Four days after my husband’s mother cracked two of my ribs with her own skillet, she was in the corridor yelling at the staff to let her in, while my husband told the charge nurse, “She’s not stable. She probably did this to herself.” I heard every word from the bed. Neither of them knew who decided now.
At thirty-seven my marriage quit being a sad one and turned into one I could get killed in.
Akash and I had been living in his parents’ place outside Erie for six years.
Six months, he’d said at the start.
Long enough for a down payment.
I worked forty hours a week at the pharmacy counter and signed over nearly every check.
The down payment never moved.
Akash ran the accounts, all of them.
He wanted the receipt when I bought gum.
If I brought up an apartment I was being ungrateful, so I quit bringing it up.
His mother, Karen, ran everything else.
When we ate.
My tone.
How many minutes I got to talk to my sister.
Sunil, his dad, let her.
My mom warned me at the bridal shower that he watched me too close.
I fought her on it until I barely called home.
That Thursday was Karen’s sixty-fourth birthday, and I wanted one dinner with no fight in it.
Pork chops.
Mashed potatoes.
Corn.
A cherry pie from scratch, with half the sugar, because her doctor had just told her to watch her blood sugar.
She ate one forkful.
The fork went down on the plate hard enough to ring.
“What is this?”
I told her about the sugar.
Her whole face went flat.
“So I’m diabetic now?”
“No, the doctor just said—”
“You’re bringing up my bloodwork? On my birthday?”
I kept my voice low, hoping she’d settle.
It only made her louder.
She said I was counting the days until she died so Akash and I could get the house.
I looked to Akash so he’d say how insane that was.
He rubbed his eyes.
“Why is it always you who sets her off?”
Karen pushed her chair back and went into the kitchen.
She came out holding the cast-iron skillet off the stove, still greasy from the chops.
I didn’t get it.
Not until she swung.
The iron caught me across the shoulder.
My hip slammed the table’s edge.
The second one got my knee, it gave out, and I was on the carpet.
The pie plate broke somewhere behind me.
Something in my side lit up every time I pulled air in.
I said Akash’s name.
Akash didn’t move from his chair.
I stayed down there staring up at him and thinking, okay. Now. Now he does something.
“Akash. Please.”
Sunil reached for the remote and turned the ballgame up.
A whole stadium CHEERING while I begged my husband from the floor.
Akash did get up, eventually.
For a second I was so relieved I almost cried.
He squatted down next to me.
Then his fingers closed on my jaw.
“You don’t humiliate my mother. NOT UNDER THIS ROOF.”
He said it quietly.
That scared me worse than the skillet had.
His hand dropped.
He sat back down.
Picked up his fork.
NOBODY dialed 911.
Nobody looked at my knee.
The knee swelled up tight against my jeans.
Then Karen asked if I was going to get the glass up before bed.
And Akash said, “She’ll get it.”
Something in me went still.
Nobody was waiting on me to be okay.
All they wanted was for me to do what I was TOLD.
My cell was charging upstairs.
Getting to the back door meant crawling right past Akash’s chair.
That left the laundry room window.
Last winter Akash had drilled metal pins into its frame so it lifted three inches and stopped.
For break-ins, he’d said.
From the linoleum it looked like a cage.
I pulled myself forward on my elbows.
Every inch grabbed at my side.
Sunil’s pliers sat above the dryer, and I went at the first pin.
I was shaking so bad I dropped them three times.
At the table they kept talking over the game.
Not one of them came to look.
The first pin came out.
Then the second.
I shoved the window up as far as it went.
My bad knee slid off the dryer.
I went out headfirst into the snow.
For a while no air came at all.
Face down, I watched the back door.
It stayed shut.
Eileen Krueger lived on the other side of the fence.
She was eighty-one.
Her porch light had always looked close.
Now it might as well have been in another county.
I crawled.
Rested.
Crawled.
At her porch steps my hands were red and stinging.
I couldn’t get up them.
So I reached and banged on the low edge of her storm door.
Once.
