Leaving Salt Lake City

by Matthew Timion

  Soon after this, as an act of solidarity towards our new child and family, we both received matching tattoos. Since Manny is Mexican we both felt it would be great to get something themed to match. One day we both took off of work early and met at the tattoo studio to receive tattoos of an Aztec sun on our left wrists. We sat in opposite chairs at the tattoo parlor receiving our permanent sign that we were in it together. We were making an unerasable statement to everyone that we were a family.

  | SEVENTEEN |

  Get a Grip

  Spring 2007

  Some time between receiving our new tattoos and her audition for the CIA, Jessica came home and told me that she had met with her CIA contact during lunch. His purpose was to prepare her for being in the CIA once again. His advice was simple: dye your hair and lose some weight. All of the months she had been complaining about how overweight she was and some stranger was the thing that motivated her to do it. She explained why these things were so important.

  “There are CIA agents of every walk of life. Hot blondes, tattooed girls, black girls, everything.”

  “Why does that matter?" I didn’t see the relevancy.

  “These people have to use whatever weapon they can to get the information they need. Often times that involves using sex or sex appeal. I need to look better in order to do my job.”

  “Have you ever slept with someone to get information?”

  “No, that was a big part of why I quit before. I would never compromise on that one.”

  She dyed her hair to match my newly black hair.

  I felt something amazing over those few days, and a real sense of trust. She was once again letting me into her world, which I took as a sign that we were fundamentally okay. The strain on the relationship was melting away. I realized that I had blown everything out of proportion and really had nothing to worry about with us. I looked up to her for what she did for our country, and saw a piece of her that was really working on our relationship by working on herself. I was okay with being the stay at home father while she was off saving the world. It would be a story we could tell our kids one day, or not, because everything was very secret.

  “In my perfect world, Matt we would move away from here, away from everyone we knew and start over." We sat on the porch talking.

  “Why?" Her new fantasy seemed to be the complete opposite of the life we had been building.

  “I just want to live a different life sometimes. I would love for us to stay married but to move to a new part of the country and just tell people that we never were married. That our love was so strong that we didn’t see a need to make it a legal matter.”

  “Then let’s do it." If it meant a life with her I had no problem with what she was asking.

  “Nah, I don’t know. I’m just sick of being labeled and having assumptions made about me because of the life we live.”

  Jessica was done with the conversation at that point and dismissed it all as silly talk. She loved our life together. This conversation made me start thinking she wasn’t happy, or perhaps didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted to either reinvent herself or reinvent us. She wanted a change.

  All of the trust I was feeling as a result of our late night front porch conversations did not change that I knew something was off. Sometimes I didn’t know if I was being unreasonable or if she was intentionally trying to make me feel insecure. Jessica felt that we had both given up so much of ourselves due to fostering and parenting thing that we needed to reconnect with friends. We couldn’t go out clubbing again, so perhaps reconnecting in any way possible was the next best thing. Our lives changed drastically when we became parents. Her solution to fix this problem was to talk to her friends every night on the phone. She would call her friend Ann nightly and they would gossip. She would laugh and it would make her feel better. I usually tended to Manny during this time period, or poked around on the computer.

  I saw that Jessica wasn't focused me or Manny any longer. Her attention was towards herself and her friends. Considering the delicate nature of our relationship I felt talking on the phone for hours each night was not the best use of her time. Honestly I was jealous of whoever was on the phone with her. This jealousy caused me to do something I never thought I would do. I eavesdropped. She talked so loudly, and left the door unlocked. I snuck into the bathroom and put my ear against the vent. Who could she really be talking to every night for so long, especially if she saw her friend Ann everyday at work? I was paranoid, and I thought the worst possible thing. I thought she might be cheating.

  I listened closely. She wasn’t talking to Ann, I knew it. She was talking about a number of our ex-Mormon friends, making fun of them, calling them ridiculous, etc. Ann didn’t know any of these people and especially didn’t know them on the level Jessica was discussing them.

  I confronted her.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Ann, you know that.”

  “Then why did you mention Gail? Ann doesn’t know Gail.”

  “I talk about these people all of the time to Ann. She knows who they are.”

  The excuse was honestly very rational. It was good enough for me. Why was I being so paranoid?

  “I don’t know what you’re accusing me of, but you need to get a grip.”

  “You’re right, I do. I don’t know why those thoughts even entered my mind. Maybe I need to talk to a therapist.”

  “Maybe you do." She stormed off, as if I had just accused her of voting for George W. Bush.

  A few days later she left for the airport for her audition for the CIA. She drove herself, because she always had to check in at the CIA office prior to starting her mission and I wasn’t allowed to know where the office was. “Let’s just say it’s somewhere near the airport,” is as much detail as she would give me.

  “I won’t be able to answer my phone for a while Matt, due to the nature of what I’m doing.”

  “If there is an emergency I will let you know, but please try to contact me when you get the chance. I worry about you,” wanting her to know how much I loved her and how sorry I was for even assuming she was unfaithful. I had an appointment set up for the doctor to see if some sort of medication could help.

