"He freaked! It was like watching a mad man." She hasn't seen him in over two weeks but the thought of him still raises her shoulders in a cringing, self-protective way.
Her mother reaches out and lays a comforting hand on her shoulder. "It's OK, he's gone and we will be with you for as long as you need us."
"I don't know what I would do without you." Her fingers gently trace the space below her right eye. With the stitches removed the cut doesn't look too bad but it is going to leave a scar.
She knew that he had violent temper but he only hit her when she did something really stupid.
Her mother, as if reading her thoughts, spoke softly but firmly, "You're a good-hearted person. I know you wanted to help but there are just some people that you can't help. They require someone professional."
In the ten years that she had lived with him her parents never knew about their occasional fights. Being eight hundred miles away they never heard them scream at each other or watched as he sometimes turned their verbal disagreement into something physical.
They still wouldn't know if there hadn't been blood and neighbors and police. If there hadn't been court orders and warrants and threatening late night phone calls. If there hadn't been the machine.
Her fingers are still absently stroking her cheek. "The Happiness Machine."
"What?"
"That's what he hit me with, The Happiness Machine." She tells her mother about the machine: how she saw it and bought it on an impulse thinking that the manufacturer's statements about aligning energies made sense. She remembers the picture on the side of the box showing a typical room with a network of wiring in the walls emitting red waves of random magnetic energy. In the next picture the chaotic red waves were replaced with evenly spaced blue lines of the aligned energies.
"It didn't cost much but then, he was right, we didn't have much." She pauses. "Maybe it was foolish but I wanted so much for us to be happy."
Her mother listens without comment.
"I was hoping I could put it in the room and just turn it on - and maybe, before he knew it, we would be happy - and it wouldn't matter that I spent a few dollars on it." But that wasn't how it happened. He saw it and things got too crazy too fast.
She pushes the thought away and turns to face her mother. "Mom, do you remember a box, it was, oooh, about the size of a toaster with blue wavy lines on the side?"
Her mother thinks about it. They had gotten the call and were on the road within an hour. They arrived twelve hours later and started packing immediately. The move had happened so quickly that she doesn't really remember the details. Looking over at the boxes still stacked in the corner of the living room. "Which room was it in?"
"The living room."
"Well, all of the living room stuff is either unpacked or it is still in those boxes."
They both get up and start opening boxes.
"Here it is!" She holds it up for her mother to see then flips the switch to turn it on. A blue light next to the switch winks on. "It still works!"
The front door opens. Her father and brother come in carrying groceries. Her mother reaches out to help them.
She stands there holding the The Happiness Machine feeling all of those random red waves smoothing out, aligning themselves and slowly becoming row upon row of smoothly ordered blue waves. It's working, she thinks, yes, it's working!
If only ...... I wonder how this writing would work if the narrative were in past tense.
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