But as you yourself already know, our lives were destined to take a much different route.

  CHAPTER 30

  Maybe I shouldn’t say this to you, but I usually lose interest about ten minutes into a sermon. Sometimes I sit and read the Bible, but there aren’t any close enough. I’d have to get up and walk back to the entrance where a few extra copies lie. So instead I study the backs of all the heads in front of me. The only one I don’t know personally is the pastor’s wife, but of course Mom’s told me enough gossip about her I could probably write several chapters of her biography.

  There’s Joy with her squirming son. Her daughters must be downstairs in the nursery. I can’t see any of her face from here, but her husband looks stern. At least he does in profile. He lays his hand on the boy’s knee, and that gets him to sit still for a full ten seconds.

  And now, as the pastor’s back to King David’s men, I find my mind wandering to a text message I received earlier from Mel. I guess she realized she’s got work first thing tomorrow morning and no daycare or baby-sitter lined up. She didn’t go so far as to apologize. It was just a short, Hey, let me know if you’re free this week to watch the kids. I haven’t responded yet. I’m not sure I will. I mean, I know she could use the help, but if she’s going to keep letting Kai into her life and putting her children in danger, I can’t see how that’s a healthy position for either of us to be in. I feel guilty leaving the kids in such a volatile situation, but I really think she’s going to have to find someone else.

  You know, back when I was a teenager and Orchard Grove was still reeling from that murder-suicide, I held certain assumptions about abusive marriages. I wouldn’t look at a woman like Mel and peg her as an easy victim, but Kai is the second psychotic boyfriend she’s had to take up a restraining order against. But you see the way she takes care of her kids or the way she can handle herself with a busload full of noisy children, and she comes across as a sharp, intelligent woman. Which she is.

  Until she gets around her ex.

  And that’s another thing about battered wives. I thought they all cowered, but Mel and several of the other women I met during my time at Sacred Meadows have tempers as feisty as the men they’re hiding from. It’s just that they don’t have the muscle power or the size factor in their favor and so they end up black and blue.

  Of course, men can end up in abusive relationships too. Like Reginald, the friend I first met when I was still employed at the library, the one who came in to visit every week. Reginald’s ex-wife used to bind him to a chair and beat him. She was quite creative in her choice of tools as well. Purse straps, work boots, belts. And just to be clear, it wasn’t the kind of beating you’d do wearing spiked heels and leather lingerie. He finally left after she knocked him out with a cast-iron skillet. There was no permanent damage, but he would jokingly blame that incident to explain why he couldn’t keep figures straight in his head when he opened a bookstore of his own.

  Reginald’s old-school through and through. As rocky as that marriage was, his ex bore him seven or eight children before they split up. And he’s not some tiny little thing, either. The way he put it was he’d been taught to never hit a woman, so who knows how many years the brutality went on behind closed doors before he finally called it quits? And you know what else? He had to send that woman alimony payments all the way until her dying day. Opening Orchard Grove’s first antique bookstore was his present to himself when he learned he didn’t have to write that old biddy any more checks.

  I feel bad that I don’t think about Reginald as much as he deserves. He’s the only one who knows all the details about what happened between Chris and me, which is maybe why I avoid him now. With so many grandchildren and such a large house with plenty of room to spare, a man like that should have never spent a solitary day in his life.

  Poor Reginald.

  The preacher must be close to wrapping up by now, and before I grab lunch, I’m going to text Mel and let her know I can’t watch the kids. Not this week. Maybe if she’s serious, we can have a sit-down and set some firm boundaries about her ex being around, but even now I know exactly how it will go. She’ll agree to whatever terms I lay out, and then in a week or a month or whenever it is that Kai rolls around again, begging her to take him back, promising her that he’s a better person, she’s going to buckle under that pressure and open wide the door to let him into her and her children’s lives again.

  I can’t stick around and watch that happen. If I thought I could do any good, I might try to stay for the kids’ sakes, but Mel’s going to do what Mel’s going to do no matter what I say. Maybe you think I’ve turned cynical.

