Completely Her Own

Laurie is on the boat, a month before her wedding, when she is asked to start remembering.

She is 30 years old. The biological clock is ticking, her mother will remind her. Will she have to rely on Laurie’s brother for grandchildren? It feels like a slap to the face. Of course not. She asked for an engagement ring last Christmas and Tony gave her a stereo for her car. There are worse gifts, she supposes, and the sound quality was impressive. She thinks of her mother on the phone, though, of the disappointment in her voice. And then the engagement ring comes a few months later, anyway, when Tony is ready to offer it to her himself. These are big decisions to make, you know. She understands.

It's the end of summer and Tony lets her drive the boat. She is with him and his brother and his brother’s girlfriend Ashley. Sometimes, when she lets her stream-of-consciousness play freely, careless as unwatched children, barefoot and maybe a little hungry, she wonders if she would’ve agreed to marry Tony if she were a few years younger. This is a dangerous place to go, and she will quickly redirect. Her children will not be unwatched, anyway, and they will have to wear shoes because this is Minnesota and frostbite is a real possibility, and they will not be hungry, she will make sure of that. This is what she means. There is a lot of pressure for women at this age; talk of babies is no joke. And she wants this. She does. She was 28 when she met Tony but between then and now all her friends are married and talking about having children. This is what people do, and Tony is a good man. A car stereo and then the engagement ring. There must be poetry in there somewhere, she decides, but what she doesn’t know yet is that most poetry isn’t meant to make you happy, it’s meant to make you feel, and feeling can happen with immense heartache.

For now, they are on the boat, engaged, spending time with family, and it’s an accident when Laurie cuts somebody off while pulling Tony on the wakeboard. Really, she didn’t mean to, but Tony throws down the rope, gets back on the boat. He starts yelling. Oops. She isn’t completely comfortable with this whole boat-driving thing. It takes a second to get the hang of it. He is still going at it, cursing and spitting, red in the face. Her fiancé is a scary man when he is angry, she will not admit to herself. She will learn, eventually. He calls her a stupid bitch. Says she’s an idiot. His brother doesn’t say anything, and later, she talks to Ashley about it, but Tony’s brother does the same thing to Ashley sometimes. It’s normal, Ashley assures Laurie.

That’s good. The wedding is only a month away.

***

When she is pregnant with her first daughter, Izzy, Tony gets mad enough again that it will come next in the remembering. It starts so slowly. She is doing everything right: married, baby on the way, house in the suburbs. Her mother is overjoyed. There have been no more boats, no more wakeboarder mishaps. This time, she is sitting on the couch, belly rounded with their child, when she makes her husband angry. She can’t recall why anymore, but she can recall what happened after. He picks up the TV remote, throws it at the door, and she feels his temper like heat that has been left on too high. He tells her, “You’re lucky that you’re fuckin’ pregnant.”

Laurie looks down at her belly and wonders, not for the last time, what sort of father this unborn baby girl will have.

Later, they’re painting the house. Now she is pregnant with her second daughter. The name is already picked out: Miranda. Tony works in construction and is always doing work on the house: gutting out the bathroom, changing the walls. He painted the door a color she didn’t like. It looks better white, doesn’t it? She paints over it. He paints over it again. This is a childish way to handle a disagreement, but she is allowed to be childish sometimes.

Did she really believe this? Was she that naïve? This is the justification she will use when her husband hits her over the head with the paintbrush. She will think about what Ashley said, about this being normal, and squeeze her eyes shut, and decide she is overreacting. They get along so well, most of the time. When she doesn’t disagree. She is a mature adult, anyway, a mother of a beautiful baby girl. She is sick to her stomach. She should know better.

Shouldn’t he?

***

Laurie is planning a girls’ trip to Hawaii with her coworkers. Tony tells her she can’t go, but Laurie explains how it’s all planned out. She will be staying at someone’s house for free. She has found flights relatively cheap and will pay for it all herself. She’ll go in February but after Izzy’s birthday. This is exciting. This is something to look forward to.

“You’re not fucking going,” Tony says.

“I am,” Laurie says.