Twice.
The porch light came on.
Eileen looked down at me in her slippers, the ones with little pom-poms on the toes.
“Julianne?”
I got some of it out.
She got down on the cold boards and called 911 from her cordless phone.
Her cardigan went over me.
Her fingers wrapped around mine.
Sirens coming.
Then nothing.
I came to under hospital lights so bright they hurt.
Two cracked ribs.
A torn ligament in my knee.
Bruises I’d need a mirror to find.
And the first word out of me was Akash.
I didn’t want him there.
I was scared to death he’d already found me.
On day four his voice came down the hall.
Karen’s came with it.
She was yelling at the nurses’ station.
“I’m her FAMILY. You can’t keep me out of there.”
Then Akash, in that reasonable tone I’d learned to dread.
He said I wasn’t stable.
He said I’d probably fallen and done this to MYSELF.
Under the blanket, I started to shake.
Then one of the nurses slipped in and pulled the door shut behind her.
“Nobody comes through here unless you say so.”
I just looked at her.
I couldn’t remember anyone asking me that. About anything.
She stood there with her hand on the handle, waiting.
So were they, on the other side of it.
Room 412
“No,” I said.
It came out small, so I said it again.
“No. Not him. Not her.”
The nurse nodded like I’d told her I wanted ice chips. She was maybe forty-five, short gray hair, green scrubs, a pen clipped upside down on her pocket.
“Okay,” she said. “Then that’s what it is.”
She went out and the door clicked behind her.
I could still hear them. Karen was saying something about lawyers. Akash said, “Mom. Mom, let me handle it,” and Karen went quiet, the way she always went quiet for him and nobody else.
Then footsteps going away.
I pressed the button that raised the bed, because lying flat with them that close felt like being back on the carpet. My side caught on every inch the bed came up.
Ten minutes later the nurse came back in with a form.
“He left this at the desk. He said you’d need to sign it for the insurance.”
She didn’t hand it to me right away. She held it a second, like she was deciding something, and then she put it on the tray table and turned it so I could read it.
It was a typed statement. One paragraph.
It said that on Thursday evening I fell down the basement stairs while carrying laundry. It said no other person was involved. It said I had a history of dizziness.
At the bottom there was a line for my signature.
He’d already filled in the date.
The hutch drawer
Akash kept everything that mattered in a blue plastic folder with a snap on the front.
It lived in the bottom drawer of Karen’s hutch by the big table, under Karen’s good tablecloth, and it had been there since our second year in that house.
That’s how I remember the second year. The folder showing up.
He brought it to the table one night after dinner, when Karen was doing the crossword and Sunil had the news on. He opened the snap and slid out a stack of pages with little yellow sticky arrows on them.
“For the down payment account,” he said. “The bank needs both of us.”
I asked what bank.
He said the bank, Jules, like I was being slow on purpose. He said it was a savings thing with a better rate, and it locked the money up so neither of us could touch it until we were ready to buy.
I remember I liked that. Neither of us could touch it.
There were maybe nine arrows. I signed at every one. I was tired from a double, and Karen looked up from the crossword when I took too long on the third page, and I signed faster after that.
He snapped the folder shut and put it back under the tablecloth.
I never saw those pages again.
What I saw was the receipts. Every receipt I brought home went into that folder too. Gum. Tampons. A two-dollar coffee from the gas station on the way to an opening shift. He’d smooth them flat on the table and look at each one before he put it in.
“We’re a team,” he’d say. “Teams track it.”
That same spring he came home in a new truck.
Silver, the big kind, with the step that folds down. I asked how, with the down payment and everything, and he said it was a lease through a guy he knew, practically free, and anyway he needed it for work.
Karen walked all the way around it in the driveway and told him he deserved it.
And there was Eileen.
Eileen Krueger had been on the other side of that chain-link fence since before Akash was born. She kept a bird feeder shaped like a lighthouse and a radio in her kitchen window that played the same oldies station all day.
