Chapter 11
Andi
The next week is exhausting. Holidays are always extra busy but this Labor Day is especially bad, with off-the-charts humidity and brutally hot dog days. I make the arrangements for overflow shelter with local motels, which means I also have to squeeze the budget extra hard to foot the bill for those rooms, and there’s still not enough without having to choose some other bill to pay late. Thank god for Rose and her work at the new Galway Brown Foundation. She’s saved our asses in more than one recent emergency by scrounging up funds from somewhere. She does it again this week.
But then there’s the ever-present volunteer shortage. We have an amazing bunch of volunteers—we couldn’t keep afloat without them—but understandably, except for handing out goodies to the shelter kids on gift-giving holidays, most people want to be with their own families at those times. I can’t blame them—it’s always devastating to see the injuries and hear the stories and have proof of people’s ugliness in the emergency room, and it’s heartbreaking to see the dazed, tearful expressions—or worse, the stoic ones—on the faces of kids as you try to get them settled into the noisy, chaotic space of the shelter.
So making sure the volunteer shifts are covered for Labor Day takes extra time too. I put myself on the on-call list for hospital runs all weekend. It’s not like I’ve had family or holiday plans anyway since Gram died.
It’s a long, difficult weekend, and then the next few days I carve out extra time to huddle with our volunteer coordinator and a couple of other staff members, making sure we’ve got everything ready for volunteer training next week. We do trainings twice a year, but they always require some tweaking.
I manage to get to the high school to run most weekdays, but I don’t have the energy to do my usual distance. It’s easiest, of course, when Kevin runs with me, because I’m too busy ignoring his stupid charm to pay attention to how tired I am.
Pretty sure his charm is pure niceness, not any kind of flirting. He’s been completely respectful about my “no” to dating. If he is flirting, it’s the subtlest, lowest-key, lowest-pressure flirting I’ve ever experienced. An extra twinkle in those brown eyes when he smiles at me, the appearance of those dimples, brief bursts of laughter at things I say.
I’ve had guys look at me with hunger and calculation when I’m onstage. I’ve had them look at me with caution in my day-to-day life. But I’ve never had a man look at me the way Kevin does, with something like delight. Something like anticipation for what might come out of my mouth next. Something like pleasure for just being with me, hot, sweaty me, running ovals around a high school track in the sweltering heat.
On Friday he walks me to my car.
I check my surroundings the way I always do and see a bunch of kids watching us from the track area. “We’ve got an audience.” I nudge his abs with my elbow and almost get distracted by my urge to put my hand there. I rein that in quick. “Or you have a fan club.”
He shakes his head, dimples deepening. Turns to the field and yells, “Get back to work!”
There’s a flurry of activity as students pretend they hadn’t been watching, but a few giggles float to us across the grass.
Kevin laughs. “Pains in my backside.”
“You know you love them.” He hasn’t said so, but I’ve watched their interactions. He may have only recently met these kids but he’s invested in them.
I click my lock and he steps closer to open my door for me, his other hand cupping my elbow.
“Thanks again for those translations you sent last night. You should have seen the relief on some of the kids’ faces when I passed them out.”
I toss my keys and water bottle onto the passenger seat and turn to face him. “Good. I’m glad to help.”
He’s still touching me. “I couldn’t help but notice the time stamp on your email. 12:01 a.m. Pretty late for you to be up working.”
I shrug, careful not to dislodge his hand. Because I am a glutton for punishment. “Oh, you know. You gotta fit stuff in when you can. I went to bed right after.”
“Well. Thank you.” He gives my elbow a little squeeze, then turns me loose and reaches up to catch a flyaway bit of my hair and tuck it behind my ear, his fingertips barely brushing my skin.
It takes all I have to suppress a full-body shiver, despite the heat. I wait half a beat to see if he moves closer. Holding my breath, praying he moves closer. Wanting to grab hold of his damp shirt, sink back into my car, and tug him in on top of me.
Which would be very uncomfortable if we’d even both fit, but still, wishes are persistent little suckers.
But he doesn’t step forward, so I slide into my seat and fit my key into the ignition. “You ready for next week?”
He nods, his expression serious now. “Looking forward to it. It’ll do me some good to feel like I’m doing somebody else good, and I figure I’ve got a lot to learn first.”
“I’ll see you Monday evening, then. I won’t be able to come run during training week. Just email me the next batch of worksheets whenever.”
He nods, closes my door and pats the roof of the car, holding up one hand in a wave as I back out.
I drive away, trying to be glad he hadn’t kissed me back there. If he had, it would have been a bad thing.
***
Kevin
I’m moving slowly when I leave the shelter building after the first night of training. The air feels different around me, like there’s more to it—more to the world, more to life—than I’d known. Like there’s a whole invisible universe full of activity going on around me and I ought to be able to peer between the molecules and layers and catch glimpses of things I’d not known existed before.
