Goodbye, Sweet Girl

by Kelly Sundberg

  HE WROTE THAT he had played “Windfall” a lot when he was in love with me and couldn’t tell me yet. He had listened to this song on his way up the mountain, and it was so happy and carefree that it had made him think of me. He wrote that he hoped, forever, the wind would take my troubles away.

  He wrote that he wanted me to have the good life I deserve.

  “GLORY BOX” MADE him think of the previous Valentine’s Day, when after Reed had gone to sleep, we boiled lobsters, cracked the red claws, sucked the meat out of the shell, and licked the greasy butter off our fingers. Then I danced for him, wearing that spaghetti-strap shirt. I had never felt comfortable before with a man in that way, but as I danced, I felt like a woman. Later, my fingers dug into his back as he came inside me, again and again.

  HE CHOSE “CONCEIVED” because we had made a baby on Valentine’s Day. He wrote, “See note for ‘Glory Box.’”

  “NEVER TEAR US Apart” reminded him of the time he had drunkenly told me that he wanted me to marry him. I wasn’t pregnant yet, and we were just two kids in love. He wrote that he had been so scared because he knew that I was the one, and told me that I should never question his love for me. I remembered that I had been scared, too, that I had thought things were moving too quickly, but his eyes and his gentleness had reassured me that it was okay.

  HE WROTE THAT he wished that he had written “Mystifies Me” for me.

  “GIVE A MAN a Home” made him think of how I had given him a home when he didn’t deserve it. He knew that I had lost my belief in him, but he wanted to restore it.

  HE WROTE THAT he wished he could have gone back to high school and stood outside my window holding a boom box while playing “In Your Eyes,” just like I had seen John Cusack do in the movie Say Anything. In high school I had dreamed of that kind of grand, romantic gesture, but had never thought that any man would do that for me.

  Until Caleb.

  AND FINALLY, HE wrote of how the song “Standing in the Doorway” made him think of how he had felt on the night in Salmon when I had made him stay in a hotel. He wrote that he hadn’t known if he could fix our marriage, that he didn’t blame me for what had happened to us, and he begged me to try to forgive him.

  When I finished the letter, I was in tears. He had accepted accountability for his actions, and his sincerity was obvious. He wanted to fix the broken things.

  More than that, he had perfectly described the shine of our early relationship, a time that had felt like a beautiful haze.

  He looked at me, tears in his eyes, and said, “I mean it,” and I prayed that he did. I didn’t know if I could handle any more sadness.

  WHEN I SPOKE to Jeannie a few days later, she reassured me that her blues had been a lapse, that she was happy in her marriage and life. I wanted to believe her. Everyone said that relationships took work. My own mother had told me to try hard, and I was going to try. I remembered the sparkle of those early days. I was not a quitter, and I didn’t want to let go of that shine.

  13

  His Ghost in Her Bones

  THE ROSEBRIAR INN, a former convent, was a bed-and-breakfast perched on the upper end of Astoria, Oregon, a town where the Columbia River meets the Pacific. Known as the Graveyard of the Seas due to the deadly mix of currents caused by the merging of the two bodies, Astoria is a city of shipwrecks.

  Caleb and I were vacationing there for our second anniversary. My parents were watching Reed for us, and we were enjoying an actual week’s vacation during our spring break. We were doing this for two reasons. The first was that Boise State had found that a certain number of adjunct instructors were teaching too many courses, and they had realized they needed to promote those instructors to special lecturers and were offering them benefits and back pay. Caleb had come into a windfall of about $11,000, but it wasn’t set to last. When his contract started over, he would be back to an adjunct’s salary of $2,500 per class, with no benefits, and he would never be allowed to teach as many classes.

  Which led to the second reason we were on this vacation: Caleb and I had decided to move to West Virginia.

  There were many compelling reasons for the move. We had money for the first time. Caleb’s parents had a house that they had bought before the bubble and would sell to us cheaply. Caleb could adjunct anywhere, including WVU, so it wasn’t like he was going to be out of work. He wanted to be closer to his family, and finally I had come to the realization that my English degree wasn’t practical enough for our financial needs. West Virginia University had a master’s program in teaching English as a second language that I had thought might be a good fit. Caleb had convinced me that we could get on our feet in West Virginia, establish ourselves, and then move back west.

