by Gail Griffin
Back at the fire department meeting Annabelle, not yet finished amazing everyone, was able to give the sheriff’s department not only a full description of the abductor and his motor home but also the license number. To be fair, a description of the captor would not have been difficult: he was dressed in green tights, a skirt, a poncho, and a woman’s hat. He was intercepted in Sunshine Canyon within the hour, by which time Annabelle was at Boulder Hospital.
From that night on, whenever I came onto the Shelf Road on the way home, I always saw a half-frozen little wraith in the road, waving a handcuffed arm. And a tall man easing himself over the edge, where I was afraid even to look.
*
It’s odd, what moments stick in memory.
One clear night in early winter, an inch or so of snow on the ground, I took Morgaine for an extra walk, a short jaunt northwest of town, up the private driveway of the woman who was heir to the Laura Ashley textile fortune. “No Trespassing” signs were clearly posted, but I had been encouraged to ignore them by the locals. I don’t think we went all the way up the long two-track drive to the manse itself—a colossal three-story log home on steroids. We just went up a ways and turned around. But before we headed home, we walked a little into a grove of trees at the bottom of the driveway. Further on was a small constellation of trailers that looked mostly empty. I stopped and looked up. The sun had just set and darkness was closing in fast, but there was light in the sky, some pink and cantaloupe-colored streaks in the clouds. A bright moon shone. Everything was very silent, and it was cold but not bitter. I breathed, and I seemed to experience that simple act profoundly. I was attuned to each inhalation, and I watched each exhalation materialize and then dissipate in the dusky air. To one side, dark evergreen forest and a steep drop into Left Hand Canyon; to the other, just yards away from this spot, the warmly lit windows of town. Two Gold Hill blocks away, Bob was making dinner.
I stood there in that moment for a while, taking in the cold, clean air, feeling the night come. Here I am. Strange, and lovely.
Morgaine studied me quizzically. “Okay,” I told her, “let’s go.” She trotted off through the snow, and I followed.
*
Later in winter we hit our impasse, Bob and I, like a car running into a fresh snowdrift—a silent, nonviolent, complete stop. I wonder what it says about me or about him, or maybe just about partnership, that the safety I felt with him could so easily be blown out the window, as if a stiff north wind had suddenly swept through. He would withdraw, distant and unresponsive, leaving me feeling abandoned and alone. He had lived solo for many years, even during his previous marriage, and here I was, wanting connection and warmth. But somewhere in his life he had learned to go inside himself and shut the door. It was probably self-protective but sometimes, when he didn’t want to deal with me or was put off by something I’d done, it was punitive. Always it felt like being locked outdoors.
I was angry that when this happened Bob could go on obliviously while I could think of nothing else but how our common life was guttering. One night, having resorted to the couch in misery, I lay staring up at the ceiling. I couldn’t imagine how he could sleep in our big bed without me, without making things all right, knowing how unhappy I was. I couldn’t imagine how he could push me away when I had driven eleven hundred miles and committed a year of my life to being here, to being with him. I felt exposed, endangered, isolated—and stranded. I have to get out of here, I thought. I found myself making an escape plan. I would go back to Kalamazoo, but where would I live? My house was rented for the year. Maybe my sisterfriend Diane would let me occupy her upper story, which she never used. Maybe I could rent an apartment. Maybe the college had a vacant house. Unable to live in this terrible chill, I was hurrying to shut my doors and windows, reestablish my boundaries, get myself safe.
When I was an adolescent and thought my mother didn’t understand me or had treated me unjustly, I resorted to writing her letters, which I would leave on her pillow. Sometimes she wrote me back. In extremity I still never quite trust my speaking voice; I have to write. And so I did: the next morning I drafted a long email to Bob. I think it had the classic three parts—here’s what’s happened; here’s how it makes me feel; and here’s what needs to happen next—and I was quite specific about the third part: we seek counseling, or I have to leave.
