Weird, I thought. Maybe Cheryl’s tired. Or maybe it’s just one of her moods. I loved my wife. I truly did. But I didn’t always understand her. Sometimes when I came home, I’d find her wiping her eyes quickly or blowing her nose like she’d just been crying or something. She never talked about what was bothering her. If I pressed her for answers, she always said things were fine.
We finished our family bike ride and went home. The next day I was set to go golfing with a couple of buddies while Cheryl stayed home with the girls. On Sunday afternoon I gathered my golf stuff and went upstairs to tell Cheryl I was leaving. Our bedroom door was closed, and I paused outside before going in. Cheryl was on the phone with someone. She must have thought I’d already left. I could hear her speaking in low tones. Muffled. Guarded. I opened the door.
“It’s my mother,” she said, then hung up.
Cheryl had been crying.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” I said, glancing at my watch. I didn’t want to miss my tee time.
“Jeff . . .” After a brief pause, the words tumbled out. “I’m just not sure I can do it anymore,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I tried to read her expression, but Cheryl wasn’t looking at me.
Then came the words that would change our lives.
“I don’t think I love you, Jeff. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever loved you.” The bluntness of my wife’s words hit the air in our bedroom with a thud.
I was stunned. Our marriage was solid. Even my buddies said how they envied what Cheryl and I had together. She must have just been tired. “Cheryl, what are you saying? How long have you felt like this?” I pressed for more answers, but it was like a television set had suddenly turned off. I could see Cheryl right in front of me. But she had rolled over and turned her face to the wall. Conversation over.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so I went out with my friends. I didn’t shrug off what Cheryl had said. But I was shocked and couldn’t believe we’d just had that conversation. Either I’d been the world’s most clueless man, or Cheryl had been frighteningly good at hiding the truth about herself. Over the next few days Cheryl and I tried to talk a few times, but we couldn’t seem to discuss anything of substance. I convinced her we should try counseling. It seemed like the right way to tackle a challenge head-on. I made some calls, and we went once or twice. But the whole process of opening up to a stranger felt stiff and reserved. Cheryl’s answers were all one-worded, vague, almost like she was purposely avoiding any depth. Quickly I became convinced that the counseling was a waste of money. We stopped going.
One Monday a couple of weeks later, my manager called me into his office. The conversation at work was equally blunt. “Need you out in Dallas,” my manager said. “As quick as you can move.” I thought Cheryl would be upset to leave the life we’d made for ourselves in Los Angeles, but when I told her about the transfer, she seemed ecstatic. Almost relieved.
“A change sounds perfect,” she said and gave me a quick little hug. Her enthusiasm for my career made me happy. I almost felt a cautious hope. We still hadn’t talked much about our marriage, but I thought maybe the move would be good for us.
Notice of the transfer came in April 1990, and we sold our house soon after. The girls turned two in July, and we moved to Dallas at the beginning of August. We settled into a condo temporarily while we consulted an architect who drew up plans to build our dream home. We’d build it right on the Queens Course of the Gleneagles Country Club.
For Cheryl, who loved to golf, it was going to be awesome. Her dad owned a nine-hole golf course in the small town of Lodi, Ohio, where Cheryl had grown up. Her family lived next to the course, and Cheryl had golfed her whole childhood and throughout college. Now she could walk outside and go golfing anytime she wanted.
For a few weeks all seemed well. But Cheryl still cried a lot. I assumed it was the stress of moving and taking care of the twins. Dallas, I was sure, would give us the fresh start we needed.
Our friends invited us to their church. It was Presbyterian, nothing I was used to, and I think we went at first just to be polite. But the decision made sense. If there were still problems in our marriage, church would surely help. I wasn’t against church or spirituality or even Jesus. He just didn’t fit into my life’s plans. I wouldn’t exactly call the church we tried out “captivating.” It was liturgical in style, more formal than anything I’d ever experienced in the churches of West Virginia I’d attended as a child. But Cheryl seemed to like the services okay, and anything she wanted, I would do for her.
