“There’s a point to this.”
“I’m dying to see where you’re going with this.”
“First thing you do, you build a fire. Do you know why?”
“To keep warm.”
“No, to keep busy. To keep your mind from panicking. That’s what you need.”
“You think I should set fire to Clive’s car?”
“That’s what I’m talking about, Mag. No matter the conversation, you bring it back to him like a magnet. You’ve got to get out of that. It’s not about him, it’s about you. You need to reclaim your life.” Her voice softened. “Look, I understand why you want to isolate. I really do. But it’s not the answer. You need to show Clive that he can’t take away your life.”
“He did take away my life.”
“No, he took away your situation. You’re still here. Life isn’t through with you. You never know what’s around the corner.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She reached over and put her hand on mine. “This will pass, love. It’s okay that you’re lying low for now. No one can blame you for that. I just don’t want to see this crush your spirit.”
I looked down for a moment, then back up into Carina’s sympathetic eyes. Tears suddenly filled my own, as the words I’d been thinking for weeks spilled out. “Why wasn’t I enough for him?”
“No one could be enough for him,” Carina said, sliding her chair closer. “Some people just have holes they can’t fill. That’s hard for you to understand because you’re not that way. Clive was insatiable. He always wanted more. That’s why he was always running for something bigger. He wanted more people to love him. He didn’t understand that one person’s love is better than a thousand people’s approval.”
I started crying more, and she put her arms around me. “Oh, honey. This will pass.”
When I could speak I said, “Are you sure?”
“It will pass if you let it,” she said. “Think about what I said about changing things up. I think it will help.” She looked into my eyes. “Will you?”
I nodded.
She smiled. “Good girl. Now when are you coming back to work?”
Chapter Four
Sometimes our past follows us like toilet paper stuck to the heel of our shoe as we walk out of the bathroom. And we’re always the last one to see it.
—Maggie Walther’s Diary
I didn’t have an answer for her question. I felt guilty leaving Carina alone during the busiest time of the year. Ironically, it’s the exact same thing that had happened to me just before my company’s previous owner passed the business on to me.
But my absence from work was more than just isolation. It was confusion. The catering business, my broken childhood, and Clive were all complexly tied together in a knot. I felt like I was trying to find my way through a confusing labyrinth that just kept taking me back to where I had started.
Where I had started. I was born and raised in Ashland, Oregon, just sixteen miles north of the California border. It’s a peculiar place. Today it’s extremely liberal—so much so that some of the neighboring communities refer to it as “the People’s Republic of Ashland.” They’d probably like to forget that their city fathers once held Klan parades downtown and advertised themselves as a haven for “American citizens—negroes and Japanese not welcome.”
But times change and so do people and locales. The scenery is beautiful there, mostly woods and mountains. Sounds like an idyllic place for a little boy and girl to grow up. My childhood should have been idyllic, but it wasn’t. My childhood was ugly.
If I had to sum up the reason for my pain in one word, I’d say, “My father.” (Okay, two words.) My father never should have had children. Of course that means my brother and I wouldn’t have been born, but sometimes I’m not sure that would have been such a bad thing.
My father never should have even gotten married. I don’t know why he did. He was always cheating on my mother. I couldn’t tell you how many times he cheated because I don’t know if he ever wasn’t. Sometimes there were fights; most of the time I just saw the pain and resignation on my mother’s face. I could never understand why my mother didn’t just leave. Eventually she did, just not the way I thought she would.
The end of their union came during my fourteenth year. My mother went in to one of those surgical centers for a routine colonoscopy. She developed complications and died. I still remember the look on the doctor’s face when he told us. I didn’t believe it until I saw her breathless body. I remember feeling angry at her for not taking me with her.
I’ve learned that everyone handles grief differently. My brother, Eric, just disappeared, first within himself, then, years later, physically. I don’t know how my father handled the loss of his wife; the only emotion he ever shared was anger. I suspect that, among other things, he felt guilt. Maybe I just hope that he did, like a real human would. But I think he also recognized the opportunity—not that my mother kept him away from other women—but her presence kept other women away. At least the kind with a scrap of dignity. I could never figure out why my father wanted women so badly, then treated them so badly.
As far as our home life, my father pretty much just checked out. Six months after my mother’s death, my father sued the doctor and clinic for malpractice and got all sorts of money. He bought himself a really big boat, the kind that could cross the ocean. I still had to beg him for grocery money.
I wanted to go to college, but I knew my father wouldn’t pay for it. I asked him about it once and he said college was indoctrination, not education, and that he had already taught me all I needed to know about the world.
I learned young that whatever I wanted in life, I would have to get for myself. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I developed young, so I always looked older than I was. Everyone assumed I was twenty when I was barely fifteen. My first job was as a server at a local café. Every day old men hit on me. Looking back, I suppose they weren’t really that old, probably in their thirties and forties, but they seemed ancient to me.
When I was a senior in high school, Eric ran away. He left me a note that read, “Good-bye, I’m sorry.” That was it. No address, nothing. I didn’t need to ask why. It was the same reason that I wanted to leave home, except my father was even worse to him than he was to me. It seemed to me that with Eric, my father was constantly trying to prove that he was the alpha dog.
Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I moved to Utah. It wasn’t the kind of place I thought I’d end up. In fact, up until six months before moving there, I knew nothing about the place. It was just one of those peculiar twists of fate that pulls the seat out from under you.
One day I was talking to one of the truckers at the café—we had tons of them—who was hauling a load of lumber to his hometown of Salt Lake City. I asked him what Salt Lake City was like. He said he liked it. It was bigger than Ashland, smaller than Portland. He said there was the University of Utah, which would be cheap once I got residence, and in the meantime there was a lot of work there. The cost of living was low and the people pretty much left you alone, except the Mormons, who would probably bring me a loaf of home-baked bread and invite me to church. Best of all, it was seven hundred miles from my father.
With Eric gone, I didn’t really have anything holding me in Ashland. I had a cute boyfriend, Carter, but I wasn’t in love or anything, and even though he talked about marriage (which I always thought was a little bizarre for an eighteen-year-old), I knew he wasn’t someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
I wasn’t afraid to leave home. After what I’d been through, I don’t think I was afraid of much. I was, by necessity, frugal, so between my waitressing and tips and the occasional babysitting, I’d saved about five thousand dollars, which my father never knew about. Even with all his money, I have no doubt that he would have cleaned me out if he did, then justify his action as another one of his life lessons.
About a month before graduation, I started looking around for someplace to live in Utah. I came across a want ad posted by a young woman looking for a roommate. Her name was Wendy Nielsen. She had just quit her job working for a catering company and even though her rent was only three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month, she couldn’t afford it.