Chapter 22
I’ve made a terrible meal—overcooked chicken, wilted green beans, bland instant mashed potatoes—but Tom eats it all valiantly, complimenting the “delicious food” as he takes one forkful after another.
I’ve been fighting back the tears that have come and gone all afternoon, but Tom’s habitual kindness unlocks them; they slide down my face.
They come faster and faster, until I’m gasping with sobs.
I put my face in my hands to try to hide, but there’s no hiding now.
“Judith! What is it?” Tom’s fork clatters to his plate as he reaches for my wrist. He grabs it too hard and I cry out, as though he were the man in the crosswalk.
Or the man in the long blue car. Or the caller.
The dark figure in my pictures. All the men or the one man who torments me.
Tom lets go, and through my hands I can see the stricken look on his face.
“Judy. What is it? What happened?” I can only shake my head back and forth.
When Rosie died, I cried like this, and again at Tom’s hospital bedside.
I cried like this when Tom Junior was born, when the nurse held the tiny bundle out to me.
I held him and wept out all the pain, all the hardship and horror of my childhood.
The kind nurse gave me tissues but she should have brought a bucket and mop instead.
Tom, beside me, made soft shushing sounds, as if I were a baby myself.
I kept saying through my tears, I’m all right, I’m all right.
Just overwhelmed. But since Tom didn’t know the whole story of my youth, I couldn’t articulate the immense and complicated joy I felt, knowing my child would grow up with two loving parents in a stable home.
When I was done sobbing, it felt like I’d gone through a monumental cleansing.
As if the flood of my tears had washed out the past like it was a rotten bridge.
The feeling ebbed, but I always remembered it and the soft peace that descended after my wild sobs.
I floated in that space for as long as I could.
When I’ve quieted a little, and regained my composure, I let my hands fall and look Tom squarely in the eye.
“There’s a man who’s been—calling me,” I say quietly. I can’t tell him the worst of it, the whole truth of it. The words won’t come out—just as they haven’t whenever I’ve tried to tell him about my early attacker.
“He says terrible things. I don’t know why he’s calling me, or why it upset me just now, but he does and it did.” Tom, whose face has reddened, asks me what the man says, and the lie comes quickly:
“He says he wants to…do things to me. He calls me names.” That part, at least, is true. Tom pushes back his chair and stands, pacing in our small dining room.
“When does he call?”
“In the middle of the day, or the late afternoon.”
“We should call the police.” He looks furious and certain, but my blood freezes.
Tom doesn’t know my history with the police: how they accused me of letting my attacker in, of being complicit in my own torment.
How, later, they suggested I’d made it all up—and my grandmother believed them.
The whole town believed them, eventually, when the man never materialized, and no witnesses came forward.
I can’t bear to have the police here, digging and prodding, doubting me, uncovering my past. I shake my head slowly.
“No police,” I say in a hoarse whisper. Tom sits down in his chair again, and holds my cold, trembling hands in his.
“We should call them, just to get it on record,” he says softly.
“It won’t help. And besides, it’s just some…idiot. A troubled teenager,” I say, lying again and scrambling to seem composed.
Tom gives my hands a squeeze and nods once. “Okay. We won’t call. Not yet. But from now on, when you’re home alone, don’t answer the telephone. Just let it ring.”
“I can’t do that, Tom. What if something happened to you? Or Tom Junior.”
“Well, if you pick up and it’s him, hang up immediately.
Don’t listen to a word. And tell me when I get home—or call me at work.
” I nod, relieved that he’s moved past calling the police—though I shouldn’t be relieved at all.
Nothing’s changed or improved; I’m still alone with my pursuer and I’ve told my husband a slim half-truth.
I tell myself I’m shielding Tom to save his health, but really, would it hurt or kill him to know? Why hold so tightly to my secrets?
Because I love them, just a little? Cherish them as wholly mine?
Do I love the man, the shadow, too? I wonder, and a shiver runs through me.
Tom sees and rubs my forearms with his warm hands.
I give him a watery smile. He’s the man here with me now in our cozy home; the main presence in my life.
But there are others, and the others find me everywhere I am, everywhere I go.
They circle the two of us, surrounding us, drawing close. But Tom doesn’t know.
There is no hope for you, I think, looking at my Tom like he’s some kind of doomed suitor. He just gives me a loving smile.