…”help her. They get help too. This is Margaret. Joy’s mother-in-law.”
I almost dropped my phone. The woman by the window. The one who watched my hands for two years.
“I watched you because I needed to know if you’d see,” she wrote. “You did. My son has been hurting her for six years. I raised him. I didn’t stop it soon enough. I’m stopping it now.”
I opened the envelope with my name on it. Inside was a letter from Joy, and a stack of photographs. Every bruise, dated, for two years, taken with a disposable camera. Margaret had been developing them at a pharmacy across town. On the last page, Joy had written: “If anything happens to me, give these to the police. If it doesn’t, please do my hair one more time.”
The plan was simple. Her next appointment was Friday at 10. Her husband dropped her off at my salon and picked her up two hours later, always. That gave us two hours.
On Friday, Joy sat down in my chair, and I washed her hair like normal. Then I walked her out my salon’s back door, where Margaret was waiting with the car seat, the suitcase, Joy’s four-year-old daughter, and an advocate from the women’s shelter. They were gone in under a minute.
At noon, her husband walked into my salon and asked where his wife was. I said I didn’t know. He didn’t believe me. He started yelling. My receptionist had already called the police, because I’d told her to as soon as he walked in.
Joy got her protective order that week. I testified at the hearing, with the photographs. So did Margaret. She looked at her son across the courtroom and didn’t look away once.
Joy came back to my salon last month, with her daughter. She sat in my chair and asked for something completely different, short and bright. When I spun her around to the mirror, she laughed. “I don’t even recognize myself,” she said. “Good.”
