A Thread of Truth

Book 3: Cobbled Court Quilts

by Marie Bostwick

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Come home to Marie Bostwick’s poignant novel of new beginnings, old friends, and the rich, varied tapestry of lives fully lived.

At twenty-seven, having fled an abusive marriage with little more than her kids and the clothes on her back, Ivy Peterman figures she has nowhere to go but up. Quaint, historic New Bern, Connecticut, seems as good a place as any to start afresh. With a part-time job at Cobbled Court Quilts and some budding friendships, Ivy feels hopeful for the first time in ages.

But when a popular television quilting show is taped at the quilt shop, Ivy’s unwitting appearance in an on-air promo alerts her ex-husband to her whereabouts. Suddenly Ivy is facing the fight of her life—one that forces her to face her deepest fears as a woman and a mother. This time, however, she’s got a sisterhood behind her: companions as complex, strong, and lasting as the quilts they stitch.

Release date: June 1, 2009

Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation

Print pages: 335

Sample

The counselor is young, blond, and pretty, and obviously nervous. She glances at her reflection in the wall mirror when she enters the waiting room, adjusts her collar, and clears her throat before extending her hand toward me with a wide, rehearsed smile and a request for me to follow her back to her office.

After a quick kiss and a promise that I’ll see them in a few minutes, Bethany and Bobby obediently accompany a volunteer to the playroom where they will wait until I finish the intake interview. I follow the counselor down a wide hallway with recessed lights in the ceiling and thick, fawn-colored carpeting on the floors.

This is a strange place. More like an upscale hotel than a women’s shelter, at least not like any shelter we’ve been in before. Everything is so quiet and everyone on the staff is so welcoming, as if they’ve all been recruited from the ranks of retired desk clerks and children’s librarians, kind and purposely calm. Well, almost everyone.

As we approach a turn in the corridor, I hear the sound of two women arguing, politely but heatedly. One voice is strained and restrained, trying to appease another, slightly louder voice that belongs to someone skilled in the art of employing clipped, educated enunciation to intimidate those who disagree with her, the voice of a woman who is used to having her own way.

“Abigail, I’m on your side. You know I am,” the first voice says. “But this is a shelter, not a balloon. You can’t just blow more women into it like so many extra puffs of air and think it will just keep expanding to make room for the additional volume. I wish we could accommodate everyone who comes through the door, but we can’t. We’ve only got so many beds.”

“And that is exactly my point. Every month we have more people coming through the door than we did the month before. It’s the worst sort of foolishness to think that trend is suddenly going to reverse itself. So why is the board dragging its feet? No! Don’t interrupt me. You don’t need to say it. I’ve heard it all before. ‘These things take time. We should do a feasibility study. Or take a poll. Or hire a consultant.’ Rubbish! We don’t need to do any of that. We need to hire an architect and a bulldozer. Today! I am sick and tired of sitting in meetings, listening to Ted Carney drone on about stiffening intake standards while the rest of the board sit and stare at their navels and do nothing! If it’s a matter of money, I’ll write a check tomorrow. I…”

“Abigail,” the first voice says wearily, “it’s not just about the money. You know that. It’s a question of space. We simply don’t have it…”

My heart sinks. It’s the same old story; no room at the inn. I should have expected this. Every shelter has more requests than it can handle, but everyone has been so pleasant since we walked in the door that I dared to hope there might be room for us right away. Maybe if we wait a few days. I dread the thought of sleeping in the car again, but what else can I do? Besides, this is such a nice place, so clean and quiet. If we could stay here, even for a week or two, maybe I’d be able to clear my head long enough to figure out a plan to exit the revolving door that leads from one shelter to the next and get the kids into a real home—at least for a while. I’m so tired of sleeping in a different spot every night. I’m so tired of being so tired, but from the sound of things, there is no place for us here. I should have known better than to get my hopes up.

As we round the corner, I see the counselor consciously straighten her shoulders and smooth her hair. The women halt their conversation as we approach. The counselor’s voice lifts to a slightly higher register as she introduces us. The first woman, I am told, the one with a genuine smile and dark brown eyes that match her short cropped hair, is Donna Walsh, the shelter director. The second woman, who doesn’t wait for the counselor to do the honors, informs me that she is Abigail Burgess Wynne and she is on the shelter board. They are both attractive, but Abigail Burgess Wynne is beautiful, strikingly so. Tall, well-dressed, and imposing, with platinum white hair drawn into a blunt-edged ponytail at the base of her neck, high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, and a smooth complexion, she might be any age from fifty to seventy.

