by Lynn Red
Almost as an afterthought, and because I knew I wasn’t going to do much sleeping, I grabbed the remote, which Dan never let me use when he was home, and flicked the set on. The local blow-hard weatherman informed me that the next day would be warmer, possibly a record high for the day. Also, there was a decent chance of rain, and the skies would be overcast, giving way to full sun in the afternoon.
“That’s fitting,” I announced to Clem Clemson, who couldn’t hear me, but somehow felt like he was company. “I guess the search party’s gonna have an easy time finding my mess.”
It’s hard to believe, and even harder to say, but right then, I just didn’t care.
Nothing felt like it much mattered. If they found him, if they didn’t, I just couldn’t force myself to give a shit. Six years of emotional exhaustion had pinned me so deep in that ugly chair that when I closed my eyes, I didn’t care if they ever opened again.
With a deep breath, followed by a heavy sigh, I listened to Clem rattle on about some interesting historical weather facts, and then after the news ended, a pro-wrestling show came on that must have been at least twenty years old. Of all the bizarre things to drift off to sleep with, that was just about at the top of the list.
But just like everything else, it didn’t matter. I let my eyes fall shut, feeling slightly surprised that after having decided only moments before that I wouldn’t be sleeping, to be, you know, falling asleep, as a couple of sweaty guys in little trunks grunted and heaved. When one of them let out a yelping noise, I flicked my eyes open to see one with a very hairy body and completely bald head with his tongue hanging out.
I laughed.
Dan never would have let me sit here in the living room at one in the morning and watch old wrestling matches.
That’s what it all came back to, really. No matter what happened, no matter how it ended up, I had somehow given myself a second shot at living. Only this time, I was on my own. I had to be my own woman and make my own way, just like I’d dreamed of doing what seemed like an eternity before.
Somehow, that thought – having to make it on my own – was more terrifying than any jail sentence. It meant I couldn’t blame anyone for my problems anymore. It meant I had to—gulp—be responsible.
Suddenly, my eyes shot open. There were two different sweaty guys hammering at each other. Even though my eyes were watching them, my brain didn’t calculate what they were doing. Instead, the main thing hovering in front of my face was that I had to do things.
I needed to work, I needed money. I needed to pay the power bill and my phone bill. Since Dan hadn’t ever managed to do anything for any real stretch of time, there wasn’t going to be some fat insurance payment coming down the pipe. Hell, there wasn’t much more than ten grand in the bank. That sounds like a pretty good chunk, but when it comes down to it, no it isn’t.
Hell, I didn’t even have access to the bank account, or the credit card accounts, or even the Lowe’s account that I had to pay off the last of our luxury washer/dryer combination on. How the hell was I going to do that? I imagined the call. “Hi, can I speak to your accounts department? Oh, it’s nothing major. I just killed my husband so I need to change the account over to my name. Wouldn’t want to run out of zero interest months now, would I?”
“What did I do?” I asked myself as a beefcake slammed into a flab mat. The beefcake collapsed to the canvas, clutching his ribs and then gulping air. “Oh my God, what the hell did I do?”
As my entire brain unwound inside my skull and every single awful, horrifying scenario I could ever think up played out in front of my eyes with stark, unyielding, awful reality, I felt the heat of my tears before the first sobs wracked my body.
It didn’t take long though. As soon as the first two hot droplets ran down the sides of my face and around my cheeks, then down my neck before soaking into the collar of my old t-shirt, a guttural, almost primal sort of crying shook my entire body.
It was the sort of crying where you don’t make any sounds because you’re too busy gasping for air.
In just over six hours, I had run through the entire gamut of human emotion, from love to hate, from fear to bravery, from elation to revulsion.
And oh my God, the worst part? I knew that it was all just starting. It wasn’t going to get any easier. Not for a long, long time.
*
To my surprise, or more correctly to my utter, absolute horror, the world was exactly the same when I woke up. Albeit with the soft orange glow of early afternoon. It was the first time I’d woken up in this house by myself. A noise from the entryway jolted me to an uncomfortable, pinching sort of reality.