She talked to me over the fence when I took the trash out. Only to me. Karen had not spoken to her in years over some argument about a maple tree.
Eileen read the Erie paper every morning, front to back, including the legal notices. She told me that the first summer, holding up the page with the little gray print.
“Property transfers,” she said. “Every house that changes hands in the county. Nothing on this street moves without me knowing.”
I laughed. I thought it was the kind of thing old women say.
She didn’t laugh. She folded the paper and said, “You’d be surprised what people do to each other with a pen.”
I thought about that, sitting in Room 412 with Akash’s statement on the tray table.
Laundry. Basement stairs. A history of dizziness.
There was no history of dizziness. I’d never once been dizzy, not even pregnant with nothing, not even the flu year.
The nurse was still standing there.
“You don’t have to sign anything,” she said. “You know that?”
Deepa
The hospital sent a social worker that afternoon. Her name was Deepa, and she had a lanyard with about forty keys on it and a laptop she balanced on her knees.
She said the nurse had asked her to come.
She also said, carefully, that my husband had called the floor twice that morning and once at noon. He had told the desk I’d been having episodes. Confusion. That I wandered at night. That I’d threatened to hurt myself once, years ago, and the family had kept it quiet.
None of it was true. All of it was written down now, in a hospital log, in somebody’s handwriting.
Deepa asked me what day it was.
I told her.
She asked who the president was, and the name of the street I lived on, and to count backward from a hundred by sevens.
I got to sixty-five before she stopped me.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m writing that you’re competent to make your own decisions. Because you are.”
She asked if I wanted to talk to the police.
There was already an officer on it. Madden. He’d come the first night while I was still out, and he’d taken Eileen’s statement on her porch, and he’d left a card at the desk that the nurse had clipped to my chart.
I’d been looking at that card for three days.
I hadn’t called it.
Deepa didn’t push. She asked what I needed first.
What I needed was money. I had a hospital gown and a pair of socks with rubber treads on the bottom. My cell was still upstairs in that house. My wallet was in my purse on the hook by Karen’s back door. I didn’t know my own bank balance. I didn’t know if I had a bank.
So I asked Deepa if I could use the room phone to call work.
My manager at the pharmacy was a man named Carlos who’d been there longer than the building’s carpet. He answered on the second ring, and when he heard my voice he said, “Jesus. Jules.”
He knew. Somebody had told him something.
“Akash came in Monday,” Carlos said. “Said you’d had a breakdown. Said you wouldn’t be coming back and he’d pick up your last check.”
I asked if he gave it to him.
“We don’t do paper checks. It’s direct deposit. I told him that.” Carlos stopped. “He said he knew. He said he wanted to change the account it goes to. He had your employee number. He had your login.”
The login was my birthday. Akash picked it, the week I started, so I wouldn’t forget it.
“Did he change it?”
“He tried. HR needs you to sign for a change. He got pretty mad at the girl in HR.” Carlos breathed out. “Your check’s going in Friday, same as always. Same account it’s been going to for six years.”
I asked him whose account that was.
He was quiet for a second.
“Jules,” he said. “It’s yours. Isn’t it?”
Eileen’s cordless
Eileen came on day five.
She came in a cab, which she told me cost twenty-two dollars and which she said like it was a crime. She had on the same cardigan she’d put over me in the snow. She’d washed it.
She brought a grocery bag. In it was a pair of sweatpants, a hairbrush still in its plastic, a toothbrush, a box of saltines, and the cordless phone.
“I didn’t know if they’d let you have one,” she said. “It doesn’t work here. It’s just so you have it.”
I held it on my lap. It was the phone she’d called 911 on. It had a strip of masking tape on the back with her own number written on it in marker.
She sat down in the chair by the window and looked out at the parking lot like she was checking on it.
“He’s been by,” she said.
My whole body went tight. My ribs caught.
“Not to see me. He’s been by the house. Your house. He carried out two boxes on Tuesday and put them in that truck.” She frowned at the window. “Your blue coat was on top. I know your coat.”
So he was moving my things. Or getting rid of them.