They don’t talk about it again. Laurie purchases the tickets and then it’s time, finally, to go to the airport. Brenda, her coworker, is picking her up. Laurie goes to give Tony a hug goodbye, but he turns around, walks away, won’t even look at her. The tears start slowly, painful and prickly. She finds herself in Brenda’s car, sobbing, and Brenda nods, explaining it must be hard to leave her kids. Laurie doesn’t correct her. What could she say? My husband won’t even hug me goodbye, she thinks but will not voice. Brenda has kids, too, and her husband is fine with this trip to Hawaii. Again, Laurie thinks of Ashley’s assurance on the boat, but that conversation has grown stale over time, diluted with its reuse in her head.

They arrive in Hawaii. She stays with a friend of a friend named Bill, meets strangers, is happy for the first time since she got married. She calls home, but when she calls, Tony won’t talk to her. He puts the girls on the phone, lets Izzy and Miranda say hi, but toddlers cannot hold a conversation. Her coworkers ask her why her phone calls are so short, and she explains that her children have not yet learned the art of speaking in complete sentences. People frown. Your husband, though. He doesn’t want to talk?

Her friends know something is wrong. How do you know what to say? Laurie doesn’t even know. Strangers treat her better than her husband does. She is heading back down that way of thinking that hurts in the most isolating way. Tony has always said it’s her fault. He wouldn’t hit her if she wasn’t such a bitch. God, what a fucking cunt. She never curses, except in her head, except when she is quoting her husband. This is why it is so hard to believe that people could be nice to her. Tony tells her she doesn’t deserve it. She doesn’t deserve it. Him. What if it’s him she doesn’t deserve.

Bill is a nice man. A millionaire but down-to-earth. “How’s your marriage?” he asks her one afternoon.  

Laurie looks up, doesn’t think, blurts out, “My husband is abusive.” Easier to say it to strangers. It’s not as embarrassing this way.

He asks her to tell him more and she keeps going and when she’s done, he says, “that’s not good, Laurie,” and she almost laughs. Simple as that: not good. It must be so easy to have eyes that are not her own, to see a wife being abused and not a marriage from which she may never escape. He does not know how it feels to break slow as cracks in the sidewalk, spidering and harmless until the ground falls out from beneath your feet. “You need to get out,” Bill continues.

Yes. If only it were that easy.

Another man staying at Bill’s house, Ivan, tells her she needs to buy a cell phone. It’s 2010 and this is a radical idea and Tony always said she didn’t need one. Who would she call? Ivan tells her it could save her life. She scoffs. Tony wouldn’t kill her.

“Not on purpose, maybe,” Ivan says, and Laurie agrees to buy the phone. Adds Ivan and Bill’s phone numbers. It’s time to go back home.

***

Laurie tells Tony she wants a divorce. He says, “I’m not fucking leaving my house, you bitch,” and again, she is sick to her stomach. How could she take care of the house without him, anyway? The bathroom off the primary bedroom is gutted, waiting to be redone. There is a hole in the wall, patched over haphazardly, covered with a picture frame. Laurie tries not to think about how the hole got there, but when she closes her eyes, she sees his fist, hears the sound drywall makes when it encounters knuckles and flesh. Then there is the yard work, the necessary homeowner maintenance, and she could never do that on her own, he reminds her.

When he tells her this time, though, she doesn’t know if she agrees.

Tony isn’t happy with her brand-new cell phone and even less happy with the two numbers already programmed into it. He finds pictures of Laurie with Bill and Ivan, their arms around each other in the big mansion in Hawaii, smiling into the camera the way you do on vacation, and decides she is sleeping with one of them.

“Bill is too old,” Tony says, “so it must be Ivan. You cheated on me with him, didn’t you?”

“You think I’m so ugly I’d have to go all the way to Hawaii to find someone to sleep with?” The joke doesn’t land. “I didn’t cheat on you,” she says but she feels guilty anyway. Blame is an old dance partner of Tony’s, one that has become quite close over the last few years. It settles on her skin like another layer of glue, thick and slimy.

The next time she talks to her father, he asks her if she slept with someone else in Hawaii. What did Tony say his name was? Ivan something? Laurie can’t find the words to respond. Eighteen years living under his roof, and he is so quick to dismiss her fidelity. Somehow, it made sense when Tony created this accusation because somewhere along the way she has grown to expect this sort of response from him. It’s one of those things you don’t realize has become normal until you’re two kids deep in a toxic marriage. What is it they say? A frog dropped into slowly boiling water. She tells her father it’s not true. He believes her, she thinks, but her mother doesn’t. Her mother believes Tony.

