“Oh, Uma, there you go again, exaggerating things. Don’t you see that you won’t get what you want this way? Listen, darling, Joey and I talked yesterday. You’re lucky, because he says he’ll still take you back. He’s not angry about how you just up and left like that.” Her voice had lowered into thebest friendsregister she’d always tried to use. “He’s hurting, sweetie. He’s really hurting.” Uma could imagine her expression: eyebrows up, tight little smile. Herempatheticface. People loved it. She could draw you in with that, make you feel like she’d do just about anything for you. “Tell me where you are, and he can come get you.”
That was the thing about her mom. She’d help anyone in need, and she’d reach out, lend them her last five bucks or invite them over for dinner. She’d barbecued tofu for more strangers than Uma could count growing up. She was good that way.
Why the hell wouldn’t she take the time to pay attention to her own daughter?
Uma had taken air in and let out a shaky, nearly crying breath. Easier, in the end, to let it go. “I just wanted you to know that I’m okay, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
“Oh, Uma. You’ve…” Her mom paused, maybe searching out the right words for an apology. Maybe she’d offer to fly her daughter to India, have her join her there for healing meditation and yoga. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. “You’ve had us in quite a state” was all her mother said.
Every part of Uma had sunk with disappointment. She shouldn’t have let her hopes get up, but she had. She always did. “Yep. Well, I’d better go,” she finally bit out between stiff lips.
“Tranquility, Uma, my sweet child.” She said it fondly, but Uma was still resentful.
“Yes. Right.Hari Om, Mom.”
“Blessings.”
After hanging up, Uma had sat there in the shelter bedroom, waiting for the knot in her chest to unravel. The single bed beneath her had been threadbare but neatly made, like the others. She’d shared the room with two other women, all victims of domestic abuse.
No, not victims: survivors.I’m a survivor, she remembered thinking, although she hadn’t felt like one. Because this was what life had come to.This.
Her mom and Joey teamed up against her. They made quite the pair, the two of them. Master manipulators, both, doling out enough guilt to last a lifetime. Uma’s breath had started coming faster, and she’d gotten that tunnel vision, squeezy-eye thing that told her a panic attack was not far behind.
At some point, one of her roommates—Carla—had come in and found her rolled into a ball on the floor, clutching her phone in one hand, her other hand a bloody mass of tooth marks. She’d called one of the shelter volunteers, and they’d calmed Uma down.
When the police car pulled up in front of the shelter that evening, it hadn’t even occurred to Uma to be scared. At the time, she’d had no idea to what lengths Joey would go to get her back—or to get back at her. She’d been sitting in the den with a few of the women, staring blindly at the TV, when Carla had come in, grabbed her arm, and drawn her quickly through the kitchen to the back door.
“Cops are here,” Carla had whispered, out on the stoop. “You gotta go.”
“What?”
“You said your ex works with the law?”
Uma had nodded.
“Well, girl, you gotta go. He knows where you at.” Uma still hadn’t budged when the woman hung her purse over her arm, then nudged her toward the back gate with a final, hissed “Go!”
Uma had gone without thinking, following the orders of someone who’d been running from abuse for a lot longer than she had. Finally, at the gate, she’d looked back at the house, seen the blue lights of the police car reflected off the neighbor’s siding, and realized that there really was no choice: she had to get in her car and run faster, harder, farther.
Curled up in that same car, the closest thing Uma had to an actual home, the oppressive weight of Joey’s presence was everywhere. At one point, she’d considered stealing a new license plate, but she’d never been much of a rebel, and the idea of getting caught had been too scary. In New York, she’d been lucky to meet a fellow survivor who’d given her a place to hide.
God, she wished she were back there, warm in Benny’s tiny bunk instead of freezing in her car.
I can’t do this, she thought before taking a deep breath to quiet the screaming in her brain. She reached for something else, some other emotion than fear and anxiety and hopelessness to brighten her outlook.
And then, as if by magic, the sound started—that nocturnal, metallic clanging. In the perfectly dark car, it echoed like some kind of prayer bell chased by the smell of smoke on the chill air. Something about the sound, the smell, the rhythm, within the perfect, moonless vacuum, brought an aura of peace.
It cleared her head of those fuzzy, messy emotions, until something new emerged—a sensation so unfamiliar that it took Uma a while to identify it.
When it finally coalesced, she recognized it for what it was: anger.
Good, clean anger, sublimating weak and wretched into strong and firm. Without clear intention or thought, she wrenched up her sleeve and ran cold fingers over the lines scrawled there. She couldn’t see them in the dark, but the words were there. A part of her now.
“Fuck you,” she whispered. She’d never said that aloud. Not to her mother or to Joey or to the woman she worked for, who wouldn’t even provide shelter for the night. It felt so good that Uma had to say it again before turning the key and revving the engine. “Fuck you all.”
* * *
The sound of an engine idling in his driveway set Ive off. He didn’t mind hunters on his land—there were a few guys who asked him for permission every year. Poor guys living in trailers who needed the meat to survive, to keep their families alive. That was something he understood firsthand. He’d started shooting squirrels for dinner before he hit puberty. That was what you did around here when you were dirt poor and had no other choice. The guys who hunted on his land bagged enough venison to last them all year. Ive was glad to help.