  I think it just means that I’ve learned a thing or two about human nature.

  CHAPTER 31

  Now I’m thinking about what I’ve got to do this afternoon. I told you my mind wanders during sermons. If that makes me a bad Christian, I’ll just have to accept it because I doubt there’s anything I can do to change myself. Anyway, Justin’s expecting me to call sometime after church. It’s hard for me to remember exactly when we went from talking once a month to once a week. And now it’s nearly every day. How did that happen?

  After my marriage to Chris, it’s taken a friendship with someone as steady and stable as Justin to force me to realize how dysfunctional I allowed things to get. Or maybe that’s the victim in me talking still. What I should say is how dysfunctional our marriage grew due to my husband’s rage.

  But I’m resolved to remember the good times as well as the bad. It’s the least I can do to ward off bitterness. I started attending church when I was two weeks old. I can’t tell you how many sermons I’ve heard on the topic of forgiveness. What you preachers never seem to mention is that it’s a cyclical process, something you do over and over again, each time carrying you to deeper crevices in your soul that you never knew existed. You might forgive someone once and think you’ve done your Christian duty only to find that in a month, maybe two, you’re right back where you were, struggling with anger or resentment, wondering how someone could treat you so deplorably.

  So you forgive him again until eventually you realize this is a cycle you might continue on until the day you die. The fact that you have to keep on forgiving doesn’t mean you didn’t do it well enough the first time. I don’t think it’s a symptom of the state of your own soul as much as it’s an indication of how deeply you were wounded in the first place.

  My journey to accomplish the intentional act of forgiveness began when Chris and I were still married, and it persists to this day. It’s hard because I feel like I’m grieving on two different fronts. I’m grieving the loss of my marriage, and I’m grieving that seventeen-year-old boy, Orchard Grove High School’s homecoming king, with his boyish dimples and vibrant eyes. It’s still so hard for me to stop blaming myself. If I had been a better wife, if I had prayed more or learned how to fast, if I had done more to make my husband happy, would our story have ended differently?

  Would we still be living out that happily ever after we imagined for ourselves at our Victorian wedding?

  It’s too late now. Chris and I are beyond the point of reconciliation, and I don’t say that because I’m a drama queen or because my heart’s hardened against him.

  I say that because it’s the simple truth.

  Inasmuch as it depends on you, Paul writes, live at peace with everyone. You know, I used to think that reconciliation was a necessary proof of forgiveness, but I know better now. Inasmuch as it depends on you ...

  I’m not saying I was the perfect wife. I’m not saying that my depression or my grieving over Daddy or my inability to maintain a spotless home didn’t contribute to the problems in our marriage. But I’ve made myself a promise. Maybe I’m not coming at it with the godliest of attitudes, but I am where I am, and that’s all you can expect from me. And I refuse to apologize — to Chris, to myself, even to God — for my shortcomings unless they are actual sins.

  So maybe it was my fault that I never learned how to scrub the rust stains out of a toilet bowl, but God doesn’t judge me for the fact that my husband was so disgusted by my deplorable attempts that he yanked the seat off its hinges and smashed it into the bathroom mirror.

  Maybe my prudish upbringing kept me uncomfortable with some of the things my husband wanted to try in the bedroom. Maybe another woman who didn’t feel shameful or degraded could have better fulfilled my husband’s voracious sexual appetite, but my conscience is clean. The fact that I never fully met Chris’s expectations might be the result of inexperience or immaturity but certainly not sinfulness on my part.

  I don’t know how to describe to you how vigorously I had to fight through two decades of conditioning to come to this relatively simple understanding. The strictest versions of evangelicalism, the kind epitomized by the upstanding folks at Orchard Grove, certainly didn’t speed me on my journey, either.