And like that, the ice dam broke loose. Bob acted as if he’d woken up and realized he’d overslept. In response to my grand opera, he was reasonable, gentle, generous, practical. The sheer difference in size of our responses was embarrassing, even though I’ve heard for most of my life that I tend toward dramatic hyperbole. It was something I had to learn repeatedly with Bob, and maybe the most important thing I learned—that conflict did not spell disaster; that he would not walk away and could be trusted with what I actually felt. There was also the lesson about myself: I had customarily thought of myself as dangerously capable of losing myself in anything that might pass as love. As it turned out, I wasn’t. With minimal time or struggle I knew that rather than be this lonely with Bob, I would seek to be alone. When I needed myself, there I was. On the couch that night, my ability to plan felt like sanctuary, like solace. Possibly Bob’s withdrawal inside himself, which read as cold and unloving to me, provided the same for him.
This was not the last time we hit this very impasse. That came eight years later, a couple months before his death, at our Michigan cabin. Weeping, I had my epiphany: “This is the same fucking fight we’re going to have for the rest of our lives, isn’t it?”
We both started to laugh. I continued. “And I will always be the one to have to say something about it, won’t I?”
He sighed. “Probably you will, hon. Because I just won’t see it coming.”
I resented having to play Relationship Custodian, one of the more exhausting traditionally female roles. I wondered how a man could learn to observe human dynamics as acutely as Bob did, probably through his professional training, and not put the same skills to work at home. But I remember also feeling, as we started to laugh, the profound calm of knowing that a big, long love includes your trademark fight. It was, weirdly, a comfortably known quantity. I would have to continue to make us struggle. But I would no longer fear the apocalypse or plan an escape. But in Gold Hill, the struggle was new and still frightening. So we did a fairly short stint with a couples therapist in Boulder who made clear, without saying so outright, that we were way, way down near the bottom of the scale of couples at risk.
It seems so obvious and natural to me now; of course we struggled, coming together as we did: two humans no longer young and long accustomed to living on our own terms, in our own modes, by our own rhythms, in a relationship mostly characterized by arrivals and departures and temporary intimacies.
That winter we also made friends with the eternal presence of the dominant parents sharing our common life. Bud would always be there, going at life as if it were an adversary, measuring his son according to an unchangeable Man template, demanding to know the plan for the beans. My formidable mother would also always be with us, and when I got particularly invested in having things done my way, Bob took to quietly responding, “Yes, Barbara.” Our other ghost parents were around too: Bob’s lovely, talented, alcoholic mother; my cold, critical father, who probably haunted me in Bob’s form throughout that night I spent on the sofa.
I came to look forward to our counseling appointments, which we always followed with a great lunch out. It became my favorite day of the week, sort of like date night. Bob started to brag about our therapy in social situations, to the confusion of plenty of people. And as spring came, we moved ahead with the notion of having rings designed. Among the populous artisan community of Boulder, we found a jewelry artist we liked and commissioned him to make two circles of white gold featuring an inlaid rectangle of polished agate. We never said we were engaged, never even discussed the rings’ meaning because we knew it: we were together.
*
Gold Hill h
ad its own weather, which usually bore no resemblance to whatever was happening down in Boulder. On a dark, snowy-wet forty-five-degree day I would drive down the hill and find myself in a city shimmering in sixty-five-degree sunshine under a searing blue sky, where the students had broken out their surfer shorts and skateboards. Sometimes a whitish miasma would slide quietly into town, blanking out everything. It was something I’d never seen before—not fog, not frost. It actually coated the branches of trees, and when I touched it, I found it weirdly sticky. Then one day I read that the cloud cover over Boulder was at approximately eight thousand feet, and I realized that we were literally living in the clouds. Cloud matter swathed our house and painted the aspen branches. It seemed to enter my head too, depressing me and making me feel captive and isolated and yearning for the flatlands.
