Donna Walsh puts out her hand and, when I take it, she lays a second hand on top of mine. The gesture surprises me and I have to stop myself from drawing back. It has been so long since I was touched with affection. I don’t quite know how to respond. “Hi, Ivy. Welcome. It’s so nice to meet you.”
“Thank you. It’s nice to meet you, too.” I haven’t had much call for company manners recently, but I still remember how it works.
“Leslie’s going to be conducting your intake interview?” she asks, looking at the young counselor, who nods. “Well, then you’ll be in good hands. I hope we’ll be able to help you.”
Abigail Burgess Wynne raises her eyebrows to their highest point as she interrupts the director. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she says pointedly. “I’m certain we will.”
Once we get to Leslie’s office, I take a seat in a firm but comfortable armchair on the opposite side of the desk. I watch Leslie as she repeatedly presses the top of her ballpoint pen with her thumb while she fills in the forms—name, children’s names, dates of birth, and the rest—tapping the pen top several times after she writes down each of my answers.
The clicking sound reminds me of those cheap, plastic castanets Bethany had. She used to put the Nutcracker Suite on the stereo, grab her castanets, put her arms over her head, and clack them together, twirling in a circle to the “Spanish Dance.” She loved those things. I wish I’d thought to bring them, but there wasn’t time. So much had to be left behind.
She notices me noticing the clicking pen, laughs, and admits what I’d already suspected. She is new on the job, just finished with her training. In fact, I’m her first client, well, the first one she’s handling completely on her own.
“Must be exciting to start a new job.”
“It is, but it would be more exciting if jobs like mine weren’t necessary.” She shrugs. “But, anyway, let’s get back to you. You’re from Pennsylvania? That’s a long way. How did you end up in New Bern?”
I take a breath, deep but not too deep, and keep my eyes focused evenly on hers, pausing now and again as if to collect my thoughts, not wanting to sound rehearsed. I tell her the story I have prepared in advance, the details I’ve worked out carefully in my mind, the revised history I quizzed Bethany on before we arrived, reminding her that if she got confused or nervous, she should say nothing. After all she’s been through, silence is a perfectly understandable response for a child. No one will question it.
Leslie bobs her pretty blond head sympathetically, bent over her clipboard, taking notes. She believes me. And I am struck by how easy it is. The lies just slip from my lips like thread from a spool and she believes every word I am saying.
I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. With its white clapboard houses and trim green lawns, New Bern, Connecticut, looks like a town lifted straight from a Norman Rockwell painting, safe and secure as can be. But after last night, I don’t want the kids to spend one more night sleeping in the car than they absolutely have to while we wait for an opening in the shelter. If it were just for myself, I wouldn’t do it, but if lying to this woman is what it takes to protect my children, then that’s what I’ll do. I have no choice. Still, it bothers me to think how good I have become at getting people to see only what I want them to see.
But why wouldn’t I be good at it? I’ve had so much practice. And it isn’t like my life is a complete fabrication. It’s close to the truth, just not close enough.
I married at eighteen. I have two children I love. Bethany is six. Bobby is eighteen months. All this is true and the rest of it is almost true.
We were almost a happy family.
But that word is an abyss that separates happy families from everybody else. Almost.
I wonder if she understands that, this newly minted intake counselor, fresh from training on the care and feeding of women in crisis? She wants to understand, I can see that, genuinely wants to help, but something about her, something about the smooth shape of her forehead and the crisp ironed creases of her trouser legs make me know she is merely an observer, standing on the edge of the abyss and peering into it. She has not been in the valley herself and probably never will. I hope not, for her sake.
That, too, makes it easier for her to take my story at face value. She won’t investigate it and I have all the paperwork, or enough of it, to prove my claim. I am who I say I am—Ivy Peterman. But what I don’t tell her is that I never changed the name on my driver’s license and Social Security card after I married. Maybe I forgot to. Or maybe, deep down, I knew it would come to this one day. Whatever the reason, I have the documents to prove that I am me.
The rest of the story—the true parts, that my husband abused me for years and that my children and I have been bouncing from emergency shelter to emergency shelter for months now; the almost-true part, that we’ve got nowhere else to go; and the lie, that my husband was killed in a construction accident—she accepts without question. Even with her training, training that surely included admonitions not to buy into the stereotypes of victims of domestic violence as being poor, powerless, and poorly educated—in other words, not like people this woman lives next door to, not people from nice suburban neighborhoods, or even wealthy ones, with trimmed hedges and late-model SUVs in the driveway—part of her still finds it easier to accept my story precisely because it feeds into the stereotype: poor, teenage girl marries boozing, battering, blue-collar boy she thought would be her salvation, not realizing what she was getting into until it was too late. She finds it easy to believe because it’s almost true and because she wants to believe it. The whole truth would hit too close to home, send her to the phones and files to verify my background, but this? It doesn’t even cross her mind to check my facts. I can tell.
She smiles and gets up from her desk, excuses herself for a moment, and promises to be right back.
In spite of the elegant furnishings and plush carpets, the walls between the offices are surprisingly thin. I can hear Leslie’s voice, high and uncertain as she speaks to Donna Walsh in the hallway, mixing with the director’s calmer, deeper tones, intersected and frequently interrupted by the clipped, insistent voice of the older woman, Abigail Burgess Whatever-Her-Name-Was. I don’t remember anymore. I can’t understand what they’re saying, so I turn my attention to the sounds coming from the playroom next door, where I can hear Bethany’s and Bobby’s muffled voices as they play with the volunteer. I like knowing they are so close and I like being alone in this room. Even with the murmur of voices coming through the walls, this is still the quietest room I have been in for weeks. It feels good to sit here alone and think. Peaceful.
Maybe, if I want to, I can stay here for a while. This seems like a nice town, filled with nice people. People like Leslie. She’s just a couple of years younger than me. Twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. Fresh out of college. So weird. All she knows about the world is what she’s read in books or heard from her professors. I’m twenty-four but I’ve seen enough to last three lifetimes. She makes me feel ancient. But still…If I lived here, maybe we’d be friends, go to the movies or shopping. Do the things that girlfriends do. It would be nice to have a friend, someone who knows the truth about me and likes me anyway, to stay here for a long time, to live here, maybe forever.
No, I remind myself. That can’t be.
We can’t stay. Not forever or for long. Even if I’m right and Leslie never checks out my story, or if I’m wrong and she eventually does, it doesn’t make any difference. We’ll be gone before the truth comes out. We must be.
If we stay too long in one place, he’s bound to find us. It isn’t safe to stand still. But if I’m careful? Then, maybe? For a while? I’m tired of looking over my shoulder, of carrying my life and my children’s lives stuffed into a suitcase