Mary closed her eyes. “Oh, right,” she said. “Boise.”
That day—the day before I left for Indian Creek—was the day Megan told me that her mother had entered the final stages of her emphysema.
As a child, I spent nearly as much time sitting on Megan and Mary’s couch as I did at home. My mom and I loved each other, but we fought terribly, both of us strong-willed and stubborn. Once, after a particularly draining fight, I ran to Megan’s house. Mary was the one who comforted me. She saw my red-rimmed eyes and, without saying a word, handed me her Nintendo so we could play Tetris. In an hour we were laughing, and I had forgotten what had seemed so important before.
Once at Indian Creek, I dreamed of Mary. Across the river, the land was scorched black. Scarred, whitish trees rose out of the ground like skeletal fingers pointing accusingly at God. In my dream I was looking across the river at the dead trees. Some of them were still burning, but just slightly. Mary was standing in the middle of the charred landscape, and I was crying for her to get away from the fire. But the river ran too fast for her to cross.
Soon after I found out about Mary, my own mother was in Texas, holding on to her brother, who was dying of cancer. Except she probably wasn’t holding him. We didn’t show love in that way.
I hadn’t known my uncle, or any of my extended family. Not well, anyway. My mother’s parents had both died by the time she was eleven. My father’s father died when I was four. We lived in Idaho, and the rest of the family stretched across Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and Kansas. I had cousins I had never met.
When my uncle was diagnosed, he and my aunt drove across the country in their RV to see us. In his eyes and my mother’s eyes, I saw love, but also regret for all those years spent apart. We were all so alone.
THAT HOT, DRY summer was the summer that Caleb and I moved into my parents’ basement with baby Reed, and I saw a gentleness in them that I had never noticed before. My mother held Reed so tenderly. I wondered if she had held me that way when I was a baby, and I realized that she probably had.
I wanted to walk Reed over to Megan’s house and show him to her mother, but Mary was gone by then.
Because of Mary’s role as my childhood confidante, her relationship with my mother had always been strained. I think that my mother was jealous of my affection for Mary, and Mary thought that my mother was too hard on me. Still, in Mary’s final moments, my mother—the nurse—spent hours caring for her at her home. It was a generosity, and a redemption of sorts, and I was beginning to realize that no one is ever fully bound by their history.
THAT HOT, DRY summer was the summer I realized that my parents thought Caleb was too good for me. He would wake up first in the mornings and bring Reed to me, then make my lunch for work. One evening, as I was chopping vegetables for a salad, my mother spoke up. “Kelly, your dad and I have been talking, and we think that Caleb does too much for you.”
The blade of the knife slid through a tomato. My hand stopped. Red juice leaked on to the cutting board. “What?” I asked.
“He’s really generous, but maybe you should step up and do more.”
I didn’t know how to respond. If he was doing so much, then why was I so tired? Why did I feel so overwhelmed?
I snapped at my mother, “You don’t see everything that I do, and you only see how he is at your house. You don’t see him at our home. Or his parents’ house.” It was true. At Caleb’s parents’ house, I was relegated to the kitchen while he sat on the back porch and drank beer with his father.
My father stepped in and put his hand on my mother’s arm. “Honey,” he said to my mother, “this is none of our business.”
She threw up her arms. “I’m just trying to help,” she said.
“He’s right; it’s not any of your business.” I threw down the knife and ran down the stairs to the bedroom that I shared with Caleb.
“What’s wrong?” Caleb asked. I started crying, my shoulders shaking. Caleb gathered me into his arms. “I’m so sorry. It doesn’t matter what she says. You have me now. I’ll always be here for you.”
That hot, dry summer was when Caleb told me that if he saw a dirty knife in the sink, he would quickly wash it because he knew that I was the person my mother was going to yell at about it, no matter what.
That hot, dry summer was the first time that a family member—Caleb—acknowledged the ways in which my mother singled me out.
That hot, dry summer was the summer when Caleb began to feel like my real family—all that I had, the entirety of my existence—and I began to feel that, without him, I would be alone.