  “We’ll be there for five years max,” he said.

  THE BIGGEST REASON for the move was that our relationship simply wasn’t working. I had tried everything—individual therapy, couples therapy, exercise, antidepressants—and I was still miserable. We fought, then made up, then fought again, and I had never been so exhausted. Caleb never seemed to tire. He could fight for hours.

  Always, I eventually broke, apologizing and begging for forgiveness.

  STILL, REED WAS such a joy. He had a stuffed toy Tigger from Winnie the Pooh that he carried around, and I would call Reed my own little Tigger because he loved to run, and jump, and would break into laughter that shook his entire body. When I would take him to the grocery store, his big eyes and broad grin charmed everyone he met. At night we would cuddle in bed and read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, and though he couldn’t read or speak well yet, he would chatter along with me in imitation, his head on my shoulder, his thumb in his cheek.

  He wasn’t a cuddly child, was generally too busy for snuggles, but when he was tired, he would hold his arms up to me and say, “Carry me. Carry me.”

  For years, even when he was nowhere nearby, I would think that I could hear his voice crying, Carry me. Carry me.

  Once, when Kelly M. was visiting, Reed was crawling in the hallway, and I pounced on him and kissed him all over. “He’s just so cute,” I said. “I’ve never been one of those people to make up silly songs for babies, but I can’t help myself with him.” Caleb adored Reed, too, and something that we always agreed on was that Reed was our greatest happiness.

  The money and the move to West Virginia was exciting, and suddenly Caleb and I were getting along. We drove to Portland, Oregon, and laughed the entire way. In Portland we ate good food and went to shops, but mostly, we had sex. We had so much sex that I felt as though my chest had cracked open, and Caleb had crawled inside it. If I could have, I would have let him inside my own skin. I felt as connected to him as I had during the shiny early days of the relationship.

  After Portland, we drove up the coast to Astoria, where we landed at the Rosebriar Inn. We went out for a dinner of salmon, then back to our room, where we drank wine, had sex again, and then watched General Hospital, my weakness. When the theme song came on, he danced into the room playing air saxophone, and I laughed, then opened my arms to him so that he could crawl into them and lay his head on my chest. We fell asleep like that.

  And then I woke suddenly. It was as though a fist had cracked me on the head. I could feel the pain. I was awake, but I couldn’t move. A woman was sitting on my chest. She was afraid. This wasn’t the first time I had suffered from sleep paralysis. One night, after a terrible fight with Caleb, I woke, convinced that a large wooden stake had speared me to the bed. Finally I screamed. Caleb grabbed me and held me tightly in his arms.

  “You’re safe,” he said as I trembled into his chest. “You’re safe.”

  THAT NIGHT IN Astoria, I was scared, but I didn’t scream. When I was a child, my night terrors had been so bad that I had slept with the overhead light on. In the Rosebriar Inn, when I could finally move, I got up and went to the bathroom, where I flicked on the light.

  I told myself that ghosts don’t like the light.

  But I was no longer that
young girl who slept with an overhead light, and the bathroom light kept me from falling asleep. Finally I pushed Caleb awake. “Will you go and turn off the bathroom light?” I asked. I was too scared to do it myself.

  He grumbled, “Why did you turn on the light in the first place?” Still, he got up and turned off the light.

  I didn’t say, “Because I was afraid.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, he teased me over breakfast, and finally I said, “I thought that I saw a ghost, okay? I was scared.” He laughed at me, and then I said, “She was a woman, and I think she had been abused by her husband. I know it sounds crazy, but it felt so real.” He had no reaction to the fact that the woman I had dreamed of was being abused.

  I didn’t tell him that I had felt that fist crack on my own skull, that I had felt her pain.

