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It was just that last time, when he came in from school and I turned at the kitchen
counter, his apple slices on a plate, his milk in a glass, my face swollen, misshapen, the
colors of a spectacular sunset just before nightfall, my smile a clownish wiggle of a
thing because of my split lip, that he couldn't manage to look away, disappear upstairs,
pretend he didn't see. "Mom, oh, Mom," he'd said, his eyes enormous. "Don't
worry," I'd replied before he could say more. "I'll take care of
everything."
"Mom," he'd said again. And then maybe he remembered, remembered the secret,
remembered all those mornings after the horrible sounds and screams, how his father would
sit at the table drinking coffee from his PBA mug, how I'd come in from running and go up
to shower, how everyone acted as though everything was just as it should be. So the wild
light in his eyes flared, flickered, died, and he added, "Was it an accident?"
Because that's what I'd said, year after year. An accident. I had an accident. The
accident was that I met Bobby Benedetto in a bar, and I fell crazy in love with him. And
after that I fell further and further every year. Not so you'd notice, if you knew me,
although no one really did. On the outside I looked fine: the job, the house, the kid, the
husband, the smile. Nobody got to see the hitting, which was really the humiliation, which
turned into the hatred. Not just hating Bobby, but hating myself, too, the cringing self
that was afraid to pick up the remote control from the coffee table in case it was just
that thing that set him off. I remember a story in the Daily News a couple of years ago
about a guy who kept a woman chained in the basement of the building where he was a
custodian. Whenever he felt like it, he went down the concrete steps and did what he
wanted to her. Part of me had been in a cellar, too, waiting for the sound of footfalls on
the stairs. And I wasn't even chained. I stayed because I thought things would get better,
or at least not worse. I stayed because I wanted my son to have a father and I wanted a
home. For a long time I stayed because I loved Bobby Benedetto, because no one had ever
gotten to me the way he did. I think he knew that. He made me his accomplice in what he
did, and I made Robert mine. Until that last time, when I knew I had to go, when I knew
that if I told my son I'd broken my nose, blacked my eyes, split my lip, by walking into
the dining-room door in the dark, that I would have gone past some point of no return. The
secret was killing the kid in him and the woman in me, what was left of her. I had to save
him, and myself.
"Where are we going, Mom?" he whined in the station, but he did it like any kid
would, on any long trip, and it almost made me laugh and smile and cry, too, to hear him
sound so ordinary instead of so dead and closed up. Besides, he knew. He knew we were
running away from his father, as far and as fast as we could. I wanted to say, Robert,
baby, hon, I'm taking you out of the cellar. I'm taking you to where there won't be
secrets anymore. But that wasn't exactly true. They'd just be different secrets now.
There are people who will do almost anything in America, who will paint your house, paint
your toenails, choose your clothes, mind your kids. In Manhattan, at the best private
schools, you can even hire a nitpicker if your kid gets head lice. And there are people
who will help you get away from your husband, who will find you a new house, a new job, a
new life, even a new name. They are mysterious about it because they say it's what they
need to do to keep you safe; when she goes on television, their leader, a woman named
Patty Bancroft, likes to say, "We do not even have a name for ourselves." Maybe
that's why I'd felt I had to whisper when I talked to her on the phone, even though Bobby
was long gone from the house: to keep their secret, my secret. There are people, Patty
Bancroft had said, who will help you; it is better if you know no more than that. I looked
down at Robert, hunched over on the bench, bent almost double over a little electronic
game he carried with him everywhere. Ninjas in glowing green lunged forward and kicked men
in black masks; the black masks fell back, fell over like felled trees. The ninjas bowed.
The number at one corner of the screen grew larger. Robert was breathing as though he had
been running. I ran my hand over his dark hair, cut like a long tonsure over his narrow,
pointed skull. My touch was an annoyance; he leaned slightly to one side and rocked
forward to meet the ninjas, take them on, knock them down. He was good at these games, at
losing himself in the tinny electronic sounds and glowing pictures. My sister, Grace, said
all the kids were, these days. But I wondered. I looked across the station at a small girl
in overalls who was toddling from stranger to stranger, smiling and waving while her
mother followed six paces behind. Even when he was small Robert had never, ever been like
that. Grace said kids were born with personalities, and Robert's was as dignified and
adult as his name. But I wondered. When Robert was three he sometimes sat and stared and
rocked slightly back and forth, and I worried that he was autistic. He wasn't, of course;
the doctor said so.
Use of this excerpt from Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: Copyright© 1998 by Anna Quindlen. All rights reserved.
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