Disaster Preparedness

She anticipated it, like the second coming of Christ. She didn’t know the day or the hour, but she sensed that you were nearing a breaking point. Your criticisms grew more harsh. Your patience wore thin. You developed a hair trigger, often raising the back of your hand to her or us kids. You spanked us with a passion, as if it felt too good to stop. You kicked her. You shoved her away when she tried to be playful. You held a knife to her throat before changing your mind and throwing it in the sink, disgusted.

              She’d been married to you long enough to identify the roiling clouds in your eyes, and experience taught her not to ignore the warning signs. She ran us kids through what-if scenarios, teaching us how to think in a crisis, what steps to take toward safety. It reminded me of the civil service drills in school, the way we would line up in the hallway, put our hands over our heads to save ourselves in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

She would test us over meals or while driving in the car, asking questions to ensure we hadn’t forgotten, urging us to be vigilant, always at the ready. For instance, we knew that if you launched an attack in the basement we were to run upstairs to call 9-1-1, the phone furthest from the violence. If the offensive was happening in the bedroom, we had a choice of the phone in the kitchen, which offered little cover, or the phone in the basement. If it happened in the daytime we were permitted to run to a neighbor’s. If it came like a thief in the night, her war-cry would be one word,“Help!”

              Even though she’d prepared us the best she knew how, it came as a cruel shock in the pre-dawn hours of an ordinary morning to be awakened by the siren of her voice. I sat bolt upright in bed, shocked from deep sleep to sudden wakefulness. She could have warned that the communists were coming or that the house was on fire, and it would not have inspired more panic. I was instantaneously aware of a struggle in the next bedroom. She kept sounding the alarm, “Help! Help!”  I cried back, “Mom!” hoping she would tell me to go back to sleep, that I was having a bad dream. But she did not respond. Perhaps you had your hand clamped over her mouth, or perhaps she was relieved that I was awake, able to enact our response plan, allowing her to concentrate on staying alive. I heard furniture turning over, glass breaking, bodies scuffling. Even then I thought about the tragedy of the situation, how ridiculous that someone eleven-years-old should be held responsible for saving her mother’s life. The burden was immense, and I was glad for the practice – glad that she’d had the foresight to arm me with a strategy. I stood at my bedroom door before bolting, exposed, into the hallway and down the stairs without being spotted. As I ran I saw the two of you from the corner of my eye, on the bed, you grappling for a tighter hold, her struggling to get away.      

She knew you were going to kill her. She said it was in your eyes, and she knew if she did not get away that is exactly what would happen. You could not have inhabited one more molecule of hate. You were brimming with madness and hell-bent on getting ahold of her, choking the life out of her. You lunged across the bed at her. The thick muscles of your fingers clasped around her arm in a vice hold, and she could not get away. So she started speaking in tongues. She called on the Holy Spirit, and then as if casting a pentecostal spell she said, “I rebuke you Satan, in the name of Jesus.” I don’t know if she really believed it would work, but it did. As soon as she said Jesus’ name all the strength left your body. You were emptied of your wind as if you’d been kicked in the solar-plexus, and the blood drained from your face. You went limp just long enough for her to wriggle free.

              Downstairs in the family room I was dialing the phone.

“9-1-1 what is your emergency?” an official-sounding female voice said.

“My dad is beating up my mom.” 

“Your dad is beating up your mom?”  Her tone was suddenly laced with anguish.

“Yes,” I said. Mom had told me that was all I needed to say.

“What’s your address honey?”

“1152 Klein Avenue.” I was careful to enunciate, so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. I kept waiting for you to burst into the room and catch me.

“We’re sending a squad car right now,” she said. “He’s not going to have his siren on, but he’ll be there soon sweetie.”

“Thank you,” I said, and then I hung up.

My next problem was finding a place to hide until help arrived. I couldn’t return to my room upstairs. I couldn’t go into Tammi’s room because little sisters know rules about staying out of older sister’s rooms. So I retreated into the laundry room. I stood behind the door, staring at the knob, breathless, straining to hear any sound. I heard nothing. No voices, no struggle, no sirens. I entertained the thought that you had killed her. I simmered in my hate for you, feeling helpless, trapped and longing for you to wander so far that you could never find your way back.

Suddenly the door exploded open, and you were standing before me looking feral, smelling wild, panting. You stared at me for a moment, wordless, and I wondered if I might become your punching bag. Afterall, my resemblance to Mom in face and temperament has always stirred you in a loathesome way. Did you think for a moment that it might satisfy your hunger to beat me to hell? Did you think to ask me where she was, threaten me if I refused to speak? In one sense I was relieved to see you, because I knew if you burst through the door looking for her she’d gotten away. But now it was me in your path, and aside from a systemic feeling of terror, I had no plan.

“Are you ok?” you asked, when you finally spoke.

I was stunned by the question. Of course I was not ok.

“Yeah,” I said.

Without another word, you turned and walked away closing the door behind you, leaving me to stand there, alone. I began to shake as warm urine ran down my leg and puddled in the floor between my feet. I did not move, but stood there until I finally heard your truck engine coming to life, leaving the driveway.

I emerged from the laundry room calling for Mom. She was not upstairs, and she was not in the kitchen, and I could not find her, and I thought that perhaps she had left and not taken me with her. And then I thought perhaps she was lying somewhere, close to death, needing help, and I was not there. When she finally crawled from the bowels of Tammi’s closet underneath the stairs, where she’d burrowed deep under blankets and clothes, I felt like I was watching Lazarus come forth from the tomb. It was as if my life as well as hers had been resurrected. She was whole. Sh

e was shaken, but she was intact. She sat down at the table to collect herself while I opened the front door to let the police officer inside.

Maybe her Pentecostal hocus pocus had worked. Maybe it was her careful preparation. Maybe it just wasn’t your time to get her. I don’t know where you went that day or what you thought or what you said to her when you spoke again, but I was profoundly saddened at 5 o’clock when you pulled back into the drive and expected our lives to continue in the usual pattern – alternating states of silence and pandemonium – but I’ve lived long enough to learn that even chaos comes to an end eventually. You just have to plan for it.

Cyn Kitchen teaches literature and creative writing at Knox College. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Carve, New Southerner, KeepGoing.org, sfwp.org, Literary Mama, Minnetonka Review and Louisville Review. She lives and writes in hard-won peace with her husband, children and animals in Galesburg, IL.