Safe with Me: A Novel

The morning of Maddie’s first day at Eastside Prep, Olivia lies in bed, watching her husband get ready for work. At four a.m., it’s not light out yet, though she can hear a few early-rising birds chirping in the cherry trees outside their bedroom window. James stands in front of the mirror that hangs over the long, low mahogany dresser, carefully looping his tie into a Windsor knot.

“You look handsome,” she says sleepily. Whatever their problems, the attraction she feels for her husband rarely falters.

“Well, thank you,” James answers, turning to look at her with one corner of his mouth curled upward. “Want me to come back to bed?”

She smiles. “I think that’s a fabulous idea.” She pauses to stretch and adjust her pillow. “As long as you do all the work.”

James laughs as he finishes with his tie, then takes a couple of steps over to sit down on the edge of their bed. The weight of him rolls her toward him. He places his hand on her hip and runs it down her thigh. “Another time, okay? I need to get to the office.”

“Isn’t there any way you can work from home for a little while so you can drop Maddie off with me?” Olivia asks, keeping her voice low and neutral. It makes sense to her that the least he could do is drive her to school, since he was the one insisting that Maddie attend his alma mater.

His hand freezes on her leg and a shadowy tension falls in a curtain across his face. He doesn’t even have to speak. She knows his answer. She knows that tension is only a precursor to what could come next—a pebble next to the boulder of one of his rages—so she shuts her mouth and pulls the covers up to her chin. He finishes dressing and she pretends to be asleep when he kisses her good-bye.

Olivia tries to get back to sleep, but her thoughts spin too quickly, remembering the first time she really understood where that shadow on her husband’s face could lead. She was seven months pregnant, it was a Tuesday night, and he’d come home late from a long day at the office, an occurrence that was more common than not. Olivia could almost see the stress rising off his body in wavy little lines, like steam from warm, wet pavement, and she wondered if a deal had gone wrong or if one of his VPs was giving him a hard time. She greeted him as she always did, at the front door with a martini and a kiss, but after the first sip he took of his drink, he stared at her like she’d done something wrong and the shadow appeared.

“What? Doesn’t it taste okay?” she asked him.

“It tastes like shit.” His green eyes were glassy, as though he might have already been drinking. James didn’t drink often, but when he did, something about him shifted.

“What?” Olivia said, scrunching her eyebrows together over the bridge of her nose. She’d reapplied her makeup two times since six o’clock, waiting for him. “You’re gorgeous no matter what,” he’d said the few times she’d happened to go bare-faced, “but it makes me feel like you love me more when you make a little extra effort to look good.”

Her initial, but silent, reaction was that he should love her no matter how she looked. In the end, however, she decided he was right. The only things she had to do during the day were clean the house, shop, and occasionally have lunch with her few girlfriends. Just because they were married didn’t mean she could let herself go. She needed to stay the same woman he fell in love with in Florida, when she would spend at least an hour getting ready for one of their dates. Marriages ended because one or both of the people stopped doing the things that attracted their spouses to them in the first place, so makeup was the least she could do for the man who gave her so much.

Now, James dropped his briefcase to the marble floor with a loud thunk and loosened his tie. “I said, it tastes like shit.” He took another sip, then promptly spat it back into the glass.

Olivia flushed and took it from him. “I’m sorry. Let me make you another one. Maybe I used too much vermouth.” She started to turn away, but James grabbed her arm, causing most of the vodka to splash onto the floor.

“I don’t want another drink.” He looked at her with half-closed eyes and ran the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip.

“James!” she said, managing to set the glass on the entryway table. She tried to wriggle away from his grasp. “Please. You’re hurting me.”

He pulled her in close and she could smell the alcohol on his breath. He kissed her then, hard, slipping his tongue into her mouth. “God, you’re so beautiful,” he murmured against her lips. He reached down and caressed her swollen belly. “How’s our baby girl tonight?” James had been thrilled when they found out she was pregnant, making sure the cook stocked the house with food that would benefit the baby, then pulling some serious strings to get Olivia in to see the best gynecologist in the city, who at the time had a waiting list of a year. The only thing he didn’t like about her pregnancy was her weight gain, though she exercised every day and denied every ice cream craving she could to ensure she didn’t put on too much.

