The Hummingbird's Cage

Praise for
The Hummingbird's Cage

“A beautiful story of one woman's reinvention, with a little touch of magic that will warm your heart.”

—Laura Lane McNeal, author of
Dollbaby

“Here is a story of a woman's courage and strength, the power of friendship, and the gift of grace, which magically appears when we need it most. Truly inspired and beautifully written; you will love this novel.”

—Lynne Branard, author of
The Art of Arranging Flowers

“Brilliant and beautifully written. Unflinching. Honest. Heartbreaking.”

—Menna van Praag, author of
The House at the End of Hope Street

“So much for her veneer as an ink-stained newspaper columnist. Tamara Dietrich's
The Hummingbird's Cage
draws you in with unusual characters, unexpected twists, and a charming small town that gives us all reason to ponder: If you had the opportunity to reset your life, would you take it?”

—Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Giblin

“You don't just read
The Hummingbird's Cage
; you fall into it. Dietrich's writing is descriptive in a way that fully captures each moment of a character's journey.”

—Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mark Mahoney

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

Copyright © Tamara Dietrich, 2015

Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

REGISTERED
TRADEMARK—MARCA REG
ISTRADA

LIBRARY OF C
ONGRESS CATALOGING-I
N-PUBLICATION DATA:

Dietrich, Tamara.

The Hummingbird's cage / Tamara Dietrich.

pages cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-18470-1

1. Mother and child—Fiction. 2. Abusive men—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction.
4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3604.I3733H866 2015

813'.6—dc23 2014047187

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Writing can be a solitary business, but getting a novel ready to pass into the hands of readers never is. Every manuscript needs gentle readers, hawkeyed nitpickers and wizards of the Big Picture.

First, to Mike Holtzclaw and Veronica Chufo for giving the first draft an early read and forgiving its countless rough edges. Novelist Leah Price, whose keen sense of plot helped add depth and drama, and whose ongoing moral support is invaluable. My fellow Pagan River Writers—Diana McFarland, Hugh Lessig, Sabine Hirschauer, Felicia Mason and Dave Macaulay. You help keep the creative torch burning every month with pizza and wine, page reviews and good humor when it's sorely needed. To jazz diva, writer and sister-from-another-mother M. J. Wilde, who has always believed in magic and miracles and, most important, in friends.

To Trudy Hale at the Porches on the James River and Cathy and Rhet Tignor at Pretty Byrd Cottage on the Eastern Shore. Their retreats were sanctuaries when I needed them—peace and quiet and blissful views from my window.

My literary agent, Barbara Braun, at Barbara Braun Associates, who took on a would-be novelist and steered her toward her lifelong ambition. Editor Jenn Fisher and editorial director Claire Zion at Penguin/NAL, for seeing promise in the manuscript and shepherding it through to publication.

I can't overlook my sixth-grade teacher at Northeast Elementary. Eons ago, Betty Hinzman was the first to believe in an awkward adolescent who said she wanted to write a book one day. She'll never know how much that meant.

And last, but never least, to my mother, Betty Phillips. (See, Mom? This is what you can do with a creative writing degree.)

To all, my warmest thanks and
gratitude.

Asunder

It's difficult to discern the blessing in the midst of brokenness.

—Charles F. Stanley

My
husband tells me I look washed up. Ill favored, he says, like old bathwater circling the drain. If my clothes weren't there to hold me together, he says, I'd flush all away. He tells me these things and worse as often as he can, till there are times I start to believe him and I can feel my mind start to dissolve into empty air.

There's no challenging him when he gets like this. No logic will do. No defense. I tried in the past, but no more. Back when I was myself—when I was Joanna, and not the creature I've become at Jim's hands—I would have challenged him. Stood up to him. If there were any speck of that Joanna left now, she would at least tell him he had his similes all wrong. That I am not like the water, but the stone it crashes against, worried over and over by the waves till there's nothing left but
to yield, worn down to surrendered surfaces. That every time I cry, more of me washes away.

This is all to Jim's purpose—the unmaking of me. He's like a potter at his wheel, pounding the wet clay to a malleable lump, then building it back up to a form he thinks he might like. Except there is no form of me that could please his eye. He's tried so many, you would think that surely one would have won him by now. Soothed the beast.

In the early years, I was pliant enough. I was young and a pure fool. I thought that was love, and one of the compromises of marriage. I didn't understand then that for Jim the objective is not creation. It's not building a thing up from nothing into something pleasing. What pleases him most is the moment when he can pound it back again into something unrecognizable.

I understand what's happening—I do—but it's all abstraction at this point. I am not stupid. Or, I wasn't always. In high school I was smart, and pretty enough. I completed nearly two years of college in Albuquerque before I left to run away with Jim, a deputy sheriff from McGill County who swept me off my feet with his uniform and bad-boy grin.

In the beginning, it was a few insults or busted dinner plates if his temper kicked up after a hard day. He would always make it up to me with a box of candy or flowers from the grocery store. The first time he raised a welt, he drove to the store for a bag of ice chips, packed some in a towel and held it gently against my face. And when he looked at me, I believed I could see tenderness in his eyes. Regret. And things would be wonderful for a while, as if he were setting out to win me all over again. I told myself this was what they meant when they said marriage is hard work. I had no evidence otherwise.

A part of me knew better. Knew about the cycle of batterer
and battered. And she was right there, sitting on my shoulder, screaming in my ear. Because she knew this wasn't a cycle at all but a spiral, gyring down to a point of no return.

But I wasn't listening. Wouldn't listen. All mounting evidence to the contrary, I believed Jim truly loved me. That I loved him. Sometimes people are that foolish.

I bought books on passive aggression and wondered what I could do to make our life together better because I loved him so. The first time he backhanded me, he wept real tears and swore it would never happen again. I believed that, too, and bought books on anger management.

When I was two months' pregnant, one of his friends winked at me when we told him the news. After he left, Jim accused me of flirting. He called me a whore and punched me hard in the stomach. It doubled me over and choked the breath out of me till I threw up. Two days later, I started to bleed. By the time Jim finally took me to the clinic—the next county over, where no one knew us—I was hemorrhaging blood and tissue. The doctor glanced at the purple bruise on my abdomen and diagnosed a spontaneous abortion. He scraped what was left of the fetus from my womb and offered to run tests to see whether it had been a boy or a girl, and whether there was some medical reason for the miscarriage.

I told him no. In my heart I knew the baby had been a boy. I'd already picked a name for him. And the reason he had to be purged out of me was standing at my shoulder as I lay on the exam table, silent and watchful and coiled.

That was years ago, before the spiral constricted to a noose. I have a daughter now. Laurel—six years old and beautiful. Eyes like cool green quartz and honey blond hair. Clever and sweet and quick to love. Jim has never laid a hand on her—
I've prevented that, at least. When his temper starts to kick in, I scoop her up quickly and bundle her off to her room, pop in her earbuds and turn on babbling, happy music. I tell myself as I shut her bedroom door that the panic in her pale face isn't hers, but my own projection. That it will soon be over. That bruises heal and the scars barely show. That it will be all right. It will be all right. It will be all right.