1: Tola
In the pocket of space before waking, Tola let slip his grasp on a dream of a scorpion crawling over his foot. Shaking off suspended consciousness, he reached out to warn Jess and found her a lump of slumber to his left. The sound of the dog barking downstairs pierced his awareness.
The bedroom materialized dimly around him. It wasn’t a bark so much as a delicate “Ar!” that signaled, Hey, people upstairs, come down here. She was a very polite dog.
He lay in bed and listened, disoriented and sweaty, adrenaline beginning its rousing slither. He would go down to see what was wrong. Maisy was nearly twelve, her muzzle turning white, and they had noticed her becoming more reactive to ordinary sounds. It could be nothing. Tola picked up the little clock—12:15—and rose to grab a shirt.
Breathing deeply in the dark at the top of the stairs, he heard muffled shouting. Great, he thought, at it again. Sharing a wall with people in a state of conflict presented as many challenges as a cramped walk-up in the city.
He trod lightly, avoiding the creaky steps: twelve, five, and two. At the bottom, in the dim glow of the streetlight through the foyer windows, he found his slippers. Shuffling across the stone tile, he still heard their muffled shouting. Feeling in the dark for the handle to the living room, Tola brushed against a tiny wind chime Jess had hung on the handle earlier that day. Softly the sound pricked like needles, surreal in the darkness.
“Hey, Maze,” Tola whispered in the dark to the dog, “hey, it’s okay, it’s okay.” She licked his hands and pranced about as if they hadn’t seen each other in weeks. Squatting down to hold her close, the dog leaned into him. Her little heart pattered away, a fired piston. “Calm down, girl, it’s okay…”
He was just about to stand up when the ragged edges of a distressed scream made the dog go flat against the ground, her frightened eyes staring up at him. What the hell, he thought, petting the dog once more before rushing upstairs. Another scream, muffled by the wall, came while he climbed. This one ended more abruptly just as he heard something large falling hard against the wall.
He came to the top of the stairs. Jess was sitting up in bed, thick curls sticking out everywhere, looking around with sleepy eyes. His heart was racing. “It’s the neighbors, I’ll check Dory,” Tola whispered from the hall. He poked his head into their daughter’s room, and her nightlight flicked on, glowing amber. She was fast asleep, one little leg hanging out the side of her blanket, arms bent at ninety-degree angles next to her head, tiny fingers curled around her two favorite stuffed animals. He kissed her forehead softly and closed the door behind him to try and dampen whatever sounds might come next.
The dog was on the bed with Jess when he came back to their bedroom.
“What the hell was that?” she hissed. Jess hated the neighbors, a touchy middle-aged couple called Aric and Zsanett who ran an unregistered music school out of their tiny home. One of them gave bass guitar lessons late in the evening, and the sound of the amplified beats always made the house vibrate just as they were trying to wind down for the evening.
They had chosen this sleepy neighborhood of early twentieth-century row houses to raise their family in, but it had turned out to be like living next to a dive bar. Tola had tried for a few years to keep the peace when their daughter’s nursery was on the south side of the house and shared a wall with the music room. But the broken songs of piano and guitar and voice students woke her up more nights than not, and Jess finally, in a flurry of do-it-yourself gusto, renovated the guest room on the northwest side of the house to put Dory’s room as far as possible from the music room. Since then, the child had slept deeply and long, and there had been little love lost between the two homes.
“I’m not sure,” Tola said as he sat next to Maisy, feeling hot dog breath on his arm. “I went down because Maze was barking and heard them shouting. Then the screams…”
It was quiet now and Jess rolled her eyes. “They really are a mess. I wish they’d just move already.”
Tola shrugged. “I’m going to go down and listen from the closet, see if I hear anything else before I leave Maze down there.” As he rose to go back downstairs, he patted his hip, and Maze jumped from the bed to follow.
Dory was the one who had discovered how thin the wall was in the coat closet. As a toddler she used to haul all the shoes out into the foyer so she could play with her glow toys in the dark.
“What dat?” she’d asked one day, pointing into the closet with big eyes full of questions. Tola had crawled in and heard every word of a searing argument the couple was having.
When he came back out, her eyebrows were crinkled together and her lips pursed.
