“Baby! Wait! Listen!”
It takes only a second for the anger to reach my throat.“Fuck you!” I scream at the top of my lungs.
Blam! I hang up.
“How long has he been calling?” I snap, waves of rage causing my body to tremble.
“Vell, you slept a long time. He’s been calling all morning. I…”
“NOTHING! Tell him nothing about me. And tell him to go fuck himself if he calls again. I never want to hear his voice. Ever!” I am shaking hard now, and I want to throw up.
“Dawn!” Mom’s eyes are full of shock and surprise at the intensity of my words. She can see her daughter has been hurt, but I am like a stranger to her, and she’s helpless.
“You don’t understand, Mom! I can’t tell you how much… he… Never mind!” I lose my appetite. Memories stab sharp, tortured pain from my gut to my throat, and I need to lie down. I curl into a fetal position, the most heart-wrenching of sobs bellowing from the very bottom of my soul. Sorrowfully, like a Holocaust survivor, I weep.
The month of January fades into February, and the phone continues to ring… two, three times a day. I stop picking it up for anyone, just in case it is John on the other line, and let it ring and ring. Morning, noon, and twice at night the phone rings. Only my family answers. In the beginning they hang up too, but soon enough John gets them to stay on the line and coaxes them into talking. “No. I’m sorry, but I don’t tink dat she vahnts to talk.” My mother stays polite while I signal for her to hang up.
There is snow on the ground, ice—and the sky is solidly gray. Eastern Oregon is barren in the winter. Brown, creepy, lifeless sticks for plants and trees. Wind chill in the teens. It suits my mood and the way I feel about life. Mom’s in a new place, a light blue two-story house nearly a hundred years old. She is recently remarried and seems happy to finally have a place of her own. They are struggling though and don’t have much, so after a month of isolating myself I finally feel well enough to apply for a job and help out. I’m a CNA, I tell myself with pride, remembering a good part of my past. I can find a job.
I secure a position at Evergreen Convalescent Hospital—not a difficult thing to do; they so desperately need the help for the elderly—and begin a three-to-eleven shift. I am blending in with people who don’t know about John or my past, and the anonymity helps me to reconnect with the part of me that’s been waiting to bloom. I am earning my own money now and helping Mom and her new husband, Phil, with the bills. But when I’m not at work, burning memories creep up, and overwhelming indignation at the degradation I’ve recently been through consumes me. The anger, the buried rage, smolders and bubbles, threatening to rise to the surface like lava overflowing from a volcano and destroying the village below.
My steam vents are my job, a crochet hook and ball of yarn, and my grandma’s old wooden rocking chair. And when I can’t sleep or bear to feel, I have alcohol to burn the memories into hated blackened ashes. Scheduled days off from the convalescent home scare me—too much time to think. I find some comfort falling back into childhood memories of the big house in Toms River, sitting in Grandma’s smooth rocker. The vision of how her arms rested across her chest embraces me as I rock and gaze out of the big picture window in Mom’s living room. I listen to the phone ring and ring and ring, muttering curses under my breath. Back and forth, back and forth I rock, remembering her consistency and faith, imagining her anger at the betrayal of my father. Full of rage, I crochet steadily. Yarn twists around my finger tightly, cutting off blood and denting the skin near my knuckle. The lack of circulation leaves my fingers blue and cold, but I don’t pay attention to it and certainly I can’t release my grip even if I try.
I associate only with my family. I am embarrassed at the way John falsely made me feel distrustful of them. He lied to me about everyone, telling me they didn’t care. Slowly, I am able to share with them bits and pieces of what happened, and my brother fumes and wants to strangle John for hurting me, his sister. He met John a few years back when he ran away from Mom to visit me in Glendale. John disliked him right away. Someone else who loved me was not allowed in the picture of John’s perfect world, so he fed me lies that caused me to distrust my brother and to send him away. It was painful to see how hurt he was then that I would believe John over him, and I am sickened to see how wrong I have been.
The few details I share with Terry have her dumbstruck. “How can he have turned that way? He wasn’t like that when I was there!
He loved you so much, Dawn, and he was so nice to me!” It is a shock to her, and she thinks it’s clear that the drugs are to blame.
I see the drugs as the culprit too. True or not, it is the only way I can accept that any of the violent abuse has ever happened. It had to be the drugs.
Winter’s end brings days of sunshine and snow, spring, the robins that build nests in my mother’s maple tree out front. I watch them play and forage for food while I still rock and pull the yarn ever tighter around my crochet hook. The phone rings constantly, and Mom continues to tell John, “She said no.”
“He says he understands and to tell you that he loves you.” Mom passes messages along, giving in a bit with John’s pleadings and weeks of relentless calls.
Exhausted from the endless ringing, everyone really just wants him to stop. Yet Terry is over often and has no problem answering the phone when it rings. She lets John talk to her. Curious, she wants to know what happened. Finding an open ear, John jumps in… he’s done that before with her. He knows Terry and speaks to her of times when he brought her food and helped us out. “He says he doesn’t want anything from you, Dawn. He only wants to talk to you.” Terry holds the phone out for me, telling me she thinks he’s sincere.
For a moment, I feel the power of an upper hand as he exposes his vulnerable side. I have only one thing I need to know… “Where’s Thor?” I yell my first words to him, breaking my icy silence.
“He’s fine. He’s okay. Do you want to talk to him?” Terry repeats his words to me.
“No!”
She continues to speak for a few minutes, then hangs up. “He wants me to watch out for you. Make sure you’re okay.”
Blankly and unflinching, I stare at her. Can he be for real? I think. Now he wants to make sure I am okay? Yeah, right!
“Is he high?” I ask her.
“I don’t think so. He sounded normal. I don’t know everything that happened, Dawn, but he said he’s real sorry. He said it was the drugs. He said he and Thor miss you.”
I see her face, furrowed brow, believing eyes, and understand how easily she is swept up in his sweet words. She is remembering the John from years ago, from the beginning. She doesn’t know how violent the drugs have made him. I can’t bear to tell her.
“He said he’s gonna send me money to buy some film so I can take pictures of you. He wants a picture.”
“God, Terry! What did you say? He has pictures. He has Thor too. He’s sick and on drugs, and I don’t believe him.”
“All right, Dawn. I guess so. But he didn’t sound high to me.” Terry and I leave it at that. The charming John, the Terry food Snickers bar John, has the power over her emotions—a lot because I haven’t told my family many details, but mostly because his seduction is controlling… and for me, dangerous.