  And she was gone, off to be a CIA agent. The house seemed empty without her laughter, without her quirky comebacks. Manny sat next to me on the couch, a space normally taken by Jessica. The couch seemed so empty with his tiny body there instead of hers. I hoped everything would be okay.

  PART 3

  | EIGHTEEN |

  The Phone Call that Changed My Life

  Summer 2007

  Something was clearly wrong. It had to be me. Everything she was saying and doing was not unreasonable. Why was her attempt towards gaining our individual independence such a problem for me? I decided at that moment that I would do what I could to make things better, no matter what it meant. Perhaps her trip away for the weekend was what we needed. While away she was going to be picked up by Vince, who lived only a state away from her assignment, and meet up with some of our other friends for lunch. I am the first to admit that the idea of her meeting up with handsome Vince made me insecure. Despite my insecurities I vowed to trust her years ago when I found out about her transgression with Bryce. Now that we were married why would I ever take that back? I wouldn’t.

  She came home and was surprised to find that I had cleaned the entire house and also reorganized her closet and dresser. It needed reorganization badly. She thanked me profusely. She had no answer about how her CIA audition went, as she would find out eventually. What she did have to tell me, however, was that she was repulsed by Vince.

  “He’s kind of funny looking, and his car smelled like a gym bag.”

  “Really? That’s hilarious,” secretly relieved that she didn’t comment on his good looks.

  “I was afraid that he would try to make a move on me, and I was prepared to tell him to fuck off.”

  More relief came over me. I was insecure due to her never callin
g me the entire weekend.

  “Why didn’t you call? I missed you,” I pleaded.

  “You could have called me too Matt." She was right. I could have called too. I was just as guilty as she was.

  That night we slipped right back into the same routine of her sitting in the bedroom and talking on the phone for hours. This time though, knowing that I overheard her before, she turned on the TV in the bedroom and locked the door. If her goal was to heighten my paranoia, she succeeded. I had an appointment the next day to see a doctor. All I could think of was how she might be cheating on me.

  The next day I filled out a questionnaire at the doctors office to determine a possible issue. The doctor examined my results and prescribed Paxil to ease my extreme anxiety. The doctor, who later accidentally prescribed me an alternative to morphine for another issue, clearly didn’t know what he was doing. He neglected to tell me that Paxil would often times increase the symptoms for a few weeks. Over the next few days I was so paranoid and anxious that I was physically shaking. My mind raced with every single possible thing that Jessica could be saying on the phone, and to whom she was saying it.

  One night while Jessica was on the phone I found Vince online and started chatting with him about Chris, the man we targeted online months before. We enjoyed talking about how nuts Chris was and our recent attempts to bait him. Fueled with Paxil-induced paranoia I said, “So are you enjoying talking with Jessica right now?”

  There was no response. Was I right? Did I overstep some boundaries?

  Jessica didn’t say a word about it that night. Maybe Vince didn’t see it and just went to sleep. I had no idea, until the next day.

  “You really need to get a grip. Why did you accuse Vince of talking with me?”

  “Because I thought you were.”

  “He doesn’t even want to talk to you any more. He’s your friend and you crossed a line. He doesn’t like being accused of sleeping with someone’s wife. You really screwed it up.”

  Vince removed me from our chat program. My paranoia was making things worse, and it was probably the driving force behind Jessica’s need to talk with other people on the phone every night, which she started doing in a hammock high up in a tree in our backyard. I had zero way of eavesdropping after her change of venue. I realized that if I kept trying to prove something secret was going on with her, I would keep looking until I proved it to myself. I was the one with the problem, not her. I was acting like a paranoid crazy person. I needed to back off and let her do what she needed to do.

  Recognizing my unease, she recommended that I smoke some pot. I had not smoked pot in years and have never been much of a fan, but perhaps Jessica was right and this would help calm me down. It didn’t help. The details of that evening are still pretty foggy to me, but I remember somehow ending up in the bathroom throwing up. Crouched in front of the toilet I knew I couldn’t move and needed help. I sent Jessica a text message from the bathroom, an endeavor which felt like it took an hour. “HELP” I sent. An eternity later she rushed into the house. She found me hunched over the toilet and her gag reflex kicked in. She told whoever she was on the phone with what was going on. She sounded annoyed, but they still laughed before she got off the phone.

  She took me into bed and laid me down. She joined me soon after. I was twitching and couldn’t lay still. The next morning she told me, “If I have to deal with another night like last night, we’re done. I cannot do that again." I didn’t get it. She encouraged me to take Paxil because I needed to “get a grip” and she encouraged me to smoke pot to calm down. This was as much her fault as mine. Why did she just jump to threatening divorce? We had a child after all. Why wasn’t she being the supportive wife willing to help me out? Why was she distancing herself from me and escaping to her tree hideout? I was done with pot, and I was especially done with Paxil. It was making things worse.