ONE EVENING DURING my Indian Creek summer, I was sitting on the porch of my cabin alone when I heard branches crack. Quickly. Urgently. I leaned forward, peering around the cabin just in time to see a deer burst out of the pine trees. Her haunches quivered. Hooves spinning. Nostrils flared. Her legs scattered the pine needles, kicking up the soil, unsettling the earth around her. A butterfly darted off in a flutter. My hand rose to my mouth involuntarily, my gut wrenching sideways.
Something was chasing her. I knew this. I moved back closer to the door, still angling my head to watch. The doe disappeared into another thicket of trees, and then the hunter appeared: a wolf, gray and lanky. His face pushed forward, eyes concentrated, the fur on his shoulders spiking, but I could see he wasn’t running as fast as he could. He was pacing himself—trotting.
I stepped off the porch and looked up the hillside. He took no notice of me. I scrutinized the trees above the cabin for anything—shadows, maybe, evidence of a pack—but I saw only pine trees with blue skies peeking through the boughs. Still, I knew that wolf probably wasn’t alone. He wasn’t running fast enough. When he disappeared into the trees, I shut myself in the cabin and sat down at the desk to read a three-year-old magazine left by a former ranger, someone else familiar with boredom and isolation.
Later, I went for a trail run alongside the river. This was the wilderness Abbey had written about; every noise was magnified. The sound of the water combined with the sound of the wind, and the tree branches swayed and rustled. I stopped when I saw some scat on the trail, kneeled down, grabbed a stick, and poked at it. It was wolf scat. Fresh. I stood up suddenly, breathing fast from my jog, and looked around. I had the eerie feeling of being watched. The hair on the back of my neck rose, but I shook off the feeling and continued. I wanted to run to Pungo.
Pungo, an archaeological site just below Indian Creek, was full of pit houses—ancient dugouts that the Shoshone Indians had lived in or used for storage. All that remained of the pit houses were indentations in the ground—barely recognizable—like potholes, but once in Pungo, my imagination always took over. I’d wonder what the wilderness had looked like all of those years ago, whether the magic would have been more accessible to me then.
I turned a corner, almost there, and stopped. Just to the side of the trail, I saw a hooved leg. I stepped closer. It was the deer. She had been torn apart—not inefficiently—legs pulled off and stomach wide open. Blood stained the ground above and below her, but there were no guts or innards around; she had been picked clean. Except for her eye. One eye—glossy and white—stared at me from her skull. It looked at me accusingly. Or pleadingly.
I wanted to cry out, I couldn’t help you. I almost said it out loud.
THAT HOT, DRY summer was the summer when I found out that Caleb had cheated on me while we were dating. Our relationship had been so short before we married that it had happened early on, but the infidelity still stung. I found out about the cheating because I had a hunch, and I pushed, and he finally told me.
It was a woman he had gone to high school with.
And another woman from the bar where I met him.
And yet another woman—a sex worker in a Nevada brothel.
Years later, when I was still pushing for an explanation, and there was no answer that would satisfy me, he exploded and said about the woman he had gone to high school with, “She treated me like shit in high school,
and I wanted to fuck her.”
He said about the woman from the bar, “I don’t know why I did it. She was fat.”
He said about the sex worker, “I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to her. I wanted to feel powerful.”
But he said none of those things during that hot, dry summer. Not that it would have made a difference.
THAT HOT, DRY summer was when I thought, I have married a man I do not know at all. That hot, dry summer was when I told my coworker Ben about Caleb’s cheating, and Ben told me about his father, who had cheated on his mother. “My dad is also a real asshole,” he said. “He’s pretty abusive. We fought this weekend, and when I tried to drive away, my dad jumped on top of the car.” I thought, Caleb sounds exactly like Ben’s dad.
THAT HOT, DRY summer was when I kicked Caleb out of my parents’ basement and made him stay in a hotel—when my parents tried to talk me out of being so angry—when I went to the hotel, so that Caleb and I could talk—when in Caleb’s room, I put Reed on the ground and then sank to the hard floor and wept beside my baby—when I told Caleb that I didn’t want to be married to him anymore—when he begged me to change my mind—when I stood up to leave, and he went into a rage.
