Asylum--Chapter Twenty-One Last Chance

Chapter Twenty-One
Last Chance

I was the only passenger on the mail plane so I sat in the copilot’s seat. The land and the Yukon River were clearly visible through the wide windshield as we took off. Peering down, I could even pick out Billy’s cabin as we passed over the woods before circling to the northwest. We flew over the Native village with its tiny, rough-hewn cabins set along the riverbank and over the town of Eagle, looking complete and self-contained, as if it held everything, every basic need: simple food, warmth  and light, peace, a remove from the harsh world outside, the solace of friends. The people there, I thought, lived with an integrity and authenticity lacking in my life full of lies. 

In the past eight months I had been anything but honest, and a sudden revulsion swept over me at what I had done. I hardly recognized the person I had become, sneaking around, making up elaborate lies and crazy alibis. It had become intolerable—that background hum of guilt, the resounding note of shame, which I had tried to ignore, but that had grown louder with each trip north. I should have been able to resist the pull of both Eagle and Billy, and my failure to do so must mean my character was fundamentally weak. Well, for once, I would be strong. I would do the right thing. 

When the plane landed in Fairbanks, I didn’t continue on to San Jose. I disembarked and called Billy from the airport. I told him I was going to rent a car and drive to Taiga to confess to Thomas—everything, going back to the first night we had spent together the previous May. 

“Louise.” Summed up in that one word was everything. “Thomas played on that excuse of autism. He took out his frustrations on you. If he had a bad day, you lost a pint of blood. How can you think of going back to that?”

 “I don’t even know if Thomas will take me back, but if he does—” I gripped the phone receiver, forcing out the words, “I’m going to move to Taiga, at least til the fall. Then we can see how things are working out.” 

 There was a long pause before Billy said, “I’m still haunted by the thought of that day you tried to take off your engagement ring, and you couldn’t because it was bent. You were twisting and biting that thing till your finger was all swollen. It reminded me of a wolf chewing off its own foot to get out of a trap.”

I remembered that day, too, my sense of desperation, of feeling trapped in my marriage. And yet here I was, determined to try again.

“Do you still love him?” 

“I don’t even know anymore. I feel dead inside when I think of him. But maybe, if I try, I can start to love him again.” Though I didn’t cry, my throat felt constricted and dry.

“The soil of your heart is barren, stripped of nutrients. You can’t plant the seeds of love now. They won’t come up.”

A surge of love went through me for this sincere man from a bygone era when people were not embarrassed to speak in romantic metaphors. I couldn’t believe I would not be hearing his gentle voice anymore.

“Maybe I can’t get my feelings for Thomas back again. But he’s still my husband, and I have to deal with that. I can’t keep running away from it. From him. I’ve got to make a decision, and I can’t until I give our marriage one more chance.” This is what it had come down to, as if our marriage were a third entity, something that needed to be respected instead of having been left untended for years.

“Last September,” Billy said, “when we were fishing, one time you went walking along the gravel bar looking for pretty rocks. I was watching you in the distance. You looked so small. You were wearing a red hat. And I said to myself, ‘What if one day she just keeps walking and walks out of my life altogether?’ Now you’re doing just that.”

“I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.” Now the tears came. “But I thought it through on the plane, all the pros and cons. Your side of the list was two pages. Thomas’s was only half as long, but I wrote in big block letters, ‘Twenty-five years.’ I’ve invested twenty-five years in this relationship.”

“That is a long time.” I could hear him breathing, then he said all in a rush, “I’m worried about your safety. What if he gets violent?”

“I’ve thought of that. I’ll call the state troopers. They’re only a mile away.” 

The phone line crackled in the interval before he burst out—with the closest thing to a shout I’d ever heard from him—

“Tell him that Billy loves you and he will take you back if he has to bring the dogsled to take you home on!” Tell him, ‘I’ve got someplace to go back to, a soft place to land.’”

“Okay. I will. I love you, Billy.”

“Goodbye, Louise. I love you, too.”

“I know.”

When I walked into Thomas’s office at the school, he looked up at me, shock and dismay written all over his face. But the look quickly faded, and he asked—as if it wasn’t entirely unexpected—“Are you here to break up with me?” 

We got in the car and drove and soon tears were streaming down his face as I told him about Billy. It was a terrible night. Thomas alternately cried and raged. Accusations, resentments and long-held suspicions flew out of his mouth. I confessed my deceptions, the secret post office box in Albion, my clandestine visits to Eagle. He was furious at the way I had lied, cheated, and misled him. I fled to the bathroom and lifted my head, mouth agape, keening for Billy. 

