Max focused on his own computer, where he was searching social networks for Steve Smith. There were lots of them.
Lots of Steve Smiths. Ordinary-looking guys with ordinary families. And jobs.
“I’m just... I guess what I’m trying to say is that someone like this, someone who’s had to hide to this extent...it’s understandable that you might not know her as well as you thought you did. In terms of you being so certain that she wouldn’t leave you.”
Chantel was talking about a woman she didn’t know. Making her sound like someone he didn’t know.
His job was to stay calm.
AT A COMPUTER in a private cubicle at the library in the main building of the Stand on Saturday, Jenna studied various domestic violence websites, reading about the abusive personality, fantasy bonds, dependent relationships. All things she knew about, but only from the victim perspective. She had to get into the mind-set, to imagine the feelings so deeply that she could predict reactions to stimulus. The goal was to figure out what stimulus to use on Steve to get the reaction she needed—him to choose to set her free.
She read statistics and psychological data. On victims. And abusers—who’d often been victims themselves. She read victims’ stories. There was Emma, who’d left an unfaithful husband for a wonderful man, Robert, she’d met online, a man who was a friend to her for a couple of years before she finally divorced her cheating husband and moved in with him, only to end up bruised and broken a couple of years later.
There was Lottie, a teenager abused by her boyfriend. Belinda, who’d suffered abuse since childhood at the hands of her father. The list, the stories, went on and on.
She felt as if she knew each and every one of the women she read about, wanted to give each of them a hug and a promise of emotional support from now through eternity.
Jenna acknowledged the feeling, understood it as a consequence of identifying with them so completely. And she moved on.
She wasn’t here to read about her sisters. She had to know everything she could find out about abusers. Not how to identify them. She knew those lists all too well—could remember the first sickening time she’d been on a website, reading a list, and finding Steve in every single characteristic she read.
But what made a man do what he did? She had to know how to get him where he hurt. To find the humanity in him and appeal to it somehow. Not verbally of course. That would just feed his sense of control—hearing her beg. Experience had taught her that during her first year of marriage.
She read for hours. Unaware of fatigue. Or hunger.
And then she found James.
His mother had died when he was two and he’d been raised by a paternal aunt who had no children of her own. And didn’t want any. She resented her brother, a long-haul truck driver, leaving James with her, but took him in because it was her godly duty to do so.
She went to church on Sunday morning and Sunday night and Wednesday night and took him with her every single time. And for every sound he made that interrupted her spiritual oneness she would burn him with the tip of her cigarette when they got home. Not enough to blister, or leave scars. Just enough to remind him of the dangers of hell’s fires.
The little boy did everything he could to please his aunt and when she took sick while he was in his teens, he kept her home, caring for her with patience and kindness until the day she died. Some thought he’d done so for the money he’d inherit when she was gone. But he’d known they were paupers. He’d cared for her himself because he’d known what kind of state facility she’d have ended up in if he hadn’t kept her home.
She’d opened her home to him. It was his duty to keep her there. God—and his aunt—had taught him well.
Shortly after his aunt died, he met a girl who’d lost her family tragically young. They hit it off from the very beginning because they had in common that sense of not really belonging, of having been denied the core foundation of a stable home life. And they married as soon as she was out of high school.
He was good and patient and kind to his wife, understanding her tender heart. He just did not tolerate any actions from her of which he did not approve. He was boss of the house now. And with that responsibility came the right to make those in his home follow his rules. By whatever means.
He provided. So he got to rule. And sometimes ruling meant that you had to teach those in your care about the dangers of hell’s fires.
He didn’t burn anyone. Remembering the burn-related nightmares of his youth he would never do that. He just used his words, and later his hands, to save his wife from falling down the devil’s hole.
He did so with God’s blessing. Using scripture to manipulate and control. To instill fear. Using hard work and dedication to family as proof of his own good heart.
And...
“Are you okay, dear?” Jenna jumped in her seat at the sound of a voice just over her shoulder.
“Yes!” she said, quickly minimizing the screen. “I’m fine, why?” Still lost in the story she’d been reading, she wasn’t sure if the sixtyish woman was the same one who’d been behind the desk when she came in, if she even worked there at all, or was a resident like herself.
“You were trembling so hard I could feel you,” she said, pointing to an adjoining cubicle perpendicular to the one at which she sat.
The woman had presumably been on a computer as well, and since the computers were reserved for residents, that would make her one.
“I’m sorry,” Jenna said now. “I guess I’m a little cold. They’ve got the air conditioner blowing pretty hard in here.”
It was. But she hadn’t noticed that either, not until then.
“I’m Renee,” the woman said, nodding.
“I’m Jenna.”
“I know. I saw you at dinner last night. You hardly touched a thing.”
“I wasn’t very hungry.”
“You also don’t act like this is your first dance. You aren’t looking lost, or trying to figure out the way things work.”
She shrugged.
“It’s not mine, either.”
If the woman needed to talk, she’d listen. There were others milling around. A woman a few tables over, with an opened encyclopedia and a pad of paper and pen in front of her. Another sitting in an armchair reading a magazine. And someone else reading from a tablet. There were a couple of women huddled together across the room, too.
Women seeking solace through conversation with other women was part of the healing process.
“You’ve been here before?” she asked Renee, as the other woman pulled her chair around and sat down.
“A few years ago. I’d just put my husband of forty years, Gary, in the hospital with a shove that ended up paralyzing him.”
Renee couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. “You hurt him?”
“The police said it was self-defense. So actually did Gary when he realized that he could lose me if he lied about it. He’d been about to throw me down the stairs. I shoved against him, purely a terrified reaction on my part, and it caught him off guard at just the right moment and he went down instead.”
It wasn’t a story she’d heard before. She could only imagine the guilt mixed with fear and confusion that one would carry in such a situation. She’d gone through years where she’d believed Steve’s anger was her fault. If she didn’t nag as much, ask so many questions, if she didn’t need so badly to be