Goodbye, Sweet Girl

by Kelly Sundberg

  I WENT BACK to Boise after that Christmas in 2004. Caleb was still in West Virginia. One night I accompanied some friends to the Neurolux. An attractive man—angular face, dark glasses, and dark hair, brooding and slightly older than me—caught my eye. I had caught him staring at me many times before. I had told my friends how cute I thought he was. That night he came and sat next to me.

  We talked, and he was interesting—an artist and musician. He seemed kind. I said nothing about Caleb. I let the man walk me home. I let him into my apartment. I put on some music. He said, “You have good taste in music.”

  He said, “I have been noticing you for a while.” I told him that I had been noticing him too. Then he kissed me, and I kissed him back.

  Not for long, but for a moment.

  I pulled away and said, “I’m so sorry, but I am seeing someone. It’s really new, but we just decided that we’re going to only see each other. I should have said something sooner.”

  He pulled back, looked into his lap, then back up. “You’re a really good person,” he said. He looked away, then said, “Things don’t always work out. If they don’t, you know how to find me, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I mean that,” he said.

  Then he got up and left. I sat on my couch in the darkness. Part of me hoped that I would get that chance.

  I TOLD CALEB about that man, about letting him kiss me. Caleb said, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I just want to be honest,” I responded.

  “Thank you,” he said, and I congratulated myself on our openness with each other. I didn’t know then that at that exact same time, he had been having sex with a high school friend.

  A year later, Caleb and I were married. Reed was a newborn. We slept in my childhood bedroom. Reed slept in a bassinet by the bed. He sighed. He made smacking noises. I woke, and my breasts ached. Milk leaked from my nipples. Caleb and I got through it by laughing. We joked about how long it had been since we’d had sex. I can’t remember how it came up. I said, “I haven’t had sex with anyone else since we started dating.” Caleb was silent. I turned to him in the darkness. “Why? Have you?” I was more curious than angry. More silence from Caleb.

  “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  IT WASN’T UNTIL Reed was over a year old that I started to find out about all the others. The secrets always came out over a long period of time. Never all at once. I kept picking. He finally broke. It wasn’t so much the fact that he had been with other women when we were dating, but the cruelty with which he described them.

  WE WERE IN the car in the driveway of my parents’ house. I stared at the light glowing out of the windows. Smoke drifted from the chimney into the darkness. I wanted to run away. I wanted to scream.

  He apologized.

  Begged.

  Maybe even cried.

  I couldn’t look at him.

  I went into the house. “There’s my baby,” I whispered, picking toddler Reed up and blowing a bubble on his stomach.

  AND THEN, ON a Christmas Eve in 2009—five years after that Christmas in 2004—there was this.

  And isn’t this what this story is really about?

  CALEB HIT ME. Fist connected with scalp. The meal cooled while Caleb screamed at me in the kitchen, and then his fist punched into my head. I felt not pain but relief. Now, I thought, he will get this out of his system and he will finally stop. But he didn’t stop. He never stopped. We finally ate the lamb roast and risotto cakes that I had made.

  I ate with my face swollen from tears and fist.

  I said, “Isn’t this good?”

  He said, “Merry Christmas.”

  I said, “Thank you.”

  I DIDN’T ENJOY Christmas with Caleb’s family, and he knew it. His family was large and insular, and I didn’t feel that I belonged. I felt that his mother cared more about getting a beautiful scrapbook page out of the holiday than actually having a beautiful holiday.

  Caleb and I had planned our own private celebration for Christmas Eve because we were driving to his family’s on Christmas Day. I had made a fig-stuffed lamb roast, risotto cakes, and roasted brussels sprouts.

