Chapter 15
Celia dropped her bag and fought back, kicking at André’s legs and screaming, but he kicked her back, sending her slamming into the bike rack beside them. Her mouth hit the metal bar with a gong, which sent another jolt of pain through her nose and a numbing sensation through her teeth. But he was coming for her again. She twisted, scraping her cheek against a bike pedal as he pulled her toward him, kneeling over her and twisting her arm painfully behind her back to keep her from moving.
Then just as Celia thought André would start to drag her back to the apartment, Sofia jumped onto his back and started strangling him.
He delivered one last punch to Celia’s mouth before letting go of her. “She has my wallet,” he choked out, trying to loosen Sofia’s grip around his neck, “and my phone.”
Sofia clung to his back, twisting back and forth as he tried to shake her off. “Look at all the blood on her shirt. Did you do that to her face?”
Celia grabbed onto the bike she’d fallen against, using it to help her stand. “He did,” she answered, her words slurring. Every breath sliced through her gums like a razor, and her teeth felt rough. She kicked at André’s legs, hoping he’d let Sofia go. By that time, a car stopped beside them and a group of teenage boys got out. Sofia explained the situation in Spanish, pointing out Celia’s face for evidence.
André let go of Sofia just as the boys piled onto him, but Celia didn’t have time to watch. She picked up her bag and the phone, which had slipped from her pocket. Then she ran.
She needed to be far away when André got back up. It wasn’t easy to run with her injuries. Every footstep’s impact shot pain through her nose, and every breath of air stabbed at the edges of her broken teeth.
“Where are you going?” Sofia called after her. “You need an ambulance.”
Celia didn’t respond. All she wanted was to get far enough away from André that he had no idea where to look for her.
She turned at the next street and then at the next, but, being injured and pregnant, she couldn’t keep up her pace for long. It was a place she’d never been before, but she found trees and bushes to crouch behind. The houses here were smaller than the ones she’d cleaned with Teresa, but still bigger than anything she could ever hope to live in.
How she wished that she could go back to Cape Verde and sleep on the floor of the Catholic Church again. She would do anything to be there right now.
She’d lost herself since coming to America. All her thoughts centered around pleasing André and protecting herself from André. It was time to start thinking of other things, before she really did become as crazy as her mother had.
After resting for a while, she came out from behind the tree and started running again. She passed a man walking his dog. He stopped short when he saw her face and furrowed his brow before asking if she needed help. With her bleeding nose and mouth, she probably looked like something out of a horror movie.
“No, thank you,” she responded. She just needed to get farther away.
She gave the same response to a woman pushing a stroller and a teenager waiting at a bus stop.
After running and walking to the point of exhaustion, she came to a school, and, checking to see that André wasn’t following her, she slumped down behind a parked car and held her hand on her chest, willing her heart to slow down, to rest.
Her teeth still burned with pain and her nose stung, but inside she felt numb. This was the end of all her dreams. There was no hope for a family with André, no hope for a job cleaning houses with Teresa, no hope of going home to visit her mother. It would be just her and the baby. But for the baby, she would do anything. She would find a way to build a home for them both.
She whispered a lullaby, trying to both calm herself and remind herself that she still had motherhood to look forward to. She also had herself to regain. She could go back to being the Celia who sang songs and danced on the beach.
After her heart rate had slowed and the lullaby soothed her, she pulled out André’s phone and her dictionary. She called the number on the pamphlet the doctor gave her.
A woman answered. “Women’s Shelter. Can I help you?” Her rich, Southern voice resonated through the phone.
“Yes. Yes, I need help.” She paused, trying to think of the words. “I am afraid of my husband.” Her English sounded even worse with her missing teeth.
“We can help you, honey.” The woman spoke slowly, making it easy for Celia to understand. “Are you in a safe place to talk?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me where you are?”
She hadn’t asked what Celia did wrong. She’d asked where she was. Celia thought through her words before answering in English. “I am at a school.” It was an easy sentence, one she’d learned as a child.
“Do you know the name of the school?”
She’d seen a sign but she hadn’t read it, so she crept out from her hiding spot behind the car and walked to where she could read the sign. “Woodrow Wilson Elementary.”
“Okay, honey. Do you need medical attention?”
“Yes.”
“We can call you an ambulance. Someone from the shelter can meet you at the hospital.”
“No. I don’t need an ambulance.” Teresa had told her how much it cost to ride in one of those things.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked. “You don’t need to worry about the money. We have donors to help with that.” It was as if she’d read her mind. “Are you bleeding?”
“Yes,” Celia said, “but it’s not bad.” Her nose had stopped gushing by that time.