I told her about the statement. The basement stairs. Then I told her about the down payment, because once I started I couldn’t stop. Six years. Every check. The account that locked so neither of us could touch it.
Eileen turned from the window.
“Down payment on what?”
“A house. Somewhere that was ours. That was the whole —”
“Honey,” she said. “He’s got a house.”
Her words made no sense to me.
“That one,” she said. “Two years ago, two springs ago. Karen and Sunil deeded it to him. I read it in the transfers. One dollar, it said, and love and affection.” She said the last part flat, the way the paper prints it. “I figured you knew. I figured you were both on it.”
I asked her if she was sure.
She gave me a look like I’d asked whether the lake was wet.
“I’m eighty-one,” she said. “I’m not stupid. It’s Akash’s name. Just Akash.”
I sat there with her dead phone in my lap.
Two springs ago was the folder. The yellow arrows. The truck.
Eileen reached over and patted my hand, the one with the IV in it, very carefully.
“Ask somebody to pull your credit,” she said. “Whatever you signed, it’s on there.”
Page three
Deepa came back after lunch the next day with the laptop.
She said she wasn’t supposed to do this, and then she did it anyway. She opened the free credit report site and turned the screen toward me and stepped back to the window so she wasn’t watching me type my Social.
I knew my Social. I knew my mother’s maiden name and the street I grew up on. Those were mine. Nobody had ever bothered to take those.
The report loaded in pieces.
Page one was my name and three old addresses. The apartment I had in college. My mom’s house. Then the house outside Erie.
Page two was a credit card from when I was twenty-four that I’d paid off and forgotten.
Page three was a mortgage.
Opened two years ago in April. Original amount one hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars. A lender in Pittsburgh I’d never heard of. Joint account. Me and Akash. Monthly payment eleven hundred and change, paid on time, every month, from an account ending in the same four digits as the one Carlos said my checks went into.
Under it was an auto loan. Opened the same month. Forty-one thousand. Joint.
The truck. Practically free.
I scrolled back up and read the mortgage line again. The house wasn’t mine. Eileen had read the transfer. The house was Akash’s, just Akash’s, one dollar and love and affection. But the loan against it had my name on it, right next to his.
The nine yellow arrows. I could see Karen looking up from the crossword.
Six years of checks, and for the last two of them they hadn’t gone to any locked account. They’d gone to pay back money he borrowed against a house I’d never own, to pay for a truck I wasn’t allowed to drive.
And Karen standing at the table with that skillet, telling me I wanted her gone so I’d get the house.
I started to laugh. It hurt so much I had to stop, and Deepa turned around from the window.
“Do you want me to print it?” she said.
I said yes. I said print two.
She went out and came back with the pages still warm. I put one set under my pillow and kept the other on my lap with the cordless phone.
Then I picked up the room phone and called the number on the card clipped to my chart.
Officer Madden said he could be there by four.
I hung up and looked at the nurse, who’d come in to check my IV.
“When they come back today,” I said, “you can let them in.”
Akash’s chair
They came at four-fifteen. All three of them.
Officer Madden was already in the corner by the window, out of uniform except for the badge on his belt, holding a coffee. Deepa was in the chair next to my bed. The nurse left the door open behind them and stood in it.
Akash saw Madden first. He stopped, and then he smiled at him, and then he came to the foot of the bed and put his hand on the rail.
“Jules,” he said. “Thank God. We’ve been out of our minds.”
Karen came in behind him in her green wool coat. Sunil stayed back by the door with his hands in his jacket.
“I don’t know what she’s told you,” Akash said to Madden, easy, like they were two guys at a hardware store. “She’s been under a lot of stress. She gets confused. My mother’s sixty-four. You think my mother did this?”
Madden didn’t say anything. He drank his coffee.
“Did you sign the form?” Akash said to me. “For the insurance. They won’t cover any of this unless it’s an accident. You know what one night in here costs? You want to put that on us?”
I didn’t say anything either.
