Chapter 12
NIA
‘D o I look worried?’
Brody’s words from our first meeting play through my mind in repetition as I lower myself into the bath. He didn’t look worried then. When it comes to my case; when I’m sitting across from him in his office, even if I’m a weeping, mismatched-scrub-wearing mess, he doesn’t look worried.
He heard Katie cough for ten seconds today, and he looked petrified.
The way that he got down on her level and shared a treat with her, I can’t remember the last time her father did that. The way that he got her a bottle of water, the same way that he’s done for me…
He really does care.
As I dip my head beneath the water’s surface, the doorbell rings, loud and singsongy through the entire house.
I think the universe might know when a mom has fifteen minutes to herself. When her daughter is peacefully coloring in her bedroom down the hall. When the house is quiet. When the world slows for just a moment and she takes that chance to relax. I think it knows.
With a sigh, I hoist myself from the tub and reach for the robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Tugging it tightly around myself, I trudge toward the front door and pull it open, met with my mother-in-law on the opposite side.
“Protective services, Mrs. Hart,” she announces, shoving her badge in my face. “We’ve been alerted to a child who may be at risk.”
“It’s Cavanaugh, and you may not come into my home,” I tell her.
“When we receive a report like this, Ms. Cavanaugh ,” she hisses, “we need to investigate.”
Stay calm, I remember Brody telling me in his email. Don’t offer up any reason for the caseworker to note that you were anything other than polite and collected.
“Another caseworker is welcome to call me and schedule a visit,” I tell her with a saccharine smile, “but you, specifically, may not enter my home.”
“Denied home visit, child deemed still at risk,” she mumbles to herself as she scribbles onto the clipboard in her hand.
I pull in a breath and force myself to stand taller.
Stay calm.
“This doesn’t look good for you,” she warns me.
“I don’t believe that my attorney would agree,” I smile. “Would you like me to call him? Maybe we should bring the police here, too?”
In his email, Brody told me that he’s requested access to any open cases with mine or Katie’s names in them. I just have to give him time to get that access. I have to trust him, maybe more than I’ve ever had to, up to this point.
And I do.
“Judy,” I muse, “is it typical of a caseworker to show up unannounced to a house at nearly eight in the evening?” When she offers no response but a narrowing of her eyes, I smile; genuinely, this time. “I didn’t think it was. Goodnight.”
As I close the door, I press it firmly into the frame as if that will offer it extra security, locking the deadbolt afterward. Stepping away from the door, I shake out my hands and press them to my mouth as a fit of giggles overtakes me.
I’ve never stood up to that woman. From the moment that Daniel brought me home to meet her, to the moment that our marriage came to an end, I have taken her insults. I’ve stomached her dirty looks and her digs at me, my job, my family, my parenting…all of it.
I’ve ridden the wave of her hatred and weathered everything that she’s ever thrown at me.
Nothing that I could ever do would make me good enough for her son. Pretty enough. Smart enough. Woman enough. In her eyes, I’d failed as a mother before my daughter was even born.
To close the door in her face and know that I finally won for once…
My legs bounce, practically making me jump up and down as giddiness rolls through me.
Rushing toward the kitchen counter, I dig through my purse for my phone, and I call the first person that I can think of.
“Yello?”
“I did it,” I tell Brody. “Judy came to the house and I shut her down.”
“What?” He asks. His voice has a rasp to it, and I wonder if he was about to go to sleep, or maybe he’s having a glass of whiskey after a hard day at work. He seems like he might be a whiskey man; barrel-aged and oaky at the finish. “Are you alright?”
“I did it exactly the way that you told me to,” I tell him. “I stayed calm, I carefully called out that she was absolutely full of shit – sorry – and I got her to leave.”
“That’s fantastic, Nia,” he says. Is he smiling? It sounds like he’s smiling. “You should be very proud of yourself.”
My bones warm at his praise; at his celebration of me. “I am,” I tell him. “In fact, I’m about to take a nice hot bubble bath and have a glass of wine about it.”
Why am I telling him that?
Jeez, talk about an overshare.
A warm, deep chuckle comes through the phone before he speaks again. “You should. You did a great job tonight. I’ll put in a call in the morning and see if there’s any new information.”
“Okay,” I say with a smile. My teeth tug at the corner of my lower lip as I move to the tips of my toes. “Thank you. I’m sorry for using your personal line for this.”
“I gave it to you to use whenever you needed,” he tells me. “Goodnight, Nia.”