  At one point, I was sure that all our woes stemmed from the fact that I’d never learned how to be a proper housewife. I hate to say it, but I was somewhat coddled growing up. Daddy wanted to see me play, and Mom was too much of a perfectionist to leave any of the chores up to me. So when things got really bad between Chris and me, I hopped over to the Christian bookstore and purchased at least a dozen titles on how to be a respectable Christian homemaker.

  You know what I learned?

  I learned that if you set your alarm an hour earlier than normal, you can get such a head start on your daily duties that by the time your husband comes home from work, he can find not only a clean and tidy home, but a clean and tidy wife who’s ready for anything. This is the advice they gave the girl who rejoiced on days when she only had to lay down for three naps instead of four during the darkest times of mourning her father’s death.

  Know what else these eager-beaver authors claimed? That if your husband is struggling sexually, if his list of faults includes lust in any way, shape, or form, it’s because you aren’t yielding to him enough in the bedroom. And the fact that your husband’s degrading treatment makes you feel as exploited as a street-walker? That must be the result of your own frigid sexuality, and what you really need to do is loosen up.

  Of course, if you read enough books, you’ll find nuggets of truth in spite of obvious flaws. One of the titles was quite helpful. The author’s thesis was that God designed marriage to make you holy, not necessarily to make you happy. I think it helps that he was speaking to husbands as well as wives, and he even had a chapter addressed to victims of abuse.

  Your God-ordained commitment to your spouse ends when your safety or your children’s safety is put in danger. He went on to list several case studies of women who fled dangerous marriages. (As an interesting aside, I’ve never yet found a Christian book that talks specifically to battered husbands like my friend Reginald.)

  Chris and I had been married about a year by then, so this would be after the toilet seat in the mirror incident. After he refused to give me the car keys for two weeks as punishment for the time I forgot to tell him the gas tank was less than half full and I lost my part-time job at the library as a result.

  The striking thing is that when I read that author who put his conservative Christian reputation on the line by urging wives to escape from abusive marriages, I never once thought he might be talking to me.

  Chris had his anger issues. My enabling tendencies hadn’t clouded my reasoning so much that I could deny something as simple as that. But he never once hit me. He never caused me any physical harm, at least never out of anger.

  Was I an abused wife? An outsider might think they have a quick and easy answer, but I’m reluctant to take on that label. And I don’t think it’s just because of some sort of latent victim mentality, at least not all of it.

  If what I went through with Chris is actual, bona fide spousal abuse, doesn’t that diminish the experiences of other women? What does it mean for people like Mel, women who wind up in the ER with broken ribs, who have pictures on their phones documenting the finger-shaped bruises around their necks? If my abuse (if you can call it that) compares to their abuse, then the agony they went through feels somehow cheapened. Diminished.

  Once you open the word abuse to mean anything that might cause physical or emotional discomfort, where do you draw the line? I don’t know a single person whose spouse hasn’t yelled at them at a given point. Hasn’t called them a name they later regretted or hurt their feelings in some way. Does the Christian woman who happens to be married to a grouch get carte blanche to leave him because his crabbiness is arguably damaging her psyche?

  It’s a slippery slope once you take any way one spouse might hurt another and label it as abuse. Is any woman in my situation justified to leave her husband? Jesus himself said that Moses allowed for divorce because people’s hearts were hardened. I’ve never yet met a pastor brave enough to tackle that passage from the pulpit, but my amateur attempts at biblical interpretation lead me to conclude that divorce is a necessary institution to give abused spouses a way to escape.

  But what qualifies as abuse and what doesn’t? You’d imagine it would be fairly straightforward until you start thinking through the nuances.

  I know there’s a line. During my entire marriage, I told myself that if Chris ever hit me, I’d not only be justified but I’d be wise to leave him. Pack my bags and get the heck out. But even then, it’s not like my plan involved hiring an attorney and signing divorce papers that same day. More like temporary separation, enough so that he would realize I was serious about him changing, that if he didn’t get a better hold of his rage, I would eventually be gone for good.

