Jigsaw

My sister Jane and I make the ideal jigsaw puzzle partnership. She’s more organized than me, the one who categorizes and compartmentalizes, but I have all the patience.

Most recently, we tried a 1,000-piece train travel scene. She dutifully separated the pieces into little groups – landscape, tray of food, luggage, maps. And then there are always those pieces that color-match but blend amorphously into the backdrop—the wall, the shadows, the seat cushions.

I will obsess over fitting these mundane pieces together. But Jane hates the slog. So she focused on the tray of food and the maps as I toiled through the pieces that all looked pretty much alike.

When we invited the police officer inside that night, I had nowhere to put my nervous energy but the puzzle. I’m sure the officer wondered how I could focus on a puzzle amidst a crisis. But I couldn’t make myself stop. I felt the disoriented need to be constructive even as I knew nothing I did would change a thing.

“I’m going to ask you some questions. I have to ask them to everyone even though I already have the details of tonight.”

“Okay,” said Jane.

I rotated a bluish blurry piece and tried to fit it to another. No luck, no matter the angle.

“Has he ever hit you before tonight?”

“No,” she said.

“Has he ever choked you?”

“No.”

“Does he have a weapon?”

“Yes.”

“Has he ever threatened to kill you?”

“No.”

How much has this questionnaire changed since we were kids? I wondered. Did it even exist back then? I thought of how varying the answers would have been depending on the timeline.

As the officer rattled off more questions, I kept trying the pieces. Sometimes looking for matching colors, sometimes honing in on the particular curvature of each edge. I had a few successes, but spent most of my time relentlessly rotating the shapes in hopes of finding them a home.

After the questionnaire was finished, the officer handed my sister a pink paper.

“This is an information sheet with numbers to call if you need a safe place to be until we issue the arrest and the EPO. But it looks like you’ll stay here, with your sister?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s great,” said the officer. “Most women in this situation don’t have a safe place to go. You’re very fortunate.”

Yes, we agreed. Very fortunate.

The officer left, and I kept working the puzzle as Jane calmed herself down. We wondered if her husband would open the door to the police tomorrow since he had refused tonight. If maybe he was too drunk to have heard the police knock tonight. We wondered, when did it get this bad? How hadn’t she seen this coming?

She thought she knew him, she said. She knew he was being erratic and increasingly seemed violent, but she never thought he would take it to this extreme.

I was still worrying the pieces when Jane asked if I thought she should go ahead and get him arrested.

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling apart two mismatched pieces ferociously clinging together. “I would. But it’s not my life. It’s yours.”

My husband chimed in. “He doesn’t know how to control himself,” he said reasonably. “Call. It might be the only thing to de-escalate the situation.”

He was right, of course. And it was the only thing she hadn’t tried. It’s the one thing our mother never did.

We set up the air mattress in our youngest daughter’s room. On most weekends, she likes to bunk with her older sister. Jane smiled at the small sleeping forms gilded by the nightlight in the adjacent room. She gave me a tender look before retiring to the air mattress.

By the time she was settled, it was near 3 a.m. But I wasn’t tired. I lay in bed until I heard my husband’s breathing regulate, and then I returned to the dining room table.

Jane was there, trying to make sense of the pieces I had set aside. All of them were in the same family of blurry blue, but on closer look, they belonged to completely different parts of the picture.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “I thought this would help.”

I nodded in agreement and acknowledged that I was there for the same reason.

“But I hate this part of the puzzle,” she said. “All the good stuff is done, and now every piece looks the same. It’s giving me anxiety, trying to sort it out.”

And for the first time that night, tears. She had held it together the entire time, from the moment he slammed her against the wall to the panicked moments on the phone with me, from escaping her house to making it to mine, from calling the police to being questioned by them. All of it had gone so quickly, almost calmly. But now it was over and we weren’t sure what was next and she had to decide whether or not she should have her husband arrested the next morning.

I held her and let her cry for a while. Then coaxed her back to bed.

As I walked back through the dining room, I glanced at the nearly finished puzzle. It was true. All the pretty parts of the puzzle were fully assembled, and what was left looked like a monochromatic mess. Big open spaces between the landscape and the tray of food and the luggage and the maps. White space littered with tiny odd shapes, all clearly belonging to each other in some way. But what a process, what a mundane and tedious and painful challenge it was to anchor the beauty to the murky background.