We didn’t have our nanny anymore, and Cheryl quit work so she could stay home with the girls. Fortunately my job was going gangbusters. They loved me at OshKosh. Nothing would stop me from reaching the sky.
Five months after we moved to Dallas, our McMansion was finished. We ditched the condo, hauled all our stuff out of storage, and moved into our new home. The place was absolutely perfect. We had all the room in the world to fill with stuff. On Valentine’s Day 1991, right after we moved in, I surprised Cheryl with a brand-new set of Ping Eye2s, the best set of golf clubs money could buy at the time. I hid them in our bed, right between the sheets. That evening Cheryl climbed under the covers, gave a little gasp, and let out a huge smile. “These are wonderful, Jeff,” she said. “Really wonderful.” She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t even kiss me. But I patted myself on the back anyway. I was surely the best husband ever.
A month later I was upstairs reading the girls a bedtime story when the doorbell rang. Cheryl was downstairs, so I assumed she’d get it. The doorbell rang again. I turned the page, stopped right in the middle of the kitty and the horsey on their way to the circus, and muttered my frustration. The doorbell rang a third time.
“Why isn’t she getting it?” I asked under my breath, and then, “Hang on, girls. Daddy will be right back.”
“I wanna go,” Lauren said. She clutched my arm with a birdlike grip.
The doorbell rang a fourth time.
“Sure, sure,” I said. “C’mon.” I picked up Lauren, tucked her under my arm, and climbed down the stairs. I could just make out a uniformed hat through the glass at the top of the door.
“Jeff Scruggs?” the man said when I opened the door.
“That’s me.” I looked at the man and raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong, officer?” It was the county sheriff.
“These are for you.” The sheriff handed me a file. “Sign here, here, and here.” He pointed. I paused for a moment, then obediently signed. The sheriff turned without a word and walked back to his squad car.
I could still think clearly enough to close the front door.
I could think to pull Lauren closer to me and walk up the stairs, still holding her in my arms.
I could think to tuck her and her sister into bed.
I even finished the girls’ bedtime story. The kitty and the horsey found their way to the circus and had a terrific time. I sang the girls their songs. I made sure their night-light was switched on. I kissed their toothpaste-flavored lips goodnight.
Then I closed the door, my heart pounding, and flew down the stairs. Our bedroom door was closed tight. I barged in.
“Cheryl! You’ve got to be kidding.”
My wife lay on the bed, her eyes half closed. She looked at me coldly. Silently. Then shook her head. She said nothing.
There was absolutely no discussion ahead of time.
No months of arguments leading up to one final confrontation.
No shouting. No fights.
No clue.
That’s how my wife served me with divorce papers.
We sold our dream home on the golf course in June 1992. Cheryl bought a much smaller house, and I rented one five minutes away from her so I could stay as close to the girls as possible. We never said the actual word divorce to the girls. At their age, I doubt if they would have understood what it meant. But we brought them together and sat them down and said, “Mommy and Daddy aren’
t going to live together anymore.” Those were the words we used. Brittany ran to her room and slammed the door. Lauren went and sat in a corner in the guest bathroom and wouldn’t come out. They understood exactly what was happening.
“They’re going to be fine,” Cheryl said.
“Right.” I was so angry I could spit. “Just fine.”
Neither of us moved out until we had to. We slept in separate bedrooms; that was a given. When the day came, the movers arrived with two big trucks and began to separate the belongings of each room in our perfect McMansion, according to our instructions. Couches. Dressers. Desks. Tables. Clothes. Lamps. TVs. Golf clubs. Our whole life, ripped in two. Even the movers couldn’t handle it. “This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” one said to me. He was sweaty and bald with a huge stomach. “Dude, you two are the perfect couple. Have you ever thought about buying her flowers?”
“Thanks,” I said. “But it’s way past flowers now.”
On August 21, 1992, our divorce was finalized, just a month after the twins turned four. We had been married for ten years, but it was now officially over. There was no more Mr. and Mrs. Jeff and Cheryl Scruggs.
