Goodbye, Sweet Girl

by Kelly Sundberg

  I stared at her for a moment, then said, “You have no reason to fire me, and I am not quitting. I need this job to support my son. We live alone now.” I hadn’t realized that I had that much bravery until that moment.

  She told me that she understood, but that I would need to think of some work that I could continue to do. I knew that she was bullying me, but I proposed some writing workshops and administrative work. All of it would require my presence in the dorm. She finally agreed, but she wanted me to go to meetings every Friday with the new resident faculty leaders and the hall director. They were meetings that wouldn’t involve me at all and would be humiliating, but I told her that I would attend them. At the end of our appointment, I saw her look down at a note on her desk that had “$3,000” scrawled on it. She then said that, since my original contract had involved housing and food, she thought that she should give me a raise. She said that she would e-mail me an amount.

  “That would be great,” I said.

  Then I stood up to leave, and she seemed to experience a moment of compassion. “Is that what he did to you?” she asked, nodding at the boot on my foot. Suddenly, it hurt. She saw my pain, but because she didn’t want to know that pain, she turned her back to me, and I was leaving again.

  SHE LATER E-MAILED me that they would give me an extra $1,000. I accepted it because I had already used up all of the fight that I had left in me.

  WHEN MY FATHER told me that he “just didn’t know what to believe,” I went to the weekly meetings in the apartment where Caleb had been arrested for battering me, and I put on a smile, entertained students, and talked to the faculty, but I was always leaving, leaving, leaving because the minute that I walked into that apartment, I shivered in the same way that I had when I hid from Caleb in the closet.

  WHEN MY FATHER told me that he “just didn’t know what to believe,” my professional outlook was not optimistic, and I knew that I needed to be Reed’s primary caregiver. Once the dormitory job ended, I was going to have nothing. I had no money and no prospects. I didn’t even have health insurance. West Virginia did not factor domestic violence against the mother into custody decisions, and the truth was that Caleb had never been abusive to Reed, so I was terrified that Caleb would get the primary custody he thought he should have.

  And then, one morning, I got a phone call. I had been accepted to a PhD program in Ohio. I was still going to be poor, but I would have health coverage, and according to our pending divorce agreement, Reed was covered under Caleb’s plan. I accepted.

  CALEB HAD TOLD me that he was supportive of me getting the PhD. At one point he had even suggested moving to the same place as me so that he could continue to raise Reed as a coparent. He said, “You are going to be a grad student, but I have a stable job and life.” I knew this was true, but I could not leave Reed with him.

  I was terrified the court would make me stay in the state of West Virginia, and of losing Reed entirely to his father, so I gave Caleb almost everything that he wanted. I let him keep the house, which was our only asset. I let him have part of the summers with Reed. I let Caleb have everything that he wanted but me.

  We had only one divorce hearing. My compromises were so great that the judge stopped the hearing in the middle and asked me, “Why are you doing this?”

  I hadn’t expected that question. “Because I want an agreement,” I said.

  The judge turned to Caleb. “Is that true?”

  Caleb was flustered. He admitted to the judge that he had agreed not to create a legal battle for me if I gave him what he wanted. He told the judge that I would someday make more money than he would. His bitterness over this likelihood was apparent.

  The judge was not pleased. He threw down his pen. He raised his voice. He said, “You should want your wife to be happy. What’s best for your wife is what’s best for your child.”

  But Caleb did not want what was best for me.

  Caleb and I left the courthouse at the same time, but not together. Christine stayed by my side. I thought, Is she scared? I wasn’t scared. I had stopped feeling fear long before that. The worst had already happened.

  I thought I would cry in the car on the way home from my divorce. I even tried to muster up some tears. But they didn’t come. Instead, I felt something in my chest. A weight released. And then, unexpectedly, euphoria. It was a euphoria stronger, even, than the dread I had felt on the eve of my wedding.

  I was no longer leaving, but gone.

