I finally told my parents and his what had happened. I felt that exposing Fish fully would take away his hiding place, and once forced to see himself—to really analyze what he was risking—he’d make the positive change that only he could make. I organized an intervention at our home with his entire family. I knew how much they all meant to him, and I had no doubt that together we could get Fish clean. At the intervention, Fish said that was what he wanted, too, while still insisting that his habit was under control. His sister tearfully pleaded with me to not leave her brother. I looked back at her, stalwart, knowing that I was preparing myself to do exactly that.
“Please,” she begged. “He loves you so much.”
But I didn’t believe that anymore. How does someone love you and lie to you? How do they choose drugs over you? How could that lead to an outcome where I wasn’t left feeling like the fool who should have been smart enough to leave? I was determined to remain honest with myself about what I really wanted out of life. A comfortable lifestyle and financial success were not enough. I wanted a partner in love I could always trust.
Not long after the intervention, Fish’s father, a retired marine colonel, came to stay with us for a weekend. On the second night of Colonel Fish’s stay, I sat with him on the front porch while he smoked a cigarette. After chatting, I walked inside the house to look for Fish. I headed upstairs to our bedroom. As I rounded the corner into our large walk-in closet, I saw him hurriedly putting something away inside a shoe.
“What is that? What are you hiding?” I accused.
“Nothing!” he spewed, his voice laden with guilt.
I ran in as he picked up the shoe again. I wrestled it out of his hands and found a plastic bag of white powder stuffed inside.
I shrieked at him, “I knew you were lying! Why are you doing this to yourself—to us? How dare you bring this into our home!”
I sprinted to show it to the colonel. He inspected the contents, and when his eyes returned to mine, they were heavy with disappointment. “This is cocaine,” he said.
It was the first time I had seen Fish’s drug use firsthand. With irrefutable evidence that he was still lying to me, something in me changed. I felt exceptionally disrespected. Honesty was not too much to ask for. I went back inside to find Fish sitting on the couch. His father followed me, waiting for my reaction. I walked slowly over to Fish and laid down an ultimatum.
“That’s it,” I said sternly. “This is your absolute last chance. It’s the drugs or me. No compromises.”
After that night, Fish started to spend less time at the house.
I HADN’T SLEPT WELL since my brother’s death. If I didn’t go out with friends to pass the time, I would come home late from work, feed the dogs, and just sit in front of the television for hours. Lying on the couch with remote in hand, I would run through the broad range of cable channels from bottom to top and back again, watching nothing, until it was time to go back to work. On the nights I made it up to bed—still in the guest room—I would read through one of Chris’s books until my eyes gave in to my exhaustion and I could no longer focus. One night as I read from Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, I came across a section where Chris had placed an asterisk in the margin and brackets around the following excerpt:
“It is a bad thing,” he said, “not to be able to stand solitude.”
Farther down the page it continued:
“Well, I can’t praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste—one who is all for show and has no resources in herself.”
My tired brain tossed these phrases back and forth, from left side to right. When I lost Chris, I’d had Fish to help me pick up the pieces. Who would I have when I lost Fish? For so long I’d been afraid, I realized, of being alone.
I’d also been afraid of not having money. I looked around the large guest room and thought about its place in my four-bedroom house. I examined the decorative items on the walls and shelves and couldn’t remember where half of them had come from, or why I had felt compelled to purchase them.
I thought about the past six years of my life and their place within all twenty-five. I wanted to learn something valuable from this experience. I wanted it to be worth it. I wanted to remember it all and understand why it was happening to me—again.
I did not feel close enough to my parents to share my feelings with them. I was embarrassed that the money they had invested in our wedding was all for nothing. I was so young and I already had two failed marriages, but I couldn’t let the fear of that failure make me stay. My mother had stayed. Once again, I determined I would not.
The supportive phone calls from Fish’s family had stopped. I had no family locally. My siblings all lived halfway across the country. I was very alone—but I felt more empowered than lonely—and I gained a further understanding of what Chris had experienced out in the wilderness. It is a bad thing not to be able to stand solitude. It is a wonderful thing to embrace it, and I was ready.
FISH’S BEHAVIOR AT THE SHOP became erratic. One day he came flying through the waiting room on Rollerblades, maneuvering quickly from one side of the shop to the other, then back out to the parking lot. A clownish smile filled his face. “Hello!” he said in a bizarre tone as he entered the room. “Good-bye!” he said as he exited, in the same strange tenor. The customers sitting nearby got a chuckle out of the oddity. Cindy and I looked at each other, dumbfounded.
What the hell is he doing?
I walked outside to find him working inside a white Chevy G20 that neither Cindy nor I had on the schedule that day. As I opened the passenger side door, I saw him hunched over in the driver’s seat, his skates repeatedly sliding upward with a screech as he pushed against the floorboards, trying to pull the steering column from the dash.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing, Carine?” he retorted. “I’m fixing the ignition on this van!”