“She doesn’t even remember it right,” Karen said. “She fell. She was carrying laundry.”
“Mom.”
“She was. And then she climbs out a window like a lunatic and goes crying to that woman next door, who has hated me for twenty years —”
“Mom, let me.”
Akash leaned down a little. His voice went quiet, the voice from the carpet.
“Sign it, and you come home, and we put this behind us. You don’t sign it, and I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t help you if you won’t let me help you.”
I took the printout off my lap and held it out to him.
He looked at it. He didn’t take it.
I turned it so the third page was on top.
He took it then. He read it standing there, and his face did nothing at all, and that was how I knew.
“This is ours,” he said. “This is for us. This is the family’s.”
“What is it?” Karen said.
“It’s nothing. It’s a loan. It’s for the house.”
“What loan on the house?” Karen came around the bed and took the page from him. She held it far from her face, the way she held the crossword. “Who is this, Pittsburgh? We don’t owe anybody. That house is paid off. Your father paid it off in two thousand twelve.”
“Mom, you signed it over to me. For the taxes. Remember? I explained it.”
“You said it was for the taxes.”
“It was for the taxes. And then I needed — the roof needed doing. And the truck. And I wasn’t going to ask Dad, I’m not going to ask my father for money at thirty-nine years old —”
“So you asked her,” Karen said. She looked at me. She looked back at him. “You put her name on my house.”
“It’s not your house, Mom.” He said it fast, and then he heard it.
Nobody said anything.
Sunil took his hands out of his jacket. There was a TV bolted high on the wall over the bed, off, and the remote was on the tray table next to the cordless phone. He picked up the remote and looked at it. Then he set it down again, face down.
“Officer,” Sunil said.
Madden looked at him.
“My wife hit her. With the pan from the stove. Twice.” He didn’t look at Karen. He was looking at his son. “And he held her face while she lay there. I was in the room. I turned up the television.”
“Dad.”
“I turned it up,” Sunil said again.
Karen made a sound I’d never heard out of her, and she put her hand on the bed rail to stand.
Akash turned to me. Not to his father, not to Madden. To me. Like I was the one who could still fix it.
“Jules. Tell him. Tell him you fell.”
Madden set his coffee on the windowsill and took a notebook out of his back pocket.
“Ma’am,” he said to me. “Do you want to make a statement?”
I had the other printout under my pillow and Eileen’s dead phone in my hand.
“Yes,” I said.
Eileen’s storm door
In March I moved into a one-bedroom over a dentist’s office on the east side, two miles from my mom’s.
The knee brace comes off in May. The ribs are fine, unless I laugh hard or sneeze. My mom drove me to every appointment and said I told you so exactly once, in the parking lot of the orthopedist, and then never again.
Karen took a plea. Sunil moved in with his brother in Meadville. Akash is still in the house, alone, and the loan is still in both our names, and until the lawyer gets it untangled I send four hundred and twelve dollars a month to a lender in Pittsburgh for a house I’ll never sleep in again.
That’s the price of nine yellow arrows. I write it on a check myself, in my own pen, from an account with only my name on it.
I kept every receipt from the first month. Then one day I bought a pack of gum at the counter where I work and I dropped the receipt in the trash, and Carlos saw me do it and didn’t say anything, and that was the end of that.
The Saturday before my birthday I drove back out past Erie.
I didn’t look at the house. I parked on Eileen’s side of the street and carried a pie up her steps. Cherry. Full sugar, the whole cup.
The steps were easy. There were only four of them.
I stood at the top and knocked on the glass of her storm door, up high, where a person standing would knock.
She opened it in the pom-pom slippers.
“Well,” Eileen said. “Look at you up here.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who needs to hear that somebody would open the door.
For more stories about family betrayals and the people who refuse to be pushed aside, read “My Ex Said I Had No Business at His Son’s Spelling Bee”, “She Signed His Complaint Against Me, and I’ve Worked That Desk Fourteen Years”, and “I Sat at Nana Janis’s Table Every Sunday for Eleven Years”.