He pinned me against the wall, and I remembered that chair hitting the wall above our bed. “Let me go,” I begged. Reed wailed and held up his arms. “Let me go!” I shouted. “Reed is crying.” Caleb unpinned me, and I grabbed Reed, then ran out of the hotel room, down a long, dark hallway, and into the parking lot, where I stopped and blinked at the sudden sunshine.
Heat bore down on me. Reed’s thumb was in his mouth, his head on my shoulder, his weight heavy in my arms. I didn’t know what to do.
I went home and said nothing to my parents. “Marriage is hard,” my mom said when she saw my red eyes, not unkindly. “It is so hard sometimes.”
SOLITUDE IS OVERRATED. “Somewhere in the depths of solitude,” wrote Edward Abbey, “beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.” At Indian Creek, I remembered, the solitude wore on me. I hadn’t found the inner fulfillment that I was looking for, so I was relieved when my coworker Rick arrived. Shortly after his arrival, the trees shook forebodingly. The wind picked up quickly, and raindrops blew sideways into me. Rick was standing on the stoop. “We should head into a cabin,” I said.
Rick looked at me and shook his head. “The cabins are surrounded by trees that could fall. The thinning crew identified them as hazard trees. We’d better find a low spot somewhere. Come on. Let’s head to that rock.” He grabbed my hand just as thunder cracked right next to us. I jumped. The wind was furious now. “Hurry!” he yelled over the wind. We ran and crouched on a large, flat rock perched on the edge of the river canyon just as the downpour started.
I was terrified, but Rick was laughing. “I love storms!” he shouted. He looked at me intensely. “Breathe,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Like this,” he said, taking a deep, long breath through his nose into his chest. “When storms come up like this, the air is charged with negative ions, and they’ll make you feel joy. No one really knows why, but the same thing happens when you walk under a waterfall. The negative ions in the air by waterfalls, and oceans, and in storms will make you happy. They release endorphins.”
I was skeptical. He looked at my confused face and smiled. “You think I’m crazy!” he shouted. “But I’m right.”
He took another long, deep breath and laughed. He really did look crazy, with his long beard and broad smile. I started to laugh too. He crouched on that rock and beat his fists into his chest, shouting madly. He smiled at me, took my hand, and I took a deep breath.
I felt something expanding inside my chest—fear, excitement, happiness—it was unclear what it was. Lightning boomed above me, and I looked up just in time to see a tree sway and then crash into the ground. A great plume of ash rose like smoke. Then another tree fell, and another. The world was shaking, rumbling, and cracking, and I was perched on a rock in the middle of it, holding hands with a strange man.
I had come to the wilderness seeking change through solitude, and I hadn’t found it because I wasn’t ready. The woods couldn’t heal me when all I could think about was Megan, Mary, my mom—people I loved who were hurting while I was unable to help. But when the storm ended, I felt released. Maybe Rick’s crazy ideas about negative ions had worked, but I don’t think it was that. For a moment, my loneliness had abated. I felt connected to—touched by—another person.
THAT HOT, DRY summer, three years later, I went away for a few days to do some stream sampling with Ben and one other young man. We stayed in a cabin together near a ghost town, but Ben and the other man bought beer and escaped to a nearby hot spring. I sat on the porch of that cabin and thought of my cabin at Indian Creek. It was all so beautiful, but what was the purpose in the beauty if I had no one to share it with? Now I missed my baby, and I missed my husband. This was not the time to reinvent myself.
I went home and told Caleb that we could remain married, but things needed to change. We would need to get couples counseling. He would have to work on his temper, and he would have to earn back my trust. He wrapped me in his arms and broke down into sobs. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry. I will fix this. I will make things better.” I felt my shoulders softening into his embrace, but still, there was a new hardness inside me.
“Thank you so much for loving me enough to give me another chance,” he said, as he held my face in his hands and kissed me.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” I said.
THAT HOT, DRY summer, I spent my days looking at rocks, feeling them in my hands, measuring them, and I learned to find their beauty within. One day I found a rock that glowed silver and green, and I turned it into a totem. When I worried about my marriage, I held that weight in my hand. I told myself that everything would be okay—that as long as I was married, I would never be alone.