“It’s okay, honey,” Tola tried to reassure her, “the neighbors are shouting. Maybe they’re playing a game. Why don’t we get your toys out and play somewhere else?”
She’d nodded her consent and happily played in the sunroom. That evening she asked questions about what the neighbors had been doing, but as far as they knew, she hadn’t heard them since then. She didn’t go in the coat closet anymore, though.
By the time he came back to bed, Jess had curled up again and was breathing deeply. He hadn’t heard anything further except some light music, a piano sonata. But Tola didn’t rest; he kept waking from a light sleep feeling panicked and uneasy.
He decided to go over the next morning to see if everything was okay, a pretense to also ask if they could keep it down at night. Jess told him not to bother but he went anyway.
The door popped open with a little click when he pushed the bell. It was something they had rigged so their music students could let themselves in while another lesson was in progress. Their cats, Diego and Hamlet, purred and wound around his ankles. He was bending to pet them when he heard Aric come around the corner from the kitchen.
“Hey, Tola, long time no talk!” He was pale and wired, twitchy hands straightening his shirt.
“Ummm, yeah, how’s it going?” Tola asked. “Hey, um, just wanted to see if everything was okay. We heard you guys last night. It was kind of loud.”
He didn’t strike Tola as remorseful. “Oh, yeah, just a little spat, you know? She took a bag to her folks for a few days. Cool off, I guess.”
The easy familiarity Aric assumed with him touched a nerve.
“Well, I guess that’s for the best. Jess and I were hoping you could keep it down in the evening. I mean, all the time would be great but especially at night. It wakes us up.”
“Oh, sure, man, no problem,” he answered. But Tola didn’t trust him.
*
Tola was at work a couple of days later when Jess, working from home, called him, sounding frantic. “There’s like a hundred cop cars outside!”
“Slow down, Jess.” Tola stood up and excused himself from the meeting he was in. “What are they doing?” His colleagues looked after him with concern as he quietly closed the conference room door.
“They’re next door! They have guns out! Ohmygodohmygod, what’s going on?”
Tola grabbed his jacket and keys from his desk. “Jess, stay inside, okay? They’ll knock if they need you. I’m coming now, I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t go outside, okay, honey?”
“Jesus, there’s an ambulance now!”
“Honey!” he shouted. He shouldn’t do that; she was already worked up. He began again, calmly, “Hey, tell me you heard me. Don’t go outside, okay? Open the door if the police knock, but do not go out there. Okay?”
“Okay, I’m going downstairs. Maze is barking. I hope the cats are okay.”
“They’ll stay away, don’t worry.” He opened the bike lock and put in his earbuds, then added, “Why don’t you and Maisy stay in the sunroom until I get home, it’s furthest from their place.”
“Wait, there’s something at the window, maybe the cats…” her voice trailed off, then she inhaled sharply and shouted, “Jesus, it’s Aric! Why is he…he’s trying to open the window from the outside!”
As Tola pedaled frantically, still a few minutes away, he heard the sounds of feet running on the hardwood floor and glass breaking and he heard shouting. Then the thud of the phone landing on the ground. Then it was quiet.
2: Jess
There’s a cage around my brain and I can’t get in. There are doctors and nurses and Tola comes with Dory, but I don’t completely understand why all this is happening. I get upset and they put injections in a bag with a tube that goes into my arm.
When I sleep, the sky is brilliant. A sunrise—or maybe a sunset—the colors of the ice cream they used to give us at church fairs in the summer. A dime for one scoop. We could dig in the overturned bushel of corn for coins and buy all the ice cream we wanted.
I rise up for what seems like forever and then crest into the arms of the galaxy, and I am floating in an ocean of dark-blue velvet. Pulsing white lights surround me, and I can move through the air with my arms, like a bird. Like I have wings.
3: Tola
When I ride into the center of the ring of police officers on my bike, they stare at me with mouths agape. Before they can act, I shout, “My wife is being attacked by the guy who lives there!” I point at the house they’re pointing their guns at. “We live next door.” I shift my arm to direct them to our home. “He’s in there with her, you need to go now!”
A moment’s pause and then they regroup forming a squad that approaches the door I painted last summer with a battering ram. I imagine our door in splinters and think, Wait! I have a key! and then I realize that would add seconds that Jess might need.