Survivors of domestic violence have taken on a whole new dimension in my eyes.
I’d walked in tonight with my head full of the question so many people ask first thing whenever they hear of a domestic violence incident: Why doesn’t she just leave? By the time I walk out after the first session, I know a whole lot more about that—enough more to make me embarrassed I ever even thought that was a valid question.
“But you know,” one of the trainers said, uncapping a marker as she stepped up to the whiteboard, “that’s how we’ve been trained to think about it. Even our language about domestic violence protects the perpetrators. Let me show you what I mean.”
On the board she wrote, The battered woman had serious injuries to her face and ribs. She stepped back and pointed to what she’d written. “How many people in this scenario?”
As we opened our mouths to answer, I could see other trainees come to the same realization I had: that although someone must have done that damage to the woman—caused those injuries—they are nowhere to be seen in that statement. The focus was entirely on the victim.
The trainer wrote another sentence: The woman was severely battered, sustaining injuries to her head and ribs. She turned to look at us. “How about this—how many people appear in this version?”
Not much better. Yeah, it hinted at some unnamed person or force, but the language was so passive and vague that we couldn’t say who.
“Exactly,” the trainer said when we expressed this. “So how would we need to write a description to clearly show who was there and who did what?”
The man beat the woman, injuring her head and ribs , was what we came up with.
It was like watching a shadowy evildoer become solidly visible before our eyes as we adjusted the wording to reflect the reality.
Then we learned that “just leave” is a ridiculous oversimplification. Not only is leaving dangerous, with abusers desperate to regain control, but also abusers have often isolated their victims from access to money and loved ones, and there are often children involved whose needs for food and shelter and uninterrupted schooling have to be considered. And finally—this one made my blood boil—many families and faith communities have a history of suggesting that victims must have done something wrong to “bring this on” themselves.
One exercise that really got me, though, was when a staff member took a seat in a straight chair at the front of the room as another staff member told us her supposed life story, which included elements that have been shown to increase a person’s vulnerability to domestic violence. Things like growing up in a family with a strong the-man-is-head-of-the-household vibe.
The story led up to the woman finding herself in a relationship with an abusive partner. She looked for help and was blamed or turned away. With each statement, a staff member came forward and put a blanket over the woman’s head until, by the midpoint of the story, we couldn’t see her. I’m not sure how she kept from smothering under there.
Then the story began to change. The woman reached out and someone actually provided something useful: the shelter hotline number. A staff member removed one of the blankets. Through the rest of the story, a blanket was removed with each bit of help, each action helping her to break free, until finally the woman on the chair was visible again.
Shannon, the trainer, asked her what it felt like under all those blankets. The woman gave a short laugh. “Lonely. I was with y’all, but not, you know? I couldn’t reach you. I felt invisible. Cut off, after the first few blankets. It was getting hard to breathe or move. Hard to think. I couldn’t see y’all, and I was having trouble hearing you, so I knew you probably couldn’t see or hear me either.”
The other trainees were leaning forward like I was, trying not to miss a word she said. I could see on their faces what I was thinking—that she was also describing life in an abusive relationship.
I don’t remember the drive home. I can’t get her words out of my head.
***
After that first night, I set my alarm for earlier, to get my class prep and grading done during the day to free my evening brain for the training.
I’m the only man out of ten volunteers-in-training. It’s not a problem for me, but it stinks for the kids who need decent male role models.
It’s a life-changing week. Each session flies by and I drive home with thoughts and feelings and questions whirring around in my mind. Some nights I lie awake thinking about things I never really understood before. My survival didn’t depend on me knowing.
If any of my family and friends was in an abusive relationship, would they have the resources they need to break free? If they reached out, would I be able to help? Would I sense they needed help without them asking?
Later in the week, we cover relationship red flags and characteristics of abusers, and I’m horrified at how many guys I’ve known who fit the profile. Toward the end of the week, one of the court advocates goes over the legal options available to survivors, and the difference between court-issued protection orders and actual physical safety.
The presenters do a great job. They’re clear and knowledgeable, and they gently guide us newbies away from myths about the dynamics of domestic violence. Shannon’s the official trainer but Andi is so good, so compelling, with such fire in her eyes that even the shelter staff are on the edge of their seats when she talks.
I don’t try to seek her out during any of the sessions. It doesn’t seem appropriate and my head is always spinning anyway. I need to get away and think about the things I’ve learned.
Each night I find myself on my couch with a cold beer, staring at the dark TV screen and rethinking every relationship I’ve ever observed. Every day I go to school and study the dynamics I see there. As a teacher, I’m a mandatory reporter if I see or suspect abuse. Am I going to be suspecting it everywhere now?
After training on the last night, Friday, I lie in bed squinting up at the ceiling, wondering if this is how Andi lives her life: in constant awareness of the danger in seemingly ordinary relationships, in fear for people she passes on the street. I wonder if she loves her work. I wonder how she can bear the weight of it.