To the Man Who Stopped

Do you remember us? We were parked on the side of the road when you stopped. You were young, my mother’s age, maybe twenty-five, wearing a white T-shirt and baseball cap. You lowered your head enough to see out the passenger window.

I was the chubby girl with the oily hair standing by the taillights with my little sister. You addressed my mother’s boyfriend, Robert—the tall man with dark bags under his eyes that made him look much older than he was—and asked him if we needed help. With this, the two of you entered into an age-old contract, something so American, so masculine. As a man, you were obligated to do anything you could to help. As a man, he was obligated not to accept. My mother said nothing, only stood by the back of the car with my sister and me. He assured you we were fine and waved you on in that friendly manner.

Only you didn’t go right away. This is what I remember most about you. Your hesitation. How your eyes shifted from Robert to my mother. The way Robert spoke to you was not the rough way he had been speaking to my mother a moment before. When he said everything was fine, he meant it in that way that is understood to mean that things were not completely fine, but they would be handled. Privately.

We were on our way to see my mom’s friend Bette when they started bickering. My mother was recently divorced, and I was used to this kind of thing when she was with my stepfather, but Robert was different. He was a religious man who brought me to the record store and urged me to buy Creed albums, but ultimately bought whatever I wanted. He spoke softly to my mother about controlling her anger and how she shouldn’t yell so much. If they had a disagreement, they would go for a walk.

Their argument was a change but not a surprise. I was ten years old, and by then, I was beginning to think this was how all relationships developed: kindness, then disagreement, then hatred, then divorce. I ignored the hushed jabs until he raised his voice and sped up. I gripped the plush fabric of the seat and held my belt across my chest. He swerved onto a side road— the road where you eventually found us that evening— jerking the wheel left and right, crossing between the lanes, going faster, faster down a steep hill. I shot my arm out in front of my sister in her booster seat, the way my mother did when she had to brake suddenly in traffic. Then we were stopped. No crash, no crunch. Just the safety of the side of the road, as if Robert had always been in control and there was nothing to worry about.

Silently, he got out of the car and waited at the back for my mother. They argued for a long time before I joined them, telling my sister to stay put, thinking she would only get in the way. She climbed out immediately. I hoped seeing us girls would remind them of our destination and get them to wrap it up. What I knew about fighting until that point was that people could argue and say horrible things. One person might even throw something, but the fight always ended quickly, people feeling hurt, if not a little silly. I also knew that people got into physical fights, but that was something only bad people did.

I had never seen them fight. I did not know that the week before, they had been taking a shower together when Robert pushed my mother up against the towel rack, bending the metal bar in half and bruising her left shoulder. I did not know how terrified she’d been and how she hustled to fix the rack that day to keep this secret between the two of them before my sister and I got home from school.

By the time you pulled up next to us, the trunk was popped, and Robert was bent at the waist, rummaging through whatever was in there. It must have seemed like he was looking for something to repair the car with when you stopped. If you had watched him for more than a few minutes, you might have noticed that there was very little in the trunk, that he was searching through only a couple of items. In fact, he was not searching for anything at all, only looking for time.

There must have been something in his voice when he told you we were fine that caused the hitch, the momentary pause, because you looked as if you had stumbled upon something you weren’t supposed to see. Were his answers too quick when you asked him what was wrong? Did it seem like he was trying to get rid of you? Another clause in the masculine pact: Be watchful of other men. Protect women, when possible. 

You had to trust him, though. This is the unspoken agreement. Help a stranger, but don’t push too hard. Don’t look too closely. But I wonder what you saw when you watched Robert, the way his eyes did not quite meet yours, and how his hands moved awkwardly at his side, his sinewy frame already pumping with adrenaline? What about us girls, confused and awkward, hiding behind the bumper? Surely there was something in my mother’s face because shortly after you nodded and disappeared down the road, she stood beside Robert, who had begun again to throw things around in the trunk, and asked, “What? Are you looking for something to hit me with?”

She would repeat this line whenever she told the story, as if these words, spoken aloud, were a charm that turned him into another person. “I put it in his head,” she told people later. But of course, that wasn’t true. It was already in his head. She’d only guessed it.