Donna Walsh puts out her hand and, when I take it, she lays a second hand on top of mine. The gesture surprises me and I have to stop myself from drawing back. It has been so long since I was touched with affection. I don’t quite know how to respond. “Hi, Ivy. Welcome. It’s so nice to meet you.”

“Thank you. It’s nice to meet you, too.” I haven’t had much call for company manners recently, but I still remember how it works.

“Leslie’s going to be conducting your intake interview?” she asks, looking at the young counselor, who nods. “Well, then you’ll be in good hands. I hope we’ll be able to help you.”

Abigail Burgess Wynne raises her eyebrows to their highest point as she interrupts the director. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she says pointedly. “I’m certain we will.”

Once we get to Leslie’s office, I take a seat in a firm but comfortable armchair on the opposite side of the desk. I watch Leslie as she repeatedly presses the top of her ballpoint pen with her thumb while she fills in the forms—name, children’s names, dates of birth, and the rest—tapping the pen top several times after she writes down each of my answers.

The clicking sound reminds me of those cheap, plastic castanets Bethany had. She used to put the Nutcracker Suite on the stereo, grab her castanets, put her arms over her head, and clack them together, twirling in a circle to the “Spanish Dance.” She loved those things. I wish I’d thought to bring them, but there wasn’t time. So much had to be left behind.

She notices me noticing the clicking pen, laughs, and admits what I’d already suspected. She is new on the job, just finished with her training. In fact, I’m her first client, well, the first one she’s handling completely on her own.

“Must be exciting to start a new job.”

“It is, but it would be more exciting if jobs like mine weren’t necessary.” She shrugs. “But, anyway, let’s get back to you. You’re from Pennsylvania? That’s a long way. How did you end up in New Bern?”

I take a breath, deep but not too deep, and keep my eyes focused evenly on hers, pausing now and again as if to collect my thoughts, not wanting to sound rehearsed. I tell her the story I have prepared in advance, the details I’ve worked out carefully in my mind, the revised history I quizzed Bethany on before we arrived, reminding her that if she got confused or nervous, she should say nothing. After all she’s been through, silence is a perfectly understandable response for a child. No one will question it.

Leslie bobs her pretty blond head sympathetically, bent over her clipboard, taking notes. She believes me. And I am struck by how easy it is. The lies just slip from my lips like thread from a spool and she believes every word I am saying.

I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. With its white clapboard houses and trim green lawns, New Bern, Connecticut, looks like a town lifted straight from a Norman Rockwell painting, safe and secure as can be. But after last night, I don’t want the kids to spend one more night sleeping in the car than they absolutely have to while we wait for an opening in the shelter. If it were just for myself, I wouldn’t do it, but if lying to this woman is what it takes to protect my children, then that’s what I’ll do. I have no choice. Still, it bothers me to think how good I have become at getting people to see only what I want them to see.

But why wouldn’t I be good at it? I’ve had so much practice. And it isn’t like my life is a complete fabrication. It’s close to the truth, just not close enough.

I married at eighteen. I have two children I love. Bethany is six. Bobby is eighteen months. All this is true and the rest of it is almost true.

We were almost a happy family.

But that word is an abyss that separates happy families from everybody else. Almost.

I wonder if she understands that, this newly minted intake counselor, fresh from training on the care and feeding of women in crisis? She wants to understand, I can see that, genuinely wants to help, but something about her, something about the smooth shape of her forehead and the crisp ironed creases of her trouser legs make me know she is merely an observer, standing on the edge of the abyss and peering into it. She has not been in the valley herself and probably never will. I hope not, for her sake.

That, too, makes it easier for her to take my story at face value. She won’t investigate it and I have all the paperwork, or enough of it, to prove my claim. I am who I say I am—Ivy Peterman. But what I don’t tell her is that I never changed the name on my driver’s license and Social Security card after I married. Maybe I forgot to. Or maybe, deep down, I knew it would come to this one day. Whatever the reason, I have the documents to prove that I am me.