“Holy shit!” I swore, jumping up out of the recliner and immediately remembering the cabernet I’d had the night before. “What’s going on?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
I whirled around way, way too fast at the sound of a familiar voice. For a second, my addled brain imagined the dark-haired stranger. My feet tangled and just as quickly as I’d jumped up, I collapsed in a heap. It all happened so quickly that my stomach had kept right on spinning even when I’d hit the floor. A hand grabbed my underarm, and then a second did the same.
“Hold on,” I said, staring at the floor and letting the world catch up to itself. “Just a second, I...”
“It’s all right, Raine, take a breath.”
“Karen? What are you doing here?” I finally managed to look up at my visitors. “Oh hey Matt,” I added, sheepishly. “What are you two doing here? You left yesterday.”
They exchanged a long glance. Karen bit down on her bottom lip, a habit we share. For what seemed like ten minutes, they just looked between themselves and me, then back to each other. “We, uh,” Matt began before trailing off. “Well, you see,” Karen tried to help, but didn’t get much of anywhere before she, too, fell silent.
I had an awful sensation that they knew what we were all getting at, but I’d hoped it would have taken slightly longer than half a day for them to find my husband. “What’s up?” A throb hit me square in the middle of my head. “Hey, will you hand me that bottle of Advil?” I pointed over to the table on the other side of the sofa.
“Uh, here,” Matt said, handing me a pair of pills.
“Thanks,” I took them and swallowed them dry. It’s a talent. “So how did you get in? Wait, did I leave the door open?”
“Nah,” Karen said. “I have a spare key. Had it for years. Listen, we saw on the news, um...”
I squinted, mostly to block out the thread of sunlight that made me feel about like an ant getting fried by a mean kid with a magnifying glass. She opened her mouth again, but before she could say anything, a series of heavy thuds on the front door interrupted her. Karen didn’t seem very upset.
“Raine Dodson?” came a voice. “Hello? Mrs. Dodson? State police.”
“Oh Jesus,” I swore. “Why...?”
“Yeah that’s what we were here for. We figured they’d already talked to you, but,” Karen shook her head. “I guess they aren’t as on top of things as the local news, sad as that might be.”
“What are you talking about?” I impressed myself with my spur of the moment acting ability. “Where’s Dan?”
It made me feel like a real shitheel. I might be many things, many of them rather unlikable, but damn it, I’m not a liar. At least, I wasn’t before then. I’m not sure if I ever told Karen or Matt a fib before as long as I’d known them, which was a really, really damn long time.
“Hello? Raine Dodson? Detective Morgan, Massachusetts state police.”
I’d seen enough cop shows to know that if they were coming to arrest me, there would be more than one man at the door. This seemed like a routine house call. “I’ll get that,” Matt said. Karen helped me back into the easy chair.
The officer at the door was a tall guy, thin, but with a slight pot belly almost completely hidden by his black suit. A detective. “Mrs. Dodson?” he asked Matt. “Is she here? I’m Detective Morgan and.
..”
“She’s in there,” Matt said. “She’s pretty shaken up, but I think it’s from last night. Everything okay? Oh,” he said, as an afterthought, “can I see your badge?”
“Oh sorry,” Detective Morgan said, before producing his identification. “I forget about that. Kind of new to the post. I’m used to being in uniform.”
I saw Matt nod, and then invite the trooper in. “Right this way.”
He was silhouetted against the sun from outside, but I was immediately startled by exactly how tall he was. This guy was at least six and a half feet tall. His head couldn’t have had more than four inches of clearance underneath the frame surrounding the open passage between the living room and the entry way.
“Mrs. Dodson?” he said, approaching me and unbuttoning his jacket.
My stomach tightened up, seized by the terror that he was about to grab me and slap on a pair of cuffs, then drag me to the can. I swallowed hard. “Sorry,” I said, “hangover,” I said by way of explanation. “Late night.”
