Page 13 of A Mother’s Love

As usual, Halley’s estimate of her work was accurate.

She had finished the first draft of her new book just before Thanksgiving, and she completed the second draft, making changes and corrections, at two in the morning on the same day that Seth, Valerie, and Olivia flew to St. Bart’s to meet the boat.

She was nervous for them, since the last leg of the trip was on a tiny plane and there had been mishaps before.

She didn’t let herself think about that as she finished the second draft of the book, which filled her mind, as it always did, to the exclusion of all else.

She had a vague thought in the back of her mind that if she was having a great time, she might stay longer, since the house was available.

She was keeping it open-ended. She had nothing to rush back for, since the girls were flying straight back to L.A.

and not stopping in New York. The trip to Paris, and finishing the book, were keeping her from thinking too much about being alone on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which hadn’t happened in twenty-seven years, since the twins were born.

Finishing a draft of a book was always like returning from a trip.

She let mail pile up when she was working, checked her messages once a day when she finished writing, and answered only those that were urgent and couldn’t wait.

She cleared her desk before she started a book, and tried to focus on nothing but writing while it was in progress.

As soon as she finished a draft, she caught up on everything, as though returning from another world.

She did that the night she finished, before she went to bed.

Real time didn’t matter to her when she was writing.

She would keep at it until she found the right time and place to take a break for a few hours to get some sleep.

Sometimes she didn’t stop until the sun came up, or didn’t go to bed at all if she was too wide-awake to sleep in broad daylight.

And sometimes, she worked straight through for another day, and then crashed for a longer stretch.

Her nights, while she was working, were more like naps.

And when the book was finished, in whichever draft, first, second, or final, she caught up on everything, including sleep, and sometimes slept for ten or eleven hours after she wrote the last page.

The night she finished, she checked her messages and mail.

There was nothing pressing, invitations to a few Christmas parties she hadn’t gone to and didn’t care if she missed, Christmas cards from old friends or people she barely remembered, or had never known well.

There was a message from her publisher with text proof schedules, and marketing plans for her next book, which was due out before the one she was working on.

She had finished that one almost a year ago.

She kept up a steady pace with her writing.

The one she was working on now was due out next fall.

She dealt with it all in a few hours and went to bed late, hoping the twins and Seth had arrived safely at the boat.

She had a text the next morning from Olivia, assuring her they had, and Halley was relieved.

Olivia had included a photo of the yacht, taken from the dock.

It looked incredible. They promised to call her soon and she knew they would.

She had a lot to do that day. It was four days before Christmas, and she hadn’t bothered to order a Christmas tree for the first time, since the girls wouldn’t be there to see it, and she would only have it for five days before she left.

It didn’t seem worth it. She had sent her gifts for them to L.A.

before they left, and they were taking them to the boat with them.

She spent several hours picking up things she needed for her trip, all practical and nothing related to Christmas.

The holiday had become a nonevent for her this year, without her girls.

She walked past a florist shop that afternoon, stopped to look at the displays in the window, and bought a small tabletop Christmas tree that would look pretty in her living room, and that she could save until next year, since it was artificial, but looked real.

It was small and elegant with silver and gold decorations and sparkling lights, and she put it in her living room when she got home.

She had to hurry to dress after that. She hadn’t been sure she would make it that night, but since she’d finished the book, she wanted to go.

It was the one Christmas party that was important to her, at the shelter for abused women and children where she volunteered.

She knew many of them well. She tried to get there once or twice a month.

It was run along the same lines as Alcoholics Anonymous, with total anonymity.

None of the women she spoke to knew her last name, and she didn’t know theirs.

They were women who had had the same violent experiences, currently or in their youth.

Many of them had been abused as children, and had partnered with men of the only kind they knew.

Their men were as violent as their fathers had been, and it had taken every ounce of courage they had to leave them.

It had been hard for Halley to accept at first, but many of them went back, even several times, until they were finally able to extricate themselves for good.

Some, even many, never did. Some of the women she had met repeatedly had been killed.

The statistics were horrifying as to how many violent, abusive men made good on their threats and eventually murdered their partners.

It was a fact Halley had to accept, volunteering with them.

She never gave up when she met women returning to the shelter for the seventh or eighth time.

The hope was always that this would be the last time they’d gone back, and they wouldn’t be pulled back in again.

The uninitiated who had never experienced abuse had the uninformed view that the women must like it, or feel they deserved it, when in fact they went back wanting to prove to their abusers that they were good people, after countless accusations of how “bad” they were, or they returned to their partners naively willing to believe empty promises that things would improve, which they never did.

In many cases, the more violent the men, the more convincing their remorse afterward, until they did it again.

It was only a question of when the women would finally give up and have the courage to leave.

It took some longer than others to get there.

What usually broke the chain of abuse was when their children were abused, and they fled with their kids to protect them.

Halley had never experienced the violent physical abuse of men, only subtler forms of sexual abuse, perpetrated on a child with no one to protect her, but there were others like her, many of them children and teenagers who had been violently abused by their mothers, which was sometimes hard to believe.

Halley knew it well, and she spent most of her time with them.

There was always the disbelief to get through that the person they trusted most and who should have protected them was the most dangerous person in their life, as her mother had been for her.

Many of their mothers were already in jail for their crimes or had abandoned them, as Halley’s mother had at a much higher social level, which should have made it more incredible but didn’t to Halley.

The children she met with usually wound up in foster care.

The system was far more aware of abusive mothers than they had been in her day.

They had developed immeasurably since those days, and emergency room medical personnel and police were trained to spot the victims, who almost never denounced their abusers, and protected them.

The children were far more loyal than their parents and also justifiably afraid of reprisals.

Sabine had committed her abuse entirely below the radar, and benefited from the ignorance of the day, and the dignity of her husband’s distinguished name.

Halley put on jeans, red sneakers, a festive red sweater, and a warm down coat, and took a subway to Charles Barton House, the shelter on the West Side, where she was a familiar sight and they knew her well.

The woman who ran it knew who she was, but no one else did, and no one had recognized her in the ten years she’d been volunteering there.

The twins were in high school when she started volunteering at the facility, and she never mentioned it to them.

They thought it was her “night out with the girls,” a small circle of her women friends.

She often came home with a heavy heart, and was quiet the next morning at breakfast, but they were busy with their own teenage lives and never questioned it.

It was an isolated part of her life she chose not to share.

She had told Robert about it, and he respected her desire for privacy and only discussed it with her when she brought it up, if she was particularly troubled by a child she’d seen, or an outcome, if one of the shelter’s adult clients was killed, or even worse, a child.

They had lost several in the past ten years, killed by either one of their parents, or a boyfriend, or someone in their severely damaged lives.