A huge blue heron floats in the air alongside our pathway. We walk slowly and quietly, mesmerized by its flight, and I ponder Kitty’s words. I feel like I should be better at life by now, but I’m not.
Before leaving Bill, I told him there would come a time when I would just plain run out of hope for our relationship and tire of body slamming against his wall of silence. I left him and Shawn in Jackson. After landing a French teacher position at a large Houston high school, I grabbed the first apartment close by my school that would let me have my two dogs, and moved to Texas with boxes of books, a twin bed, a desk, and a rocking chair.
Sister Kitty is one reason I gravitated toward Houston. We have stayed in touch ever since she hired me as a physical education teacher in 1974; in fact, we’ve become very close sister-friends. She has been a nun for thirty-seven years, and is one of the most open-minded, spiritual, committed-to-her-God people I have ever known, in a beautiful non-judgmental manner that feels refreshing in a life-saving kind of way. I could use a little life-saving.
Leaving Bill and Shawn was agonizing, and it felt like the right thing to do. My packed U-Haul pulled out the morning after Shawn’s high school graduation, trusting that with at least a diploma under his belt, and the years we all had together, Shawn would ultimately figure out how to piece together a good life.
Bill had almost left me years ago when he discovered my relationship with Cara. I missed the vibrant relationship Cara and I had shared—the laughter, deep conversation, our long letters, playing tennis, sailing and, yes, the sex. I experienced more ease and openness with women. After Cara, Bill and I stayed together another six years, until at a loss for how to make things work, I picked myself up and headed to Houston—alone and lonesome—with a fragile spirit and hollow heart. But my days are already calmer. I’m not cringing at calls or messages from Shawn’s mother, or when I ask Bill if we can talk about something and—standing in front of me—he sighs, slumps, and shuts his eyes.
I have made three geographical moves for Bill’s jobs in our marriage and have put off completing a master’s degree for fourteen years. Steering Shawn toward finishing high school amped up my own determination to complete this degree. Settling in Houston means I can get started in graduate school and finish this time. Plus, it’s time for more therapy to figure out what to do with all this sadness inside of me, and these damn memories. This is another move to try to save my life.
But first, I have to adjust to my new job and find a different place to live. This affordable apartment that I chose because it’s close to my school and takes dogs, where I signed a six-month lease, is full of hookers and pimps. I had no idea Forum Park Drive is renowned for this, and I was slow to notice. A teacher at my school saw me turning onto this street and asked me the next day at school where I was going. When I answered home, he told me about the reputation of the street and area. Only then did the persistent thump, thump, thump in the apartment above me begin to make sense.
Everyone has been incredibly respectful and kind to me here, whether I’m out walking my dogs or coming and going from my teaching job. Now I recognize most of the residents are coming back from trawling for work when I leave in the mornings and heading out for their evenings when I’m dragging home from a day of navigating two hundred plus students. We ask how the other is doing, actually listen to the answers, and sincerely encourage one another to take care, often mentioning how nice the other is looking. The men I encounter give a friendly nod. Not one has ever been inappropriate, even when I’m walking my dogs after dark. Everyone remembers my dogs’ names: Pookie and Dancer.
Sister Kitty comes back to my apartment for dinner after our walk, commenting on my choice of apartment complexes, then noticing herself how pleasantly welcoming my neighbors are. All of us, we’re just coming or leaving home, doing whatever it is we know how to do in order to survive and, hopefully, make something of our lives.
Kitty laughs lovingly as we walk into my apartment and I add, “You know, earlier when you said life doesn’t necessarily get easier, but we get better at it? Come to think of it, living in this apartment complex is helping me to see how maybe I am finally getting a little better at life.”
ON THE MEXICAN BORDER
1995 (age 43)—Candelaria, Texas
A storm is blowing in, and I’m in the middle of nowhere. The road I thought I was on is apparently a dry creek bed. Definitely not a good place to be during a west Texas downpour. The dogs are restless under the topper in the back of my Nissan pickup, and rightly so. We’ve been driving today for over ten hours. I thought I would have arrived at Theresa’s ranch by now but seem to be way off track. She explained how these last eighteen miles could take well over two hours, and I’m clearly seeing why now. Hell, I’m pretty sure I’m lost.