  The intriguing thing is that most of the battered women I know have similar lines. For Mel, it was if he ever hurt one of the kids. She was perfectly content explaining away strangle marks on her throat, beer bottle cuts on her scalp. But if Kai ever hurt the children, that’s when she would go. Which is how we ended up at the same shelter. Her and Kai’s sagacious parenting philosophy was to never fight in earnest until the children were asleep. What neither of them realized was that as Kai was kicking her in the kidneys while she crouched in a ball under the table, the commotion woke up their son. Bowman charged at his father with nothing more than a pillow in his little grubby hands, a pillow wet with tears. All Kai did was push him aside, but Bowman tripped and hit his head on the dining room table. Didn’t even bleed, but that had been the line Mel was waiting for him to cross. She sent Bowman back to bed, soothed Kai’s raging nerves, and accepted his profuse and flowery apologies. Once he fell into his drunken slumber, she and the kids sneaked out, ran to the nearest gas station, and called a cab to take them to the shelter.

  Even now, I’m far more likely to note the differences between me and Mel than the similarities. In my case, Chris wasn’t a drinker. When we went out for dinner, I was the one to order wine while he was content with Diet Coke. I never had to sneak past him. Even when he took the car keys from me to keep me from going to work, I figured that was his right as head of the household. He’d never really wanted me to get the job at the library anyway, and if I had submitted to his will more readily from the beginning, he wouldn’t have been forced to put me in that awkward predicament.

  Those are the excuses I made, the reasons I stayed with him as long as I did. And it’s not like you helped. You never once told me that Chris’s problems were Chris’s problems, not mine. Even when I sat in your office for counseling, you told me that it was my responsibility to submit to my husband, to respect his God-given authority, to shut up and pray and let the Holy Spirit work on his anger issues.

  I heard it from you so many times that eventually I grew to believe I was the one in the wrong. I was the bitter wife who stubbornly refused to accept her husband’s impressive apologies. Because if Chris knew how to do anything, it was apologize. You should have seen the mess of himself he made after he broke the bathroom mirror. Swept me up in his arms. Cuddled me for half an hour, crying into my shoulder, begging me to forgive him.

  That’s the side of him you saw. The repentant side. The oh, please forgive me because I’m trying so hard but I’m still a slave to my sin side. Did you ever stop and wonder what it was like for me? I’m not asking rhetorically either. I really want to know. Did you ever say to yourself, Wow, I guess all this must be really hard to put up with. Maybe she’s the one who needs all the prayer and fasting, not Chris.

  Did that come into your head? Because I lost track of how many times you belittled me for not being more forgiving. True love always trusts, always perseveres. You told me that so many times I could recite the entire chapter in my sleep. But where’s the line drawn? Because that line exists. I know it does. But how far does it have to go before you look me in the eye and tell me enough is enough? Before you give me the freedom to love my husband from a distance. A good, safe distance.

  Before you give me the freedom to walk away without acting like I’m the one transgressing God’s commands.

  Maybe if you’d recognized that line once we passed it, I wouldn’t be sitting here with my chest aching over the daughter I’ve lost. I wouldn’t be sitting here surrounded by missionary league women who all judge me, all condemn me. They only know me as that little Chinese girl who married her high-school sweetheart and then got pregnant with another man’s child.

  CHAPTER 32

  And here comes the closing prayer. At least the sermon didn’t run overtime. That’s one thing pastors learn within their first week or two of ministry at Orchard Grove. You don’t make the old retirees sit on the patently painful pews for longer than thirty minutes max. Greg’s preaching lasted about twenty-eight minutes, and I could see him up there sweating a little as he raced through his last two bullet points.

  I’m just glad it’s over. I’ve got to get home. Got to clean up after my canned ravioli from last night. Got to make sure I don’t leave Mom’s house a dust speck dirtier than it was when she left for my brother’s. I don’t have time for Pastor Greg’s long, drawn-out closing prayer.