Chapter 1 of Victims:
1.
Dr. Mortensen looked at me and shook his head.
“What happened, Nora?”
The last time he’d visited me in the hospital, four months earlier, I’d had two black eyes and a broken nose. I’d told him I’d had too much to drink and had fallen down the stairs. Six months before that, I’d told him my dislocated shoulder had come from slipping on a patch of ice.
This time I was suffering from a cracked collar bone and a broken wrist. I thought fast. “I went ice skating in Rockefeller Center and forgot I’m not as young as I used to be.”
Dr. Mortensen frowned. “Maybe you should talk to one of our counselors.”
I gave a phony laugh. “Unless she can teach me how not to be a klutz, I don’t think it’s going to do much good.”
I could see him thinking: Another abused woman. Why does she let her boyfriend knock her around like that? Why doesn’t she give him his walking papers? Why doesn’t she just leave?
If only it had been that simple. If I had a boyfriend who beat me up, I would have had a place to turn. There are shelters for battered women all over New York City, places of refuge for women whose husbands or boyfriends punch them, stalk them, and try to murder them. I could have shown up at any one of those shelters and been welcomed with open arms.
But I didn’t have man trouble. I had child trouble. It was my sixteen-year-old daughter, Shana, who’d broken my wrist, and my eighteen-year-old son, Ricky, who’d cracked my collarbone.
* * *
Some things in life I expected; other things I did not. Like all girls growing up in New York in the 1960s, I expected that I’d meet a wonderful man, marry him, and have his children. I expected that I’d be able to juggle the demands of being a wife and mother with the pressures of being a school teacher, which had always been my dream. I expected that through savings and hard work, we’d be able to buy a home and save enough money for the kids’ college educations.
I didn’t expect that my wonderful husband would be pushed to his death on the subway tracks when Shana was six and Ricky was eight. I didn’t expect that my precocious daughter would fall in with the wrong crowd before she was old enough to start shaving her legs. I didn’t expect that Ricky, who’d always been shy and sweet, would get involved with a gang that terrorized Alphabet City and distributed most of the drugs in Lower Manhattan. Most of all, I didn’t expect the children I loved so dearly to begin beating me regularly.
When Dr. Mortensen visited my hospital room on that January day in 2003, I didn’t think there was any hope. By that point, I’d begun believing my own lies, and the abuse had become so routine—so absolutely normal—that I’d come to accept it as inevitable. Most of the time the injuries were accidental, I told myself. When Shana had slammed me against the kitchen wall, kicking me in the groin and grabbing my arm, she hadn’t meant to break my wrist. And Ricky had been taking out his frustrations on the wall when I got in the way of his fist, which led to my fractured collarbone.
But help comes from the places you least expect it. As I lay in bed, slightly dopey from the morphine Dr. Mortensen had prescribed to help me deal with the horrible pain, two nurses wheeled in another patient and lifted her into the bed next to mine.
“Whoa! Watch where you put those hands, ladies!” were the first words I heard Gloria Hetherington say. In the next few months, we’d become fast friends, and one night over a bottle of wine we’d realize that we were in exactly the same boat: that she, too, was brutalized by her children.
If Gloria’s son hadn’t killed her on Christmas day, 2003, I might not be alive today, either.
2.
Theo surveyed the living room of his rent-controlled Grove Street flat. The walls had a fresh coat of almond paint, and the ceiling, for the first time in years, was a plain, unpretentious white unmarred by stenciling, filigrees, painted-on stars, or Calderesque mobiles of celestial bodies. What a delight to have a clean, bright living room again. The apartment had spent the last three years being incessantly redecorated and repainted according to Leila’s tastes, which often ran to the dark and depressing. Until just two days ago, the four walls had been a deep maroon; it had taken the painters six coats of Benjamin Moore Almond Crème to return them to their pre-Leila state.
A few boxes of knickknacks sat in the corner nearest the entryway—junk that Leila had bought on their trips to Europe and the Far East, as well as the godawful bric-a-brac to which Leila was drawn like a magnet. Good riddance to it all.
Now that the walls were painted and Leila was gone, his next step would be to re-privatize the various rooms. Upon moving in, Leila had declared that all the doors—even the one leading to the bathroom—simply had to go. They interrupted the “flow” of the floor plan, she said, and Theo knew better than to argue with a woman with a newly bestowed certificate in interior design from the New School. Plus, Leila added, all those doors didn’t help the place’s feng shui, which already faced enough challenges from the unfortunate placement of the windows, which forced furniture to be arranged in ways that could only lead to migraines and catarrhs.
He looked at the clock sticking out of one of the boxes, a bizarre assemblage of vectors, rays, and geometric shapes. Leila had purchased it in a SoHo gallery, for a price Theo had blocked out of his memory, during her “mathematical” period. The clock’s design made it practically unreadable, but Theo had discovered that he could get a rough approximation of the time by standing about four feet from the clock and cocking his head 45 degrees to the left.
He took four steps backwards, tilted his head, and stared. 2:35. Leila was already more than half an hour late. This was only to be expected; Leila subscribed to the Manhattan school of fashionably late for everything, whether a cocktail party, a dental appointment, or an evening at the theatre. For the first few years they’d been together, he’d tried various games to trick her into being punctual, but none had worked.
He heard a slamming noise from down the hall. He looked up to see Leila marching toward him. Though she’d moved out nearly a month ago, she had yet to surrender the apartment keys.
“Jesus, Theo, what were you thinking? This place looks like the restroom at Grand Central.” Leila reached into her bag and pulled out her sunglasses to protect her eyes from the harsh rays of reflected almond light.
“I was sick of spending time in a living room painted like a New Orleans whorehouse, that’s what I was thinking.”
Leila looked hurt. Over the years, she’d become accustomed to saying and doing whatever she wanted while Theo protested only mildly or not at all. Since their breakup, Theo had become more aggressive about expressing his frustrations, and she wasn’t used to it.
“That’s just hurtful, Theo. I was only trying to bring some warmth to this place. It had a negative vibe the first time I walked into it, and I thought I could help. I should have realized the negative vibe was coming from you, not from the paint and floor plan. Unfortunately, they only taught us design at the New School, not psychology.”
“You could take a few psychology courses to fill in the gaps in your knowledge, Leila. The wide, wide gaps.”
“Maybe I will, Theo. That’s the difference between you and me. I’m always looking to improve myself, while you just sit in this apartment and find fault with everyone and everything.”
“Be sure to ask your professor about people who are late for everything. I’m sure he’ll tell you they’re passive-aggressive, controlling, and manipulative.”
“What are you talking about, Theo? Sure, I’m late once in a while. Everyone is. This city is unpredictable, you know. It’s not my fault if a cab gets stuck in traffic or the subway doesn’t come.”
Theo stared at his ex-lover, amazed and speechless. How could he respond to what she’d just said? How could he possibly respond?
Leila pointed to the three boxes on the floor. “The van is waiting outside. Is that all the stuff?”
“Yup. And since this is your last time here, maybe you should give me the keys too.”
Again Leila looked hurt. “Fine, Theo. If that’s the way you want it.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out a wad of paraphernalia containing five keys and approximately 25 trinkets, charms, chain-store discount cards, photos of her nieces and nephews, and mini cans of mace. She began struggling to extricate the two apartment keys from the tavern puzzle that was her keychain.
“You know, Theo, maybe if we’d talked a little more, none of this would have happened. But no. You’re happier making snide remarks or pretending everything is just great. Then you wonder why your relationships don’t work and you don’t see your kids.”
Theo narrowed his eyes. “Just leave the keys with the doorman on your way out.”