“I’ll come over to get you then. You just watch for a green van. It should be there in about . . . hmm . . . twenty minutes or so. Will you be safe waiting that long?”
“Yes.”
The woman took down her name and a description. They were coming to get her. Wherever they were taking her, it couldn’t be as bad as going back to the apartment with André. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Okay, honey. Meantime, if anything happens to make you uncomfortable, you call 911, you hear?”
“Yes,” she said before hanging up. “I will.”
Twenty minutes. She could wait twenty minutes.
She crept back behind the car and examined her face in the side mirror. She almost didn’t recognize the monster staring back at her, and she held onto the car, slumping against it as her legs gave way. Her nose had swollen and was a huge, bulbous thing at the tip while its bridge appeared smashed and crooked. When she recovered enough to look back in the mirror, she lightly touched the side of her nose, daring it to stop swelling. Worse than her nose, her two front teeth were broken half-off with a third missing. Her beautiful smile was gone. She also had a gash slicing across her cheek, which would surely scar just like the cut in her eyebrow that had grown dark and bumpy. Hopefully, her swollen lips would return to normal, but with her teeth—what would she do about her front teeth?
Though she never wanted to see André again, she also wanted to scream and shout at him, to say the words she’d been holding inside. She knew now what she’d been denying all along. He’d tricked her into falling in love with him, making her believe that Manny was dating someone else. She’d believed that André was a gentleman. A gentle man. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He wasn’t the man she thought she’d married, and because of that, she was no longer the happy girl who married him.
Tears trickled down her cheeks, the salt stinging the gouge from the bike pedal. Her whole body hurt because of his abuse, but what hurt more was her spirit, knowing that he cared so little. How wrong she had been to ever trust him!
She cradled a hand protectively over her stomach, fearing that he might still come after her. Even more, she feared that she would never be able to get back to the person she’d been before she met him.
It may have been his goal to destroy her, but he hadn’t, not completely. That girl who climbed mango trees and sold flowers to tourists—she would find her again. Her hand squeezed into a fist. She may have been all alone in a strange land, but she was going to make it on her own.
She rose up from the pavement to peer into the car’s mirror once more, hoping she had overreacted the first time she saw her reflection. She hadn’t. How could anyone stand to look at her this way, much less give her a place to stay or a job?
And with her broken teeth, she could set aside any thoughts of finding another man, not that she was interested in looking. But Teresa had already told her as much. She had said a woman who married in the church could never divorce. Celia could never hope to have another man.
That was fine. Being alone was better than staying with André.
Resting her head against the car’s tire, she opened her bag and looked up the word shelter in her dictionary. It meant a safe place, a refuge, a place where André wouldn’t be able to get to her. She kept that in mind as she breathed in and out, as slowly as possible to keep the air from hitting her teeth.
After only a few minutes, the woman with the Southern voice came to pick her up in the green van. She had gray hair and her concerned gaze lingered on Celia’s face. “My name’s Melissa. It’s nice to meet you.”
Melissa had a box of first aid supplies with her, and she used them to clean up Celia’s wounds as they chatted. Celia told her about the baby and how she’d come from Cape Verde almost a year earlier.
Melissa squeezed and shook a white package. “This is an ice pack for your nose. Now, don’t worry. You’re going to be safe.”
They drove to the hospital, where the nurses and doctors checked on the baby and cleaned Celia’s wounds. They told her there wasn’t much they could do for her nose. She would most likely need surgery later on, and it might not be covered by insurance. All they could do for her now was to put a splint on it.
While the doctors took care of her, Melissa was on the phone, talking with a dentist. Celia had never been to a dentist. On Fogo Island, they only had a doctor, who would pull teeth if they became a problem. Though the idea scared her, the pain had become excruciating. She agreed to the make an appointment.
From the hospital, they drove to a large, glass-covered building and walked inside. The dentist shook his head as he met her in the waiting room. He ushered her to the back and had her lie on the chair with her mouth open. “I’ll give you something for the pain,” he said.
The syringe burned, and she could still taste the acrid flavor of blood at the back of her throat. The chemical smell of the dentist's office twisted her stomach, but the medicine worked quickly, dulling the pain until all she could feel was her disappointment. She’d always imagined creating a beautiful family here in America, a family that people would look at and admire. Instead, she would only receive pity, like the dentist and Melissa were showing her as they tried to fix her broken teeth.
But she was safe. The whole time she’d been in America, she’d feared being on her own, but all along, there had been people who could help her, people who seemed to care more about her than those who should have loved her most.
The dentist smoothed the rough edges and explained that he would fit her teeth with false tops that he called caps He picked and prodded with his tools—filing, drilling, and measuring.
