My mom was famous for novel-length texts.
I started to draft a return text and lost connection.
Damn it.
“Here you are!” Virginia appeared with the white carafe again. “Sorry it took so long. I had brewed a fresh pot and it was just finishing.”
“That’s okay. I actually got a text to go through and got a return text before losing reception again. Kids are okay, which makes me feel so much better.”
“Of course it does, Lizzie,” she agreed. “Good to hear.”
“Well, we’re fucking stuck.”
Cal’s voice sounded from the foyer, and I stood, my nerves already frayed. I met him in the front entryway.
“Could you not swear?” I hissed under my breath.
“Sorry but it’s fucking cold.”
I wasted three seconds trying to grasp his logic.
“The Explorer won’t start. And neither will your truck.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Jake’s out there now. He thinks it’s either a bad cell in the battery, or the alternator. Or maybe the fuel line is frozen. Who knows. Any cell reception?”
“Still no.”
“Fuck.”
I ignored that one because I felt the same way.
“Well then! We’ll just have to make the best of it, won’t we!” Virginia called cheerfully from the living room.
Cal and I exchanged a mutual annoyed/ frustrated/ irritated glance.
I hated that we could still do that.
FOUR
Virginia offered for Jake to push the truck into the oversized, detached garage adjacent to the house. “I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s in there, Jake. My ex-husband wasn’t much of a mechanic, but he owned a lot of tools. If you know a little bit about fixing cars, some of it might be useful.”
Jake knew enough about fixing cars to accept her offer.
Cal lifted his eyebrows in his over-animated way. “I could help a little. Maybe we could get at least one car running and get to a phone. How far’s the closest house from here?”
I could tell Jake was totally against spending the day in a garage with Cal. Virginia looked thoughtful, pointing toward the back of the house. “Just beyond the lake, through the woods, about six miles.
Six. Miles.
Six miles was an easy hike in July. Six miles in my fancy leather Christmas-dinner boots in the middle of a December snow storm in Pennsylvania was another story.
“I’d offer you my vehicle, if I had one,” Virginia said. “After the accident, I stopped driving. I have some friends in town; they’ll give me rides when I need one.”
Of course she didn’t have a vehicle.
“You’re more than welcome to go exploring, if you’re brave enough. Both the house and grounds. I have plenty of cold weather gear, both women’s and men’s. My ex-husband left behind a lot of clothing.”
There it was again. Ex-husband. I felt like she was presenting me with the information as a form of emotional currency. I feel you, Lizzie. I am here for you.
I wondered if the ex-ing happened before or after their daughter died.
“Thank you. I’ll take you up on that, if you don’t mind. I was going to ask you if I could explore the house first, actually. It’s so beautiful,” I added.
“Then I’ll explore outside,” Lana sniped, crossing her arms over her chest.
Virginia looked between the two of us, and Jake gave a low whistle, slicing the tension in the room. “I’ll be in the garage. Cal, you can come if you want.”
Cal was at Lana’s side in an instant.
“Nah, I think I’ll go outside with Lana. You said you have men’s snow gear?” he asked Virginia.
I tuned out their conversation, looking at Cal with Lana by his side. She was much shorter than me, and much younger than him. Twenty years younger. He bowed to her every will like she was some kind of trophy wife, though I struggled to articulate an actual title for her.
Recovering drug-addict.
Active alcoholic.
Resting bitchfaced adulterer.
Bad mom.
Worse step-mom.
Convenient. Convenient Wife. There was nothing trophy about Lana.
I didn’t remember much about the day Cal left.
I remembered crying. I told him to leave, and to never to touch me again.
The first nights were the worst. At night, my tortured memory would wonder the most arbitrary things about my marriage. I’d wonder about the last time my husband had kissed me. Had it been the morning of the big reveal? The day before Thanksgiving, when he had admitted to having an affair, was called The Big Reveal in my mind. I had felt like I was going borderline crazy back then. I was living in a game show and the extent of our many years had culminated into that one moment. The Big Reveal.
Had I kissed him that morning? No, he’d left before I’d woken up.
The night before? I knew he’d started eating dinner in our bedroom, away from me and the kids, so I doubted I’d kissed him then either.
I hadn’t wanted to kiss him anymore by the day of The Big Reveal. I guess my lips knew before my heart did.
The way the pain would wrap around my chest like a vice still surprised me. I tried not to think about that day, ever. Spending so much time with Cal and Lana was starting to rekindle old memories better left dead and buried.
Virginia showed Cal and Lana to the room with the clothes they’d need to go outdoors, and Jake wrapped his arms around me.
“This sucks.”
“Yeah. But it could be worse,” I assured him.
He raised his eyes, backing up a bit to look down at me. “Could it? Really?”
I laughed, shrugging. “Maybe. I could be stranded with two broken legs and my number one fan.”
“Even worse. I could be at work,” he added with a grin.
Even in the most dire situations, Jake made me laugh.
“True.”
“Speaking of... I know you want to tour the house. Maybe you’ll be inspired to start writing again?” he suggested.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
He kissed my lips before heading for the garage.
