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“Why?”
He opened his eyes and lifted an eyebrow. “Why is it a good place to live?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not too many places where so many different kinds of people get along. Nobody stands out much here. You can be whoever you want to be, and nobody thinks you’re strange. At least most people don’t think so.”
“How do you figure out who you want to be?” she asked before she thought better of it.
He looked surprised. “Isn’t that the easy part?”
“No.”
“I guess you figure out who you admire, and you try to be like that.”
She admired people with courage, people who’d had dreams they’d pursued despite obstacles. People who had been able to protect their children.
She blinked back tears. “And if you fail?”
“Aren’t you too young to write off life that way?”
She wondered.
He stretched and stood, long arms reaching out as if to embrace the world. “I say go for whatever it is you haven’t done yet. You’ve got time right up until you draw your last breath.” He gave a quick, final wave, almost a salute, and strolled off.
She asked herself what she hadn’t done yet, and the answer was so overwhelming she could hardly breathe. If she took his advice, where would she start?
She gazed around the park, searching for a clue. Minutes passed and finally her heart rate began to slow. Then she saw the answer was simple.
“Blue jeans.”
It didn’t matter if she was frightened by everyday things that others took for granted. It didn’t matter if she felt alone in the world, something Rex had repeatedly warned her would happen if she ever tried to leave him. It didn’t matter that she no longer knew what a woman like her could actually achieve. Perhaps it didn’t even matter that she had failed at the things she had most hoped to accomplish and was still seeking forgiveness.
What mattered now were jeans. From what she could tell, she was the only person in Asheville who didn’t own a pair. If she didn’t want to stand out in the crowd, now was the time to remedy that.
She got to her feet, and her knees still trembled, but life was going to be like this. A pair of blue jeans. An afternoon alone in a strange—in more ways than one—city. Participating in a short conversation with someone she’d never met and wasn’t likely to see again.
Life. One step at a time with nobody blocking the way.
And if, for one moment after Taylor had dropped her off, she had yearned for Rex—who had all the answers as well as all the questions—then she supposed she could seek forgiveness for that, as well.
But first, one small thing. A pair of jeans.
This she could do.
From the audio journal of a forty-five-year-old woman, taped for the files of Moving On, an underground highway for abused women.
Some people believe violence comes directly from the traditional family, when one person is awarded all the power as well as the right, even obligation, to enforce his values or lack of them. Others believe domestic violence is caused by the disintegration of the traditional family. Neither view is true. Domestic violence is the result of one family member with sickness in his soul, and the desire to infect those who are weakest and most vulnerable. Sometimes fatally.
And yes, I’ve used the word he. The vast majority of batterers are men. Mine certainly was.
And yes, I’ve also used the word was. Now that I’ve left the Abuser, I have no doubt that if given the opportunity he’ll cause more and greater pain, perhaps ending our struggle once and for all, as happens too frequently. I’ve been warned that 70 percent of all women who die from domestic abuse die after they leave their abusers, as I left mine.
For now I’m free of him. I have dreams in which he finds me and exacts his final vengeance, but I believe that someday I may have just as many dreams in which I find him first.
* * *
Adam Pryor hadn’t known he could fly. He had spent most of his life on the ground, never realizing that if he flapped his wings he could soar with the eagles and vultures. Today he felt kinship with both, the eagles with their hooked beaks and lethal talons that tore the flesh from their prey, and the vultures, who fed on carrion, destroying evidence so the world could pretend death wasn’t an ugly business. Right now, though, he only wanted to get away, to rise above the clouds, up, up, just high enough that he didn’t lose consciousness and plunge back to earth.
He was especially careful about that. He never wanted to touch the ground again, particularly not the ground just below him. If he could gaze through the clouds, he knew exactly what he would see. A rural bazaar, a brief spot of color against a desolate landscape, with crude wooden sheds lining an unadorned village roadway. Sides of meat hanging from hooks. Yellow plastic jugs with labels in Arabic script. Shelves of cans, some which would have been perfectly at home in an army commissary and probably had been before they mysteriously disappeared.
Children. Boys in their long shirts over baggy white pants, colorful wool pakol covering heads. Girls in an array of colors, pants, overdresses, scarves over dark hair, walking or skipping beside their mothers.
He knew better than to watch the children’s progress. He had wings; he could fly away and should. Yet, somehow, he was powerless to do so.
Suddenly, despite struggling to lift himself higher, he realized he was floating downward. He wasn’t above the clouds at all. Now he saw that the clouds were really plumes of smoke. It tickled his lungs, then filled them until he began to cough. His eyes burned as he drifted. Then he picked up speed until he was falling like a meteor streaking toward the earth.
Through the veil of smoke he saw flames below, and then, as the air rushed past him, he could hear screams.
The wailing began.
“No...”
Adam tried to sit up but was only partially successful. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. The answer that left him momentarily paralyzed was this: he was inside a coffin or a crypt.
“No!” He struggled to lift his arms so he could feel something, anything, around him, but his arms were pinned to his sides. A scream gathered inside him, even as he saw light seeping through an unfamiliar doorway, and heard clinking and shuffling just beyond it.
Just in time, he remembered.
The ice machine near the elevator. A cheap motel on the highway. The only room still vacant when he had arrived after midnight two nights ago. The clerk had given him a discount—but not much—because of a bathroom sink that dripped without remorse and a shower nobody seemed able to fix.
He clamped his lips shut and forced himself to lie flat again until he could untangle the top sheet that bound him. Once he was free, he sat up and rested his head in his hands. In the hallway, whoever had needed ice at 2:00 a.m. rattled a bucket one more time, then slammed the lid on the machine. In a moment Adam could hear footsteps die away, then silence, except for a hum as the machine set out to replenish its supply.
Even the dripping no longer kept him company. He had fixed both the sink and the shower on his first morning, although he hadn’t told the guy at the front desk, who probably would have raised the price of the room.
Now that he was awake he wasn’t surprised that the dream had visited again. In the past year he had fought to get away from the same familiar scene a hundred times or more, although he hadn’t had the full-blown nightmare, this Technicolor, stereo version, for weeks. He had known he