Her mother believes she has cheated on her husband with some man named Ivan on a work trip in Hawaii because Tony said so. This is why it was easier to tell the strangers.

“He hits me, Mom,” Laurie says. “He hurts me.” Desperation creeps up her throat. He hit her over the head with a glass cup and knocked her unconscious. She will only feel comfortable owning plastic cups for the rest of her life. What more is there for her to say? What does her mother need to hear?

“You hit him, Laurie,” her mother says, “I know how your temper can get. Tony told me.”

The sidewalk, the one that had given way beneath her feet, caves in deeper.

***

She has two daughters. Izzy and Miranda, five and two years old. This is one of the hardest parts of remembering, the part that makes her throat close. These are memories that sting. Miranda stops talking, stops being potty trained. Laurie takes her to daycare, and she sits in the supervisor’s lap all day, silent. Izzy gets cold sores across her mouth from the stress and will continue to get them even as she gets older. First day of the college Tony will refuse to pay for, for example.

Laurie starts seeing a counselor through work. Tony makes sure she will tell the therapist what a horrible wife she is, how she cheated on him, etcetera. What she tells the therapist is, instead, how afraid she is, and the therapist asks what she will do when he gets violent in front of the girls. He won’t, Laurie dismisses.

He does.

They are in the bathroom in the morning, before work. Izzy and Miranda are there. Tony gets so angry he punches a hole through the wall. What must it be like to watch your father use his strength to destroy so unapologetically, Laurie wonders. What must it be like to watch your husband. Laurie knows but it is from a distance.

She calls in sick to work today. After Tony leaves, she takes the kids to daycare and then she drives to the courthouse, hands on the steering wheel, foot on the gas, watching her body as though she is not who is inside it. When she orders the restraining order, she is asked to document every time he has hit her. The cops are impressed with the detail of her recounting as if it is not every bad moment of her life on paper. Her own handwriting, all her secrets. She gives it away. Man in uniform. This is so much harder than an afternoon conversation in Bill’s mansion in Hawaii.

This cannot be what she will be summarized as. This cannot be all she will leave behind, this pain made 2D. When she thinks of the word future there is little that comes with it. She lets herself imagine a reality in which her daughters grow up without her and the what if feels disturbingly closer. Worse-case scenario, she reminds herself. But wasn’t this? Daycare at 9 AM, courthouse at 10 AM. A restraining order is an abstract concept until she holds it in her hands.  

When Laurie takes the kids home that evening, the house is empty.

***

This time, when she tells her parents, her dad believes her. Her mom doesn’t say anything. This is the isolation Tony has created, this protective padding around himself that has reached her mother so thoroughly.

The first time Tony violates the restraining order, it’s their anniversary. He writes her a letter: eight years ago, I thought I married the woman of my dreams. Eight years ago, I thought I would be with you forever. You’ve ruined me.

You’ve ruined me, Laurie thinks.

He is allowed into the house to gather some of his belongings. While he is there, he leaves books behind about how to save a marriage. He won’t pay for daycare or school or extracurriculars, but he will pay for glossy new paperbacks that will teach her how to be a better wife. Don’t make your husband hit you. Stop being a bitch. You’ve torn this love story to shreds. On that same visit, he steals her checking account information. She has already closed her savings account, but not until after he drained it. There is a name for this, she will learn later: financial abuse.

The second time he violates the restraining order, it’s just after Christmas. She asks him to drop the kids off so she can take them to see their grandparents. He calls her and leaves a message: you fucking bitch, he says, I’m not gonna let you have the kids, you fuckin’ moron. There are words that lose meaning after repetition, but these ones never do.

She saves the voicemail and tells the cops and later they call her to say he is in custody. Her reaction is immediate: that’s not what she meant. She didn’t mean to put him in jail. Don’t you think that’s a little extreme, she asks the police officer on the phone. She has done this so many times. Practice makes perfect. Minimize, minimize, minimize.

“He needs to be in jail,” the officer says, and the only word that Laurie can manage in reply is oh.

***

After New Year’s, her three-year-old gets back from Tony’s house wearing a bail bondsman hat.

“Why did you make the police put Daddy in jail?” Izzy asks. “That’s not nice of you.”