We put a visitation schedule in place. It was standard custody procedure. I had the girls the first, third, and fifth weekends of the month, as well as the Wednesdays and Thursdays during the weeks when I had them for the weekend, or Mondays and Tuesdays if they were at their mother’s for the weekend. It sounded complicated at first, but it soon became routine.
Cheryl was amicable. Polite. Gracious. A perfect ex-wife. There were never any arguments between us. Even with our family in shambles, we still did everything perfectly. We even had the world’s perfect divorce.
A month went by, and then another. Six months passed. Eight months. A year. This was real. Very real. A broken family was our new permanent reality. Even the world’s perfect divorce was still horrible.
A friend and I split the cost on a small lake house a couple of hours away from Dallas. I figured I could use it for vacations in the years to come. The girls and I had a ball together there—waterskiing, swimming, paddling a canoe. I bought the lake house out of love for my daughters, but I also bought it out of anger toward my ex-wife. There was no way she’d ever go there. Not in a million years. It became representative to me of the one place in my life she could never ruin.
Strangely enough, both Cheryl and I kept going to church. She told me she’d started attending a women’s Bible study. Although she had a marginal religious background, she’d never actually studied the Word of God before. Until now, she’d never been taught how a person could have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. For the first time some things were beginning to click for her, she added. I just nodded. Too little, too late, I thought.
I began making some spiritual strides of my own. The youth pastor asked me to help out as a sponsor with the church’s high school group, and I agreed. Initially I just did crowd control. I’d show up at the church on Wednesday evenings and hang out, herding the kids from their game times to their discussion times, whatever needed to be done. About a year later, the youth pastor asked me to lead a boys’ book study, so I bought a ten-pack of Disciplines of a Godly Man by Kent Hughes and gave a copy to each of the guys. Every Sunday night I’d read a chapter in preparation and then lead the boys through the chapter the following Wednesday night. “Train yourself to be godly,” I read. “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:7-8, NIV). It was an eye-opening book for me. “Guys,” I told them one night, “I might be thirty-six years old, but when it comes to learning this stuff, I’m only three days ahead of you.”
On a Saturday morning, a little more than a year after the divorce, I took the girls to a city park. I brought a little brown paper sack with some cheese sticks, crackers, and juice boxes inside. After the girls and I ate our snacks, we hiked down around the creek that ran through the park. We spotted crawdads and found a frog, its eyes bulging, but didn’t try to capture it. We looked for imaginary dinosaur prints in the brown, suburban sand and picked up little rocks and pretended they were long lost arrowheads.
After half an hour we hiked back to the main area of the park, and I sat on a bench as the girls ran to the playground equipment. Brittany swung arm over arm across the monkey bars, while Lauren climbed to the highest rung of the biggest slide.
“Lauren!” I called. “Be careful! You, too, Brittany—always be careful!”
But the damage had already been done.
That day, they wouldn’t fall from the monkey bars or tumble off the slide.
They would simply look at me, their father, their eyes full of joy, yet also full of unmistakable sadness.
CHAPTER 7
Bittersweet Years
Brittany (Lauren’s twin)
To say I feel a sense of responsibility for my twin sister, Lauren, is an understatement. When we were four years old and our parents divorced, I took on the role of the eldest child, the rescuer, even though I’m older than Lauren by only one minute. After our parents no longer lived together, so many juggling pins of uncertainty were tossed into the air. We couldn’t catch enough of them to make sense of our lives. But we needed to keep going forward, despite our wounded hearts.
As sisters, we were inseparable, more so after the divorce than ever. A huge part of our security as kids was knowing we always had a familiar friend nearby. Even from the moment Lauren and I were born, we shared an ultra-close connectedness. No matter what season of life we were in, Lauren and I never fought. We were never jealous of each other. We never experienced any of the normal sibling rivalry so many sisters struggle with. Lauren and I could lock eyes and remind ourselves of an experience without even talking. We could tell a joke without words and then push it further until we were both in hysterics, still never uttering a single word. We could envision the same mental image without speaking it—it was completely unfair to play Catch Phrase against us. That’s how the growing up years went for Lauren and me. We were always on the same side. I didn’t know how to be myself if Lauren wasn’t there. Sometimes it felt as if we were the same person.