I manage to turn around in the creek bed and head back toward the spot where I turned off a real road. Clouds consume this moonless evening, and my headlights seem sucked up by the darkening skies. Thunder booms. It occurs to me that I may be sleeping out here until the light of day. I wonder why my truck is listing off to one side, so I poke my head out the window and glance back. A flat. Great.
I’m out surveying the damage when I hear a voice. Looking up, in the stormy dusk I can barely make out a skinny old guy on a horse decked out in a crumpled, well-worn hat and spurred boots—a genuine cowboy.
“Looks flat,” he pronounces, very matter of fact, now sliding off his horse. “Boyd Chambers, Theresa’s dad. She told me to be on the lookout for you.” Walking toward me, he holds out a hand. I grab that weathered hand and shake it, like reaching for a branch to keep me from falling into the bottom of a dry well. I can’t think of anything nicer to be holding onto when stranded in an old truck with a flat in a dry creek bed in the west Texas outback with a storm about to bust loose.
Boyd helps me put on the spare in the glow of my flashlight and flashing lightning bolts, then points to the road ahead. “You’re almost there,” he promises. He nods to me, pats each of the dogs on the head, mounts his horse, and trots off. I pack up the dogs and nervously proceed in the direction he pointed, soon seeing some headlights. It’s Theresa, who has decided, by the grace of God, to come search for me. Again, more handshakes, and then I’m following her back to Rancho Viejo, where we arrive just as the sky breaks loose and dumps a pounding gulley-washer. If I had still been in that creek bed, I would surely be floating toward the Gulf of Mexico right about now.
The ranch is without electricity due to the storm. Theresa introduces me to another guest who is there for his last night and suggests we all turn in since it’s dark and stormy. “We’ll have a chance to get to know one another tomorrow,” she tells me in a soft West Texas twang, directing me to my room with a flashlight and lighting a single candle that glows warmly across the room’s adobe walls.
My Austin friend Peggy told me about Theresa and the Chambers’ property several weeks ago. I had been voicing a fantasy for a retreat site where I could escape and ponder my separation and divorce from Bill, and where in the world my life might be going next. I’ve been in Houston for one year, learning how to live alone again, pondering applying to graduate school, experimenting with medications for migraines, and holding the lid on the Jack-in-the-box of abuse memories, not seeing any reason to continue rehashing those when I have a life to pull together, not let fall apart.
Peggy had heard about Rancho Viejo. “It sounds like just the kind of place you would love,” she offered encouragingly. She rattled off the number and I called Theresa, catching her on the first try. Yes, people did take retreats on the more than twenty thousand acres of land her family had leased for fifty years. The cost was one hundred bucks a day. Ouch. Too much for this struggling schoolteacher. Theresa mentioned she was also a teacher at the one room schoolhouse close to the ranch in Candelaria, Texas, along with her mother, Johnnie. We were soon sharing stories like old friends.
“I’ve been wanting to take a trip this summer but have hesitated because o
f the responsibility of the ranch. Would you consider ranch-sitting for me?” Theresa offered in that beautiful Trans-Pecos Texas drawl.
Ranch-sitting, she explained, would entail watering indoor and outdoor plants, feeding her horse and dog and keeping them both company, checking phone messages, and keeping an eye on this out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere property smack on the border of Texas and Mexico. Until arriving here, it was impossible to grasp just how isolated this place is. Now, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark with a lone candle glowing and listening to a raging summer storm, I remember the road I traveled to get here. I’m both excited and scared about the coming six weeks.
The next day feels a little surreal. First, morning breaks like a scene on a movie set, with birds galore in a setting like nothing I’ve ever seen. The ranch house is simple, functional, and very comfortable. Bird songs waft through the big homey rooms that apparently welcome and house all manner of desert spiders and other interesting bugs. A door opens directly from my bedroom onto a path that wanders for miles up a spectacular canyon. Later, I discover I can stretch out my arms in a big desert embrace and almost touch the towering fifty-foot sides of the canyon’s walls.