I hadn’t written in three years. I spent way too much emotional energy focused on being a single mom, then meeting and falling in love with Jake, all while trying to maintain my day job at the insurance company I worked for. Writing had been my escape from all of Cal’s bullshit. My wonderland of make-believe. He couldn’t touch me there.
But maybe that’s why I never saw it coming.
I had to be aware with Jake. Alert. Present and available. Writing took me away, and I wasn’t prepared for that.
Not yet.
I got a Brother typewriter for Christmas in second grade. This was after writing story after story with pen to paper. My mom and dad knew how much I loved to write and fed my creativity with the best tools they could have ever offered me.
Freedom.
I had very little boundaries growing up. No bedtimes, set meal times, or really rules of any kind. I watched HBO in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I watched Saved by the Bell and I watched Romancing the Stone. I loved Annie and I loved The Bodyguard. I read “Little House on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder and “Flowers in the Attic” by V.C. Andrews. No censorship.
I learned by making good choices and bad choices. In our household, it was all about the Golden Rule. That’s how I learned, and that’s how I grew up.
We lived in a big, blue colonial home next to the most magical woods in the world. In the summer I’d wake up, run to the woods, and spend the day there. Sometimes there was a helicopter crash that left me and my brother and sister as orphans, fending for ourselves in the wilderness. Sometimes we were international spies, and our missions would take the better part of the day to prepare (passports using Newsweek photos and detailed maps drawn on brown paper bags.) We built actual fires, cooking our food over the open flame even though we had a gigantic kitchen stocked with grocer
ies at our disposal.
We used our imagination.
Most of the time I was a princess, of course. But I was more than just a princess. I was an escaped princess, running from a castle, protecting my baby doll from the evil wrath of a king who hunted me down and threatened my execution for my infidelity with his knight. When I wasn’t play acting, I was playing Barbies. I had one Ken and about twenty Barbies, so Ken and his harem would often find themselves in precarious situations.
I wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote poems that made absolutely no sense but sounded deep enough to convince my teachers that I was weirdly talented. I joined a writing club in school that competed against other schools. I won a blue ribbon for a story about a woman who buys an old answering machine at a garage sale, goes home, listens to the message, and hears that a drug deal is going down later that night. (Because most criminals leave their criminal buddies messages on their answering machine, detailing the events of their criminal plans.)
I wrote a story about Kate and Jack. Jack was cheating on Kate- with the sexy secretary! And they had a four-year-old daughter. Even though I was only twelve, my grandma loved it. She was very proud of my imagination and told me so as we snuggled on the couch to watch our daily dose of Days of our Lives.
I was a chunky kid with glasses, crooked teeth, zero sense of fashion, unkept permed hair, and acne. I was never teased, or if I was, I never knew it. I lived in the la-la-land of my own imagination. By the time I got to high school, I grew out of the awkward and found a better sense of myself.
I grew up. I wrote more stories. I wrote fan fiction before fan fiction had a name. I researched past lives. I researched Cambodia. I researched music. I researched everything I could in my dusty collection of Encyclopedias. I wrote more. I wrote utter shit purely for enjoyment. I wrote seedy stories and I wrote poignant stories.
As I would tell my kids- writing, just like anything, was a skill. Some skills come naturally, some you must work at. Some will never exist no matter how hard you try. Or they may exist, but may not exist well. When you are doing something that you love, you want to do it. And therefore, you do more of it. And the more you do, the better you get.
The English language and I were torrid lovers. We fought, we spun, we italicized and we ellipsed. We began our journey together sometime around 1983. Sometimes I wrote like I was holding a feather quill, feeling very pretentious and deep and showy. Sometimes I was gritty and grainy. Sometimes I alliterated like it was nobody’s business.
But that was me, and that was the way I liked it.
My writer’s voice came with time, and practice, and experience. It came differently with each character. When I wrote, I did what I loved, but I wrote only for passion. To make writing my sole source of income- to depend on others to buy my books for me to feed and clothe my children- would completely take the fun away. It would eliminate my personal therapy session that consisted of a solid block of time and nothing by a cup of coffee and the keyboard in front of me. I submitted zero query letters to publishers or literary agents- not for fear of rejection, or lack of time, or any other reason. I chose not to go that route, and I loved having a lucrative hobby.
I had a career at great company. That was my job. Writing was my love.
My memories were based on a true story.
Fiction delivered me from evil.
I wandered through the front parlor into the back parlor to wait. If my memory of the book research I’d done served me correctly, most Victorian-style mansions had both a front and a back parlor, and I was right. The mansion already had a dining room, so I expected this room to house a quintessential claw-footed billiard table.
I was pleasantly surprised to find a library. Enormous floor-to-ceiling shelves were a booklover’s dream. I ran my fingertip over the spines of the books that were at eye-level, marveling in the rough binding embossed with smooth lettering.
Moby Dick.
The Great Gatsby.
The Scarlet Letter.