Not wanting to see her mouth reflected in the mirror above her, she closed her eyes. How had she gotten to this point? André had been a good man—the best soccer player on the island and a business owner. She was sorry that she had encouraged him to come to a place that would turn him into a wife beater, sorry that he hadn’t been able to hold down a job here. But it wasn’t Celia’s fault. She could stop blaming herself.
All she’d ever wanted was to make him happy. She’d wanted to give him children and a nice home. She would have cleaned a million houses for that to happen. But she needed to be happy too, and she could never be happy with André, not after all that had passed between them.
She still missed the family she’d hoped to have with André, though, and she hoped he would get accepted to the professional soccer team as he’d always dreamed.
After three hours, she left the dentist’s office with two temporary caps on her front teeth. The tint of the white enamel was grayer than her other teeth, and she was still missing one tooth, but her mouth looked much better than it had before. The dentist also assured her that she wouldn’t feel so much pain as before when the medicine wore off.
They finally reached the shelter as it was growing dark, and Celia could finally rest in a room by herself. The place was empty except for one other family, a mother and three children who slept in a room across the hall.
Lying on the unfamiliar bed, Celia missed her mother now more than ever. Mama had gone crazy once, yes, but she had more sense than André ever had. Besides, Mama spoke her language. Celia pulled out André’s phone and opened an Internet call to her old friend, Senhor Antonio, who had agreed to let Mama use his phone. She turned off the video camera, so he wouldn’t see her missing tooth and battered nose, but when he answered, she saw his grinning face as if he were standing right there in the same room with her.
“How are you doing, Celia? Is America all good?”
His cheerful voice almost broke her. She could barely keep from bursting into tears. “I’m in trouble, Senhor Antonio. Would it be too muchbother to let me speak to Mama through your phone?”
“I’ll run and get her,” Antonio said.
He hurried off, and Celia realized that it was the middle of the night in Cape Verde. The only reason she’d seen Antonio was because he’d turned on his lamp. She closed her eyes, singing the lullaby to calm herself.
Antonio came back ten minutes later with Mama, staring wide-eyed at the screen. “I can’t see her.” She was wearing a kerchief on her head, making it obvious she’d been asleep. Toon stood behind her, rubbing his eyes while Antonio stood off to the side, so he wasn’t in the picture.
Celia raised her voice. “The video’s not working, Mama, but I’m here. Can you hear me?”
“I hear you. How’s the baby?”
“The doctor says the baby’s good and healthy.”
“Praise God. That’s good news. Then what’s wrong? Antonio said you’re in trouble.” Mama sounded like her old self in that moment. No matter what André said, she knew her mother was completely sane now.
Celia tried to steady her voice. “I had to leave André. He wanted me to abort the baby, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
Toon rested his chin on Mama’s shoulder to look at the screen. “André wanted you to abort his own child?” he asked. “So much for coming from a good Catholic family.” Toon may have been a little disabled, but there was nothing wrong with his mind.
Mama folded her arms across her chest and turned to Toon. “We’ll have to talk to his mother about this.”
Toon nodded. “We sure will. She won’t stand for that. She wants a grandchild as much as we do. Want me to get her now?”
“No. It won’t make any difference now that I’ve left him. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
Mama clucked her tongue.
She was tempted to press the button on the video camera, allowing them to see her face, but she knew it might be too much for either of them to bear, being so far away. “He was hitting me, Mama.”
Her mother startled, pulling back from the screen. “André! Hitting you?”
Toon paced back and forth behind Mama, hobbling along from his short leg to his long leg, and shaking his fist in the air. “I wish I was there, Celia. I don’t want any man hitting my little girl.”
For the first time in hours, she chuckled. Toon had never called her his little girl before, but she didn’t mind. “He won’t be hitting me anymore, Toon. I’m staying at a refuge for battered women. They won’t let him in here.”
Mama clutched at her chest. “Oh, Celia. You’re tearing my heart out.”
Toon threw his arms around Mama from behind and kissed the top of her head. “You don’t worry, Lidia. Celia’s gonna be just fine. I’ve got relatives in Brockton. They’re good people. They’ll take care of her and the baby.” He held up a finger. “Just give me a few minutes to run back home and get my cousin’s address and phone number.”
They had no concept of how far it was from North Carolina to Brockton or how much it would cost to get there. She opened André’s wallet and began to count the money. She had no idea how much a bus pass to Brockton would cost, and she guessed it would be more than the thirty-three dollars she had, but she needed to be around people who spoke her language. She would go, even if it meant she had to walk the whole way.