They bash the door in on the second try and burst inside. I hear what sounds like a mangled scream. I think about the way Jess looked at me when we first saw the house, how she slid her hand into mine when we approached.
A minute later they’ve got Aric in handcuffs and are marching him outside through my front door. His eyes are nuts; he stares right through me. No sign that he even sees me. Two officers are holding me in place, otherwise I’d go bite his face off. I hear the static of the radio on the hip of the officer on my right and then a command that sounds both urgent and desperate: “Medics now!”
Three people wearing fluorescent-yellow jackets race into my house with a stretcher and a bunch of other equipment. My body fights and pulls, my breath becomes ragged.
“Easy, man, easy,” they say, “they’re going to do everything they can.”
What the hell is happening.
After what feels like an hour, the yellow jackets emerge quickly but gingerly, guiding the stretcher; one of them is pumping one of those airbag things over Jess’s mouth. They look concerned but not frantic, and she’s not in a body bag. I relax a tiny bit and the officers release their grasp. I run to Jess on the stretcher. My fingers touch her limp hand, chipped peach nail polish and the sapphire ring I gave her two birthdays ago. So much blood. I look up at the one pumping the airbag, who says, “Let us get her in. You should ride with.”
In the waiting room are two other people: an elderly woman looking grieved and a teenage boy with scrapes on his tear-streaked face. The three of us make heavy air, but there’s nowhere else to go. I offer to get coffee for them but they both decline.
On my way back to the waiting room, a nurse signals to me from the desk down the hall. “You can go in now, the doctor wants to talk to you.” She is wearing a shirt with hearts all over it, which seems somehow offensive to me.
I enter the dim room. Jess is motionless on a bed. She looks like an experiment plugged into a million different kinds of machines. There is a light, steady peeping noise, and the doctor is reading a chart, looking weary; she isn’t startled when I look in, just looks up slowly and smiles weakly. “Hi, Mr. Baudelaire, please come in. Close the door.”
We bring Jess home twenty-eight days later. The pain is a supernova, a pulsing, permeating energy that seeps into every corner of our life. There’s nothing to do but try to keep our heads above water. But Jess is alive. If you could call it that.
Dory has become so grave. The lightness of her little soul is dragged down with a burden too large for someone just starting out. Their bond, prior to the attack, had been incomparable; the two of them could stare at each other with such adoration, it almost made me jealous. Now I’d give anything to see that. Give anything to hear their conspiratorial giggles coming from the kitchen.
I look through pictures and try to make it present but it’s the past. Jess’s heart needs time to heal, and one of her lungs and her back are wrecked. I shouldn’t say that. They’re not the same. Her face doesn’t look the same anymore either. I thought that’s what would bother Dory the most, but I have found her lying next to her passed-out mother, running one tiny finger over the healing wounds and singing softly. As if she could heal them.
The Jess from before would be horrified by the painkillers. She was so pure, so vibrant. Such a believer in avoiding the manufactured, chemical, artificial crap that is mainstream food and self-care. She made all of Dory’s baby food from scratch, gathering vegetables from a local garden every weekend and filling ice cube trays with pureed rainbows.
Now, if I’m late with the medication, she starts to howl. It sounds like an injured animal screaming. I have to wake her at night to dose so she doesn’t wake up Dory. I’m just scrambling in the dark every moment of every day. Even in my sleep I can’t find a light.
I thought that I had experienced difficulty. I thought that I knew what hardship was. And who knows, maybe my past actually helped prepare me for this. Got me to a level where I can tolerate all this fear and sleeplessness and loneliness.
There’s so little help, that’s the biggest problem. Family so far away and none of them are really able to come for any length of time. We have a few friends here, but they all live like we did, big paychecks to pay big mortgages and everything else that goes with it. It’s funny—when Dory was really small, just born, Jess used to leave articles about homesteading on my nightstand, and now I can’t stop thinking about how much better off we might have been to just crack the grip that it all had on us.
Because I certainly don’t care now what kind of car I drive or what school Dory goes to or what neighborhood we live in or where we go on vacation. I’d trade my soul to get Jess back.