  Unbeknownst to me, Kelly M. had been doing her own planning. She secretly reached out to all of our friends. She told them that my birthday was on Christmas, that I had never had a proper birthday, that I had never even had classroom cupcakes. She told them I was going to have to spend my birthday on the floor of my sister-in-law’s house, and that she wanted to come up with enough money to get me a hotel room in the fanciest hotel in town. Our friends came through, and she called me with excitement on Christmas Eve to tell me that she had come up with enough money to get Caleb and me a room at the Blennerhassett Hotel. I was so touched, and Caleb had known about her efforts all along. He said, “That’s so sweet of Kelly M,” he said. “This is great, baby.”

  BUT THAT NIGHT, as I bustled around the kitchen, I felt his anger growing. I didn’t know where it was coming from, so I grew anxious. I offered him compliments, I offered him food and wine. I hugged him and felt his shoulders rigid under my hands. By then, I knew what his silence and tense body meant.

  Finally he exploded, “How could you humiliate me like this?”

  I was confused, had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “How could you tell Kelly that you didn’t want to stay at my sister’s house?”

  “I didn’t,” I protested. “I never said anything like that. I love staying at your sister’s house. You know that.”

  And then he bellowed, “You don’t respect me!”

  I ran into the living room to get away from him. He followed. He backed me up against the wall. “I didn’t say anything to Kelly,” I whispered. But he was so close, so angry.

  Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I shouted, “Just do it! You know that you want to.”

  He threw me to the ground. Was on top of me. He screamed over and over again, “Is this what you want? Is this what you want? Is this what you want?”

  The blows kept coming.

  By then, it was what I wanted.

  When he was finished, I curled into a ball. Maybe this will be what makes him finally stop scaring me, I thought. Maybe he will finally realize he has gone too far.

  WHEN I WAS a kid, I was always jealous of my brother. I felt that he was the favorite. Once I counted all of his Christmas presents, and all of mine. He had twice as many as I did, and I presented the evidence to my parents. They rationally presented me with the counterevidence: my brother and I were different ages, and not all presents are of the same monetary value.

  Still, for some reason, I thought that love could be measured in presents. I didn’t know how to measure love in less tangible ways.

  Once, while Caleb and I were visiting my family for Christmas, he, my brother, and I went to a party at a friend’s house. Caleb left early, and my brother and I walked home together. He didn’t know how unhappy I was in my marriage. We talked about our childhoods, and my brother said, “I don’t think that we experienced the same things.” I started crying unexpectedly, and he hugged me on that dark sidewalk. I sobbed into his chest. I knew that I was not only sobbing about my childhood, but I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling. I said, “You were always the favorite.”

  He said, “That’s true, but you were always the smart one. Would you have rather been the favorite?”

  I thought of that for a while, then sniffled. “No,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  I wiped my face with my sleeve, and we walked home in the cold December darkness.

  CALEB ALWAYS GAVE me the most thoughtful presents. Things that he knew I would love. If I liked something, it would eventually end up wrapped and in front of me. I had no interest in trends or expensive things. I didn’t want diamonds or a fancy purse. I wanted earrings made by a local artisan, leather earrings with beads on them. A large, red stone pendant necklace. A trio of prints
made by an artist we knew. Or a book written by my favorite author.

  Holidays with him were fraught—a mixture of joy and tension. He was a thoughtful gift giver, a wonderful cook, an attentive father, but the stress of travel combined with familial expectations induced his anger. If I asked him for help with the house or getting Reed ready for our travels, Caleb would scream at me that I didn’t appreciate all that he did for me. He would bring up what he had cooked, the presents that he had bought for me. He would scream, “I give you everything you want, and it’s never enough.”

  I remembered myself as the little girl who had counted her presents. I saw myself as greedy, always wanting too much. I grew to dread Christmas.

  AFTER CALEB BEAT me on that Christmas Eve, I had to wear long sleeves to his parents’ house. At one point, I forgot. I pushed up my sleeve in the kitchen. My sister-in-law reached out for my arm. “What happened?” she asked, her voice soft and low. How could I have ever told her? I don’t remember how I answered. There would be so many more questions like that in the years to come.