The other guest, a somewhat polished businessman who is leaving later that morning, introduces himself and mentions he is from Austin, and I learn he works for my first husband’s firm. I mention that I know Dave and can tell my fellow guest is somewhat dubious, yet curious, running into someone in this far stretch of west Texas in the middle of a lonely desert who says she knows one of the owners of this company he works for. “Really,” he comments somewhat skeptically, “how do you know Dave?”
“Well,” I answer flatly, while pausing to take a deep breath, “we used to be married.”
The guy does a double-take, and I guess he never knew Dave had been married before, much less to this bedraggled woman the storm blew in the night before in an old pickup with two panting dogs hanging out the back. “Tell him Patricia says hello,” I say, ending the conversation as I turn toward Theresa, asking about places to hike.
Over the next four days, Theresa takes me on some excursions, hiking this vast territory. She also leads trail rides from Texas into Mexico for businessmen who land on a little stretch of runway nearby to avoid the calamitous, axle-dropping drive that I precariously navigated. This rugged land offers breath-taking panoramic vistas, stunning canyons abundant with hidden springs and a diversity of birds, crumbling cave walls full of ancient petroglyphs, and hiking trails littered with crystals that reflect the penetrating west Texas light. Hollowed out rocks, where Indians once ground their grains, rest like abandoned monuments to busy ancient lives, now ghostlike amidst this wild landscape.
We take a day to cross the Rio Grande River to visit the Mexico side. The water is still too high from the storm several nights before to forge in a vehicle. Holding our shoes and day packs above our heads, we wade through rushing waters, crossing from the United States into San Antonio del Bravo, a tiny Mexican village where Theresa is building a personal home along with a library and school for the children of the area.
Meanwhile, I mail my flat tire to a mechanic in nearby Marfa for repairs. It’s what you do out here. Theresa soon leaves on her summer travels, and I come to experience the limitless beauty and quiet mystery of this place in utter solitude, except for my wonderful entourage of canine companions—her dog Hank, and my two, Pookie and Dancer. I leave notes on the kitchen table stating the direction I’m taking off, just in case something befalls me during my meandering hikes. The only visitor for the first several weeks is Manuel, a ranch hand, delivering my repaired flat.
During my weeks alone, I often cool off with a skinny dip in the above ground water tank, climbing the ladder to the tiny deck and plunging in. Within the circular walls, I float on my back and watch red-tail hawks and turkey vultures circle far above me. I think of Bill and the massive efforts we made to make our marriage work, ultimately, I guess, doing the best we could with the knowledge we had. We made plenty of mistakes, but damn it, we tried. I think of Shawn and feel the tug he has on my heart.
In the empty expanse of far west Texas, I am becoming aware of what it was that I craved in my marriage with Bill. In two strong relationships I have thus far experienced with women, conversations were two-way and could go on for hours, sex was comfortable physically and emotionally, laughter frequent, and romance a pleasurable habit. After feeling violated in relationships with men for so long, love like that was a relief.
Solitude and hiking remote canyons along this vast border landscape reveal how life can gently unfold while embracing my doubts and fears. I discern a growing trust that maybe, just maybe, I’ll learn how to hold memories of abuse and dreams of love and peace with clarity, and experience a head without pounding headaches. If I’m going to figure out anything, this is as good a place as any to do it.
A birthday card from Bill arrives with my repaired tire. I look at the closed envelope for a while before opening it and have the thought that if Bill asks me to get back together, I just might. I’ve wanted him to reach out to me for so long, to step forward and say, “Let’s do whatever it takes. I’m ready now.” I feel like I’ve been the one, for the length of our marriage, pleading and prodding us to talk about things and initiate changes, until that wall I kept bumping into just got too hard and high.
I open the card to three lonesome words: “Happy birthday, Bill.”
