Journey

“How the hell can you say that? Why don't you want to believe that that fat bastard abused her? Is that so incredible? Does he look all that nice to you? Why isn't it possible she was telling the truth? Because she's a woman?”

It made her furious listening to him, and even Greg had doubted the story when she told him. “Why is the woman always lying?”

“Maybe she wasn't. But the fact that she killed herself supports the theory that she was unbalanced.”

“It supports the theory that she thought she had no other way out and she was desperate. Desperate enough to leave her kids motherless, and even risk having one of them find her.” She was crying openly as she spoke to him, and her breath was coming in little staccato gasps of terror. She knew what it felt like to be so tortured, so terrified, so cornered that there seemed to be no escape route. If she hadn't been young and beautiful and Jack hadn't wanted her for the network, she might easily have met the same fate as Janet McCutchins. And she wasn't so sure Jack was right that she would have killed Bobby Joe first. She had thought of suicide herself, more than once, on dark nights when he was drunk and her lips and eyes were swollen from his latest acts of vengeance. It was all too easy to understand what Janet had been feeling. And then she remembered the calls she had made the day before, on her behalf, from her office. “I called the Coalition for Women for her yesterday, and a hotline. Shit, I wish I had called her last night. But I was afraid to, I was afraid Paul would intercept the call and I'd get her in trouble.”

“She was beyond your help, Mad. Don't beat yourself up over it. This proves it.”

“This proves nothing, goddammit, Jack. She wasn't crazy. She was terrified. And how do you know where he was, or what he had done to her before she did it?”

“He's an asshole, not a murderer. I'd stake my life on it,” he said calmly, as Maddy got ever more heated about it.

“Since when are you two such big pals? How the hell do you know what he did to her? You have no concept what that's like.” She was shaking with sobs as she sat at their kitchen table and cried for a woman she scarcely knew, but she had once walked the same path she had, and she knew that she was one of the fortunate survivors. Janet hadn't been as lucky.

“I do know what it's like,” he said quietly. “When I married you, you had terrible nightmares, and you slept in the fetal position with your arms over your head. I know, baby, I know … I saved you….”

“I know you did,” she said, blowing her nose, and looking at him sadly, “I never forget that…. I just feel so sorry for her…. Think of how she must have felt when she did it. Her life must have been an agony of terror.”

“I suppose it was,” he said coolly “and I'm sorry for Paul and her kids. This is going to be rough for all of them. I just hope the media don't have a heyday with it.”

“I hope some hotshot young reporter does an investigative piece on it, and exposes what he was doing to her. Not just for her sake, but all the other women who are still alive and in the same position.”

“It's hard to understand why she didn't leave if it was that bad. She could have left. She didn't have to kill herself.”

“Maybe she thought she did,” Maddy said sympathetically, but Jack was unmoved by it.

“You got out, Maddy. She could have too!” he said firmly.

“It took me eight years to do it, and you helped me. Not everyone is that lucky. And I just got out by the grace of God and the skin of my teeth. Maybe in another year, he might have killed me.”

“You wouldn't have let that happen.” Jack sounded certain, but Maddy was less so.

“I let it happen for a hell of a long time until you came along. And my mother let it happen until my dad died. And I swear she missed it, and him until she died. Relationships like that are a lot sicker than people realize, for both the abused and the abuser.”

“That's an interesting perspective,” he said, looking skeptical again. “I think some people just ask for it, or expect it, or let it happen, because they're too weak to do anything else.”

“You don't know anything about it, Jack,” she said in a tense voice as she walked out of the kitchen, and went upstairs to get her bag and a jacket. She came down carrying a well-cut dark navy blazer, and she had put on small diamond earrings. She was always beautifully groomed and dressed, at home or at work, she never knew who she'd run into, and people recognized her everywhere she went.

They rode to work together that morning in silence. She was annoyed at some of the things Jack had said, and she didn't want to get in an argument with him about it. But Greg was waiting for her at work, he had seen the story, and he looked anguished.

“I'm sorry, Maddy, you must feel like shit. I know you wanted to help her. Maybe you couldn't have anyway.” He tried to reassure her, but she turned and snapped at him as soon as he spoke.