4: Jess
The pills. There’s a rush of euphoria that kicks in just minutes after swallowing. Jess can read it before it comes by the tick of her heart and the pulsing of her fingers and toes. They take the pain away and everything else too. Her body still knows, though. It experiences emotions that she doesn’t feel anymore. This time Dory’s downstairs crying, and tears spring to Jess’s eyes. But she doesn’t feel sad or happy or anything else.
The new wheelchair gives her freedom but Tola still hovers constantly. He can’t get used to her going out by herself. He thinks he can fix it all and maybe he can. But she can’t locate anything inside of her that wants to let him try.
One day after an appointment, waiting at the pharmacy with Tola for her refills, a frantic woman was removed by an armed guard. She was screaming, Get your hands off me, you commie, I’m going to Bikkle Park!
Later that day, Jess searched craigslist for Bikkle Park. It was just enough information for her to find an alternative. Now she shoots up once a day or once every other day in a garage with two other women whose names she doesn’t know. It’s better that way, honey, says the older one.
It takes an hour to get to the garage because she goes all the way to the bus stop by the high school. Tola never walks that way with Dory and Maze, and there are no grocery stores or parks anywhere around it. Wheelchair-accessible buses are slow and unfriendly places, but she’s come to appreciate the journey. Nobody is nagging her. Nobody sees a disfigured woman in a wheelchair. She’s invisible.
Sometimes, in the early morning hours, when the room was lavender from the curtains she’d sewn in what seemed like a different life, she felt something familiar. It was even more heartbreaking than the visions of suffocating helplessness that followed her everywhere, even into her sleep. Mostly, though, she was numb enough that remembering her life was is in her brain, not her heart.
In those predawn moments what she finds herself chewing on is a desire for vibrancy, dulled and impossible to completely taste, the phantom limb of a fading memory. She sometimes laughs out loud at the joke and Tola wakes up, surprised. But he doesn’t break into warmth or affection for her like he once did. Caring for her is a duty, now.
He looks at her face, and there is a microsecond of disgust that not even he knows is there. She can’t really blame him; she’s seen a mirror. Then he rights himself and asks, with pinched brow, if she needs a pill. But she’s not shrieking.
Her grandmother told her when she was little that they used to rub brandy on the gums of babies to help them sleep. Tola pushing pills is an aid to keep her quiet. That’s why she seeks out the garage. At least she has some control over how she gets quiet and when.
Catching a ride down the rabbit hole into her past is worse than the pain and worse than the nightmares. It’s a reminder of what she once was. Pleasant to know. Mother to a magic child. Wife to a compassionate man. Friend to many. Creative and caring and funny. Vibrant.
A few months after she started visiting the garage, she woke up there alone. Someone had draped an old woolen military blanket over her in her chair. Thirst like torture brought her to, and the fingers of pain were already working their way along her nerves. Her phone said it was tomorrow late morning, and she had missed twenty-seven calls. She turned it off without looking at the messages. The batteries of her chair were almost dead, and she didn’t have a charger.
She scratched her arms, noticing with alarm how the shape of her bones was emerging from her flesh like pieces of sunken debris. Nothing to do but wait, of course. In spite of how frightened she was, the weight of Tola’s worry was enough to make her try to enjoy the time alone. He had been trying to end her independence.
She coughed as loud as she could, and when nothing happened, she threw a full soda can that was sitting next to her against the garage door. This ended up being really stupid because it was the only thing she had in her reach to drink. The interior door yanked open, and a huge man filled the doorframe in silhouette. She ain’t here, ya damn junkie, quiet down.
He probably knew she wouldn’t, though, because he brought a big sports bottle full of water and a couple of packaged cereal bars. Ya got a couple a hours ta wait. She’ll be back wid ya shit.
So, she just sat, scared and jittery from the pain blooming throughout her body, and tried to remember the shape of Dory’s smile.
5: Tola
Tola jerks awake to the rumble of a low growl. From the glow of the television across the room, a caged tiger looks at him like prey. He turns it off and takes his aching head upstairs to check on Dory and Jess.
Jess sleeps, a whisper of a whistle passing between the sliver of space made by her parted lips. Maze sleeps on the rug by the bed, her perpetual post. She looks up and wags unenthusiastically when she sees him in the doorway.