  Caleb was used to my ghosts by then. In our first apartment I had dreamed of that woman—bloated and bruised—floating in the corner of the bedroom. But in the Rosebriar Inn, he teased me, and then we had sex in the shower. As I came, I felt that someone was watching me through the glass door, and Caleb later said that he had felt the same.

  AFTER WE DRESSED, we explored town, went to a coffee shop and read our books side by side, walked down to the wharf and looked at the sea lions, and then bought a picnic lunch. Then we drove down the coast to Ecola State Park, where we started our hike down to the ocean. Halfway down the trail, we stopped to eat our lunch while we watched the ocean crash upon the shore. I had grown up landlocked. The immensity of the water thrilled me.

  When we reached the beach, we were alone. It was early evening, and the sun shimmered gold on the water. We scooped up sand dollars like delicate flowers. We chased each other.

  We took a self-portrait, and it remains my favorite picture of the two of us: my head bent toward his. Both of us relaxed. The ocean stretching behind us.

  Just off to the side was a cave, and I stared at it—the arresting darkness inside it. I wanted to go inside, but I didn’t.

  The tide was coming in, and I was afraid of drowning.

  CALEB AND I went back to our room for our last night in Astoria. I still felt the presence of that woman, but I had made peace with her and slept soundly that night. The next morning, after breakfast, as I was readying for a shower, Caleb rushed into the room. “Let’s go,” he said, scooping our clothes into our suitcase.

  “I was just getting ready for a shower,” I said.

  “Shower tomorrow,” he said. “I’m ready to get on the road.”

  We went downstairs to check out of the inn, and while the woman at the counter was preparing our bill, Caleb said, “I have something to show you.” He took me to a table in the lobby. There was a little book on it titled Haunted Astoria. It was a book written by a ghost-hunting agency. “Turn to the chapter on the Rosebriar Inn,” he said. A medium who had been brought in to investigate had said that the room we had stayed in was haunted by the ghost of a woman who was “afraid for him to come home.”

  I laughed. “I guess I’m psychic,” I said, tossing down the book.

  “Honestly, it freaks me out,” Caleb said. I realized that was why he had wanted to leave so quickly.

  “Honey,” I said, “if there is really a ghost in there, she was there the entire time. I don’t think leaving sooner makes a difference now, but this is going to make a really great story.”

  It did make a great story, and in the years that followed, I thought of that woman often. At the time, I had never known what a fist to the head felt like, but Caleb would show me.

  I learned about “old hag syndrome,” where the victim wakes to the feeling that a woman is pressing down on her chest. It’s just another word for sleep paralysis, but the victim feels haunted. I knew that what I had experienced was a dream, but still the idea of that woman remained coiled inside me. What if she had been a ghost? What if she had come to warn me? What if she had been a ghost from my own future?

  When I woke to that woman’s presence on my chest, I didn’t yet know that the memory of Caleb’s fist would become a ghost in my bones.

  Caleb and I drove down the coast to Corvallis, Oregon, where we spent a couple of days with Megan and her husband. We stopped along the way at a shipwreck. Caleb took a picture of me in front of the boat’s hollowed-out skeleton. When I looked at the picture, I thought that though I was smiling, I looked sad.

  We headed back to Boise, where my parents had been taking good care of Reed. He stretched his arms out to me, and I buried my head in his warm baby softness. I had never been sentimental with my parents before. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, but I cried this time as their car drove away. In only a month, Caleb, Reed, and I would be leaving them behind, on our way to West Virginia.

  I thought that we were doing the right thing.

  MY IN-LAWS CAME to help us move. We packed all our belongings into boxes, then hired a moving van to take them cross-country. Caleb and his father were driving our car to West Virginia, and Joanne and I were flying together. Caleb left, and Joanne and I were alone in the house with Reed during that final day. Joanne entertained Reed while I scrubbed everything clean. I didn’t know how to talk to her, and I felt so sad. At one point she took Reed to the store, and I sat in the middle of the empty living room and wept.

  We boarded the plane the next day. Reed sat on my lap as we took off, and Joanne sat a couple of rows behind us. I wished that it was my own mother with me. As the plane rose higher, I saw the brown desert of the Boise foothills below me, then the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and soon the plains of the Midwest stretched before me.