The rest of the story—the true parts, that my husband abused me for years and that my children and I have been bouncing from emergency shelter to emergency shelter for months now; the almost-true part, that we’ve got nowhere else to go; and the lie, that my husband was killed in a construction accident—she accepts without question. Even with her training, training that surely included admonitions not to buy into the stereotypes of victims of domestic violence as being poor, powerless, and poorly educated—in other words, not like people this woman lives next door to, not people from nice suburban neighborhoods, or even wealthy ones, with trimmed hedges and late-model SUVs in the driveway—part of her still finds it easier to accept my story precisely because it feeds into the stereotype: poor, teenage girl marries boozing, battering, blue-collar boy she thought would be her salvation, not realizing what she was getting into until it was too late. She finds it easy to believe because it’s almost true and because she wants to believe it. The whole truth would hit too close to home, send her to the phones and files to verify my background, but this? It doesn’t even cross her mind to check my facts. I can tell.

She smiles and gets up from her desk, excuses herself for a moment, and promises to be right back.

In spite of the elegant furnishings and plush carpets, the walls between the offices are surprisingly thin. I can hear Leslie’s voice, high and uncertain as she speaks to Donna Walsh in the hallway, mixing with the director’s calmer, deeper tones, intersected and frequently interrupted by the clipped, insistent voice of the older woman, Abigail Burgess Whatever-Her-Name-Was. I don’t remember anymore. I can’t understand what they’re saying, so I turn my attention to the sounds coming from the playroom next door, where I can hear Bethany’s and Bobby’s muffled voices as they play with the volunteer. I like knowing they are so close and I like being alone in this room. Even with the murmur of voices coming through the walls, this is still the quietest room I have been in for weeks. It feels good to sit here alone and think. Peaceful.

Maybe, if I want to, I can stay here for a while. This seems like a nice town, filled with nice people. People like Leslie. She’s just a couple of years younger than me. Twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. Fresh out of college. So weird. All she knows about the world is what she’s read in books or heard from her professors. I’m twenty-four but I’ve seen enough to last three lifetimes. She makes me feel ancient. But still…If I lived here, maybe we’d be friends, go to the movies or shopping. Do the things that girlfriends do. It would be nice to have a friend, someone who knows the truth about me and likes me anyway, to stay here for a long time, to live here, maybe forever.

No, I remind myself. That can’t be.

We can’t stay. Not forever or for long. Even if I’m right and Leslie never checks out my story, or if I’m wrong and she eventually does, it doesn’t make any difference. We’ll be gone before the truth comes out. We must be.

If we stay too long in one place, he’s bound to find us. It isn’t safe to stand still. But if I’m careful? Then, maybe? For a while? I’m tired of looking over my shoulder, of carrying my life and my children’s lives stuffed into a suitcase constructed of half-truths, and only as large as can be fit into the trunk of my Toyota.

I’m lost in my thoughts and don’t hear the counselor when she comes back in the room.

“Mrs. Peterman? Ivy? Are you all right?”

The sound of her voice startles me, jars me back into the moment, and I realize that she’s been gone for a good while, at least fifteen minutes. “Sorry. I was a million miles away. Guess I’m tired.”

Leslie tips her head to one side, and murmurs sympathetically, “I can imagine you are. Don’t worry about it. We’re almost done here.” She puts the clipboard on her desk and sits down again. “We’ll get you and the children something to eat and see you settled in for the night.”

“You can take us? Tonight?” I can’t quite believe what she’s saying. Maybe I didn’t hear her correctly. “You’ve got a room right now?”

She nods, pleased that I am so pleased, and beams when she tells me the truly amazing news, like she’s handing me a wonderful and unexpected gift. And she is.

“But…I thought…when I heard them talking in the hall…I thought you were full.”

“Well, technically we are, but Mrs. Burgess Wynne absolutely insisted that we find you and the children a bed tonight. She said if we didn’t, then she was taking you home herself, so Donna did a little shifting and asked some of the single women to double up a few days so we could make room for you and the children now.”