Laurie takes a deep breath, smooths a hand down her daughter’s hair. “Izzy,” she says, “when you hit your sister, I put you in timeout, right? Because you did something naughty?”

“Right.”

“Well,” Laurie continues, “Daddy did something naughty. All I did was tell the police about it and they put him in jail. Do you understand?”

Izzy looks up at her, wide eyes, too innocent. “Ok.”

***

After the divorce is finalized, Laurie and Tony see a parenting consultant. Izzy wants to do gymnastics. Miranda wants to sign up for soccer. Let’s put the girls into piano lessons. Tony looks her in the eyes, this man whose ring she wore, and refuses. Gymnastics isn’t a valid activity, he says. Piano is too expensive. Miranda can play soccer when she gets to high school. What sort of choice is this to make? She has denied her children so much already; she has gotten so good at saying no.

No spring break trip this year. I know your friends are all taking one. Not next year either. If we save, I can make it happen in five years. I’m sorry.

She is so, so sorry. She donates plasma during the year of the divorce so she can buy her girls Christmas presents. She takes them to parades all summer long, lets the sweat drip down the back of her neck while Izzy scrambles to catch the candy thrown into the crowd, pretends this is something her daughters have requested of her, tells herself this will be enough. Parades are free. Let’s go to the lake, next. The beach is free. And now Miranda is begging to play soccer and Tony is telling her too expensive and the parenting consultant tries to reason but he is shaking his head. He won’t pay for it. Miranda is still begging.

Laurie sits the girls down and says, “here is what I can offer you.”

They say it’s worth it. They want Miranda to play soccer, so it’s ok if they only get one gift on their birthday instead of three. It’s ok if Christmas looks different from now on. Her daughters look up at her with such sincerity, and Laurie wants to cry. She is teaching them sacrifice, she rationalizes. She is teaching them decision-making and independence. She is teaching them that you must be careful who you marry.

The parenting consultant recommends the Domestic Abuse Project to Laurie. All this that has happened, all these lives that she has lived, and DAP comes in so late to this story, you muse. But listen. These things cannot happen all at once. Laurie does not get hit over the head with the paintbrush and drop her kids off at daycare and then her husband is arrested in time for dinner. The divorce will be finalized by morning, her therapy will be over before the workday ends. Have a nice life.

It's already been a year since she returned from Hawaii. It’s been eight years since she was asked to start remembering. That day on the boat? So close to her wedding? She did not go from there to the courthouse. She did not go from the courthouse to DAP. You do not recognize the red flags until they are bruised and raw on your skin, and even then, you persist. You are strong. There are the girls to think about. He refuses to leave the house anyway, you bitch. Somehow, you blinked, and your world has become so, so small. He has already left his marks deep in the foundation of your home. The hole in the drywall. The dark maw of the basement stairs. Some things are better left unsaid.

***

There are parts that drag. No, not parts. There are years that drag.  

***

Her first day at DAP, in the large group room, there is a lawyer. Laurie thinks she must have the wrong address; lawyers do not get abused. They’re lawyers. They’re women in pantsuits with tight ponytails and stern smiles and bring home paychecks that would fix Laurie’s life. Yet here this woman is. Laurie does not have the wrong address.

She enrolls in the Victim Survivor Program and puts Izzy and Miranda in the Youth Program. Her daughters learn how to deal with the anger and frustration. She sees one of DAP’s legal advocates to help her in court against Tony. She must write a statement against him, and this is a mess, this is not just a signature on the dotted line, this is her husband ripping her apart, one legal document at a time. She gets the house, but Tony goes through every item they own to make sure he gets his exact half. He wants his share of the dishwasher. The dishwasher. Is this what hysteria feels like?

The advocate helps her finish writing the statement. She reads it to Tony in front of a judge and he stands up, starts yelling. She can no longer picture her ex-husband without seeing him yelling. “That’s not true!” he says, “she’s lying!”

“Tony,” the judge says, “look at where you are sitting.”

***

Her kids get older. Their memory grows blurry, but Laurie’s does not. Honestly, I thought he was going to kill me, she says now. It has taken a long time to admit this, but she remembers the police calling her:

“You got this restraining order two years ago, Laurie, and he’s still violating it,” he says. “All I’m saying is, what happens next is stalking. And that usually doesn’t end well.”