“Like hell you are! Get out of it. Now!” I demanded. “You’re high!”
“You’re mean,” he complained as he came out of the van. Then he promptly declared a slogan from a bumper sticker he’d recently installed on his Jeep: “Mean people suck!”
“Are you serious?” I scoffed back at him. “You can’t come to work acting like this! I don’t even want you around here anymore!”
“Fine!” he said, then stuck his tongue out. “That will just give me more time to spend with my new girlfriend,” he continued. “She hates you!”
“Oh, please,” I laughed. “You really think I care? She’s never even met me! And I doubt you’ve been honest with her about why we split.”
“She’s much cooler than you!” he shot back. “She’ll party with me!”
“Lovely,” I said as I walked back toward the shop. “Now get the hell out of here.”
“You’re just a hard-ass—Little Miss Can’t-Be-Wrong!” was his last jab as he got into his Jeep and took off.
I’d already known Fish had a girlfriend, and it didn’t bother me. I was still in love with him, but I had also moved on with someone else, possibly before he’d even met her. Although we were still married and sometimes still under the same roof, we had been living separately for a long time, and the distance between us was too destructive. I did what I’d done with Jimmy but this time with stronger ammunition to justify my disreputable decision. I moved forward because I knew it would keep me from stepping back. Intimacy with another had put me safely past the point of no return.
Fish was so far gone. One night, months before it had come to this, we’d had a heart-to-heart about whether there was any chance we could stay together. At one point Fish pointed out our extreme differences on the matter at hand. I was against any drug use, even the occasional pot smoking. He said that my standards were tough to live up to.
“But I don’t understand,” I said. “I haven’t changed. You’ve known I was t
hat way since the day we met. Why in the world did you ask me to marry you?”
“I guess,” Fish said with a smile and a shrug, “I thought you would fix me.”
His words made me feel like I’d been cheated. I didn’t enter into our marriage with the intention of changing him and I hadn’t known he needed to be fixed. Besides, I already knew that change doesn’t come to someone who doesn’t really want it.
AS THE ZEN SAYING GOES, “After enlightenment, the laundry.” And Fish and I had a lot of the latter. We had incorporated our business as C.A.R. Services before we were married, and since we had started the company as a joint effort, we’d split the corporate shares down the middle. I had to figure out how to keep him away from the shop even though he had just as much legal right to be there as I did. Since I controlled the finances, I struck a deal with him that he would continue to receive his full salary and any profit sharing only on the condition that he did not show up for work.
I hired an attorney to begin divorce proceedings. Fish finished moving out of our house completely. He stayed away from the shop, and communication between us returned to being nonexplosive. We even consulted an attorney together to decide what to do about the business, which was still small but strong. Given the circumstances, it was impossible for us to manage it jointly. Our attorney advised that either we sell the company or one of us would have to buy out the other. We agreed to meet again the following month. I continued to run the shop, but I began to look for other employment options.
Before our next appointment with the corporate attorney, Fish called a meeting at the shop after hours to speak with me and all our employees collectively. Apprehensive, we all took seats on the couches and chairs in the waiting room. Fish proceeded to explain how he was going to force me out of the company and take over. Apparently he had not paid much attention to what it meant to be incorporated as equal shareholders—he couldn’t just force me out.
Everyone, including me, just sat there for a few minutes listening to him. Then Greg stood up, took a measured breath, and said, “I’m not going to stay here and watch you run this place into the ground. I’m following Carine. I’m going wherever she goes. We asked her to make some changes around here and be present, and she did that. She’s made it a good shop to work in again. I simply don’t trust you anymore. I trust her.”
One by one, the employees announced their faith in me and asserted their disappointment in my business partner. Fish sat there listening, flabbergasted. My jaw gaped even more than his.
Finally Fish stood up, called them all fools, and walked out.
The meeting was over.
I muttered out a “Thanks, guys” as the staff dispersed. Still in shock, I went back to my office and collapsed into my chair to collect my thoughts. Maybe I didn’t have to leave. Could I actually buy Fish out of the business instead? It hadn’t seriously occurred to me to own the shop by myself. I had just been trying to maintain everyone’s jobs and keep things operational until the attorney told us what to do next. But as I sat, staring at the idle papers on my desk, which may as well have been blank, it occurred to me that this was my decision to make. I’d already been running the shop on my own, and I’d loved it.
Then Fish walked in—a ghost of the man I’d stood with at the altar, just a shadow of the man who’d stood up for me in South Dakota. He looked at me with utter disdain. “My customers will never stay with you,” he said. “This is a man’s business. You can never run it by yourself. You’re just a woman.”
I knew my employees could easily fill out a W-4 form at another shop down the road, put on a new uniform, and count on a paycheck—and they knew it, too. And I could easily do the same. But the way Fish said the word “woman” motivated me—I heard echoes of the way my dad had talked to my mom. Billie, you’re nothing without me.