“Goodnight.”
I can’t wipe the smile off of my face as I trek up the stairs to Katie’s room. She’s seated at her craft table, using a set of watercolor markers to fill in the pages of a coloring book that my stepdad got for her this week.
My eyes scan the room; soft yellow walls, a twin bed covered in stuffed animals and her favorite blankets. Her bedtime book sitting on the small table that rests beside the bed, waiting to be read to her.
“It’s time to say goodnight, my love,” I tell her.
Because she’s the best kid in the entire world, she puts her markers back into their box and sets them aside, silently telling me that she’s planning on finishing her project in the morning. Moving to her bed, she climbs under the covers, pulling her favorite stuffed elephant into her arms and hugging it tightly to her body while I reach for her book.
“I want Daddy to read it,” she tells me.
“Katie,” I sigh. “Daddy doesn’t live here, remember? He can’t read it to you.”
“But I want Daddy,” she pouts, pinching her brows together.
I carefully perch on the mattress next to her, brushing her hair behind her ear as I smile down at her. Things have been going so well, I’d hoped that this wouldn’t happen. That was na?ve, maybe even stupid, but a part of me had hoped that she was young enough, that I could keep her distracted enough, that she wouldn’t be so upset by his absence in our lives.
“You know what, Mommy doesn’t have to work tomorrow. What do you think about having a date day, just me and you?” I press a kiss to her forehead. “We can talk about why Daddy can’t read your bedtime book.”
After reading her story to her, after what must be a thousand goodnight kisses, she finally drifts off to sleep, and I quietly step out of the room, leaving the door cracked open just a few inches to let the hallway light stream inside.
My bath has gone cold by the time I return to it with my wine in hand, so I sit on the edge of the tub, sipping on my drink as I empty and refill the water. I drain my glass more quickly than I intend to, refilling it just a touch more on the second go.
I step into the tub again once it’s half full, using my bottle of body wash to add suds to the water as I lower myself into it.
‘You did a great job tonight.’
‘You should be proud of yourself.’
He gave me his personal number to use whenever I need it .
Maybe it’s the wine, but a buzz settles onto the surface of my skin as my conversation with Brody plays over again in my mind.
When was the last time that Dan said things like that to me? Certainly not since he met his leather-clad playmate. Maybe never.
It feels nice to be seen. To be celebrated.
I wonder if he’s awake. Lying in bed, replaying our call the same way that I am.
I consider, just for a second, calling him again; and then I tell myself how absolutely insane that would be. He’s my attorney, not my friend, not anything more. I pay him, I apparently cry at him, and he’s helping to keep me from drowning under the current weight of my life.
God, I’m already tipsy. This is ridiculous.
Setting my emptied glass onto the rim of the tub, I dunk my hair under the water, letting the warmth of it surround and relax me.
No matter how I try, I can’t seem to shake one singular thought:
He was proud of me .
There isn’t anything quite like the sound of children’s laughter. It’s a sound that carries pure joy and untarnished innocence into the air, and there is something so incredibly healing about it. Of all laughter that exists in this world, my daughter’s is my favorite.
Katie giggles wildly as she runs through the store, always ten steps ahead of me as she reaches for clothing items and a plush fabric heart to stuff into the rainbow-colored teddy bear in her arms. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ fly out as an amalgamation repeatedly as she pulls things from the shelves to go along with the bear, until we finally reach the area where the toys are stuffed.
Her smile lights up the entire store as she presses a kiss to her bear’s heart before stuffing it inside and helping to sew it shut, and even more as she gives her new friend a ‘bath’ and a name.
She’s practically beaming when we walk out of the store and toward her favorite pretzel shop, which we only get to visit once every few months. As we sit across from each other and I watch her little feet kick back and forth beneath her chair, my heart cracks down the middle.
“Katie-cat, do you remember us talking about Daddy last night?” I ask her.
“Yuh-huh.”
“You know how much Mommy and Daddy love you, don’t you?” I ask.
She nods as she tears off a piece of the massive pretzel that she won’t be able to finish in one sitting. “Lots and lots.”
“Lots and lots,” I nod with a smile. “Sometimes, mommies and daddies love their babies lots and lots, but they can’t be married to each other anymore, so they live in different houses. That’s why Daddy doesn’t live in our new house.”
“But Daddy is Daddy,” she says with confusion etching itself into her features.