What a strange way to put it, Laurie thinks. It being her murder.

***

Laurie tells her boss she can’t work 60-hour weeks anymore. “I’m going through a divorce,” she says, “I have my daughters to think about.”

“Everyone else can manage to work 60 hours, Laurie,” her boss says.

And so, Laurie takes a new job, and with it, a $10,000 pay cut. They want her to travel, and she can’t. They want her to be flexible with her hours, and she can’t. What is she supposed to do? She has a restraining order against her ex-husband. He is not jumping at the opportunity to bend his schedule with the kids around Laurie’s work hours.

Just the divorce costs her a year’s salary. No one talks about how hard it is to recover from this financially, Laurie thinks. Tony is forced to pay for medical bills and daycare and little else. The bathroom off the primary bedroom is still gutted from when Tony was planning to redo it, but she can’t afford to fix it. She can’t afford much, these days.

Still, DAP provides her with a sisterhood of sorts. Her friends are kind to her, but they cannot empathize, they do not know what it is like to have lost balance this completely. In group therapy, she is not alone in her isolation. She learns words to use for what happened to her, can understand that these are tactics that people who use harm often take. She puts meaning behind words: gaslighting, manipulation, blame. She learns how to cut negative people from her life, to pay attention to who she chooses to spend her time with. She looks inward. She trusts herself.

Laurie does her best to show her daughters abundance. What she feels is empty. What she does is pretend.

***

When Miranda is in middle school, she plays in the USA cup up north. So many sacrifices that Laurie has made for this to happen, and Miranda has taken to soccer like it was what she was meant to do.

After they get home from the tournament, Laurie starts a load of laundry and then she notices the smell. Something isn’t right. The cat’s litter box? No, she cleaned that out earlier. She opens the basement door, lets herself into this cold, underground place. There has been a sewage leak, she realizes. She descends slowly and now stands ankles deep in murky water.

She spends the next week cleaning literal shit out of her basement, wheelbarrowing it and dumping it into the sewer in her street. Her daughter says, “Mommy, I’m sorry if I pooped too much,” and Laurie cannot help but laugh.

It’s a basement full of poop. It’s disgusting, objectively. She knows she should be more bothered by it than she is but what she feels instead is strength. She will handle this, and she will do it on her own. Tony will always have said what he always has said but what would he say now? This is proof, this is real, she can see and touch and smell it: she can take care of this house, her house. She doesn’t need his help. Never did. Six inches of standing shit water? No problem. Laurie buys the necessary tools, and she carts out all the sewage and with it she takes the bad memories. All that violence that lived in that basement is soaked up and shoveled.

Laure redoes the basement: new carpet, new walls, new furniture, new memories. There is so much symbolism in renewal. Out with the bad, out with the shit. Fresh start, all on her own. She sees herself retired and happy and oh-so-capable of cleaning out basement sewage water. She sees her daughters married and thriving. She lives the future that police officer once worried she would never get to have and it is glorious, it is taking a deep breath once the snow melts in the spring.

Ten years after the divorce, Laurie finally has enough money to redo the bathroom. It feels like symmetry, first the basement, now this. Little by little she is making this house her own. She takes Izzy and Miranda to the store, and they pick everything out together. They do it alone. They choose what they want. This is something they have done themselves. Laurie leaves the bathroom door open, now. Stands in the basement and inhales and exhales and does not feel the trauma rising up her throat like bile. Not anymore.

Sometimes, it’s hard to focus on the good but she does her best. It is a house that has seen so much violence and anger and pain. It wears the scars on its bones the same way that Laurie does. But God, we are so much more than bones. It is a house that has seen the birth of her daughters. Love that will outlive the hurt. Laurie laughs so much. She laughs while she cries. She has a stable job and can pay to put both her daughters through college. She shares a bond deep as roots with herself. The sidewalk does not cave anymore. It’s solid as she is.

When Tony buys a 1971 Ford Grand Torino the spring before Izzy leaves for school, Laurie’s anger is now simultaneous with her pride. “This car he has purchased costs the same as one year of your college,” she explains to Izzy, “and he has purchased it instead of one year of your college.” These are the choices he makes. She knows how his story will end: alone, in an empty life, with his cars for company. It is not a victory.

It is Laurie, in this house that is completely her own.