if that comforts you, but don’t bother to deny it.” Karen continued to lie very still in his arms and the silence seemed to balloon around them and envelop the room. They could hear noises from outside-the wind against windows, the far distant cough of a car engine starting-but within the room it seemed to Karen that all sounds had ceased to exist. She could no longer hear Becker’s breathing and was aware of her own only by the measureless rise and fall of her bosom. When she shifted her weight slightly, the groan of the mattress and the rustle of the sheets against her body seemed incredibly loud. In the new position, Becker’s arm had ridden up from her abdomen so that it crossed her chest just below the first swelling of her breast. He still held her firmly and she was grateful now for the pressure and the sense of comfort it gave her. She wanted someone close if she had to confront the monsters of her past.
When Becker spoke his voice seemed so loud in the stillness that had come over them that Karen was momentarily startled.
“What else?” he asked.
“What?”
“Was there more? With Carl.”
Her ex-husband’s name sounded odd on Becker’s lips, and she realized she had not heard him speak it before. He had referred to him only as “her husband,” not by name, and the change seemed too abrupt, overly familiar. For a moment she resisted it, as if allowing someone else to use Carl’s name was in itself a revelation of family secrets. Her reaction was swiftly past, but it left her feeling slightly soiled.
“No,” she said. “What do you mean?”
“Did he do anything else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s too much, but it usually doesn’t stop there. Violence creates its own appetite.”
Karen wanted him to stop asking, she wanted to demand what made him such an expert. But she knew he was, she knew he understood it all better than anyone.
“He hit me, too,” she said. Her throat was constricted and her voice so low she had to repeat herself. Even as she said it, she still found it hard to believe.
Becker grunted noncommittally, as if he had expected her statement and was waiting for the rest. There was a quality to his silences that Karen found compelling, as if she had to fill them. He seemed to know what came next but required the formalities to be observed by having her say it.
“It didn’t happen that often,” she said. “Any is too many, but it wasn’t that often. The first time I couldn’t believe it had happened. I couldn’t believe he would dare to do it, that he would want to do it. It was still early in our marriage. I had convinced myself I was in love, we were in love, hell, I wanted so much to be in love…”
“To have someone love you,” Becker interjected.
“Yes, I suppose, but to love someone else, too; I knew you were supposed to love someone else, that’s what everyone said, so I convinced myself I loved Carl… And then he was so repentant afterwards. He cried, he said he loved me, he adored me, he would never, never do it again…”
“And you believed him.”
“I wanted to. I made myself believe him. I was in a marriage, I had to give that every chance, every effort. I couldn’t just walk away because of one mistake.”
Again Becker was silent and Karen felt she had to continue, had to find the explanation that would justify herself, that would win his approval.
“The second time was months later. He had been fine until then. We had had quarrels but he had controlled himself. I assumed that it really was only a one-time thing. But then he snapped. We weren’t fighting about anything special, nothing particularly sensitive. He’d been drinking, not much, just a little. There seemed to be no provocation, then all of a sudden he was hitting me, hitting me and hitting me… I wore pancake makeup the next day to hide the bruises at work, I was so ashamed. If anyone had asked what happened-no one asked.”
“And you stayed with him.”
“I was pregnant then, I had a child on the way. That was the curious thing; in the midst of his rage Carl had not hit me anywhere near the baby. In an odd way that seemed to show he cared about the baby, about us, about our future… I don’t know, I rationalized it a hundred ways…”
“And you stayed.”
“Yes, damn it, I stayed! Don’t judge me, John. You don’t know what it’s like to be beaten by someone who’s supposed to love you… It makes you feel so worthless, it makes you feel that you deserve it, it makes you feel it’s your fault.”
“I know,” Becker said simply. There was no special pleading in his voice, just a statement. Karen realized there had not been any harshness in his tone before, either. The judgment was only in her mind. Becker was merely noting, just stating the obvious so they could get on to the next step, as if the process had to be completed no matter what.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right.”
“I did stay with him, you’re right. I should have left him then, but it seemed so-so ludicrous that it was happening to me. I wasn’t some welfare mother in the ghetto, I wasn’t a hillbilly with trucks parked in the front yard. Carl was a professional, for God’s sake. He was a radiologist. We weren’t the kind of people this happened to. Plus, I was trained in self-defense. Even when it was happening, while he was hitting me, I told myself, ‘I can break this man in two.’ ”
“It’s not about self-defense, though,” Becker said.
“No, not at first. But it got that way. When Jack was two years old Carl tried to beat me again. The baby was there in the room, watching, and maybe that’s what gave me the courage, I don’t know, but I realized right then that it was going to stop. I kneecapped him and broke his arm… He never touched me again.”
“But he started on Jack.”
“Not long after that, I think he must have, but I didn’t know it.”
Becker was silent.
“I swear to you, John, I did not know it. I did not. I did not know it.”
Something broke within Karen and she began to cry, quietly at first, and then fully, sobbing, her body shaking with the effort. Becker pulled her even more tightly against him, covering her whole body with his own as she spooned against him.
He let her cry until she had had enough, not trying to hush her or even comfort her beyond his close presence. When she was finished at last Karen felt as if she had returned from a distant place. Her grief had taken her out and away from the present and deep within herself, but now she was back, in a darkened bedroom, on her bed, with the wind pushing at the windowpanes and a strong man pressed against her from behind.
She could not say if the quality of the stillness changed when she stopped sniffling, or if the electric charge of the room had been that way all along and she had only become aware of it. Becker’s body was warm against hers and his skin seemed alive in a way it had not when she was talking about herself. His flesh seemed to lie against her like a creature with a life of its own, as if poised to move whenever she chose. It was up to her entirely, she realized, and the thought gave her a sense of freedom and power.
She reached between her legs and touched him and felt him rise eagerly to her touch. They did not speak, they scarcely moved. Then he was in her from behind and she was clamping the pillow to her mouth once more. This time it was direct and simple without foreplay or patience or tenderness, which was how both of them wanted it. When they finished she had tears on her face once more, but this time for a different reason.
Chapter 12
When Bobby awoke on the third day of his capture, he knew that he was being watched even before he opened his eyes. He could sense another face close to his, he could hear the hushed, too deliberate movements of someone trying to be quiet that did not make noise so much as they displaced space in a way that he could feel. He kept his eyes closed, pretending to sleep, clinging for a moment to the hope that the hovering someone might be his mother. Perhaps today when he opened his eyes the long nightmare would be over and he would be home