The snow, too, was radically different from what I’d known all my life: bone-dry, squeaking like Styrofoam underfoot, impossible to compact into a ball. Winter wasn’t the Overlook Hotel snowpocalypse I’d imagined. As a rule, it’s the places that don’t expect it that are immobilized by snow. The more snow a place gets, the better its equipment will be. In the Rocky Mountains, snow is removed by full-scale bulldozers that essentially regrade the dirt roads as they push through. Getting to the road from our cabin and back again was another matter, requiring major shoveling, which Bob always did at an alarming pace—his log-splitting pace, the pace of a man who saw his work as an opponent to fight into submission. The big drifts glorified the town. At the end of a walk Morgaine would snowplow nose-first through the long snowbank in front of the house in utter ecstasy.
Spring in the Rockies is another thing altogether. At first I thought it came early, as some brilliant sun began to melt the snow in early March. I soon came to realize that a mountain spring means wild vacillation. There were seventy-degree walks with Morgaine and no jacket; there were blizzards; there was ice.
In May I finished a draft of the book I was working on, and I set my departure for the 15th of June. Bear and Poppy returned to their Boulder house, and I delivered Morgaine and said good-bye. On the 14th, we had a wet, heavy blizzard.
Bob always said good-bye as if he would see me in a matter of days. “Call tonight?” he said, kissing me as he left for work the next morning. When I got down to Boulder it was brilliantly sunny. I have no idea how I got lost on the way out of a city I had been navigating for a year. It took me a full hour to leave Boulder behind and head east across the plains, back home, back to work, back to the world where planes were about to fly into towers, ushering in a new millennium.
*
Bear and Poppy wanted their house back, so Bob faced homelessness. But he had Gold Hill bona fides now, so Jack and Linda invited him to move into their place in exchange for a little rent and maintenance work during their long absences. Thus was he able to stay in Gold Hill for the six more years he would be at CU. He came to Michigan for most Christmases, rooted there by family as well as by me. One year he was preceded by a rectangular parcel about two feet by one and a half, maybe two inches thick, and remarkably heavy. Inside was a slab of rosy granite inscribed, IT’S WRITTEN IN STONE.
“You should have seen the guy who engraved it, trying to figure out what I wanted it to say,” Bob said. “I kept saying, ‘It’s written in stone!’ and he kept looking at me. ‘Crazy flatlander. Probably from the university.’ ”
I visited him many times. One memorable spring break I arrived at the tail end of a blizzard that kept me in Boulder overnight before the roads opened sufficiently to allow Bear, who’d been stranded in town as well, to ferry me up to Gold Hill. But none of the driveways had been cleared and I had to climb up to Jack and Linda’s cabin through thigh-high drifts. Two local kids kindly portered my suitcase. The snow was up above the cabin’s back windows, making it very dark inside, and periodically Bob had to shovel the roof.
But my visits were usually in summer. I spent long, bright, dry days writing out in Jack’s little log studio or reading in the one easy chair Bob owned. Like most Gold Hill cabins, this one had an addition, a long room ending in a big dining table and a lovely bay window looking out over the hill and down to the road on its way out of town and the Meadow beyond it. One day, sitting there, I looked up to meet the eyes of what was either a bobcat or a lynx about ten feet away, making its way up the hill. The cabin porch looked down over the town, and Long’s Peak was visible in the far distance on clear days, when there was a great gold-and-pink sunset over the Divide. One night after we’d come home from Boulder and Bob had fallen into bed, I sat out there in the cool dark blue air. A full moon was rising over Horsfal, directly behind the cabin. As the light increased and the shadows before me intensified, its imminence was palpable, as if it were a huge living power coming up behind me. I made myself stay, almost frightened.
*
At the end of summer 2007, after ten years in Boulder, Bob retired. We didn’t ever really discuss his next move; it was somehow implicit that he would return to Michigan. I was heading into my fourth and final sabbatical, during which Bob and I would make it legal. In August I drove west one last time. At farewell events at the university he was given cards with dozens of signatures, toasts celebrating his achievements, photo montages, and polished granite versions of Ralphie the Buffalo, the university’s mascot. We spent a few days packing up and cleaning out, and by “we” I mean “I,” as he was still going to work. I plundered the hoard of near-empty boxes Bob had been moving around the country for several decades, consolidated their contents, and broke them all down for the recycling run. When he came home at 5:30, he found me filthy, T-shirt clinging to my body, hair plastered to my head, and he wasn’t nearly grateful enough.