In the other room, Thomas listened to me crying for another man, and struggled to accept the reality I had forced upon him. When I came out of the bathroom, he said, “I have to make this okay because otherwise my world will collapse. I still love you, and I want to try to save our marriage.”

I felt nothing for Thomas except pity for the pain I’d caused him. But in an effort to communicate that, despite my love for Billy, I had chosen my husband, I pulled him gently to the floor and wordlessly removed all of our clothes. But Billy was in the room, and Thomas turned away, sobbing.

The next morning, exhausted but calm, we made an agreement to stay together for seven months—until our anniversary in November—then to re-evaluate things. This was longer than I had told Billy we’d be apart, but Thomas insisted, and I reluctantly agreed.

As soon as I could, I checked my email at Thomas’s office. My kids had been getting worried since they hadn’t been able to get in touch with me. I found a plaintive four-word message from Ambrose. “Mom,” it said, “Where are you?”

It was March when I told the chairman of the fellowship committee I had to leave San Jose three months early for medical reasons. Thomas flew down and helped me move back to Pullman; from there we would pack and go on to Alaska. As he drove the U-Haul north, Thomas was in good spirits and tried to engage me in conversation, and when that failed, in song. In the car on every vacation we had ever taken, Thomas and I had sung in harmony “our song,” with words by William Blake. When I wouldn’t sing this time, he sang alone about the “prince of love” who 

 . . . caught me in his silken net

And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,

And, laughing, sports and plays with me;

Then stretches out my golden wing,

And mocks my loss of liberty.

The next three months passed in a daze as I tried to reconcile myself to living in Taiga while I longed for Eagle. Everywhere I went, people’s faces lit up when I introduced myself. “Oh, you’re the music teacher’s wife. The one he’s been waiting for!” It made me feel awful every time, and I slunk away from these encounters. Volunteering at the library took up a few of my empty hours.

A tarp was often set up by the roadway with a few Native women sitting beneath it selling crafts. Stopping to look at the beaded moosehide boots, the dark-furred marten hats, and birch bark baskets, I struck up a conversation with an old woman with a dark, creased face and a gentle look in her eyes. She spoke with a heavy accent, making her speech hard to understand. As I examined her exquisitely crafted baskets, she told me her childhood home had been in the wild country, far from any roads. Her family had moved with the seasons, hunting, trapping, catching salmon, picking berries, living in the traditional Athabaskan way. I asked her when she had learned to speak English and she laughed, “I was twenty. That’s when I came out to the road. I got married.”

“Came out to the road.” What volumes those simple words spoke—to have grown up in a wilderness so vast that the outside world was represented by one far away road. I bought a small basket from her, with the bark neatly folded at the corners and the rim edged with spruce roots. 

The school year hadn’t ended yet, and Thomas taught violin and piano lessons after school every day, so he often didn’t get home until dinnertime. On these long days when I was on my own, I was consumed with anxiety, overwhelmed by memories of being bereft and alone in San Jose. I feared my isolation would continue forever, with Thomas unable to break through my frozen self. My thoughts returned again and again to Billy and Eagle. I took walks down by the Chulitna River and found comfort in the sound of flowing water, so like the Yukon. The sight of Denali never failed to move me. This place was undeniably beautiful, and I knew I was lucky to be back in Alaska, and yet I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. Taiga did not feel like home and I doubted it ever would. 

Still, I made an attempt to settle into my new environment. I got a part-time job at the visitors center, although I didn’t know any more about the area than the tourists. My pride in my adopted state showed itself when people from Ohio and Texas came in, exclaiming over the spectacular landscape and the wildlife they’d seen. I kept a tally of sightings on a chalkboard: lynx, bison, porcupines, birds. On cloudy days, visitors complained that Denali wasn’t visible. They were disappointed when I told them “The mountain is out” only about a third of the time. One reason I’d been hired was to write a newsletter but, to my dismay, I discovered I still couldn’t write—not even bits of small town news. I sat at the computer, paralyzed. 

Thomas and I made tentative efforts to reconnect. We were considerate of each other, perhaps overly so, always deferring to the other person’s choice of movies, places to eat, where to walk. We got along better than we had in years, with never an argument, never a raised voice. I had made that a non-negotiable point. “I’ve had enough yelling for one lifetime,” I said.

Thomas told me about his students—the teenager who played the violin with single-minded ferocity, and the girl who shyly sidled up to him after school to ask for lessons. I told him the silly questions tourists asked. “Where do you keep the animals? Do you take American money? Where can we see an igloo?” We went for hikes in the woods, though our conversation often trailed off and we walked silently, holding hands. Any talk of the future was deliberately avoided. At night, we tried to reconnect physically, but all too often, Billy could not be banished from our thoughts, and Thomas and I each retreated to our own bedroom. We had still not overcome this basic incompatibility: I preferred it cool and quiet; he liked it warm and with the fan on high.