“I see,” Morgan said. “Listen, I don’t know if you’ve heard, and if you have I’m terribly sorry. The news got there before we did. Local sheriff’s office said they tried to contact you but couldn’t get an answer, and I’m the lead investigator on the case, so here I am.”
I looked at him with shock that wasn’t entirely dishonest. I couldn’t believe that I was sitting here, staring at the cop who should be arresting me, and the guy was apologizing for the news he was about to deliver. Was I not even a suspect? How could that possibly be?
“What is it?” I asked. “Is it about Dan?”
I sat forward, doing my absolute best to appear both surprised and worried. Worried, I mean, about Dan and not my criminal record. “Detective?”
His lips were pursed. I don’t know why, but he was the sort of man who is just immediately likable. His eyes were pale blue. They stood out starkly against his dark facial hair and darkly tanned skin. They were the sort of eyes that twinkled when he smiled in a way that just made him feel like a safe person to be around. Good quality for a cop, I remember thinking.
“Sorry,” he said. “Just new to this whole bad news thing. I’m sorry ma’am, but we found your husband’s truck, out a ways from town.”
I stared at him blankly. “You... where’s Dan?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “We found the truck, but he’s nowhere to be found. We had a dive team out to look and see if he’d had an accident. A lot of times we find them like that, you know, go out to the woods to drink or camp, and they fall in. Did he give any indication that he was thinking of leaving?”
“I... yeah, but it’s hard to explain,” I said, gulping honest sobs back into my throat. It was the shock, the surprise that I actually felt sad for him, that surprised me more than anything else. Although hearing that they hadn’t found his body meant that the hope from the back of my mind – that somehow he’d survive – had either come true, or that his body had just washed off somewhere further down the river. “I knew he was going camping, he does that every so often. But this time before he went, he told me we were through.”
Detective Morgan was nodding solemnly. “Well, I’m afraid that’s the news, or at least what little of it there is. If anything comes up, I’ll let you know. First, this time, before the news gets ahold of it.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, my voice weak and rattling in my throat.
“And here,” he fished in his pocket, adding as an afterthought. “If anything comes up, here’s my number and email. You need anything, let me know.”
“I will, thanks,” I said. He was already heading toward the door.
“Oh,” he said, turning back. “Mrs. Dodson? I’m going to need you to come down to the station and identify his things. Personal effects, nothing very exciting. Only things in his truck were a wallet, a few notebooks, his phone and a few other odds and ends. We’ve got it all down there as evidence unless he turns up.”
“Okay,” I said, grabbing tightly onto Karen’s wrist. “I can, I’ll get down there.”
He nodded curtly, and vanished through the door. The hinges creaked painfully before the screen’s metal frame slapped against the jamb.
“That’s what we were here for,” Karen said, looking into my eyes. “Are you okay?”
I swallowed hard, and nodded. “I think,” I said, “I always had a feeling it would come to this. Him leaving, and me left behind.”
She exchanged a look with Matt. They both returned their attention to me a second later, but neither spoke, they just listened.
“He wasn’t what you thought,” I heard myself say. “He was bad. He kept me here, wouldn’t let me out. Guilted me into thinking I was nothing.”
Karen pulled me close. I let my head fall into the curve of her neck as hot tears came again. “But I didn’t think it’d be like this,” I whispered. “I didn’t think I’d feel like this.”
I shook as a sob worked its way through me. I was crying, yeah, but it was with a mixture of horror and relief. “He wouldn’t let me leave. Wouldn’t let me be who I am. But now he’s finally left and... And I feel okay.”
I sniffed, hard, trying to gather myself. I wondered, in that moment, if I would ever come clean to my friends. I wondered, really, if I would ever come clean to anyone, including myself, about what had happened? Or would I just bury it like I did all the pain Dan had put me through? Would I just pretend it never happened and go on with my life?
It was impossible to say.
Matt had to go a few minutes later. Work, he’d said. Karen stayed once again, to help me adjust and just to talk to me. I’ll never forget her, never forget what she said and what she did.
