Free Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen Page A

familiar.
    “Is there anybody who lives in Florida who’s really from Florida?” I said to Cindy as we sipped at decaf.
    “Well, me, actually,” she said apologetically, as though it was a character defect.
    Secrecy, Patty Bancroft had told us at the hospital, is the secret of her success. I know all about keeping secrets. There is no one in the world who knows the topography of my injuries, who knows all the secrets of my body. There is no one in the world who knows that my husband twisted my wrists, pushed me down the stairs, broke my collarbone, and, finally, my nose. Not my mother, who seemed to lose interest in me after I married, as though I was her responsibility only until I could be handed on to someone else. Not my sister, who saw me only when I could arrange it, which is to say when I could lift a sandwich without wincing. Not my friend Winnie, although she had treated more women like me than either of us could count. Only Bobby knows it all, but he always said I exaggerated. Mountain out of a molehill. That’s one of his favorite expressions.
    My son knows some of it, but he knows it in his own peculiar way, in some closed-up closed-down corner of his mind. I’mafraid over the years he’s developed a strange kind of color blindness. At some point he stopped being able to see black and blue.
    Secrecy, secrecy. As I listen to the sound of her voice on the phone I can picture Patty Bancroft adjusting the triple strand of pearls she wears on TV, wore that day at the hospital, that hide the lines around her neck and complement her pretty pink-and-white skin. Winnie had invited her to South Bay in February to talk to the senior staff. We’d had three women die in our emergency room in a single year. One had fallen out of a window when her boyfriend came at her with a box cutter, another had had a bottle broken over her head by her husband, and a third had been shot with a Saturday night special by a man she’d divorced the year before. All three women had had restraining orders against the men who finally killed them, legal papers saying that the men had to keep away. Maybe they were the last three women in New York to know what all emergency-room nurses know, and cops’ wives know, too: that restraining orders are a joke, made, as they say, to be broken. One of the tabloids did a big story about the three women, about the hospital and what it had done for them, and what it had failed to do.
    “Here’s a story about the hospital,” Bobby had said, shoveling in his eggs before going out on an undercover narcotics assignment. He’d sipped at his coffee, glanced up and seen the look on my face, thrown the paper down and then his fork, too, so that it skipped across the surface of the china and landed tines down on the tablecloth. “You take yourself too fucking seriously, Frannie,” he’d said, putting on the army camouflage jacket he wore when he was supposed to be a druggie. “You didn’t used to be like that.”
    God, how many conversations I had with Bobby Benedetto insidemy own head, so many words bouncing around, fighting, dying to get out and instead dying on the vine like one of the squash he planted in our little backyard after the black bugs got to them. I didn’t used to be like that because you didn’t used to hit me quite so hard, Bob, I’d say silently. I didn’t used to be like that because I didn’t have to call in sick or stay away from my own sister, with her sharp eyes and sharp mind. Or see my son look at a welt on my arm, a welt like the shadow of a hand, and see the question form in his mind and watch as he shoved it back into the closet where he keeps his fear of his father and his fears for his mother. And for himself.
    Talking to myself, always talking to myself. I didn’t used to be like that when I was younger, Bob, twenty and twenty-one and full of dreams and plans and love, because the good times overwhelmed the bad and your hands were gentle more often than they pushed