10
Take Me to the River
WHEN THE SCHOOL year began, we moved back to Boise. An older friend of mine who had worked with me in the forest service was renting us a house for an amount that we could afford. It was a clean little house on a tidy street in an orderly neighborhood with a large fenced yard and a garden. It was the kind of house where a family could be happy.
IN AUGUST, JUST before we moved back to Boise, Caleb and I left Reed with my parents for a couple of days and drove to Boise to make arrangements for the move. We stayed in a hotel and went to see my therapist. We talked about Caleb’s betrayal, about my feelings of resentment, and about how to move forward. We did not talk about Caleb’s anger. We talked about what I could do differently. The answer was clear: I had to be more forgiving, more tolerant, and more accepting of Caleb’s flaws. I was too hard, he said.
I felt this hardness inside me; I knew it to be true.
THE THERAPIST ASKED Caleb why he hadn’t told me the truth. “Because she would have punished me,” he said. The word punish continued to recur from him, and I was baffled. What did he mean by punish?
Finally the therapist said to Caleb, “Did your mother punish you when she was angry?”
“Yes,” he said. “If I skipped church on a Sunday evening, she would have still been giving me the silent treatment on Tuesday.”
The therapist then asked, “Do you think that Kelly punishes you?”
He thought for a long time and then said, “No, I guess not.”
It was true. I rarely held grudges. My own mother had been short-tempered, but she was not a grudge holder. She never held things against me for very long, and my father was almost oddly calm. Punishing was not behavior that I had seen modeled at home, but although I didn’t have the extremes of my mother’s temper, I did have a temper.
I had spent my twenties in therapy, trying to learn how to forgive. I wanted to forgive my mother for how hard she was on me, and I wanted to forgive myself for how hard I was on her in return. I hadn’t wanted to have chil
dren because I was afraid that I would duplicate the dynamic I’d had with my mother in my own family, but it never occurred to me that I would marry an angry person rather than becoming one. Therapy taught me how to accept accountability for my insecurities and my failings, but maybe I grew too willing to accept accountability. I was more inclined to blame myself when I was angry than I was to blame Caleb.
After that therapy session, we went back to our hotel, and I held Caleb tenderly, said that I was sorry. I felt a kinship with the broken boy inside him who had craved his mother’s approval, and I wanted to love that boy the way he had never been loved. We went for a swim in the hotel pool. I had sobbed at the therapist’s office, and then again in the hotel, and my eyes were puffy and red. My body felt so heavy, but in that cool, blue water, Caleb picked me up and wrapped my legs around his waist. He held me, and the heaviness lifted.
STILL, THE NEXT day, on the six-hour drive home to my parents’ house, we argued. About something. Anything. Soon we were screaming. I felt that I was drowning. No matter what I said, it was turned against me. I wanted to make it stop. I almost wanted to jump out of the moving car, but then Caleb stopped in the middle of the highway. He got out of the driver’s side, ran across the road, and threw the keys off the hillside. I got out, too, and just stood there. He had thrown the keys onto a rock field, where they fell in a crevice between the rocks that was dark and endless. The keys were gone. I looked at the car—both doors open—in the middle of the highway. We were on a deserted stretch of highway, and we didn’t have a spare key with us.
The Salmon River, dark and fast, rushed below us.
I REMEMBERED THE last time that we had stared at the river together. A few weeks earlier, just after I decided to stay with Caleb, our little family had gone to Dagger Falls, where the salmon jump. They are called Dagger Falls because of the sharp black rocks that poke out of the frothy white water. As I stared at the falls, Reed in my arms and Caleb beside me, I thought back to the summer when I worked at Indian Creek. I had found an arrowhead at Dagger Falls, black obsidian carved into a sharp point, and I had pocketed it, even though I shouldn’t have. Take only memories. Leave only footprints. I had tried to take a part of that wilderness home with me, but I lost my treasure somewhere along the way. Maybe it was karma. Maybe I lost the arrowhead because I never should have tried to take something that didn’t belong to me. Maybe I didn’t deserve to have anything beautiful in my life.
Goodbye, Sweet Girl Page 10