“I don’t understand you sometimes, Kandace.” She sat down beside me on the bed. I was craving affection, the affection that usually followed immediately behind the hits, but she didn’t reach out to me. “The things that come out of your mouth.”
“If I’m lying, Momma, how would I know he has a scar inside his left thigh? About the size of a silver dollar? He said he got it climbing over a wire fence when he was five.” Shock overcame her face. It was no time to let up, so I continued, “I’m right, aren’t I?”
She snickered at me. “Josh could have mentioned that to you at any time. It doesn’t mean you’ve had sex with him.”
“You remember that time, about two years ago, when you came home from work and found me in the bed bleeding?”
“Sure! You were starting your periods.”
I shook my head. “No, Momma, my periods didn’t start until last year.” I reached out for her hand and grasped onto it. “That was the first time. That was the first time he hurt me.”
“This is absurd!” Momma shouted, peeling my fingers away, grabbing her purse off the door handle, and heading for the hallway. “See what you did? You’ve fooled around and made me late. I have to get out of here.”
I couldn’t believe that, after all I had said, she was still planning to stay with Josh. Desperate times called for desperate measures. She was halfway out the front door when I said, “Look at this, Momma. If you look at this and you still want to stay here, then I’ll stay, too.” She turned around and I came closer so she could see the large bruise on my left side in the sunlight. “I’ll stay here until I lose a kidney or something.”
Momma let her purse strap fall off her shoulder and the bag tumbled to the floor. She gently fingered my side and struggled for breath. “Josh did this to you?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Tuesday night, when you were working late.” I pulled my shirt up even higher so she could get a better view. “This is what he did to me when I refused him.”
“My poor baby!” Momma squealed, continuing to run her fingertips across my side. “How could that animal do this to you?”
I pulled my shirt back down. “Have you seen enough yet?” I asked, praying that she had. “Can we leave now?”
“Yes, yes we can leave now,” Momma replied without the slightest hesitation. She ran back down the hall toward the bedroom. “Just give me a minute to throw something in a bag and we’re out of here.”
I was so relieved. “Let me help you,” I called after her. “We really need to hurry, if we’re going to meet Irene by noon.”
“Look in my bottom left drawer, underneath my bras, and get the money,” she called out to me as I entered the room. She was inside the closet yanking clothes off hangers. Money, I thought to myself. She claimed she didn’t have any. I didn’t comment when I found her stash that had to amount to at least five hundred dollars. She had planned on escaping all along. “Let’s go, Baby,” she said excitedly, brushing past me. “Where’s your bag?”
“In my room,” I answered, running into my room to get it. I grabbed my baby-sitting money from under my alarm clock.
Less than two minutes later, we were in the car, a raggedy, but still running, powder blue 1989 Pontiac LeMans. Momma revved the engine and we settled into the customary five-minute warm-up time.
“Kandace, are you sure we can pull this off?” Just like every other aspect of our lives, she was looking for guidance from me instead of the other way around.
I held her hand. “Yes, we can pull this off because we’re going to turn it over to God. Right here and right now; we’re in His hands and He won’t let us down.”
We sat there in silence. I’m not sure what Momma was doing but I was praying like I had never prayed before. There was still a lot of uncertainty surrounding what we were doing. She was right. I had met Irene on the Internet but I knew that was the way it was supposed to be. Destiny sent her into my life at that exact moment in time.
I was in the school library about six months before, searching the Internet for information on the government of China when I decided to type the words domestic abuse into Yahoo. Thousands of sites resulted but one caught my eye immediately, so I clicked on it and sent an email to the women of the Safe Haven. Irene replied to me that same day and I read her message the next morning. There was a toll-free number for me to call. I waited until Momma and Josh were in their room asleep the following night and dialed the number.
From that moment on, there were a series of late-night phone calls and dozens of emails back and forth. I explained my home situation to Irene and she said the Safe Haven was there to help victims of abuse, but only if they were trying to help themselves. I lied and told her that Momma wanted out; that it was all she ever talked about. Irene insisted that we meet somewhere locally and I was shocked when I finally got up the nerve to broach the subject with Momma and she agreed.
We met Irene at the Tastee Diner and she told us all about the abusive husband she escaped from along with her three kids. One of them, a daughter named Sheila, was about my age. We worked out plans that very night to flee on March 30th. That would allow us enough time to get our affairs in order, not that we had any affairs, and save up a little spending cash. Irene said that we wouldn’t need much because the shelter had certain benefactors who believed in the right of women to be free from such despair.
So there we were, about to embark on the first day of the rest of our lives. I glanced over at Momma and she was frozen in time, trembling like a leaf. “Momma, I think the car is warm enough. We can go now.” She didn’t respond; simply sat there staring into space. “Momma?”
“Okay, Baby,” she weakly replied. “Give me a second to get my bearings together.”
“It’s okay to be scared.” I caressed the hand that was gripping the steering wheel. “I’m scared, too, but it has to be like this.”
“You’re right.” She glanced over at me. “It has to be like this. Besides, I did promise Momma.”
“Yes, you did, and I’m sure she’s looking down from heaven at us right this second cheering us on.” I looked at the dashboard clock and saw that is was 9:30. “We have to go now so we won’t be late. Irene is waiting.”