  WHEN I ARRIVED at the house I had shared with Caleb, my parents were there to help me pack and move to Ohio. They expected me to be sad and broken, but that wasn’t the case. I was happy—manic almost—and I set to bustling around the house and finishing the packing. My mother was obsessed with cleaning, as though I were moving out of a rental. I was dismissive, “Caleb can clean it,” I said; he was moving back into the home where we had lived together. And as the day progressed, my father’s mood darkened.

  It was too easy for me, you see?

  I had always been a flake, you see?

  On the day of my divorce, my father and I had the worst fight of my life. He said, “Well, you also said that your mother abused you, and that wasn’t true.” I realized that my father still “just didn’t know what to believe.”

  “I have never claimed that what Mom did to me was like what Caleb did to me,” I said, feeling a rage inside me like I had never felt before.

  I shouted at my father that I wanted him to leave.

  My mother finally said, “Stop, this is not between you two.” She looked into her lap. “You both need me to admit that something happened, and it did. I was not the best mother that I could have been, and I’m sorry.”

  I looked at my father for confirmation that he believed her—that he believed me—but he wouldn’t look back at me.

  “I want you to leave,” I said again.

  “Honey, no,” my mother said. “You need us to help you.”

  “I don’t need you anymore,” I said, and I meant it. “I can do this on my own.”

  I looked at my father. “I forgive her because she couldn’t help herself,” I said, “but you were a coward.”

  AND THEN HE and my mother left. They got a hotel room for the night, but the next day, we all pretended that nothing had happened.

  THE NEXT DAY, we went to dinner at a restaurant. I said something about the possibility of Reed having a stepparent someday. “I had a stepfather,” my mother said. My father, who was driving, looked at her and said, “You never told me that.”

  “My mom married him after my father died,” my mother said. “They were married for about a year before she died. He was so kind to me. He wanted to keep me and raise me, but my brother thought that it would be better if I went with him.”

  I was silent. I couldn’t understand how my father and I had never known this before. I knew so little about my mother, about the grief that she must have felt when her parents died, about what her life had been like with her older brother as a surrogate parent. I thought about how much she had suffered in her life, how quietly she had accepted that suffering, and how I had followed that same pattern myself.

  I no longer wanted to suffer quietly. I no longer wanted to be controlled by my story. I wanted to tell my story instead.

  21

  Goodbye, Sweet Girl

  PEOPLE GO TO Motel 6 to die. Specifically, to the Motel 6 in Avoca, Iowa. But I hadn’t come to Avoca to die. Like most patrons of Motel 6, I was on my way from somewhere to somewhere else, and I needed to sleep, but the ambulance lights flashing outside the double glass doors of the lobby weren’t making me optimistic about my chances.

  It had been nine months since I left Caleb. When summer arrived, my father flew out to meet me, and together we drove through the long, flattened heartland to the mountains of Idaho. I’d taken back my old summer job of working for the forest service, and I consoled myself with fantasies of rivers and snowcapped mountain peaks as I watched the Iowa sky listlessly pass me by. My f
ather and I had four long days of driving together, and that time was what we needed.

  WHEN I WAS in my early twenties, my father, my brother, and I drove to Kansas to see my grandmother. I had never spent time with my father without my mother, and as the mountains stretched into plains, my father and I talked quietly. For the first time, I grew to think of him as a friend.

  After that, my father and I started backpacking together, sometimes with my brother and sometimes just the two of us. We once backpacked into the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana together and climbed a tall mountain on the first day. At the summit, I could see the valleys covered in beargrass below me, and I felt so proud that I had conquered the ascent.

  Years later, when I was in labor with Reed, I had cried out, “I can’t do this.”

  My mother took my hand and said, “Yes, you can. Remember when you climbed into the Bob Marshall Wilderness with your father? He was so proud of you. He said that he’d had no idea that you were so strong, but you are strong, and you can do this.”

  And I did.

  I remembered how I stopped backpacking with my father when I married Caleb.

  I remembered how, by the end of our marriage, I didn’t even drive. Caleb would drive me to work in the morning and pick me up in the evenings. It was control disguised as help. He drove me everywhere to such an extent that I had grown fearful of driving myself, but there I was, hands on the steering wheel, my father in the passenger seat, navigating the turnpikes around Chicago. “I’m glad that you’re the one driving,” he said. “This is a real mess.” He didn’t know how scared I had been to drive, but he knew enough to be proud of me.