Slowly I slip the card back in its envelope, gaze for a few minutes at his familiar writing and the last name we still share—Eagle—then whistle for the dogs and take off on a long hike into a desert dusk spattered with comforting pinks and blues.
BURY THE BABIES
1996 (age 43)—Austin, Texas
Dr. Casey, a chiropractor, listens carefully as I explain the history of my migraines. The first really bad headache I can remember, other than those in the mid-seventies that resulted from the earliest potent birth control pills, occurred when I was hospitalized for severe blood loss in 1982.
Dr. Casey listens and nods as I detail the ongoing migraines that have followed that first pounding headache thirteen years ago during an emergency room visit. “How many abortions and miscarriages have you had in all?” he asks gently.
I have to think about this. It’s not a tally about which I like to be reminded. After holding one finger after another as I quietly count, I tell him four, maybe five. I stare at my five outstretched fingers. “With one pregnancy, I was told I had twins while having a miscarriage in an ER the day after having an abortion. Not long after that I had an IUD put in to thwart what might have been yet another pregnancy. I haven’t wanted to remember or keep count.”
“Here’s what I’d like to offer,” Dr. Casey suggests. “We’ll do some routine chiropractic adjustments, and then I’d like to take you through a guided visualization of birthing five children. I’ll check out front and have them rearrange my schedule to make this time available. Then, after you leave, I encourage you to go buy some clothing that can represent every child and find a place to symbolically bury each child’s body. Do you feel like you could do that?”
This isn’t my first time to see Dr. Casey. He is well loved, and for good reasons beyond cracking joints in ways that provide relief. He waits patiently for me to make a decision, his hand resting on my shoulder, and tells me that it’s possible all or parts of this process could help alleviate my persistent migraines.
I leave the office over an hour later, feeling raw but lighter. Since I’m staying with my close friend Sharon during this Austin visit, I call after leaving Casey’s office to discuss the possibility of using a place in her lovely backyard. It was Sharon who had recommended I go see Dr. Casey for my headaches, and she’s pleased to hear of how powerful this visit felt. She tenderly offers an area in her backyard for a ritual burial.
I know where there is a Goodwill store, wanting no questions from some salesperson at a baby boutique while I wander through infant clothing. More tha
n that, I want to think that the clothing I select has already been on babies, absorbed their smells, drools, wettings, maybe even a mother’s love. I think of the velour of baby skin and the taste from kissing the tops of fuzzy little heads mixed with smells of powder, sweat, and grime, and how delicious these sensations have been for me when holding my friends’ children.
I gave this all up, deliberately, but didn’t the fathers as well each time they released their sperm in me without any apparent thought or care of the possible children that could result? I stand there in front of the tiny clothes and picture the men’s faces: Dave or Tim, Dan, Richard, and the last guy I spent one night with. What would our children have looked like? Four of these men now have children of their own. Not one ever expressed any grief over my choice of aborting. In fact, each seemed relieved. Choosing to end the pregnancies became my way of asserting my independence and equality with them. If they could walk away with such ease, well, then, so could I. Now here I am dealing with a residual grief, something I doubt any of them ever thought about any further after helping me pay for a procedure or the abortions—if they even did that. Not one of them was with me in the process or held me through the pain and discomfort during or after.
With five little outfits in a bag, I drive back to Sharon’s. She softly greets me, offering fresh flowers to use. Silently, I head to the backyard and begin digging. I’m afraid if I don’t do this quickly, I won’t do it at all.
I break the ground with a shovel, then kneel down and use my bare hands to finish digging five holes. Sweat rolls down my back. As I look over the open graves, it suddenly seems like a genocide of sorts. I lay the clothing out tenderly in each small hole, piercingly aware right now of the choices I made and the losses that resulted. I don’t hate myself for what I did. Instead, I am awash with an understanding and forgiveness for how I had learned to do what I thought I had to do for survival. But I wonder: Would I have become a mother if I had not been sexually abused? Tears fill my eyes as I imagine kissing the top of my own child’s head.
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