  “Goodbye, Idaho,” I whispered. “I’ll be home soon.”

  14

  Christmas Baby

  ON A FRIGID white Christmas in Idaho—just across the border from Wyoming, in the same snowy town where my father had started his first job with the US Forest Service, where my mother had once slid into a snowbank in her Volkswagen Bug, and my brother, still a tot, had panicked and jumped out of the car into that bank—I was born. My brother’s fifth Christmas was effectively ruined, and though my parents called me the best Christmas gift they’d ever received, it was always in the back of my mind. I was not a Christmas gift; I was the one who ruined Christmas.

  IN ASTROLOGY, THOSE born under the sign of Capricorn are austere. Winter babies are born into darkness.

  IN THE FIRST or second grade, I grew so impatient to know what I was getting for Christmas that I ripped open every single package under the Christmas tree. First I opened my own, and then the disappointment set in—the realization that I had nothing left to look forward to—so I opened everyone else’s presents too. My mother was enraged. I cowered in the corner of my bedroom as she screamed at me, and I knew that I was bad.

  Always, I was bad.

  That year, I received a plastic baggie of coal in my stocking. My father looked at my mother and laughed. It should have been funny, was funny, but I was hurt. I still believed in Santa. I thought that, in addition to disappointing my parents, I had also disappointed Santa. My father stopped laughing when he saw my face. He looked at my mother as though to say, Maybe we went too far. My mother gently took the baggie out of my hands and said, “Look at the rest. You still got everything you wanted.” But what I had really wanted was to be a good girl.

  IN 2004 MY mother’s brother died on Christmas Eve, and she flew to Texas. My father, brother, and I spent that Christmas alone. I had started dating Caleb during that October, and he was in West Virginia, visiting his family.

  Before Caleb left for West Virginia, I asked him, “Can I call you my boyfriend?”

  He kissed me quickly. “Yes,” he said.

  “So, we’re not seeing other people?”

  “No, I only want to see you.”

  I drove him to the airport at dawn. The sun was rising, and the Boise foothills were bathed in light. On my way home, I thought, I think I love him. But then: Something does not feel right.

  Still, as I tucked myself back und
er the covers for a couple more hours of sleep, all I could remember was how much warmer my bed had been with him inside it.

  WHILE HE WAS away, Caleb sent me a card for my birthday. He wrote, “My mom didn’t get the joke, but I know that you will get it.” And I did get it. It was an inside joke. The card had a honeybee on the cover. On the inside, it said, “Love you, HONEY.” The joke stemmed from the time when I told Caleb about a romance novel I read in the eighth grade. A pirate said to his love, “I’ve tasted your milk. Now I want to taste your honey.” I read that line out loud to my girlfriends in the middle of science lab, and we howled with laughter. At that time, I read so many romance novels that my mother finally went to the public library and asked them to stop checking them out to me. She told me they would give me “unrealistic expectations” of love.

  My mother was right. They did give me unrealistic expectations about love.

  AFTER I TOLD Caleb that story, he leaned in to kiss my neck—his beard tickling me—and growled into my ear, “I want to taste your honey.”

  “That’s so creepy!” I said, but then I laughed and turned my face to him so that he could kiss me properly. It became a ritual. He would sneak up on me from behind and whisper that he wanted to “taste my honey.” The feel of his beard on my neck always startled me, but in the most delightful way.

  ON THAT CHRISTMAS in 2004 when my uncle died, Caleb called. My father said, “There’s a guy on the phone for you,” while shooting me a curious glance because I hadn’t said much to my parents about a new boyfriend. Caleb then told me about how embarrassed he had been to ask his mother for a ride to get my birthday card. I said, “Why did you need a ride? Why couldn’t you drive yourself?” I didn’t know at the time that his driver’s license was suspended in West Virginia because of a DUI. He didn’t tell me that until after we married. Instead, he distracted me by saying, “My family all wanted to know about you. I told them that you were beautiful, and smart, and funny.” I told him about my uncle’s death and realized how little we knew about each other.