Olivia laid her hands flat against his chest and pushed him away. “She’s good,” she said, trying to keep her breath even. She’d grown accustomed to his flares of temper, which tended to blow in quickly and then evaporate, but when he drank, his tongue grew sharp and more dangerous. She knew the best thing to do was feed him and get him to bed. Everything would be better in the morning. “Dinner’s on the table,” she said, taking him by the hand and leading him toward the dining room. “Roast chicken and broccoli.” A few months after their wedding, Olivia had convinced him to let go of their chef, reasoning that since he didn’t want her to get a job, she was more than capable of learning to cook for her husband. It had actually turned into a task she enjoyed.

They sat down together, though she had already eaten. James hunched his shoulders over his plate, forearms resting on the edge of the table as he ate.

“I had lunch with Sara Beth and Waverly today,” Olivia said, knowing that he liked to have a full inventory of how she spent her time. “We walked a few miles on the Burke-Gilman Trail and then had a salad at the Bellevue Club.” James grunted in approval; Sara Beth and Waverly were the wives of two of James’s friends. He’d introduced Olivia to them the first week she lived in Seattle, when the three couples went out to dinner to celebrate their new marriage at Seastar, one of John Howie’s premier restaurants.

“Now those two are the kind of wives a man can be proud of,” he said when they got home that night. From then on, Olivia took note of the women’s sleek blond hair, toned bodies, and tanned skin; she watched the way they allowed their husbands to lead the conversations, throwing in the occasional witty, but always appropriate, comment. She saw how they made looking good for their husbands a full-time job. They gave her the name of the stylist who gave them their matching highlights, took her shopping, and helped her pick out more items for her wardrobe that accented her figure but didn’t flaunt it. They were younger than their husbands, too, something that made Olivia feel like she could open up to them the way she did with the couple of girlfriends she’d left behind in Tampa.

“Don’t you want to work?” Olivia asked them one afternoon over a late lunch. Though she enjoyed the fact that she no longer had to worry about pinching together enough pennies to support herself or her mother, Olivia did miss the complexities of her legal cases. She missed plunging into research, smothered by facts in the library, taking notes, writing reports for the lawyers in her firm. If she’d had the money when she was single, she might have gone to law school herself, but needing to take care of her mother had erased that particular dream. After high school, she cocktailed nights to put herself through the paralegal program at a community college, then found a job as quickly as she could. And then, she met James.

“It’s a full-time job to look this good for our husbands, sugar,” Waverly responded, laughing. Sara Beth agreed, and Olivia smiled and went along with what they said when really, she didn’t believe it. In fact, it was a bit appalling to her that these women thought so little of themselves. Olivia knew James loved her for her, not just for the way she looked. She knew this because he had cried on her chest one night in Florida, after they made love for the first time. He told her that his own mother had never loved him, that his father constantly told James he was a worthless son. “He beat us,” James revealed. “Me, mostly. I’d get between him and my mother and just . . . take it.”

“Oh, honey,” Olivia said. Her heart ached hearing how James had been treated, and she understood more than ever why a stable, happy relationship was so important to him. “I’m so sorry.”

“I never thought someone like you would love me,” he said, shuddering as he pressed his face into her neck. “I never thought I deserved anything this good.”

So when James lost his temper or threw out a painful verbal jab, she remembered that moment. She remembered his tears, how his face was like a little boy’s, scared of what she’d think once she knew the most vulnerable parts of him. She remembered that moment after he told her the drink she’d made him tasted like shit. And she forgave him one more time.

“We were talking about the baby shower,” she said, thinking that the meal had improved his mood. He seemed much calmer than when he’d first walked in the door, so she figured it was safe to bring this subject up. “And they were wondering if my mother is going to come.” She gave him her most charming smile. “I wasn’t sure what to tell them.”

James looked up from his plate, chewing a mouthful of chicken. “You tell them you need to ask your husband if he’ll pay for your mother’s flight.”

Olivia bowed her head a bit, averting her face from his gaze. There was a strange light in his eyes—she wasn’t sure what it meant. “Of course. If it’s too much trouble—”

“You think I’d let you tell your friends that I wouldn’t pay for your own mother to come to your baby shower? What kind of man do you think I am?”

Olivia took what she hoped was an inaudible, measured breath. She knew what he needed to hear. “I think you’re wonderful. The most generous man a woman could ask for.” She looked up, then reached over and grabbed his hand. “I love you so much, James. I know how hard you work for us . . . how hard you work for our baby girl. I am the luckiest woman in the world.”