  My father had always wanted what was best for me. He just didn’t necessarily know what that thing was. I was still hurt that he hadn’t believed me, but I came to realize that my well-being was my own responsibility, and that I needed to learn how to take care of myself.

  MY TEACHING CONTRACT in West Virginia had ended in May, and I was moving to Ohio in August. Our custody arrangement gave Caleb six weeks in the summer with Reed, and I was at a loss for how to fill the time. It seemed fitting somehow to retreat to the wilderness.

  Once back in Idaho, I lived and worked in an A-frame at the end of a long dirt road. Perched just before the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness border, my A-frame was at the base of tall black-rock cliffs that cradled the Salmon River, a river so deep in places that prehistoric fish could survive for a hundred years in dark pools. It is one of the last places in the world where the stars are undimmed by electric lights.

  I remembered how much fun I had in my twenties when I worked there with my friend Jen. Back then, surrounded by good-looking river guides and outdoorsmen, we had had a lot of sexy fun, and though a lot had changed since then, Jen still worked for the forest service. When I called to tell her that I was leaving Caleb, she said, “Come home.” So I did.

  JEN SCHEDULED ME to work with Emily, a tanned woman with a bleached blond pixie cut, a collection of hooded sweatshirts, a foul mouth, and a laugh that I could hear from across a room. On the surface, we seemed to have nothing in common. Still, like me, Emily was sad, and I loved her immediately.

  A few months earlier, Emily’s husband’s twin brother had died in his sleep of an aneurysm. Emily met her husband when she was only sixteen, and her brother-in-law had lived with them for years. He was as close to her as a biological brother, and although she was brassy and funny in a tough-shelled way, when she fell silent—which was rare—I always knew what she was thinking.

  AS EMILY DESCRIBED the loss of her brother-in-law, I knew that I had been lucky. Caleb was still breathing, still alive. Leaving him had been like giving up a drug. I had to white-knuckle through the nights without him, but I had made the decision. I had taken control.

  Emily and Jen decided that the cure for my sadness would be to get laid. Together, we mulled over my prospects among this new batch of river guides and outdoorsmen. Yoga Dude was a former river guide turned ranger, and he and I shared a tiny A-frame as part of our living arrangement. On a river trip, Jen, Emily, and I reclined in beach chairs with beers while he took his shirt off and stretched on the beach.

  “He does have a good body,” Jen said, taking a sip of Coors Lite.

  “Yeah, but he likes to rescue bugs,” I said. “He catches them and releases them outside.”

  “And he’s always talking about what a ‘nice guy’ he is,” said Emily. “No one who is truly a ‘nice guy’ ever refers to himself that way.”

  A month later, Yoga Dude snuck into my bedroom in the A-frame and stole the spider traps that Jen had set up for me before I moved in. I only realized that Yoga Dude had removed the traps when I brought Emily into my room to kill a black widow for me. It disappeared before she could get it, and I couldn’t sleep for a week.

  “I don’t like Yoga Dude,” I said. “He can keep his Buddhism to himself.”

  THEN THERE WAS Burly Guy, a brawny, cheerful man who still remembered me from a decade earlier. Burly Guy was a rent-a-guide, which meant he would work for any river company who would have him. Most likely, this attitude extended to his personal relationships.

  “He was flirting with you. And he remembers you,” Emily said. “You should totally sleep with Burly Guy.”

  “Well, he is cute,” I said. “And he’s so huge that he makes me feel petite.”

  We speculated about how we could make this coupling happen. We finally settled on me just approaching him and saying, “Wanna go?” while cocking my head toward the A-frame.

  But when Burly Guy came back the following week, Emily pushed me to actually approach him, and I just couldn’t.

  “I don’t think I’m ready,” I said. “I don’t think I want to be with anyone else.”

  “Kell,” she said, her face kind, “I didn’t mean to pressure you. I just thought it was what you wanted.”

