’d left earlier and was already at the edge of the woods when I remembered Buddy’s scrapbook. I went back, and on the way to the stairs I saw those photos and...I just snapped. I burned them in your father’s favorite ashtray.”
Harmony remembered talking to friends at school whose parents smoked. She had been the only one who’d wished her father would smoke more and suffer the consequences.
“I went upstairs,” Janine continued, “but it took me some time to find the scrapbook. When I came out of Buddy’s room, the stairs were on fire. Your father took up the runner just a few weeks ago and refinished the steps by himself. The house still smelled like varnish. Maybe whatever he used?” She shrugged.
“But