  THAT CHRISTMAS IN 2005, Caleb and I walked our dog down by the river in Salmon. Our dog ran out onto that ice and slid into the river. I screamed. Caleb stretched out on the thin ice. He grabbed our dog’s paws and pulled him out.

  Reed was five weeks old.

  As Caleb stretched onto the ice, I thought, I am going to be raising my child alone. But though the ice shook and heaved, it didn’t break. The black water ran beneath it—hard, and fast, and cold.

  15

  What I Didn’t Write

  I FOLLOWED THE CHRISTMAS letter tradition in a family blog that spanned a couple of years. But these posts had a way of leaving out the bad stuff. There was so much that I didn’t write.

  WHAT I DID WRITE.

  I wrote about how much Reed loved living near his cousins. I wrote that Reed named everyone in relationship to himself. That his cousin was the “best friend of Reed.”

  I wrote that I was the “mommy of Reed.”

  I WROTE THAT I knew that Reed would likely be an only child. I wrote about how much older my brother was than me—how I had often felt like an only child—and how my cousins had all grown up across the country from me. I wrote that I wanted to give Reed a different childhood from the one I had.

  I wrote that, as much as I liked Morgantown, I missed the West and wanted to return to my home.

  I wrote that I had received an award for being the top creative-writing undergraduate in the department, that I was starting to think of myself as a writer.

  I wrote that we had bought our first home.

  I wrote that Caleb’s friend who was a police officer often visited when he was on shift. I wrote about how the neighbors seemed to judge us because the cops were always coming to our house. I wrote that I thought that was funny.

  I wrote about our bumper crop of heirloom tomatoes—how easy it was to grow tomatoes in the rich West Virginia soil. I wrote about how fall was approaching, and I dreaded the way the leaves would fall, just after they had turned so beautiful—the way the beauty of those autumn leaves signaled the beginning of the long winter.

  I wrote that West Virginia winters were lonely.

  I wrote that Caleb was teaching too many classes, that he had to commute on the snowy roads and I worried about him.

  I wrote that we didn’t get to see my parents enough.

  I wrote about how, in a last-ditch effort to save summer, we went to a family-friendly bluegrass joint in Thomas, West Virginia. We took Reed to see a bluegrass band, and then we went back to our room and watched the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on an old VHS machine. Reed had his own little twin bed, and he would sit up and wave at us while yelling “Hi Mommy! Hi Daddy!” Then he would grin ear to ear, stick his thumb in his mouth, and lie back down.

  I wrote that, on that same trip, we went to the Dolly Sods Wilderness for a picnic and hike. The elevation was high enough that I could almost convince myself I was in Idaho. I wrote that we had found a bog full of huckleberries and wild blueberries. We picked as many as we could without straying off the trail because the Dolly Sods had been a live training area during World War II, and there were still live bombs there.

  I wrote that Reed ate as many blueberries and huckleberries as he could pick, that he ran up and down the trail laughing, that I had to watch out for him because he didn’t know that there was danger buried underneath all of that beauty.

  I wrote that Kelly M. had launched a fund-raising effort to get me a hotel room for my birthday, but that Caleb and I had used the hotel credit later and gone to Pittsburgh for a weekend instead. I wrote that we had gone to the Andy Warhol Museum, eaten at a brew pub in a converted church, and had dinner with Caleb’s friends.

  I wrote that the university paid for us to go to Greece for a week, so that Caleb could prepare to teach a class on Greece. I wrote that we got lost looking for the cave where Socrates was held prisoner.

  I wrote that I had decided to be impractical and follow my dreams rather than get the MA in teaching English as a second language. I wrote that I was accepted to WVU’s MFA program. I wrote that when the director called me, he told me I was their top candidate.

  I wrote that I was afraid of failing.

  I wrote that Caleb and I had some of the same students, and they all seemed to love him. I wrote that one of my students had come to my office, and Caleb had brought me lunch while she was there. When he left, she said, “That is so awesome that you two are married. You are my favorite teachers.”