His expression softened, and minutes later they were upstairs in their bedroom. He disrobed her carefully, running the tips of his fingers over her skin, making her feel like every nerve was a lit sparkler. He moved her to the bed, took off his own clothes, and then joined her, taking care of her before he moved behind her—the only position that was comfortable for her this late in the pregnancy. Olivia moaned the way she knew he liked her to, the way that helped him finish, and she waited and waited for the end to come. After twenty minutes, when it still hadn’t, she wondered if he really had had too much to drink at the office.

“It’s okay, baby,” she whispered, “if you can’t.” She thought she was giving him an out. She thought she was being generous.

But then James stopped moving, grabbed her by the waist, and wrenched her over onto her back. A sharp, twisting pain shot through her belly. She cried out, but before she could speak, he slapped her once, hard, across the face. Olivia closed her eyes and saw bright splotches of stars. She tried to keep from crying.

James dropped to her side and put his mouth up against her ear. “You don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.” He bit her earlobe until she yelped again. “Do you understand me?”

Olivia nodded, her chin trembling as she fought the tears in the back of her throat. James just hit me. He hit me, he hit me. She repeated the words over and over in her mind, until eventually, they held no meaning. She rolled away from him and pulled the covers up over her naked body. She felt his eyes boring into her back, but she couldn’t look at him. She was too afraid of what she’d see.

The next morning, after he’d slept in the guest bedroom, he brought her breakfast in bed. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said, placing the tray carefully over her lap. He’d made her scrambled egg whites with feta cheese and tomatoes—her favorite. “I squeezed you some orange juice, too,” he continued, holding up the small glass before reaching out to caress her belly. “Can’t give this sweet girl too many vitamins, right?” He smiled at her, the same wide, charismatic grin he’d given her the first day they met.

Olivia stared back, searching his face for some evidence of remorse for what he’d done. Some proof that she hadn’t just imagined that moment in the dark. “Can you bring me a mirror, please?” she asked him.

He frowned. “What for?”

“I must look a mess,” she said, reaching up to flatten her hair. “I just need to put on a little makeup.” She smiled, and he brought her the lovely antique silver hand mirror he’d bought for her birthday. She took a deep breath, readying herself for a bruise on her face, some mark that would confirm that she hadn’t been dreaming, but there was nothing. Her cheeks were rosy from sleep, and though her eyes were a little puffy from crying, no one, not even she, would have believed that James had slapped her.

He left for work soon after, and later that day, two dozen long-stemmed yellow roses arrived at the house, followed by an email confirming that a flight had been booked for her mother to come for the shower. In the end, though, her mother was too ill to travel, afraid her aching hip joints wouldn’t be able to withstand a six-hour flight. “We’ll take the baby to see her once it’s born,” James promised Olivia that night. “She needs to see her grandchild.” He was drunk, Olivia told herself. He didn’t realize what he was doing. Just this once, she could let it go.

This morning, after he left her alone to take their daughter to her first day of school, Olivia knew she had to let it go again. It had become an art on some level, navigating her husband’s moods, reading his expressions and bodily tics. Much like a poker player, Olivia memorized James’s “tells,” the twitch beneath his left eye, the strange light in his eyes, the shadow across his face—minute signs that gave his impending reactions away. She knows that to some extent, Maddie has learned to read her father, too, but she can push him farther than Olivia can. Though he sometimes raises his voice at his daughter, though his eyes flash and his fists curl up in frustration, he never hits her. At least, he hasn’t yet. Olivia believes that if James ever does hurt Maddie—even if he threatens to hurt her—that will be the catalyst for her to finally leave. Until then, she knows if she does, James will take Maddie away from her. It’s not what he’s said that makes her know this—it’s who he is. He wouldn’t let Olivia leave him without taking something from her, too.

Olivia knows little about family law, but she doesn’t doubt that James has the power, money, and connections to take custody of their daughter away, so she stays. She stays and stays and stays, enduring whatever she has to so she can take care of Maddie. So her daughter will be okay.

Her alarm goes off at six a.m. and Olivia silences it, then rises from the bed. She knows Maddie doesn’t understand why she doesn’t leave James. Maddie has never seen her father hit her mother—James is too smart to let that happen—but Olivia is certain that Maddie suspects. She is also fairly sure that Maddie thinks she’s a coward. But what her daughter can’t comprehend is how much strength it takes to survive a life like this. It’s a chess game—Olivia has to see ahead four, five, even ten moves to protect them both. It’s exhausting, really, to live like this, to second-guess her every breath.

But this morning, James isn’t home, so for the moment she can relax. She can fix Maddie breakfast, she can help her pick out what outfit she’s going to wear. She can focus on what’s important—she can take her daughter to her first day at a new school.