I wasn’t eager to bust my way into a male-dominated industry as a solo female owner. But I wanted to see if I could do it. I thought about my big brother and what advice he would have given. The risks were great. But I was prepared and would proceed cautiously. I figured Chris would have said Easy is boring, and I went for it.
CHAPTER 12
MONEY WAS NEVER JUST MONEY in my family. Money was power, it was loyalty, it was leverage. It was a truism that Chris understood early. When he was home one summer from college, working at Domino’s Pizza—more to stay out of the house than anything else—Shelly came to stay with us for a few days. Despite her tumultuous history with my parents, she had a good reason for the visit: she wanted to go to college, desperately, but couldn’t afford it, and our mom and dad had offered to pay.
“Don’t take the money,” Chris warned her. “There are strings attached—there are always strings attached. If you take the money, you will feel obligated to them for the rest of your life, because they’ll make you feel obligated to them for the rest of your life. Is that what you want? Go to school, but find another way to do it.”
Shelly listened to what Chris had to say—he was so adamant and she couldn’t deny his logic. But she didn’t have an inheritance from Ewie like we did. She couldn’t do it without Mom and Dad’s help. So, she accepted the money. In the end, Chris was right. Their demands proved to be too daunting and Shelly didn’t finish college.
Still, she accepted a gift of a trip to France years later, as did I, as did Shawna and Stacy. “Please come,” Dad had said when he invited me. “You and your sisters. Your mom and I want to treat you to this trip—it will be good for all of us.”
My sisters and I discussed it. Was there a catch? Should we go? Was this really a bid for familial connection, for closeness? If so, how could we say no to such a generous offer? Why had I spent so much energy protecting them if not to take any opportunity to preserve and improve our relationship?
In the end, we all accepted the invitation. We had a wonderful time together touring the French Riviera, enjoying cultural delicacies and historical architecture. We lazed in the sun on beaches overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. We strolled through villages and their quaint shops, which offered fine cheeses and beautiful works of art. The conversation remained lighthearted and safe. It was the kind of time spent with Mom and Dad that convinced us that a deep bond still existed that could withstand any solvent.
But soon after we returned stateside, the old dynamics were back in place. Dad called his daughters separately and told us that it was looking like he had no choice but to leave my mom. His reasons alternated from the insensitive to the ridiculous, including his own diagnosis of her state of mind being enough evidence to prove that she was bipolar—and that he couldn’t be expected to stay in such a difficult relationship. He reported negative things she was saying about each of us and reminded us of hurtful things she had done in the past. He was trying to pit us against Billie, and while my sisters didn’t have a good relationship with my mom, we all thought his treatment of her was unfair. We recognized he was laying the groundwork to discredit her, which probably meant that she was threatening to expose something he’d done. It reminded me of when my parents had said my older siblings were doing drugs: Don’t believe them—they’re high and demented. Any construction of a hopeful future was eroding again.
I knew the dangers of taking my parents at face value as well as Shelly and Chris did, but I still struggled with accepting more than just their financial advice. My parents were proud of my accomplishments, and they constantly boasted about them. Dad wore C.A.R. Services T-shirts around town almost every day. I needed help to buy Fish out of the business, and I had been wary yet still receptive when my mom called one day with a plan. She suggested that she and my dad loan me the money. I could pay them back with profits from the shop, the sale of the house with Fish, and my share of the royalties Jon had agreed to pay our family for the right to publish excerpts from the letters, diaries, and other documents Chris had written during his journeys. I accepted the offer and was able to pay them back quickly.
It wasn’t long, however, before the same tra
gically comedic scene started to unfold at work at least once a week:
“Here they come again!” whoever spotted them first would warn when Walt and Billie’s Cadillac sped into our parking lot. Immediately after the car jerked to a stop, both front doors would fly open as my parents tried to beat each other inside. They looked like little kids scrambling to be the first to tattle on the other, and I was the judge.
The opening line was always the same, gender interchangeable depending on who’d won the race to find me first. “Carine! Do you know what your mother/father just did?” . . . and it would go on and on in the same way it had for more than twenty years.
“How many times do I have to repeat myself?” I would scold. “You guys absolutely cannot do this here. This is a place of business—my place of business.”
“Oh, really? Is that so? You think you got here on your own? After all we’ve done for you, now you won’t help us in return?”
“Keep your voices down,” I would say, trying to contain the scene. “You two don’t want help. That’s why you keep having the same fight over and over again. You actually prefer this misery. I do not. Please leave.”
Eventually they would leave, but not until their tantrums had dissipated. I’d then apologize to any staff and customers who’d been in the line of fire. Luckily, Mom and Dad were out of town a lot during this time and would just leave me phone messages. And I, feeling obligated, would always call back.
I was grateful for their generosity and support, but their constant reminder of it was enough to make me regret the favor. I now felt like it had been offered simply to keep me appropriately aligned and permanently obliged to them. I was working hard to make my own money, and I was determined not to drown in the materialism Chris had warned me about.
The Wild Truth Page 17