But at the end of the day, I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t just wait around for Dan to come back and find me – and I’m certain he would, if given the chance. Maybe he’d gotten a case of amnesia and ended up at some hospital in Boston, or even further away. Who knows?
The only things I knew for sure were that he was still alive, and I had to get the hell out of there. Not only because I was scared of him ever coming for me, but because in a way, I did feel guilty, underneath it all.
And anyway, I had to figure out who I was.
After six years of being told who I was, it was just about time to find out. What better way than by selling everything I could, and just hitting the road? It’s an old notion, a little romantic and a touch poetic. I felt my inner Kerouac flare to life as I fired up Booger, my old Jeep, stuffed the wad of cash in my pocket I’d managed to finagle out of the bank, along with what I’d managed to round up selling my junk.
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt quite as free as I did when I saw the Boston skyline disappear behind me in the haze of an early morning in my rearview mirror.
I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I’d decided I’d just go to a damn music festival. I’d never been allowed to before, so why not?
I plugged the coordinates of the venue – Denver, Colorado – into my phone and let the GPS satellites find me. Twenty eight hours, four minutes and eight seconds in the future, I was going to find my destiny. That destiny, I thought with a loopy, confused brain, was the guy whose name I didn’t even know. I hadn’t the first clue how or why, but it was just a feeling that gripped me, deep down in the stomach, and wouldn’t let go.
If only I’d had the first clue what destiny would look like when I found it, things would be a lot easier. Of course, if that were the case, finding it would be something everyone did instead of a fool dream that only a few bothered to reach for.
But whatever, I told myself, it didn’t matter. I didn’t have anything in Boston. I didn’t have anything anywhere. Those are the moments when a person can really throw themselves into finding a destiny they’re not even sure exists. After all, if I ended up back in town, at least I would have seen some things. At least I would have let myself roam, if even for a fleeting time.
And if I did find it, whatever it was – w
hoever it was – it couldn’t be any less interesting than a life lived underground, hardly coming up for air, drowning in whatever boring job I managed to land with a liberal arts degree and zero experience.
I turned up the radio.
“Michael Fucking Bolton,” I said out loud, as the opening bars of What Am I Supposed To Do Without You? filled my ears. I shook my head. “Whatever the hell I want,” I said, answering the song’s rhetorical question. “Wherever the road takes me, I’m ready to see it.”
As I switched the station, and belted out some Guns N Roses, it occurred to me. Kerouac? I woulda made him proud.
-7-
It’s All Worth It
I couldn’t possibly explain why going to Denver made any sense. It’s true, I did want to see a few acts at the Rocky Mountain Experience music festival which started in T-minus-two days from my point of departure, but that was just a convenient excuse.
I guess the reality is, it mattered so little where I went that the first place I came up with any flimsy reason to go to, I went.
These stories are all supposed to go like this: boy meets girl, girl says no to boy. Boy gets all excited and proves to girl that he’s the man of her dreams. Boy and girl have a problem, girl finally relents, boy sweeps girl off her feet.
That’s nice. It’s always seemed like a nice fake sort of yarn to spin, but the thought had occurred to me that I might be in the middle of something like that. Love stories always have some kind of harrowing situation that brings the lovers together, right?
Then again, when’s the last time you saw “hit husband with baseball bat, skipped town” in a Sandra Bullock movie? And unless my soulmate was Earl, the guy at the Quik Stop counter outside Des Moines at three AM, I hadn’t met my prince charming.
So let’s face it – things weren’t looking so great for my prospects at a long and beautiful life. I had this wretched and fairly ridiculous feeling that sooner or later, Dan would turn up again, and he’d probably say something to someone, and through a convoluted series of twists and turns that is so strange it can only happen in real life, because no one would ever buy it in a book, I’d be picked up at some ratbag motel in the middle of nowhere, extradited to Boston, and I’d spend my prime years getting a bunch of prison tats and trading cigarettes for toilet wine. Really though, he was knocked out for four hours. No way could he have survived that. Right?