Dory is lying awake, staring at the ceiling. She grins when she sees him poke his head in her room. “Daddy, what are you doing?”
His heart breaks that something as easy as sleep has become so hard for them. “Checking on you, pumpkin. What are you doing?”
“I was remembering.” She holds up a photo of her and Jess.
Tola sits down on the bed next to her. “Tell me about it.”
“Well…you know how Mommy used to make cookies?”
“Ah, the ones with cinnamon?” He stretches out on the narrow mattress next to her and scoops her little body into the curve of his arm.
She turns her face up to look at him, an expression a lot like guilt rippling across her big eyes. “Do you think Annemarie could make some?”
The help he had hired to take care of light cleaning and weekday meals was holding them together. Barely. Jess couldn’t stand the sight of her and threw whatever she could reach at Annemarie if she entered the bedroom when Jess was there.
“Why don’t we find the recipe and you can ask her tomorrow. I betcha she can.” He smiles at her, trying to reassure her that it’s okay to want something familiar.
She pauses before agreeing and then, softly asks, “You think Mommy will be mad?”
Tola feels a twist in his gut and swallows a sob. He kisses her head and it smells like mint. “Oh, my magic muppet, Mommy just wants you to have what you need. Even when she’s hurting.”
“But the medicine helps, right?”
Kids are so wise. They know exactly what’s going on, even if they don’t have the words for it.
“Yeah, it helps,” he concedes. But it feels like a lie. “Should we try to sleep now?”
She burrows her face into his neck and reaches her tiny arm across his chest to grab his other hand. Placing it over her, she whispers, “I really miss those cookies.”
The hardest part about having to make and execute decisions hasn’t been the complexity. It hasn’t been the lack of mental agility brought on by perpetual sleeplessness or the constant shortage of money. It’s been having to make them alone. Life since Jess’s attack has been isolating in a way that is hard to know how to back out of.
Tola doesn’t know anyone who is going through anything even remotely similar. He sees familiar faces when he drops Dory off at school and on the rare occasion that he goes into the office, but people are so delicate with him now. They don’t know what to say, and they seem relieved that he’s functioning as normally as he is.
When you’re in survival mode after a trauma, the days slide by unnoticed, and you become grateful for something predictable that you can count on. It wasn’t even a year since the attack, the trial hadn’t taken place yet, but for now their bases were mostly covered, and he had learned how to hustle and how to read the signals. What kept him awake at night was wondering how long he could keep it all up.
After they got the insurance approved for the electric wheelchair, when Jess’s insistence about her outings became tenacious, his gut reaction was that they needed to do something different. He didn’t know what exactly, or why. But something in the way she asked for things less and hid from him more told him that sooner rather than later, he better make some big decisions.
A few days after Dory asked about the cookies, Jess refused to go to a scheduled physical therapy appointment for the first time. That night, after she came home too late to tell Dory good night, he decided to sell the house. A quick search of apartments for sale further out of the city told him they could reduce their mortgage payments by more than half. He worked from home most of the time anyway, and he could put Dory in a small public school. There were a few good physical therapy centers a short distance away and more parks and a community garden. The whole house would be on one level so Jess could navigate easily, and it was even closer for Annemarie.
He worried he was being too impulsive, but Tola found making the decision a huge relief. They had both seemed insistent to keep their dream alive after the attack, a stubborn refusal to let it change them. He still felt unsure acting alone, but Jess was in a sort of suspended animation; where would they end up if he didn’t act? He called the Realtor the next day, after Jess had gone out, and had the house listed in less than twenty-four hours.
He had planned to tell her long before it was final—when her morning meds were wearing off but before she really needed the afternoon ones. But it all happened so fast, and she still hadn’t come home yet when the Realtor came by the next day with the sign for the yard and some papers to sign.
Every possible horrible scenario played out in his head as the Realtor pounded the sign into the front yard. After she left, he called the police to file a missing person report. Annemarie stayed with Dory and he just hit the streets for the rest of the day and all of the next. Eventually, after being gone for two days and two nights, Jess responded to his million frantic calls and asked him to bring the chair charger to an address in a part of town they had never been to before.
