It Takes Two
“Momma,” Charlie’s voice whispers. “Momma, wake up.” Her small hand brushes away my hair. “Mommy!” Her breath quickens and she begins to cry. Unable to move my head, my heart begins to race. I drift out of consciousness.
“Eva, its Mary,” the voice of my mother-in-law pierces my head. A rapid thrust of awareness, then shame. I flinch with nowhere to hide. I tighten my hand into a fist, doing my best to conceal my face from Charlie.
“Granny, what’s wrong with her?”
I try to lift my head off the pillow. Is this my pillow, or is it my hair? It is my hair, matted with blood and tangled into a tuft, a towel tucked under my cheek, soaked with water and blood. My neck is stiff, making it nearly impossible to turn or look up at the voices coming from the sofa. The sun blasts in from the balcony doors and the two figures sit shadowed in its glare. I stretch out my hand, my fingers, purple and red with dried blood. My right eye focuses in on two fingernails, torn too close to the flesh, stinging as I press my hand forward and into the mattress. Determined, I try to lift my head and turn to look at my daughter and Mary.
Just feet from my bed the two of them sit on the Davenport Max’s mother had given us when we first moved into this house. Now that we could afford our own furniture we moved it upstairs into our room. I imagined that it would be nice to have guests, like my sister, sit and visit with me in our room. Or, perhaps Charlie would enjoy a bedtime story before being tucked into bed there. Instead, today I had Max’s mother and my daughter trying to pry me out of unconsciousness. I could not imagine what Charlie was thinking as she saw the brutality on my face. I could not meet their eyes or muster the word hello to my mother-in-law. My eyes were swollen shut; the taste of blood filled my mouth.
“Momma! What happened to you?” I don’t have to see Charlie to know that her tiny frame is stiff, her eyes frightened and her face distorted by what she sees. I have seen this look on her before and she has seen me beaten before. However I sense this time is worse.
My mother-in-law gently asks, “Eva, did you and Max have another fight?”
I nod yes.
“Oh Lord Jesus and Mary. Eva, one of you has to learn to shut up.”
Charlie defends me, “I heard them Granny. They were fighting all night. He hit her all night.”
I fluttered my eyes a tiny bit, opening them for brief intervals, enough to see the horror on my child’s face and the sincere naiveté mixed with horror and shame on my mother-in-law’s face. I lay crusted to the bed in disbelief at what she was saying. Did she really think that me shutting my mouth was all it would take to stop her son from beating me? I tried to raise my body a bit to get a look at what my face looked like. Instead, I saw through the crust of my lashes the look on baby Charlie’s face. I drift to a place, my mind falling back into a deep hole until everything goes black like when the doctor gives you anesthesia and asks you to count backwards from one hundred: One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety- and out cold.
What makes a woman stay when her husband beats her? People judge her as stupid, as crazy. They say cruel things like, “She must like getting hit.” They get fed up; tired of hearing the same old stories. “Just leave him,” they say, as if it were that easy.
I don’t know why I stay. I do. But if I had to defend it, I realize how stupid it would sound. Something in my emotional makeup keeps me chained to my husband. Fear of destitution, fear of failure fear of complete loss of identity and fear of never being loved again; I don’t think it has to make rational sense, but I am not rational. My mind is in madness. One thought completely contradicting the next. Complete and utter madness of terror. Everything is cranked up to high. On paper, you would hate me. On paper, I hate me. In my heart, a place you cannot see, I want love. I am a frightened little girl who never got enough love and affection. How cliché. I don’t care because it is true. I had wobbly knees, freckles and red hair. I was teased constantly. However, when he came along and took notice of me, admired the contrast between his brown and my white, it ignited something in me. And now I was here, lying in this bed, both I and the sheets, one mangled mess of blood, hair and teeth, like a baby miscarried because it never fully formed, the parts clearly human but the whole unrecognizable and disfigured, dead. Lying in our bed, dead to the soul.
#domesticviolence #metoo #justiceformothers #nomore #believeher #beleivesurvivors #whyistayed #whyshestayed