Free Up Island by Anne Rivers Siddons

repeated themselves. I stared at the phone in my hand in horror. Had I really done that to my children, perpetuated upon them the same vicious dance that I had been caught up in? If so, what else had I done, what other damage had I wrought, or let be wrought, without realizing?
    “Can’t you fight her?…”
    Caroline’s words stung my ears long after I had soothed her sobs with promises of a visit and hung up. Fight her?
    Fight who? How? I did not know how to fight anyone, certainly not this mythic creature, this arcane Sheri, without scruples or vulnerability, as intent as a young shark on the one thing she wanted: my husband. I had never known how to fight, only propitiate, only accommodate, only enable. It had always seemed enough. Poor Caroline. If anyone was going to march out and get her daddy back for her, it was not likely to be her mama.

    62 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    Much later that year my father said to me, “I never could understand why you didn’t get angry. If it had been me, or your mother, we’d have blown the bastard sky high. I thought for a while that you were protecting the kids, and maybe even us, but it seemed to me it went further than that. I admired you for it, but I wondered.”
    Anger? Dear God, of course there was anger. In those first awful days, when simply getting through one until it ended and became another was all I could seem to accomplish, I felt enough anger at Tee and Sheri Scroggins to blow the world apart. Oh, not always, by any means; there were long periods of pure, sheer pain that humbled and silenced me like a flailed ox, and there were intervals of crazy gaiety, of idiotic confidence that he would come back to us. These came mainly in the mornings when I woke, having forgotten for a few hours that catastrophe had struck, and when I first remembered it seemed simply so silly, so unimaginable, that I could only stretch and smile and think, “What have I been so worried about? Tee hasn’t left us. How stupid.”
    And sometimes I just drifted in the soft cocoon of seductive listlessness that lay always just outside my consciousness, like a fog bank waiting to roll in. It became increasingly simple to let it.
    But under it all lay the anger, red and bottomless, waiting to immolate the only world I had known. It licked at me mainly when the fact of Tee’s betrayal collided with someone I loved—Teddy, Caroline, my parents. Then, I clenched and knotted everything inside me so that I could tamp it down, beat it back, chill its heat. Then is when I let the white fog come. Because I was afraid, I was terrified: I could not blow UP ISLAND / 63
    up the only world I had, the world of The Family. What would I do without it, who would I be, how would I live, who or what would provide the context for The Family?
    “I guess I was afraid,” I said that cold night to my father, and knew of course that I had been mortally, endlessly afraid.
    Naked and alone in space, no world around me? Anything was better, anything more bearable.
    So in the best traditions of my grandmother Bell, I buried all of it deep. For me, that meant avoiding everyone but Teddy. I could not even see my parents after that first nighttime visit, could not run again to my father as I had then.
    Not yet. I gave Lilly the week off and canceled all my meetings and unplugged the phone. I stayed home and cleaned and polished silver and did endless laundry; I baked and mended and scrubbed patio furniture and cooked from-scratch meals for Teddy and me that neither of us ate. On one level it was infinitely comforting to get in touch with my house and my things again, handling them as I had not since the first days of our marriage, before we had help. I remembered how I had felt then, so full of joy that my blood prickled. Look at me, I did not think but might have, moving efficiently among the furniture of my life, what a good wife and mother I am.
    What a good woman. My price is above rubies. What could happen to me?
    On