Jeanette looked up sharply. “Oh, Anne-Marie,” she said as if she didn’t believe her, as if Anne-Marie were spinning another lie.
“I’m serious, Mom,” she insisted and witnessed the cords in her mother’s neck tightening, the way they always did when Jeanette was forced to deal with her wayward, rule-breaking daughter’s problems.
“Okay. So he shoved you,” she finally said, finding a way to make the statement more palatable. “Why don’t you just, you know, keep q
uiet about it?” Jeanette Favier’s type of motherly advice. “That’s what we do, you know.” She reached for her cigarettes, then her fingers scrabbled over the glass top of the table, nearly knocking over her iced tea before she clenched the soft pack.
Anne-Marie stood her ground. “He beat me!” she repeated, her fists clenching at her sides. “That’s assault, Mom.”
“Hush!” Her mother sat up quickly, then glanced furtively over her shoulder toward the inside of the huge plantation-style home. “For the love of God, Anne-Marie, keep your voice down. The cleaning people are here and your father’s in his study.” She pointed overhead to the area in the general direction of Talbert Favier’s private office.
“You don’t care that he hit me?”
“Of course I care.” Jeanette tried to shake a cigarette out of the crumpled pack.
“You should, because he hit me over and over again. I thought . . . I thought he would crack my ribs.”
“But he didn’t, did he?” Jeanette managed to shake out a cigarette and light up despite the fact that it was slightly bent. Her hands were trembling.
Anne-Marie stared down at her mother. “Not yet. But he will.”
“No, no. You don’t know that.”
“He’s going to really hurt me.”
“Now, look, Anne-Marie,” Jeanette said, sighing in a cloud of smoke. “This is not good. But you knew he had a temper before you married him.”
“Not like this. I didn’t know he was violent.”
Lifting up her sunglasses, Jeanette squinted at her daughter through a thin tendril of smoke. “So what do you want to do?”
“Go to the police.”
“What? Oh, Lord!” She shook her head at the thought, then set her cigarette in the ashtray. “No way. You have to leave the police out of it.”
“He beat me, Mother. What part of that don’t you get?” To prove her point, Anne-Marie took off her own shades to display the red in her eye, the bruise surrounding her eye socket.
“Oh . . . oh, dear.” Jeanette winced.
Not stopping with the damage to her face, Anne-Marie lifted her T-shirt to show the black, blue, and sickly green discoloration across her abdomen.
Her mother sucked in a swift breath. “I’m so, so sorry.” In an act so foreign to her mother that Anne-Marie was stunned, Jeanette grabbed a towel draped over a nearby chair and dipped one corner into the pool. “Sit,” she said, indicating the end of the chaise and then, smelling of smoke and her signature perfume, she gently dabbed at her daughter’s injuries.
Anne-Marie sucked in her breath as her mother touched her face, pressing the cold towel against her cheek.
“I think you’ll live,” Jeanette pronounced.
“This time.”
“It’s not that bad.” She took her time folding the towel.
“He attacked me, Mother. Beat me. Then raped me.” Anne-Marie was trembling inside, the memory of the vicious attack fresh and brutal. She needed her mother to understand, to be her champion.
“Oh, darling,” her mother said softly.
For an instant, Anne-Marie believed Jeanette’s hard exterior had cracked with empathy and love for her only daughter, but that hopeful impression was short-lived as the older woman asked gently, “Whatever did you do to provoke him so?”
“What? Didn’t you hear me? He assaulted me, gave me these.” Once more, Anne-Marie lifted her T-shirt to display her bruises. She hurt inside, was as emotionally beat-up as she was physically. But it was at the hands of her own damn mother, the woman whom she’d hoped would believe her and protect her.