“Really? Thank you. I…I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I’m so glad we were able to find a place for you. And”—she grinned—“the news gets even better than that. We have an opening in the Stanton Center. Not tonight but soon.”

I look questions at her and she goes on to explain. “The Stanton Center is an apartment building just for women and children who have been victims of domestic violence, the home of our transitional housing program. You can stay there for up to two years while you’re getting back on your feet. Initially it’s free, but we’ll encourage you to find a job as soon as possible and then we’ll charge modest rent, a percentage of your earnings. While you’re there, we can offer you vocational, financial, and psychological counseling, and child care.” She pauses, waiting for me to say something, but it takes me a moment.

“An apartment. A real apartment?” Tears fill my eyes.

She nods. “A real apartment. There’s a community room where we hold meetings for the residents and a playground with a swing set and slide for the children. It’s in a secret location, no sign in front, and has a good security system. Of course, since you’re a widow, you don’t have to worry about that so much, but the other residents have fled violent relationships and we do everything possible to make sure their abusers can’t find them. It’s like a safe house.”

I blink hard, willing back the tears, trying to stay composed, not wanting her to see the effect those words have on me—a safe house. It has been so long since I even dreamed of such a thing.

“So?” she asks cheerily, already certain of my response. “What do you say? Would you like to take the apartment and stay here in New Bern for a while?”

“Yes,” I whisper. “I would. Thank you.”

“Good!” She stands up, indicating that I should follow her. “We can finish the paperwork tomorrow, after you’ve had a chance to settle in a bit.”

Leslie opens the door and leads the way through the three right turns of the corridor that will lead us to the playroom that backs up to her counseling office, talking as she goes. I’m still in shock, able to offer only short responses to her commentary, the script she has been trained to deliver to new residents.

“You’re not required to accept any of the counseling services we offer to residents, but I do urge you to take advantage of them as much as possible—especially the group counseling sessions. Your abuser can’t hurt you anymore, but even so, the effects of domestic violence can stay with you long after the abuse ends. Counseling can help you work through that and I think you’ll appreciate the chance to develop relationships with women who’ve dealt with similar problems.”

“Yes. I’m sure you’re right,” I say, knowing that I’ll never go to even one of those group sessions. I’m not going to get close to those women. I’m not going to get close to anyone. I can’t take that risk.

“Good.” She looks back over her shoulder, pleased that I agree. Leslie is a good person. Part of me wants to tell her the truth, but I can’t, especially not now, with an apartment on the line. An apartment! A real apartment just for us. I still can’t believe it.

“Your timing was lucky. One of our residents, former residents,” she corrects herself, “decided to go back to her husband. That’s why we have an opening in the Stanton Center.” She sighs heavily and shakes her head.

“After all she’d been through, you’d think that’s the last thing she’d do, but it happens a lot more often than you’d suppose. It’s such a hard pattern to break. Well, at least we don’t have to worry about that with you, do we?”

“No.”

This is the truth. I’m not going back. There was a moment, one, when I wavered, but not now. In my mind, I see my daughter’s face, a dark reflection in the rearview mirror, small and serious and too young to know so much. No. We’re not going back.

“Good,” Leslie says again, even more firmly. She likes to speak in affirmations. “I hate to think of our other resident leaving, but I’m glad it’s worked out so well for you. The timing really was fortunate.”

We have arrived at the playroom. She puts her hand on the knob and turns to me before opening the door. “You must be on a lucky streak.”

If I am, it’s a first.

But, then again…A striking, silver-haired woman whose name I can’t even remember insisted that room be made for me and my children. A brown-eyed director I’d never met before shifted her charges to make it happen. And now sweet, nervous, well-meaning Leslie has said there is a place for us. A safe house. Tonight. Now. Just a few miles from here, somewhere in this lovely little town where the kindest people on earth live, there is room for us.

Maybe she is right. Maybe, at last, my luck is changing.

Eighteen months later

Fight or flight? Until recently, it’s never been a question. Not for me.

Whenever I feel frightened or threatened, my first instinct has always been flight. I do it pretty regularly.

I was six years old when my father had a heart attack and died. The news sent me running into the woods in the back of our house. I could hear my mother calling for me, her voice raspy with tears and shock and anger, but I wouldn’t budge from my hiding place in the branches of a half-dead oak. Finally, she sent our neighbor, Pete, to find me.

