U-turn In My Thinking

Life doesn’t always comply with the assumptions we’ve made.

A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE

With our two year old son fast asleep in his own room on a cold and rainy New Year’s Eve, Dennis and I were young and lustful in front of the roaring fire in our living room.  Stretched out on the new carpet, undressing each other to loud music on our stereo, we were unconcerned about privacy.  Our suite in the fourplex was on the top floor on one side, and there were no buildings across the street.  Lovemaking progressed, hot and heavy, until the loud rapping on the living room patio door.  Through the sheer curtain, we saw the outline of a male body on the other side of the window.  I screamed, grabbed my clothes and ran for the bedroom as Dennis pulled up his pants and yanked the curtain aside.

The intruder was the next door neighbour, Henry, who had climbed over the railing, looking for another couple to help ring in the New Year.  He and his wife, Sharon, were middle aged and, like us, new to the area and lonely.  Dennis invited them over to join us in the count-down to midnight.  Because they liked to drink, and so did Den, that was the first of several drunken evenings.

By then, in 1978, Henry and Sharon had been married twenty years but had no children.  He was slim and about five feet, ten inches tall.  She was a little stockier, with long blond hair, and about the same height.  He worked in construction and she worked in an office.  I never did learn much more about them or their background.

Den and I rented both suites, up and down, on the west side of the building in Surrey.  We lived in the upstairs three bedroom suite, while using the downstairs suite as office space for our contract flooring business.  Henry and Sharon had only the upstairs suite on the other side of the building.  Travel between our place and theirs meant traversing down and then up two very long staircases.  Henry had taken a shortcut New Year’s Eve, over the balcony railings, which I strongly discouraged as a continued practice.

Except that Den and Sharon and Henry liked alcohol far more than I did, there wasn’t much else a young couple in their twenties, with one child, had in common with an older couple in their forties who were childless.  Interaction with them became infrequent.  Den and I both had family living further out the valley, and I was in no way desperate for drinking companions.   I had enough to contend with, chasing a two year old and helping with our business.  I just sort of ignored their existence until that one day when I slammed up against my own misconceptions.

It was late on a Sunday afternoon.  We had just returned from visiting family for the weekend.  We were tired and glad to be home.  Our son was still sleeping so we placed him on his bed and continued unpacking.  In the quiet of our home we became very aware of the loud banging next door.  We thought maybe they were doing some repair work.  The banging continued and then came the screaming.  We heard loud, anguished, female screams.  Den and I froze and looked at each other.

“Oh my God!  What do we do?  He’s beating her!”  I was terrified of the violence I saw in my head.

“I’ll see what’s up,” Den said, as he rushed down our stairs, out the door and over to their door.  I could still hear her screams.

Shortly, Den rushed back into our place and back up the stairs.  “They won’t answer their door and it’s locked!” he panted, as he made for the patio door in the living room.  He slid open the door, climbed over the railing, around the wooden partition between our units, and over the railing on their patio.  And I still heard heavy banging and screaming.

Then suddenly there was silence.  Den poked his head around the partition and told me to call an ambulance.  By then, our son was awake and wanting to follow his Daddy.  I retrieved our son, locked the patio door and called for an ambulance, wrought with concern for Sharon, my victimized neighbour.

From my living room, I first saw an ambulance arrive, and later a police car.  Then I changed and fed our son, and made dinner to eat when Dennis returned.  I needed to stay busy.  An hour later I heard Dennis enter down below and slowly climb our stairs.  He opened and closed the safety gate at the top while I silently watched.  Our son grinned from his highchair and threw his sippy cup on the carpet at his Daddy’s feet.

“Is she all right?” I asked.  “How badly injured was she?”

Den retrieved the sippy cup and handed it to our son, then looked at me over his glasses with a lopsided smile.  “Sharon wasn’t hurt.  She was on top of Henry pounding him with a pot when I got in their sliding door.  I grabbed the pot from her and she settled down, but there was blood all over Henry’s face and on the floor.”

“Sharon was beating up Henry?” I repeated, slow to turn my thinking in the opposite direction.

“Yeah.  I think he has a broken nose.  And he’ll have a couple of black eyes for sure.  He went in the ambulance and she was taken away in the cop car.”

“Oh,” I said, dumbfounded, as Dennis sat down at the table and started spooning out some casserole to eat.

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By Lisa A. Hatton