Page 66 of Mad Mabel

“And Shane is…?”

“Persephone’s father.”

“Ah,” I say. “And… I take it he was violent?”

She nods.

“Scumbag,” I say.

“Motherfucker,” Daphne cries.

“Yes,” Roxanne agrees. She reaches for the last item in the basket, my cream blouse, shakes it out and hangs it.

“So what now?” I ask. “Will you have to move?”

She laughs, without humor. “This is my sixth move since I left him. He still found me. Where do I go now? The moon?”

I collect the basket and we go inside. In the back room, she sitson my sofa and pulls a cushion into her lap. I offer her tea again and she declines, so I bring her a glass of water and put it on a coaster on the coffee table.

I sit in the armchair. “How did you meet him?” I’m prying, which is probably rude, but what the hell? I’m curious.

“Shane and I met when he was injured in a car accident. I was twenty-three and he was thirty-three. I was working as a nurse at the local hospital in a small town outside of Sydney. I’d just lost my mother. Ovarian cancer. My father had never been in the picture. I had a few cousins, but none lived nearby. My community was mostly the nurses at work. Anyway, Shane was in a bad way—broken ribs, black eyes, bruises all over him. I fixed him up and he asked me out to dinner. Shane was the charming sort, believe it or not.”

She picks up the glass of water from the coffee table and takes a sip. Then she puts it back down. “He came on very strong, with romantic gestures, like surprise weekends away, flowers, gifts. And the sex,my God. He was aman, if you know what I mean.”

“I do indeed,” I say.

Daphne chuckles.

Roxanne blinks. “Anyway… I was renting an apartment in town when we met. A few months after we’d started dating, I went to Sydney for the weekend for a friend’s birthday and returned to find he’d packed up my things and moved them into his house.”

“Uh-oh.”

She nods. “Red flag, I know. But part of me liked it. I had no family and in a way it made me feel safe, to have someone. What an idiot.”

“Hindsight,” I remind her, “is twenty-twenty.”

“I guess. But there were other signs along the way that I shouldhave paid attention to. Like… he didn’t give me a key to his house. The one he’d calledmyhouse. He said I could just come and go with him, or, if I went out without him, wait for him to get home to let me back in.”

“Sounds very odd,” Daphne says.

“That was just the beginning. Next thing I knew he’d got rid of my car! I went into the garage one day and it was gone. He said it wasn’t safe, and in fairness to him, he was probably right. It was an old bomb—the only thing I could afford. He told me he got his uncle to tow it to the junkyard and that he’d ordered me another one. A Mercedes! I was so excited about the Mercedes that I didn’t complain about his dumping my car. But the Mercedes never arrived. It was hard to object since he drove me to work and back every day.”

“The controlling type,” Daphne says. “Probably terrified you’d catch the eye of another fellow.”

Roxanne picks up her water glass again but doesn’t drink. “He always managed to make everything sound romantic and as though it wasforme. He said he would always take care of me, and I liked the sound of that. But I became quite isolated. And before I could address it, I was pregnant with Persephone. You can see the trajectory I was on. Trapped, reliant on a man. Powerless.”

I shake my head. “Exactly how he wanted it.”

She nods. “The first time he hit me was when I got a taxi to a prenatal appointment. He was meant to drive me but he couldn’t so he told me to reschedule. But there was no reason I couldn’t go. So I called a taxi. I was getting sick of him telling me what to do. When I got home after the appointment he was there. I remember being really annoyed. He’d said he couldn’t make the appointment, so why was he home? I started to ask him about this and he slapped me across the face, hard.”

I look at Daphne. Her eyes are full of tears. Her right hand rests against her right cheek.

“It was a hard slap. It hurt alot. I ran out of the room, but then I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t leave.”

“Let me guess,” I say, “he apologized in the morning and said it would never happen again?”

“Actually, no. He never apologized. He didn’t bring it up at all. And I didn’t either. I was too afraid. But that was when I started planning to leave. We finally got away when Persephone was six months old. But he keeps coming back.”