Before going to pick her up, he dialed her doctor from after the attack and told her that he suspected Jess was doing something harmful to herself and that he was on his way to pick her up. As he drove to the address Jess had given him, the doctor advised him to stay as even-tempered as possible, tell her how glad he was that she had reached out, avoid judgment, and just get her home. She told him to bring Jess in the next day for a routine checkup and that if he couldn’t get her to come in, that she’d come to them.
6: Jess
I mostly lie in sweaty heaps with sheets smelling of bleach, wishing Tola dead for putting me here. The polished mahogany of the doorframe in the eating hall fills me with rage. How dare they surround me with such neatness and normalcy when every demon of the culmination of humanity’s efforts is yanking my nerves, my flesh, my bones into bits and reassembling them into their own demented castle. They drink my blood and call it wine and I am voiceless.
I fantasize about driving a car into Tola against a concrete wall, and then I cry bitter tears of horror at my own wickedness. Who am I that I cannot see what good is?
When I was seven, I watched two of my older cousins disassemble a fish they’d caught in the creek by the softball fields. I remember how beautiful the lungs looked, white and puffy, like disfigured, pearlescent balloons. We were hidden by a curtain of oak trees, down a ravine and out of the view of the adults. We knew that we were hiding and what we were doing was wrong but we pretended it wasn’t. They took all the parts out and threw them against a tree, and at the time I didn’t understand why it frightened me so much.
*
Tola stares back at me across the table. I’m pushing bits of fruit around on a plate, and he hasn’t touched his coffee. I want to see Dory, but I understand why he didn’t bring her.
I’m not as mad at him now that I’m clean.
“Jess, the new house is great. You’re going to love it. We have a garden just at the end of the street.”
I don’t say anything, can’t say anything. He’s trying so hard and I don’t know how to help him.
“Dory’s new school has a community kitchen, and every week parents can sign up to come and help cook lunch with the kids. Grilled cheese, soup, whatever. She’s so excited to have you come and make the soup with the daisies that open.”
That gets me. The first time I showed Dory how the little daisies we picked from the park would bloom again—a new life—when we tossed them into warm soup, her face lit up so bright.
Since I started feeling things again, I’m having trouble with responding in the right way. Like the dial for moderating my responses got broken. The shrink says to just let them flow, like a tidal wave. But I feel like a wretch on a bit of driftwood, and the sea will swallow me up if I do that.
“It’s okay, honey.” He slides closer, dares to put an arm around me. I don’t shove him away. I let him wipe my tears. I hate how my jaw gets stuck now when I cry big, my mouth hovering open like a big vacuum cleaner. I snatch the tissues from him and hold one over my mouth with one hand, massaging my jaw with the other.
My mouth closes and I start to hum. It’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” and Tola looks at me, surprised. He starts to sing softly, his eyes closed and forehead against mine. Somewhere inside my brain, a little locked box clicks open.
*
When the doctor came over and found the tracks on my thigh, I vowed I’d never look at Tola again. Now I can’t imagine what I thought I was getting away with, and, still, I have moments where I want to find that garage again. The shame is heavy; it has bound itself to me, wired through my brain like blood veins.
The work of extracting it is painstaking and tangled up with a range of other things, all wrapped up in a rage blanket. The schedule these days keeps me straight, and I try not to think about the future too much. How I’ll ever be a good mom or partner or friend again or, worse, if I even want to.
Between outpatient, group, Dory, the garden, and helping Annemarie, there’s not much time for me to sneak away. I wish that I could stop fantasizing about it, though.
Dory climbs up onto my lap. I let her steer the chair, and she laughs like music as we fly down the sidewalk in the new neighborhood. I have to admit, Tola was right. It is much better here. Not at all what we had envisioned when we started out, but good enough.
About the Author:
Kjersti Ehrie was born and raised in Northeast Iowa. She studied graphic design and photography and worked for various startups and agencies across the U.S., eventually starting her own consulting company. She has travelled extensively around the world and met her Dutch wife while volunteering with a children’s art program in Peru. They reside with their daughter in the Netherlands, where Kjersti is currently on the faculty of HZ University of Applied Sciences. Her work has appeared in Perceptions Magazine and Umbrella Factory Magazine. Find her on X:@KjerstiEhrie
Isele Magazine 