It made sense that Virginia had so many books, and I had a strong feeling she’d read every one of them. They weren’t part of the décor. Literature meant something to her. Words were her strength.
Her character.
I chose the Scarlet Letter to personify my mood. Opening to a page in the middle, I realized that the spine was broken and bent to the place where I’d chosen. There, in pencil, was underlined a single passage.
“Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves beside him. "Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”
I tried to remember my tenth-grade honors literature class. We’d read and discussed The Scarlet Letter, but I wasn’t going to pretend I’d opened the book since. This part, however, was clear.
She wanted forgiveness. She wanted God to judge.
He wanted revenge.
I was thinking about Cal again, no matter how much I tried to distract myself with Hester’s shenanigans.
There were only so many days that we were privileged to spend in the world, and some become more important than others.
Birthdays. Holidays.
Firsts and lasts.
The night before Thanksgiving, three years ago, had become all of them to me.
I wanted to proclaim that it was the day I was born out of the wreckage of chaos and abuse. That it was the day my strength, in its most primitive form, emerged from a spring so deep inside, I wondered if I could ever tap that source again.
In actuality, it was a Wednesday that I merely survived.
I slipped into automation, and the memories were like dead, falling leaves. Crumpled, with no rhyme or reason for where the wind takes them.
I’d left work early the day before Thanksgiving to try to get everything that we needed for dinner the next day and beat the holiday rush. The store was a madhouse anyway, despite my best efforts to avoid the lines.
I’d tried calling Cal several times from the store. I knew he also got off work early that day.
He wasn’t answering.
I’d suggested we spend our first Thanksgiving in all our years together alone, just us. Me, Cal, and our three children.
He’d responded with a shrug.
I knew that the night before Thanksgiving was the biggest drinking night of the year, thanks to so many years of being with an alcoholic.
At first, back in the good ol’ days of 1997 when we’d first met, I’d made a joke that the bar was the proverbial “other woman.” I’d developed a sixth sense long before his first DUI, knowing exactly when the next binge would occur. Now that I’d had plenty of therapy, I knew my sixth sense was actually my subconscious recognizing the cycle of abuse.
Back then, it was just a “Cal’s about to get drunk and abuse me” feeling.
That Thanksgiving eve, as I’d roamed around the busy wholesale club trying to decide whether Cal would want turkey, or ham, or both, I’d stopped at a kiosk of white t-shirts for sale.
Whenever I got stuck in flashback mode, I always thought about those goddamned white t-shirts.
Me: Cal. WHY aren’t you answering me!? I’d texted him for the third time.
As I stared at the t-shirts, thinking that Cal needed some new shirts but believing he was drinking away his paycheck at the bar, I fought with the simultaneous urge to make him happy and then immediate disgust with myself for the way that I let him treat me.
I threw the pack of t-shirts in the cart and checked out, deciding I was going to catch him in a lie.
But also wanting him to have nice t-shirts.
This internal emotional battle described our entire marriage.
His work was right around the corner from the store, so I drove through his parking lot.
His car was not there.
Check.
It was time for him to reply to me and tell me he was “still at work.”
We both knew the script by now.
Liar.
I waited, wondering which bar he’d gone to.
My text sounded, and I glanced down at the message on the screen.
Cal: Sorry, I was talking in the parking lot. You can call me now.
He was a talker. He knew I’d buy this excuse.
I narrowed my eyes, a million thoughts running through my head as I reached for my phone.
Why do I continue to take this from him?
Why do I let him lie to me?
Have I lost so much self-respect that I just don’t even care anymore?
Is this just what keeps my engines running? The fight?
I knew that I cared. I cared enough to visit a lawyer the last time he’d grabbed me by the throat and shoved me into the closet door.
But then, he was sorry.
He was sorry, he’d never do it again, blah blah blah... but the words he spoke were silent compared to the psychology of it all. The Cycle of Abuse, detailed in a colorful poster on my psychiatrist’s wall. For me and Cal, it would be time for the honeymoon phase, the part of our marriage I looked forward to the most.
He would cuddle me, shower me with attention, tell me what a brilliant writer I was and how lucky he was to have me and the kids. He’d make sure we spent time together doing the things that I loved, like walking through the park or seeing a movie. He would morph into the Cal that I fell in love with, and though I knew deep down it would be short lived until the build-up began again, I was so fucking starved for attention that I’d just let it be.
I always ended up staying. To We The Abused, the honeymoon phase is crack.
Mostly, I couldn’t imagine having to hand my children over to him if we split up. I’d quit my job twice to stay home with them over the span of years, knowing that when Cal was in charge, the kids would end up crying and calling me home from work anyway. His way of parenting included screaming and berating them, and all of my kids had ended up developing some sort of anxiety disorder over the course of their lives.
I hated this part of my thought spiral. This is where I blamed myself.
It’s my fault for staying so long.
But it wasn’t my fault, I’d been assured by newer and more improved psychiatrists. The cycle of abuse was a chemical reaction in my brain, just like love. Or hatred. Or anger. I was Pavlov’s pup.
ABOUT HER Page 4