Chapter 6 - The Language of the Scars
The convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph had an interior courtyard that had been paved with weathered limestone blocks in the year of the Columbian Exposition. In the center stood an iron pump that had not drawn water since the Great War, its handle rusted into a fixed, upright salute against the brick wall of the chapel.
Emily was sitting on a stone bench beneath a leafless pear tree, wearing an old woolen shawl that Mother Mary Catherine had found in the parish linen storage.
She had the blue teddy bear on her lap, its fur matted where her tears had dried in the wind, but her eyes were different now. The wide, skittering terror of the kitchen was gone, replaced by that heavy, clinical quiet that falls over soldiers after the artillery barrage lifts and the field dressings have been pinned in place.
I sat down on the other end of the stone bench, my bones aching with the deep, cold damp that always settles into my hip before a November freeze.
"He signed," I said.
She didn't look up from the bear. "Everything?"
"The house. The custody waiver. The full release of the prenatal medical accounts."
I took a manila envelope from my coat and laid it between us on the cold limestone. Inside were three original counterparts of the chancery settlement, signed in black ink by Mark Sterling in the holding room at Cermak Health Services forty minutes ago, witnessed by two deputy sheriffs and a notary from the county jail’s administrative unit.
"He didn't fight?" she asked.
"Men like Mark don't fight when the lights are turned on, Emily," I said. "They only fight when they're in a room with a woman who can't hit back and a mother who tells them they're kings. Once the state takes their belt and their shoelaces away, they turn into seven-year-old boys who want someone to bring them their slippers."
She reached out with her bruised fingers, her nails tracing the embossed gold seal of the Circuit Court of Cook County on the corner of the envelope.
"He told me I was nothing, Dad," she whispered. Her voice was flat, devoid of tears, the words falling into the courtyard like dry pine needles. "Every morning. While he was putting on his cufflinks. He’d look at me in the mirror and tell me that if I left, he’d have the township police declare me an unfit mother. He said his father had three judges on his Christmas card list. He said I’d be sleeping in a shelter on 12th Street while he took our son to the country club."
"I know," I said.
"Why didn't you tell me about the Burr Ridge files three years ago? Before the wedding?"
I looked at the rusted handle of the iron pump.
"Because three years ago, Emily, you were twenty-three and you believed that love was something you earned by being patient with a man’s temper. If I had handed you those files, you would have shown them to him. You would have tried to save him. And he would have used your decency as an anchor to drag you thirty feet deeper into the mud."
She turned her head, looking at my profile—the broken nose from the 1982 dock strike, the scar through my left eyebrow where a defense witness had thrown a glass ashtray across a grand jury room in Maywood.
"You knew this would happen," she said.
"I didn't know the day," I replied. "I didn't know the hour. But I’ve read five thousand domestic case jackets in my life, Emily. The trajectory is always the same. It starts with a broken plate. Then a locked door. Then an open palm. And if nobody steps between them, it ends on Ray Morales’s zinc table with a toe tag and a detective taking photos of the wallpaper."
She shivered, pulling the woolen shawl tighter around her shoulders. The wind came through the alley between the convent and the schoolhouse, smelling of cold soot, diesel exhaust, and the fried onions from the diner on the corner of Western Avenue.
"What do we do with the house in Oak Brook?" she asked.
"We sell it," I said. "On Tuesday. To an institutional investor who will turn it into a rental property for people who don't care about Linda’s garden club. We take the equity, we buy a three-flat in Beverly near the commuter rail, and we put the rest into a federal treasury trust that no one can touch until that boy is twenty-five years old."
"And you?"
"I have a garden in Berwyn," I said. "The tomatoes were poor this year because of the rain, but the garlic needs to go into the ground before the first hard frost."
A nun in a black habit stepped out onto the porch of the parish house, carrying two heavy mugs of steaming black tea. Sister Mary Thomas was seventy, her face lined with the deep, vertical creases of a woman who had taught fifth-grade catechism to five generations of Lithuanian laborers' children.
She set the mugs on the stone bench between us without a word, patted Emily’s head with a dry, cool palm, and walked back inside, the hem of her wool habit whispering against the limestone flags.
Emily picked up her mug with both hands, letting the steam warm her bruised cheek.
"He screamed my name at the hospital, didn't he?" she said.
"He did," I replied.
"What did you tell the police when they asked why you were smiling?"
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I looked at my daughter—my only child, who had survived the worst thing a man could do to her and was sitting in the cold air of a Catholic churchyard with her son’s heart beating steady and strong beneath her ribs.
"I told them," I said, "that that was only the beginning."
