No Safe House Read Free

Grace, God help us, was a teenager. In another six years, if Cyn and I hadn’t killed ourselves by then, we’d see Grace mature into a sensible young woman.
    But it was hard to believe that day would ever come.
    Like that night when Grace was thirteen and hanging out at the Post Mall with her friends at the same time Cynthia happened to be there looking for shoes. Cynthia spotted our girl outside of Macy’s sharing a cigarette. Cynthia confronted her in full view of her classmates and ordered her to the car. Cynthia was so rattled and busy tearing a strip off Grace that she ran a stop sign.
    Nearly got broadsided by a dump truck.
    “We could have been killed,” Cynthia told me. “I was out of control, Terry. I totally lost it.”
    It was after that incident that she decided, for the first time, to take a break from us. Just a week. For our sake—or more specifically, for Grace’s—as much as her own. A time-out, Cynthia called it. She bounced the idea off Naomi Kinzler, the therapist Cynthia had been seeing for years, and she saw the merit in it.
    “Remove yourself from the conflict situation,” Kinzler said. “You’re not running away; you’re not abandoning your responsibilities. But you’re going to take some time to reflect, to regroup. You can give yourself permission to do that. This gives Grace time to think, too. She may not like what you’re doing, but she might come to understand it. You suffered a terrible wound when you lost your family, and it’s a wound that will never completely heal. Even if your daughter can’t appreciate that now, I believe someday she will.”
    Cynthia got a place at the Hilton Garden Inn, over behind the mall. She was going to stay at the budget-minded Just Inn Time to save money, but I said no way. Not only was it a dump, but there’d been a white-slave operation running out of it a few years back.
    She was only gone a week, but it felt like a year. What surprised me was how much Grace missed her mother.
    “She doesn’t love us anymore,” Grace said one night over microwaved lasagna.
    “That’s not true,” I said.
    “Okay, she doesn’t love
me
anymore.”
    “The reason your mother’s taking a break is because she loves you so much. She knows she went too far, that she overreacted, and she needs some time to get her head together.”
    “Tell her to speed it up.”
    When Cynthia returned, things were better for a month, maybe even six weeks. But the peace treaty started to crumble. Minor incursions at first, maybe a shot across the bow.
    Then all-out warfare.
    When they had one of their battles, feelings would be hurt and it’d take several days for our normal life—whatever that was—to resume. I’d attempt mediation, but these things had to run their course. Cynthia would communicate anything important she had to tell Grace through notes, signed
L. Mom
, just the way her own mother used to do when she was pissed with her daughter and couldn’t bring herself to write
Love
.
    But eventually the notes would be signed
Love, Mom
, and a thaw in relations would begin. Grace would find some pretext to ask her mother for guidance. Does this top work with these pants? Can you help with this homework assignment? A tentative dialogue would be opened.
    Things would be good.
    And then they’d be bad.
    The other day, they were really bad.
    Grace wanted to go with two of her girlfriends to New Haven to a huge used-clothing bazaar that was running midweek. They could only go at night, because they had school through the day. Like that concert in New York, it would mean a late return homeon the train. I offered to drive them up, kill some time, and then bring them back, but Grace would have none of it. She and her friends weren’t five. They wanted to do this on their own.
    “There’s no way,” Cynthia said, standing at the stove making dinner. Breaded pork cutlets and wild rice, as I remember. “Terry, tell me you’re with me on this. There’s no way she’s