Bob’s lush rosemary plant, so helpful for pork roasts, went fully buffered onto the floor of the back seat of my car, and one September morning our two laden vehicles pulled out of town over the Shelf Road. In my rearview mirror as we skirted Horsfal, a girl wavered in the middle of the road, having crawled from death back up into her life. With her unshackled wrist, she was waving.
*
Eight months later, when Bob died, the Gold Hill gang all called or wrote in shock and grief. After that, contact was sporadic. Sharon called occasionally to check on me and report wryly that she thought of Bob every time she used the compost bin he’d bequeathed to her when he left. In 2010 a monster fire roared up Four-Mile Canyon, burning over six thousand acres and destroying 160 dwellings, but the town itself survived yet again. Sometime after there came an email from Poppy to a world of people, announcing that Morgaine had died. The best dog in the world, she wrote. And in 2012, Annabelle returned to Gold Hill. Jack and Linda organized a reunion of the folks who had saved her life that night forty years earlier, after she had saved her own. Annabelle said she wanted to say thank you, and to show everyone she’d turned out all right, her life had gone on. She was married now, a mother.
When I fled the cabin on the Manistee two days after Bob died, I somehow managed to take the rosemary plant with me. But in Kalamazoo I neglected it and one day it was entirely brown. Rosemary, for remembrance.
*
A couple nights before we left Gold Hill, Poppy and Bear hosted a farewell feast at their house. It was like most late summer/early fall nights there: clear, cool, full of stars. Bob—having been required, even as guest of honor, to mix the martinis, in deference to his expertise—drank them steadily. I did my gin and tonics, my wine with dinner, and my share of the fierce mountain weed—which is to say maybe two hits, more than enough. We hugged and thanked everyone and then the two of us began to stagger home.
We moved through the silent streets. The dark inn, the closed-up store, the funny old cabins, familiar but still strange by night. The abandoned red pickup that had sat in the grass above Pine Street for decades. A huge moon cast our shadows on the hard-packed, rutted main drag. We held onto each other, laughing. I stopped once to look up, stumbling slightly. “Look,” I said. “We won’t see these stars again
.”
When Bob gazed up, he began to topple, so I grabbed his arm and we walked on.
I go back to that moment and implore everything to stop there. I beg those wheeling stars to spin us up and dissolve us into their vortex. But they were wheeling, after all. So we kept moving too, through the empty streets of that improbable place, two unlikely, drunken lovers beneath the fervent moon, eternally working their way home.
Grief’s Country
After the night of the open door, a morning comes, outrageously. It is brilliant and clear, a perfect May day. I am alone, standing in the living room of the cabin, looking out the dining room window, unseeing, waiting to move.
I am paralyzed in contradiction. It is impossible that this has happened, yet I know this has happened. But the spiking images cannot be real—they are too outlandish. So I am stuck, unable to move in the world of time.
We have been married four months and eight days, so this cannot have happened. It cannot have happened here, at our cabin, our stake in a joint future. It cannot have happened when he only went outside to bring the bird feeders in, as he did every night, to keep them from raccoons. It cannot be that he never came back. That makes no sense. But I feel twigs and mud in my matted hair, so my memory of sliding down into the river to find him must be true. An image lurks at the edge of my mind: slippers, one under the big white pine, one on the lower bank, inches from the water. I could not have imagined such a thing so it must have happened. And he must be gone, because I am here alone.
I have been alone all night. The police and neighbors were gone by 1 a.m. After asking me repeatedly if I would be all right, they left me, so I must have said I would be. Of course I did. I made five mandatory, dreadful phone calls, to his two siblings and two children and to Diane. I took a call from a stranger, a mortician, and said cremation.