“Daddy is Daddy, you’re right,” I tell her. “That’s still the same – just like you’re still Katie-cat and I’m still Mommy. We’re still your parents and we still love you, our family just looks a little bit different now.” Reaching to wipe mustard from her lip with a napkin, I tell her, “And you need to know that it is not your fault.”
I study my daughter for a long time, watching as her hands fidget with the pretzel between them. I’ve seen it a lot at work, children trying to self-soothe with the nearest object they can get hold of, be it a blanket, an IV line, or a TV remote.
I even do it myself.
As I watch my little girl’s world change before her eyes, I wonder if I’ve handled this poorly. If I was wrong . If I took the pain that Dan has caused me and I put it on Katie. What he did to me was cruel, and it broke something inside of me, but he loves his daughter.
“When we get home,” I say through the tightening of my throat, “do you want to call him?”
She nods, and I stand to wrap her in my arms and press a kiss to the top of her head.
“Okay, Katie-cat, we can call him,” I tell her. “I’m sorry I told you no before. Sometimes grown-ups get things wrong, and Mommy was wrong. We can make a schedule for you to call him, how does that sound?”
“Good,” she says, and I squeeze her just a little more tightly.
I’m thankful that the somber cloud hanging over us seems to lift within a few minutes, giving us the opportunity to finish our itinerary for the day: a stop for some fun bath supplies that make her feel like a grown up, a new PJ set, and of course a trip to the mall’s candy store, because no girls’ day out is complete without a sweet little something to bring home.
I give Katie my phone when we walk into the house, with the instruction to stay in the living room while she calls her dad and I get her bath started. Maybe I should be ashamed that I want to listen to her side of the conversation, but I’m still uncomfortable, and I still can’t trust him yet.
I don’t like feeling this way; knowing how deeply he loves her, knowing that he has never given me any reason to believe that he would do or say anything to harm her, but not being able to trust that anymore because he’d never given me any reason to believe that he would do anything to harm me, either.
Even listening to her talk to him, my stomach clenches and all I can think about is wrapping her in a protective bubble that will keep the rest of the world away from her. Keep its claws out of her and let her stay little.
Safe.
My molars grind against each other as I step into the bathroom to turn off the faucet and rest one of her new colorful bath bombs on the edge of the tub.
“Daddy wants to talk to you,” she tells me as she finishes her call, extending the phone toward me, and my stomach lurches.
“Okay, Katie-cat. You go get started and scrub-a-dub,” I tell her. She leaves with a nod and I pull the phone to my ear. “Yes?”
“You can’t keep her from me,” Dan tells me.
“I told her we would talk to you about a call schedule,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said that you can’t talk to her.”
“No, Nia, I want to see my kid,” he demands. “You need to bring her over here for the week.”
What?
“No,” I say, shaking my head as my hand grips at my chest. “A phone call is one thing. I’m not— you have a lot of trust to rebuild before I leave her with you.”
“The unlawful removal of a child from its parents or guardian,” he says after several long beats of silence. “That’s the definition of abduction. You abducted my daughter.”
“Daniel—”
“You can move into a big, fancy house, and I can’t do anything about that,” he says, “but I can, and I will, have you arrested for kidnapping Katie if you don’t bring her to me, and I will make sure that you never see her again.”
My eyes burn. The world pulls away from me in a long tunnel that stretches the room too far beyond my reach. My chest feels hollow, and I think I can feel the ground dissolving from beneath my feet.
“You’ve said that to me before,” I whisper as a distant memory blurs in the back of my mind.
“And this time, I have the power to follow through,” he grits, and the line disconnects.
My hand rests at my stomach as I try to pull in a breath.
The sound of my daughter’s singing pulls me toward the bathroom through a fog of days long forgotten.
I throw on my best smile as I round the corner, looking at Katie with her hair piled high on her head, coated in thick, foaming suds. “Is your body all scrubbed?” I ask, and she nods mid-song.
Taking a seat on the ground next to the tub, I reach for her rinse cup and pour water through her hair to rinse out the shampoo, replacing it with a gentle conditioner before rinsing her again. By the time I get her into jammies and tucked into bed, I’m barely holding myself together.
I run a hot shower for myself in the hopes that it will quell whatever horrible thing has awoken inside of me, but it’s useless.
Wrapping myself in a robe, I move to the kitchen and crack open a bottle of wine. I don’t like reds, usually, but a white feels too bright for tonight. Too cheerful. Red feels somber. It feels like the kind of wine to drink when your heart is on fire and your brain won’t shut off.
When your soul needs to cry.