Robert paused the moment she finished asking the question, and I saw the flash of a raised arm, something metal. I had never heard of a tire iron before. I was running in the opposite direction before it made contact with my mother’s skull. I didn’t even hear her cry. The hill we’d come down was impossibly steep, and the only house I could see had its lights off, but I still ran and thought about you, the driver. The road was so remote. Did the house belong to you? I knew it didn’t. I saw that the lights were out in the house long before you drove by. Before I got to the porch, I knew no one was home. When I knocked on the door, I waited for a three-count, then turned and ran again.

Not feeling my feet, only hearing them hit the pavement, I tried to prepare myself for what I would find, but my mind kept slipping into a white space every time I pictured his arm rising and striking downward, a flip-book of that scene playing in my head. The first full thought I had was that my mother was dead. I knew he hit her at least once, but I imagined it was more. And then there was my sister. She was only five years old. My focus had been on finding help for my mother, and now I realized the horrible, simple truth. I’d left my sister alone with him.

The taillights had disappeared, and it took me longer than it should have to realize what this meant. He had left. And I thought, He’s taken them! He’s left me, and he’s taken them! It had gotten so dark on that country road that I could not tell where the car had been. Then my mother yelled, and I swooned, knowing that she was okay, okay enough to speak. I found her lying on the ground, holding her head. Her voice was so calm when she told me she loved me. She looked up at the sky as she spoke. My sister, who had seen everything, stood by my mother’s head, wiping blood off a single leaf.

I prayed for you then, driver, for you to come back, even if you didn’t live in that house. Maybe you’d be taking the same route back from wherever it was you were headed. I knelt on the shoulder of the road, looking into the wide, wet eyes of my mother, her sclera seeming to take up her entire eye. She said the address of a friend. 19 Laurel Street. 19 Laurel. I repeated the words, eating them. Her instructions were so clear, so serious, that I felt it was essential, that if I could not remember the address, we would not survive.

Headlights lit the street at a distance. So little time had passed that my mother told us to back up into the tree line; it could be Robert again. Then, No! Get to the side of the road and wave your arms. She knew it was not him because it was a van. This is where my memory fails. I know there were two women who took us to the police station, while two men stayed with my mother and waited for an ambulance. I remember having to be brave, having to trust that these people were good. I don’t remember saying goodbye. In one version of the memory, I make it to 19 Laurel. Another tells me this was the next day, and that when we were handed over to the police, they somehow knew to bring us to my grandfather’s house. I remember being in the back of a car, giving directions. I remember making a joke, thinking it would make the women feel more comfortable, less horrified by what they had just seen.

Later, in the hospital, while my mother was recovering, the police told her they caught Robert because he kept driving by our house, waiting for us to come home. He’d called the hospital several times to see if she was okay. 

My mother shaved her head so lawyers could take pictures of the staples, eight industrial metal straps across the back of her head. I stole glances at them, tiny hairs prickling out from under each one like caterpillar fur. I looked but never touched the pink puckering spots that refused to grow hair. In an effort to understand what happened, we reasoned that things could have been worse. My mother’s hands, which covered her head after the first two blows, were swollen but not broken, and she suffered no brain injuries. 

Two years later, when he was released, Robert disappeared. No one could tell us where he went. With him free, I felt anything could happen. Was he still mad at my mother? Had he been plotting against us the entire time? It got so that I was afraid to talk about him at all, as if the mention of his name would conjure him.My mother began to see him everywhere. Once, while she was shopping, she was finally sure it was him, and she fled, leaving her full cart in the middle of the store. She broke into tears in our home in broad daylight behind the safety of our locked doors.

But Robert did not come. He did not write. We breathed a sigh of relief and then another and another. Years passed without a word. No menacing pop-up, no apology in the mail. My family has moved on. We seldom think of Robert these days; we talk about him even less. Largely, he is a collection of memories no one can really agree upon.

It’s been over two decades, and still I think of you, driver. I now hope that house was not yours. I hope you never heard anything about us and that I only imagined that look on your face. I hope that we left your mind as soon as you drove off. I’ve imagined myself, a version of you, hearing through the grapevine about what happened only a few feet from my door. I think of all the things that would go through my head. All the things I would have wished I had done to interfere. I hope you hold none of this guilt.

I don’t remember the faces of the police or those people in the van. I remember you and how you made me see the odd lines of our situation more clearly. Without words, your hesitation clued us in, told us to protect ourselves. When the time came, I was primed to run. Even before Robert raised his arm, I was facing the hill and that lone house at the top, knowing something I could not yet explain. Perhaps this too is what prepared my mother to cover her head, the single look you gave us that asked, Is it really safe here?