I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia by Gillian Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

somebody’s collection so you seem credible.’ My God! I thought you women were doin’ your own thing now, bein’ your own people. This sounds like the great white hunter in the jungle, catching critters and wearing camouflage!” He tossed the book back onto the sofa.
    I felt as humiliated as if I’d written the rubbish myself.
    “Your mom’s gone baroque, don’t you think?” He sounded mildly amused, but distracted, and then I saw he’d picked up the book my mother hadn’t sent me.
    “Why?” he asked. It upset me that he was more shocked by my having a book on battering than a disgusting date manual.
    “It was in the stuff donated to the Not-a-Garage Sale.”
    “But why bring it home?”
    “It’s underlined.”
    “What are you, a fanatic? The English teacher tracks down the book defacer and gives him a detention?”
    “Her. It belonged to a woman.”
    He fanned the pages, stopping to read, but his only reaction was a frown.
    “See the notes in the margin?”
    He nodded and slapped the book shut. “Why’d you bring it home?” he asked quietly.
    “Some woman’s in big trouble. Calling for help.”
    “Oh, Mandy.” His voice was weighted with sorrow. “Don’t. This is none of—”
    “How can I ignore it? Could you?”
    “Domestic violence is the worst. The most dangerous call. Stay out of it.”
    “But she says he’ll kill her. There’s a crime waiting to happen—happening!”
    “There are always crimes waiting to happen. Stay away from them.”
    “Does a person have to be dead before you care? This woman’s—”
    “This woman’s a stranger. You’ll never find her. If she’d wanted to be found, she’d have written her name. She wanted to complain. Makes no sense to write an anonymous call for help. It’s a game, like hide and seek. A prank. Maybe even somebody who knows you and knows you’ll tool off on a wild goose chase. Or somebody writing a paper, underlining important—”
    “The comments in the margin! How can you ignore them?”
    Mackenzie is tall and lean and has a nice, slouchy Southern rhythm that often leaves me weak at the knees. But right now his posture and pronunciation both seemed infuriatingly casual. “Hey,” he said mildly. “Ease up. I’m not the one hittin’ on anybody. But assumin’ she exists, why hasn’t she gone to a shelter?”
    “The book explains. I just read about it. It’s called learned helplessness. ” I had to stop and find a tissue, but he waited, patiently unconcerned.
    “They’ve done experiments,” I said, eager to make him understand. “Dogs were given electrical shocks no matter what they did. After a while, the dogs caught on that nothing would help them escape the pain, so they did nothing. Even when the cage was opened, they stayed where they were and didn’t avoid the shock. They’d given up, just the way that woman has.”
    He raised an eyebrow and looked unimpressed.
    I tried harder. “They did it with rats, too—held them tight until they gave up trying to move, and after enough of that, when they were put in water, even though rats can swim, they didn’t try. They drowned. They’d learned they were helpless, don’t you see? That’s exactly what happens to battered women.”
    He nodded—grudgingly, I thought. “It’s awful, I understand, but that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with you,” he said. “Besides, this book could be old. These underlines could have been made any time.” He kept his voice reasonable, which made me angrier.
    “The copyright is last year.”
    “A year’s a long time.”
    We had hunched and tilted our bodies and now stood tensely, like duelists facing off before the count. It crossed my mind that Jinx, the sugarplum fairy, probably never, ever disagreed or behaved in this unladylike a manner.
    “What do you want me to do?” I shouted, hoarsely. “Wait until he murders her?”
    “Calm down,” he said. There is nothing more infuriating than a man with nothing at stake