One night, I was asleep on the front seat and heard a noise. I woke up to see a figure, a man, pressed up against the passenger side window of the backseat, where my kids were sleeping, trying to slide a wire hanger into the space between the window and the door. I didn’t think, just jumped out of the car and started screaming, “Get away from that door! Don’t touch them! Get away!”
Somewhere along the line I must have grabbed the metal flash-light from the side storage compartment in the door. Still screaming, I flung it at the intruder and it hit him in the head. He swore and ran off into the alley. The kids woke up and started crying. A tall, scruffy man with a four-day growth of beard—the clerk from the twenty-four-hour mini-mart where I’d decided to park that night, stupidly thinking it was a safe spot—heard the commotion and came outside to investigate.
He took one look at me, tears in my eyes while I tried to quiet Bethany’s and Bobby’s sobbing, and decided to call the police. Over my protests, he went inside the store to make the call. I got in the car and told the kids to buckle up. There was no way I was going to stick around and answer a bunch of questions from the police. If Hodge had filed a report saying I was a kidnapper, they’d lock me up and take the kids away from me forever. That’s what Hodge said would happen if I ever even thought about leaving him. He didn’t say that out of any kind of love, but just to make me believe that no matter what I did or where I went, he would still be in control. And I did believe it. I’d put hundreds of miles of road between us, but even so, I could feel his power, the menace of his presence, just like I always had. We had to get out of there.
My tires squealed as I peeled out of the parking lot, my mind racing. Did it make more sense for me to get on the freeway and go to another town? Or better to find a dark alley and park there until the coast was clear? I decided on the freeway.
In the backseat the kids were still crying. I swore under my breath, cursing traffic engineers who were too cheap or too stupid to put up any signs directing out-of-towners to the freeway entrance. Ten minutes later I was still lost. Bethany had stopped crying, but Bobby was still going strong.
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw his face, his chubby baby cheeks flushed and hot, his black lashes clumped and glistening with tears. “Bobby. Calm down, baby. Mommy is going to find a quiet place to park and then you can go back to sleep, all right?”
“Go home!” he wailed. “Go home!”
And for the first time, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. A few weeks before, my children had been living the relatively normal, scheduled lives of children in the suburbs: three meals a day, playing on the swing set in our fenced backyard, watching cartoons, baths at seven, bed at eight. Of course, when it was time for Hodge to come home, they’d get clingy and quiet, feeling my fear, perhaps, as I listened for the grind of gears as the automatic garage door opened and tuned my ears to assess the level of force Hodge used to slam the door of his BMW, a clue as to his mood and what the rest of the evening would bring.
But, I told myself as I drove through the darkness, he wasn’t violent every night. Only when I’d done something, or not done something, that made him mad. After all, I was the one he took his anger out on. Not the kids. Maybe they’d be better off if we went back. At least they’d be safe.
But a voice in my head reminded me that it wasn’t true anymore.
I remembered that last day, Hodge screaming and swearing and pounding on one side of the locked bathroom door, while we huddled on the other side. I remembered the swelling of my left eye, pain shooting through my bleeding hand, but worse, so much worse, was the memory of the angry red mark on Bethany’s pale cheek.
Bethany was used to his rages, used to seeing me holding ice packs on my bruises, or trying to cover up the marks of his fury with extra makeup, but he’d never hit her before. That day, he considered her fair game and I realized that from then on, he always would.
In the backseat, Bethany tried to calm her baby brother. “Bobby, don’t cry. We can’t go home. Daddy’s there.”
She was right. I couldn’t take them back. Not now. It wasn’t safe to go back to Hodge. Not for me and not for my children. But we couldn’t go on like this, either. We couldn’t keep running. I was tired and scared and broke. Somehow or other I had to come up with another plan. But what?
To say that I haven’t had a lot of experience with praying in my life would be an understatement, but that night, driving around in the middle of the night without the least clue of where we should go or what we should do when we arrived, I prayed silently, asking God for a sign or at least a hint.
Lost in uncharted territory, I accidentally turned onto the northbound freeway entrance instead of the southbound. By the time I figured it out, I was crossing the state line into Connecticut. And that’s how I ended up in New Bern.
After three weeks of living in a tiny studio apartment in the emergency shelter, we moved into a much larger two-bedroom unit in the Stanton Center. The counselor talked to me about putting down roots, finding a job, and putting Bethany in school. I nodded, mutely assenting to everything she suggested, but in my heart, I knew we’d stay in New Bern only as long as it felt safe to do so. That was more than a year ago and, believe me, nobody is more surprised than I am that we’re still here. If not for Evelyn Dixon and a log cabin quilt, I’d have put New Bern in my rearview mirror a long time ago.
Evelyn owns Cobbled Court Quilts in New Bern. She runs a free quilting class for the women at the shelter. Initially, I didn’t want to take the class and had a suitcase full of good excuses for not doing so:
1) With two kids, I was too busy for hobbies.
2) I’d never liked crafts, anyway, and any spare time I had really should be spent looking for a job.
3) And wasn’t quilting something people’s grandmas did? Maybe I’d lived long and hard, but I’m not exactly ready for bifocals and a rocking chair, you know what I mean?
But none of those was the real reason I didn’t want to take Evelyn’s class. The truth is, I just didn’t want to find one more thing to fail at. There had been so many already.
But Abigail decided to change my mind for me. That’s Abigail Burgess Wynne, a volunteer at the shelter as well as a big donor, the woman who insisted that they find room for us at the shelter. Abigail is something of an oddball. Beautiful, in a nineteen fifties movie-star kind of way, all long legs and perfect diction, but an oddball.
She comes off as a snob but, for some reason, she took a liking to Bethany. Out of the blue, Abigail made this gorgeous pinwheel quilt for Bethany and they’ve been fast friends ever since. She’s become not quite an adopted grandmother to my kids, but more of an indulgent great-aunt. And I have to say she’s grown on me. Anybody who loves my kids is okay in my book and when she gave that quilt to Bethany, I was so grateful that I started to bawl. I couldn’t help myself.
Anyway, Abigail is really very sweet deep down—way deep down—but she’s also used to getting her own way. She wouldn’t listen to any of my excuses about passing on the quilting class, just knocked them all down in that way she has, huffing and puffing out words like “Nonsense!” and “Rubbish!” like the big, bad wolf on a mission, not stopping until your little house of sticks is lying in a heap and there you stand with nothing left to hide behind. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in a room with six other students, listening to Evelyn Dixon explain the techniques for constructing our first project, a log cabin quilt.
It’s an easy pattern, just row after row of rectangular strips nesting round and round a center square, stacking one upon the other like those wooden log toys I used to play with when I was a little girl.