During the night of the propeller accident, as we all prayed so hard for Lauren’s recovery, both good news and bad news circled back to us with each team of surgeons that worked on her. We knew Lauren’s condition had stabilized and that she had escaped death, but the full extent of her injuries was being discovered little by little. The hardest news came after Lauren’s brain surgery. When the propeller had smashed down on her head, more than one blade had hit her. It had taken only a miniscule fraction of a second for her body to jolt away on reflex, but the damage had already been done. Part of her skull was shattered; the fragmented bones were pressing into her brain. “Brain injuries are always tricky,” the neurosurgeon said to us in the waiting room. His face was grave. We could tell he was trying to brace us for the worst. “Lauren might never form a complete sentence again. Even if she recovers well, she might have a vastly different personality.”
I couldn’t go there. I just couldn’t. I desperately needed my sister to be the same beautiful, vibrant person she had always been—in mind as well as body. I needed to know that she was still LoLo.
LoLo—that’s what our family always called her when we were young. Or just Lo for short. Mom started it when we were little, maybe three. The nickname stuck. It was just part of our fun. After the divorce, Dad would pick up uncooked ravioli from a specialty store next to his office in Dallas. He’d bring it home, and he, Lo, and I would hang out in his kitchen, pretending to be gourmet chefs in the fanciest restaurant in all of Italy. He’d screw up his face into this hoity-toity grimace and speak fluent fake Italian. “Hey-ah you-ah, you are both so vehry goo-oo-ood loo-oo-ook-ing. From now on I will call you Lorenessimo.” He pointed a spatula at Lauren. “And I will call you Brittchessi.” He looked at me.
“All r
ight, Dad,” I said and giggled. “As long as we can call you Dachessi.”
That’s how we related in our family, even though we weren’t all together anymore. It wasn’t like we were sad every moment of every day. We always had a lot of fun together: us with Mom, us with Dad. We knew our parents still loved us deeply, and they worked hard to provide us with the most normal childhood possible.
After we grew up, Lauren and I eventually went our separate ways—but only to a point. When Lauren interned in the fashion industry, I interned at an inner-city ministry. When I was twenty-two, I married my college sweetheart, Shaun Morgan, the most wonderful man in the world. I’d forgotten it by then, but the strange homeless man’s prediction from years before had come true for me. He said I’d live a life of kindness with the support of a man who’d help bring me to the top of that goal. Shaun was that man; I knew without a doubt. But even with that amount of confidence securing the decision in my mind, a month before Shaun and I got married, I had a little meltdown. I just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Lauren all alone, of living life without her so close by. I kept thinking, Oh my gosh, is Lauren going to be okay? When I confessed my fears to my sister, the two of us had a long and beneficial conversation. At the end she gave a low, bemused laugh, and said, “Brittany, I’m going to be just fine. I’m really excited for you guys!”
The funny thing about my husband, Shaun, is that, personality-wise, he is Lauren, almost exactly. I married a male version of my sister. And Shaun has no problem being married to a twin. For instance, for birthdays he’ll do something special for both Lo and me. He realizes we’ve grown up always thinking of the date as “our” birthday, never individually.
Lauren welcomed Shaun into our family just as warmly. Their mutual respect was particularly evident after the accident. As Lauren began to recover, Shaun was one of the people she listened to most closely. Early on in the hospital stay, she slurred her words while regaining her speech. Sometimes she added extra syllables to words, almost like English was a foreign language and she didn’t have the idioms quite right yet. She nicknamed Shaun “Bosser Cracker,” a combination of “boss” and “crack the whip,” we think. Each morning Shaun went to the hospital for an hour while Mom or Dad went back to their hotel or I went back to my house to take a shower and get some sleep. His shift came before he went to work, right after Lauren woke up. She was often most alert then. “Hey Bosser Cracker,” she’d slur, and Shaun would smile, gently rub her forehead on the undamaged side, and work with her to perform some simple movements before she would fall in and out of sleep.
Still Lolo Page 5