Just after my sixteenth birthday, Mom was killed in a head-on collision and Pete, who was by then my stepfather, also became my legal guardian. He and I had never gotten along, but then again neither had he and Mom, not since about ten minutes after their wedding. After Mom died, Pete started to drink even more than before, so I ran away again. Farther this time, buying a one-way train ticket to the city. So far that Pete would never be able to find me, though now I realize he probably never tried.

And, of course, when I was twenty-four, I ran away from my husband. This time I took my two babies with me.

My escape wasn’t exactly well-planned.

The day began normally enough, with a trip to the department store and a new tube of lipstick, but by that night I was running. I had to. I was afraid, not just for my life but for the lives of my children. All I took were some clothes, a file with some personal papers, the kids’ baby books, some jewelry I later sold, and about $288 in cash, fifty-six of it from the spare change jar we kept on the kitchen counter. That’s all. I had credit cards, but I didn’t take them. I was worried that Hodge would be able to track us down if I used them.

When we could find an opening, we lived in emergency shelters. When we couldn’t, we lived in the car. That was the hardest time. The kids were cranky, and so was I. The things I’d taken for granted while living in a nice house in the suburbs, like being able to keep clean and warm, using a toilet whenever we wanted to, or eating hot food, were concerns that occupied my every waking moment. I had no reserve of time or energy to consider how I was going to get us out of that mess, only enough to survive the day.

One night, I was asleep on the front seat and heard a noise. I woke up to see a figure, a man, pressed up against the passenger side window of the backseat, where my kids were sleeping, trying to slide a wire hanger into the space between the window and the door. I didn’t think, just jumped out of the car and started screaming, “Get away from that door! Don’t touch them! Get away!”

Somewhere along the line I must have grabbed the metal flash-light from the side storage compartment in the door. Still screaming, I flung it at the intruder and it hit him in the head. He swore and ran off into the alley. The kids woke up and started crying. A tall, scruffy man with a four-day growth of beard—the clerk from the twenty-four-hour mini-mart where I’d decided to park that night, stupidly thinking it was a safe spot—heard the commotion and came outside to investigate.

He took one look at me, tears in my eyes while I tried to quiet Bethany’s and Bobby’s sobbing, and decided to call the police. Over my protests, he went inside the store to make the call. I got in the car and told the kids to buckle up. There was no way I was going to stick around and answer a bunch of questions from the police. If Hodge had filed a report saying I was a kidnapper, they’d lock me up and take the kids away from me forever. That’s what Hodge said would happen if I ever even thought about leaving him. He didn’t say that out of any kind of love, but just to make me believe that no matter what I did or where I went, he would still be in control. And I did believe it. I’d put hundreds of miles of road between us, but even so, I could feel his power, the menace of his presence, just like I always had. We had to get out of there.

My tires squealed as I peeled out of the parking lot, my mind racing. Did it make more sense for me to get on the freeway and go to another town? Or better to find a dark alley and park there until the coast was clear? I decided on the freeway.

In the backseat the kids were still crying. I swore under my breath, cursing traffic engineers who were too cheap or too stupid to put up any signs directing out-of-towners to the freeway entrance. Ten minutes later I was still lost. Bethany had stopped crying, but Bobby was still going strong.

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw his face, his chubby baby cheeks flushed and hot, his black lashes clumped and glistening with tears. “Bobby. Calm down, baby. Mommy is going to find a quiet place to park and then you can go back to sleep, all right?”

“Go home!” he wailed. “Go home!”

And for the first time, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. A few weeks before, my children had been living the relatively normal, scheduled lives of children in the suburbs: three meals a day, playing on the swing set in our fenced backyard, watching cartoons, baths at seven, bed at eight. Of course, when it was time for Hodge to come home, they’d get clingy and quiet, feeling my fear, perhaps, as I listened for the grind of gears as the automatic garage door opened and tuned my ears to assess the level of force Hodge used to slam the door of his BMW, a clue as to his mood and what the rest of the evening would bring.

But, I told myself as I drove through the darkness, he wasn’t violent every night. Only when I’d done something, or not done something, that made him mad. After all, I was the one he took his anger out on. Not the kids. Maybe they’d be better off if we went back. At least they’d be safe.