  I WROTE ABOUT my health problems—the weight gain, insulin resistance, sleep issues, high blood pressure.

  I wrote that I had found it difficult to make friends in Morgantown, that I missed Kelly M. and my other friends, that I felt isolated

  AND THEN I stopped writing on that blog.

  I stopped writing because what I wasn’t writing was becoming too large to ignore. I stopped writing because it was becoming impossible to rewrite the story in a way that felt authentic.

  I stopped writing because I wanted to write, “I no longer know where he ends, and I begin.”

  I stopped writing because I wanted to write, “He ends.”

  I stopped writing because I wanted to write, “I begin.”

  16

  A Hard Heart

  MY MARRIAGE WASN’T like the romance novels I read in middle school, where the men were withholding and angry at first, but always became gentle and nurturing by the end. It was more like an after-school special where the men were gentle and nurturing at first, but withholding and angry by the end. I was heartbroken, but even more than that, Caleb’s anger taught me to be hard. My rage filled the house; it became the fourth family member. When I was playing with Reed, I became Happy Mommy. Happy Mommy wants to play peekaboo. Happy Mommy wants to hear your story. Happy Mommy wants to go for a walk. Happy Mommy wants to cuddle you to sleep.

  But I had a monster inside. At night I curled next to Caleb, my body outlining his contours, my hand caressing his head, our way of falling asleep. But my heart always said, I won’t forgive.

  BY THE TIME Caleb first hit me, I no longer understood where right ended and wrong began. At the time, I was thriving in graduate school—had bonded with my graduate adviser and was winning competitive awards—and my writing was going well. Caleb was also working hard to gain some recognition as a writer. Perhaps there was some unspoken competition between us, but I was always proud of his efforts, and he knew that. When we were dating, I had gone to a graduate reading of his at a coffee shop. His story was about boys in the woods of Appalachia. There was an angry preacher who taught the main character to feel shame, and at the end of the story, the boys burn the forest down. The main character, a boy who sounded a lot like Caleb, stands in the middle of the fire and watches it burn.

  With his clean-shaven face, he looked so young and tender as he read his brutal story. For years he would tell me that he had felt so strong, reading in front of that crowd, my
face glowing with pride at the front of the room.

  HE SUBMITTED THAT story to almost one hundred journals. Years later, it was finally published in a decent journal that his mother prominently displayed in her living room. Privately, she told me, “That story was so dark. I didn’t raise him like that.”

  I thought, You don’t get him.

  That lapse was one of the reasons why throughout our marriage, I never felt comfortable in the home of my in-laws. When we visited, I would fatigue from all of the activity, the pressure. Sometimes I would escape to the upstairs bathroom. Once I saw Caleb’s mother’s Bible sitting on the counter. I opened it to a random page, and read a passage.

  They shall not pour libations of

  wine to the Lord;

  and they shall not please him

  with their sacrifices

  Their bread shall be like mourners’ bread;

  all who eat of it shall be defiled;

  for their bread shall be for their hunger only.

  I heard those words repeat in my head, and later, I wrote an essay about love, shame, failure, and forgiveness. I felt the hardness in my heart softening. I titled it “Like Mourners’ Bread.” In the essay, I was mostly honest about Caleb’s treatment of me, but the physical abuse was still rare, and I thought that it was going to remain that way.

  The ending was about the importance of forgiveness. I believed my own words. I believed that my forgiveness was the key to our healing. I believed that my hard heart was perpetuating our misery.

  When Caleb read “Like Mourners’ Bread,” he said, “It’s beautiful. It hurts to read, but I know that it’s true. I know that I didn’t treat you right, and you have every reason to tell this story.”

  I felt valued. As a writer. As a wife. As a person.

  I thought, How many women have a husband who supports their career so fully that they can write painful truths about him, and he is okay with that?