  Sometimes actions speak louder than words. By this point our adoption date was confirmed. We would be finalizing the adoption in June. As troubled as our marriage was, as paranoid as I was, as much as it seemed Jessica was at her breaking point, the adoption was going forward. In the foster training classes the most important piece of advice they gave was that the kids in the foster program have been through enough already. Don’t get divorced. Divorce would ensure kids with horrible backgrounds would experience emotions ten times worse than where they came from. We both knew this. The fact that the adoption was going according to plan and moving forward told me that her goal was to move forward with us.

  Over the next stretch of time everything went just the same as before. She would talk on the phone in the tree. I would watch television and take care of Manny. She told me that there was another CIA trip coming up. This one would be a week long, and she would be in Oregon.

  After work one day the phone rang. I was silent. I watched her pull a marker out of the drawer and make some marks on the calendar on the wall. The dates for her first real assignment in the CIA were finalized. It would be in June, the week after the adoption was finalized.

  I looked at the phone later and saw the caller ID of whoever called her. I searched for him on the Internet and learned about his position in the Air Force. I had always assumed covert trips would not be communicated over wireless telephones with easy access to caller ID. It seemed a bit odd to me that I suddenly knew who else she was working with in the CIA.

  The timing worked out for us to visit her family in Denver, which we had been planning for a while. The visit with her family would happen the weekend before she left for Oregon.

  Still Vince’s friend on Facebook, he made a comment about going to Oregon for a week. My paranoia was heightened again. What was he talking about? Were they working together?

  “Did you see what Vince posted on Facebook?” Jessica asked me.

  “Yes." I was hoping she knew what was going on.

  “He did that just to fuck with you Matt. I told him to stop it and to remove it. He did." Huh, I was now becoming Vince’s new target on the Internet. Excellent. And my wife, for whatever reason, remained friendly with this guy who clearly had it out for me.

  The day for the adoption came and we arrived in the courtroom, planning to leave the courtroom as a complete family. Everything went swimmingly. Adopting a child whose parental rights had now been terminated was easy. Our lawyer presented us, and the judge asked us simple questions about our fitness, willingness, etc. to adopt Manny.

  An hour later we were done, and Manny was officially our child. His birth certificate was changed to reflect the fact that he was born to both of us.

  We got on the road to Denver, with Manny in the back seat. I have always joked that Wyoming has a population of three people. Every time I drove from Salt Lake City through Wyoming I was reminded of the sad realization that there was nothing in that state until you approached Cheyenne, unless you count Little America, a mini city set up in the middle of nowhere.

  On the way to her brother’s house, we stopped by a giant liquor store. Jessica needed to be properly lubricated before interacting with her family. She purchased a large number of mini-bottles of liquor, mainly because they are easy to hide, quick to consume, and for the novelty since mini-bottles are not sold in Utah because of Utah’s very conservative alcohol laws. The liquor store was humongous, and we called it the Liquornacle, a play on words for the huge structure built by Mormons in downtown Salt Lake CIty, the Tabernacle.

  The weekend went very well, and Jessica would sneak a mini-bottle of vodka here and there to get through the day. Of course I consumed too. I wanted to be her equal, her partner. If she felt she needed to drink to interact with her family then she knew what she was talking about.

  We drove home and had one more night with each other before she left. She didn’t want to spend it arguing, which is what we did the entire car ride home. After Manny was asleep we jumped into the hot tub, which she had wanted and then rarely used. We started being intimate, and she turned around and gave me a show. Never once in
our almost three year relationship had she ever done something like that before. It was sexy as hell, and something I could use to fuel me during our time apart over the upcoming week.

  She left Monday morning to return the following Saturday. I missed her. Manny missed her. I hated that she had to do this job, but I couldn’t stop her.

  During that week a gay couple we knew was moving to Chicago so that one of them could attend graduate school. They had both participated in the feeling me up at the costume party months before. I hosted a small farewell party at our house. There were only a few of us in attendance. Sitting under the swamp cooler we all talked and drank. I stayed true to my refusal to drink too much as Manny was asleep in the next room. The gay couple, after a few drinks, told me that my wife had, on more than one occasion, approached them and tried to get them to have sex with me.

  “Huh?” I was confused.

  “Yeah Matt, she thinks you’re gay,” they responded.

  “But I’m not gay.”

  “We both know that. You’re as straight as they come.”

  Why was she trying to get me to have sex with men? I didn’t get it. Was it some sort of “let’s explore our sexuality” thing? Was it her way of trying to justify wanting to sleep with a girl? She had expressed that desire a number of times.

  The farewell party died down and everyone left except for my friend Nadia. She helped clean up and we sat outside talking about our relationships. She was leaving her husband after years of a physically and sexually abusive relationship. I was trying to figure out what was going on with my relationship with Jessica so we more or less swapped stories and tried to figure out what the other person was thinking.

  The next day I noticed that Jessica’s cousin, Isabelle, and her two other cousins had removed me as “friends” on Myspace, the most popular social networking site at the time. I called Jessica and asked her why, hoping she would know. She told me she would find out and get back to me.