But a voice in my head reminded me that it wasn’t true anymore.

I remembered that last day, Hodge screaming and swearing and pounding on one side of the locked bathroom door, while we huddled on the other side. I remembered the swelling of my left eye, pain shooting through my bleeding hand, but worse, so much worse, was the memory of the angry red mark on Bethany’s pale cheek.

Bethany was used to his rages, used to seeing me holding ice packs on my bruises, or trying to cover up the marks of his fury with extra makeup, but he’d never hit her before. That day, he considered her fair game and I realized that from then on, he always would.

In the backseat, Bethany tried to calm her baby brother. “Bobby, don’t cry. We can’t go home. Daddy’s there.”

She was right. I couldn’t take them back. Not now. It wasn’t safe to go back to Hodge. Not for me and not for my children. But we couldn’t go on like this, either. We couldn’t keep running. I was tired and scared and broke. Somehow or other I had to come up with another plan. But what?

To say that I haven’t had a lot of experience with praying in my life would be an understatement, but that night, driving around in the middle of the night without the least clue of where we should go or what we should do when we arrived, I prayed silently, asking God for a sign or at least a hint.

Lost in uncharted territory, I accidentally turned onto the northbound freeway entrance instead of the southbound. By the time I figured it out, I was crossing the state line into Connecticut. And that’s how I ended up in New Bern.

After three weeks of living in a tiny studio apartment in the emergency shelter, we moved into a much larger two-bedroom unit in the Stanton Center. The counselor talked to me about putting down roots, finding a job, and putting Bethany in school. I nodded, mutely assenting to everything she suggested, but in my heart, I knew we’d stay in New Bern only as long as it felt safe to do so. That was more than a year ago and, believe me, nobody is more surprised than I am that we’re still here. If not for Evelyn Dixon and a log cabin quilt, I’d have put New Bern in my rearview mirror a long time ago.

Evelyn owns Cobbled Court Quilts in New Bern. She runs a free quilting class for the women at the shelter. Initially, I didn’t want to take the class and had a suitcase full of good excuses for not doing so:

1) With two kids, I was too busy for hobbies.

2) I’d never liked crafts, anyway, and any spare time I had really should be spent looking for a job.

3) And wasn’t quilting something people’s grandmas did? Maybe I’d lived long and hard, but I’m not exactly ready for bifocals and a rocking chair, you know what I mean?

But none of those was the real reason I didn’t want to take Evelyn’s class. The truth is, I just didn’t want to find one more thing to fail at. There had been so many already.

But Abigail decided to change my mind for me. That’s Abigail Burgess Wynne, a volunteer at the shelter as well as a big donor, the woman who insisted that they find room for us at the shelter. Abigail is something of an oddball. Beautiful, in a nineteen fifties movie-star kind of way, all long legs and perfect diction, but an oddball.

She comes off as a snob but, for some reason, she took a liking to Bethany. Out of the blue, Abigail made this gorgeous pinwheel quilt for Bethany and they’ve been fast friends ever since. She’s become not quite an adopted grandmother to my kids, but more of an indulgent great-aunt. And I have to say she’s grown on me. Anybody who loves my kids is okay in my book and when she gave that quilt to Bethany, I was so grateful that I started to bawl. I couldn’t help myself.

Anyway, Abigail is really very sweet deep down—way deep down—but she’s also used to getting her own way. She wouldn’t listen to any of my excuses about passing on the quilting class, just knocked them all down in that way she has, huffing and puffing out words like “Nonsense!” and “Rubbish!” like the big, bad wolf on a mission, not stopping until your little house of sticks is lying in a heap and there you stand with nothing left to hide behind. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in a room with six other students, listening to Evelyn Dixon explain the techniques for constructing our first project, a log cabin quilt.

It’s an easy pattern, just row after row of rectangular strips nesting round and round a center square, stacking one upon the other like those wooden log toys I used to play with when I was a little girl. A simple pattern, maybe the simplest of all. I never expected it to change my life.

Evelyn brought a selection of light and dark fabrics for us to use for the “shady” and “sunny” sides of the house, but for the center of each block, the “hearth,” she told us to find our own fabric, to cu