  I didn’t know how to tell her that my true desire was not to be with someone else, but to want to be with someone else, and worse, that I still missed Caleb every moment.

  EMILY WAS RELIGIOUS and thought that God had brought us into each other’s lives, and though I had lost the religion of my childhood, I almost believed her. I had felt so alone before I lived with her that summer. Together, we were united by grief. In a dream she had, her husband’s twin appeared and told her not to be sad anymore, that everything was going to be okay.

  “The dream was so vivid,” she said, starting to cry. “It was as real as if he was there with me. I think it was his spirit.”

  “Oh, Em. I’m sure it was,” I said. What I didn’t tell her was that sometimes Caleb appeared in my dreams—as real as though he was in the room with me—and sometimes he, too, told me not to be sad anymore, that everything was going to be okay. But Caleb was alive, watching our son alone across the country. It wasn’t Caleb’s spirit that comforted me in my dreams. It was the ghost of the man I had wanted him to be. When I woke from those dreams, I didn’t feel that everything was going to be okay. Instead, I wanted to close my eyes and go back to the dream.

  EVEN THOUGH I knew I wasn’t ready to be with someone else, Emily, Jen, and I still joked about the different men I could have sex with. It was fun being crass and made me feel normal again. The best option was probably Bearded Man, another rent-a-guide. He knew Emily and Jen from the river, and I used to casually date him.

  “Whaaaat?” Emily shrieked when I told her we had dated years before. “What happened?”

  “It was long-distance and wasn’t going to work, and then I met Caleb.”

  “Kelly says that Bearded Man is really good in bed,” Jen interrupted me, saying what I had said with a wink.

  I remembered long, athletic afternoons with Bearded Man. He had a physicality about him that appealed to me. We’d put on a Prince album, and Prince would finish before we did.

  “It’s going to be Bearded Man!” Emily said.

  And it was.

  I didn’t plan it, but it happened.


  HAVING SEX WITH someone after almost a decade of marriage was a bit like losing my virginity again. I thought I had accumulated a lot of knowledge throughout my marriage, but it turned out to be particular to the two us. Bearded Man and I no longer knew each other’s bodies as we had the first summer we were together.

  Still, as with losing my virginity, there was a part of me that was just glad to have it out of the way. And I did feel better. The sex abated my sadness a bit, and I thought of Caleb a little less often.

  But having sex with Bearded Man couldn’t take away the memories of my time with Caleb. At its best, sex with Caleb was like being in a snow globe together, protected by a glass bubble that contained only magic and no troubles. Shortly before I left him, I said to Caleb, “I’ll never love anyone but you.” It sounds tinny and hollow in my memory, but at the time I meant it as both a promise and a plea.

  BEARDED MAN AND I saw each other a few more times, and the sex got better, but then I had to leave. My chest deflated when we hugged, but I was also relieved. I still loved Caleb, and after all, things hadn’t worked out with Bearded Man the first time. It was good that I was leaving.

  IN AUGUST I packed up my car and started the long solo drive from Idaho to West Virginia; I was no longer afraid of driving. I was going to pick up Reed and then move to Ohio. My chest constricted as I drove through the Badlands of South Dakota. The absence of the mountains felt like a physical loss, and when I stopped along the way at the Motel 6 in Avoca, Iowa, I wondered if I was making the wrong decision. I checked in and saw my dining options, which consisted of a Taco John’s attached to a gas station and an Iowa chain that specialized in some sort of “meat sandwich.” I missed Emily and Jen, the river, and Caleb, most of all.

  Still, none of that kept my dog from needing a walk. I had kept the smaller dog because I was going to have to rent an apartment in my PhD program, and Caleb had kept our larger dog because of his yard. Losing the first dog that Caleb and I had adopted together had been yet another loss, but I was grateful for the dog I had. As I walked him down the hall on his leash, I saw a door propped open with a trash can. The room was in disarray. The covers lay on the floor, and white-sock-clad feet poked off the edge of the bed. A couple of paramedics pushed by me with a stretcher.