A Knock at Midnight(15)
My experience with Red taught me how easy it can be for young women to fall into cycles of abuse—even confident, successful, strong young women. My abusive relationship became my own addiction. I was addicted to the intense highs and lows, to the intimacy you share with the one other person who knows just how bad things have gotten. And when you love the person abusing you, you have in-depth knowledge of the pain and brokenness that leads them to treat you in a damaging way. How will they ever heal, you think, if I leave? And as you worry about them, bit by bit your own sense of self gets broken down, too, so much so that being without the bond you share with the person hurting you seems impossible.
But I did it. With the kindness and quiet strength of Eleanore Murrell, the clarity brought to me by Pastor Taylor’s beautiful sermon, the strength of my own family bonds—I broke up with Red. No more sweeping his abuse under the rug or hiding his outbursts in the closet. Cleaning up made me feel free.
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THE AFTERNOON OF Jazz’s high school graduation was typically gorgeous for late May, the fields around my grandparents’ house in Campbell stretching away in shades of gold and green, the sun high and warm, songbirds competing with the lowing cattle from the dairy farm next door. I was outside, catching up with cousins, glad to have the break from school and work, glad to be home. With work and school I hadn’t been back as much as I’d wanted, but I was excited to see everybody and to celebrate Jazz.
My uncle Gerald came out onto the porch, looking like my dad’s twin in his sports coat and slacks, his aviators in hand.
“Daddy Sudie wants you, Britt,” he said. I’d heard the same thing from someone else not two minutes before. In all the jostling about who would ride with whom to the ceremony, the jokes and the stories to catch up with, I didn’t pay them any mind. My grandpa was getting older and sometimes obsessed over small things that he would forget about shortly thereafter.
Just as we finally began piling into the cars, I heard my grandfather calling me insistently from the front window. He sat there most afternoons now, laughing uproariously at old Martin reruns, no longer spending his days at the pond where I used to follow him down to fish. His shoulders were slimmer and his belly rounder, but he still had the full cheeks and commanding tenor of the family patriarch. I left the car and pulled back the sliding glass door to the living room.
“Yes sir?” I asked.
“Brittany, I need you to be careful.”
“Daddy Sudie, we’re just going over to the graduation! I’ll be okay.”
“Brittany, you need to be careful,” he said solemnly. “You’re going to Commerce and that boy’s going to be there. I want you to be careful.”
“C’mon, Brittany!” came the shouts from the car. “We got to go!”
Jazz was so happy that day, all smiles when she walked the stage, even more when she heard the yells and applause from all of us in the audience. Red’s cousins were graduating in the same class, and he was in the audience, but we didn’t speak. I nodded hello in the general direction of his family but made sure not to catch Red’s eye. There was nothing more to say to each other—we were through.
We celebrated Jazz into the evening, and then I drove back down to Arlington with Sissy and my cousin Kawoina for company. It was so good to be with people from home. At one in the morning we were still sprawled out on the living room sofa, laughing and talking and having a blast. When the porch light outside switched on, it startled all of us.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Someone was pounding on the front door, kicking at it, throwing their body at it.
“Let me in, you bitch! Let me in this fucking house before I kill you!”
The rage in his voice was unmistakable. It was Red. My body pumped with fear and adrenaline. Sissy and Kawoina were looking at each other in disbelief. Somebody got up and turned out the front room lights, and we sat still in the semidarkness. The pounding and cussing at the front door stopped, and we listened hard, hoping to hear a car start and drive away.
Instead, the patio door that led directly to the living room shattered. Red stood there with his shoulders heaving, eyes as red as his name. The concrete block he’d heaved through the double-paned glass lay in the middle of the living room. Kawoina and Sissy screamed. Red started cussing and shouting again, moving steadily toward me, Kawoina and Sissy pulling on his arms, hanging on his shirt, pleading with him. “Red, stop! Stop! What the fuck are you doing?”
But I knew. I’d been a victim of Red’s rages before. He was coming for me. “How you gonna leave me, Brittany? You think you too good for me?” he said angrily.
I backed as fast as I could into the bedroom, talking to him, trying to calm him down as he came at me. The ironing board was still laid out from where I’d ironed my clothes for graduation, and all I could think about was getting that iron out of Red’s way. My body stiffened for the blows that I knew were coming. Red cussing and belligerent, Sissy and Kawoina screaming at him from behind, me winding that cord around the iron, talking as calmly as I could, desperate to put that iron up before Red could hit me with it, knowing now I should have used it on him.
And then he was coming after me. I could hear Sissy screaming, “Run, Brittany, run!” I was barefooted; even as a country girl I never went out barefooted, but now I took off. I made it out the front door and looked back to see Sissy and Kawoina holding on to the lanyard around Red’s neck that held his keys, holding him back by that lanyard with all of their weight and punching him in the back of his head with their fists.