Thomas often professed his love for me, asking for constant reassurance that I loved him, that I am happy to be here with them, that I was his best friend again. He craved equally profuse proclamations of my love for him, but I said, “That would be out of character for me,” thinking guiltily of the night I had told Billy on the phone that I loved him, until I ran out of words.

“Everything you did with him was out of character for you,” Thomas said. “I like

that character.”

I, too, liked who I was in Eagle.

“I say that with all my heart. I just wish you were like that with me.”

But the spontaneous, no-holding-back person I was with Billy was at odds with the responsible, well-ordered wife Thomas had always wanted me to be. The two would not coalesce in my mind. I was one way with Billy, and another with Thomas, and I didn’t see how I could change that. Instead, I tried to come up with true statements of, perhaps not love, then connection. “Without you, Thomas, I would have no one to write me music or poetry. Without you, my past would disappear because I’d have no one to remember it with. Without you, I wouldn’t know how to be a mother, if you weren’t there beside me as a father.” Thomas appreciated these sentiments, but they did not satisfy him.

In the fall, the local branch campus of the University of Alaska asked me to lead a six-week memoir workshop. I felt like a hypocrite. How could I teach writing when I couldn’t write, myself? Thomas urged me to take the job, saying I would feel less anxious if I had more to occupy my mind. But teaching, which had always been stressful for me, exacerbated my anxiety. I started having strange aches and pains. I felt like I was getting old, that I was dying. I grew nauseated at the sight of food. 

Although I could scarcely eat, I made a nice dinner for Thomas every evening. He’d give me a kiss, take off his tie, and put on a CD he thought I’d enjoy. He was trying to create something we’d never had before—a normal life where the husband comes home to dinner with the wife, the kids are grown and gone, the house is quiet, and the man and woman know that life together is good and they have, if not a long future together, then at least a close and satisfying one. 

One night Thomas put on one of my favorite pieces, the seamless Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5, by Villa Llobos, which sounded to me full of inexpressible longing. He held my hand for a moment before we began eating. He smiled at me. I did not respond. I looked out the window at the leafless, lifeless trees and it seemed I was as dead as they. My face felt like a leaden mask.

“Can’t you see how hard I’m working to get us back together? Being in Alaska has changed me,” he said, making an expansive motion to encompass all the world outside our window. “I’ve become more of the man you wanted me to be.”

Having to conform to the strictures of the public school system had reined in some of Thomas’s impulsive behavior. He’d received special monitoring and coaching from his supervisor at the university to address his autism and how it affected his teaching. Wearing a tie and maintaining a professional appearance had been a new thing for him, a concession he hadn’t been willing to make before when he was so bothered by tags in his dress shirts and the binding feeling of properly fitting pants. Through enormous efforts at self-control, he’d learned not to erupt into angry outbursts at his students when they weren’t following his directions. As he said, “I’ve learned to turn off those triggers in myself.” For the first time, he was making a deliberate effort to see things from others’ perspectives, to consider how others might feel. I wondered why he was willing to do these things to preserve his job when he hadn’t been willing to do them to save his marriage.

“I can see that you’ve changed,” I said. “You don’t tell me to shut up anymore. You don’t pressure me into making deals that I don’t want to agree to. You take no for an answer. All that is good. But it’s too late.”

“No, it isn’t,” Thomas protested. “Give us some more time. It hasn’t been long enough.

It had been long enough for me. Much too long, in fact. All through those many months, I had been unable to keep Billy out of my mind. In June, I imagined him planting peas and turnips. In July, I could see him floating in his canoe down the Yukon on a warm summer day. In August, I knew he’d headed up into the mountains for the caribou hunt, and I wondered if he’d been successful. In September, I remembered the previous autumn when we’d pulled dozens of brightly colored salmon, pulsing with life, from the river. The people I’d met—Esther, Arliss, Homer, Paula—surfaced in my daydreams, and I wondered how they were doing.

Throughout the time I’d been in Taiga, I’d tried to revive my feeling for Thomas, but, I finally realized, there was something more basic to a marriage than love: trust. I no longer trusted my husband. There was no getting that back. And I no longer deserved his trust. Where did that leave us? I sat at the table, my food untouched, unable to speak.

Thomas misunderstood my silence as assent. As far as he was concerned, things were settled between us: I was staying in Taiga.

Desperate, I looked in the phone book for a therapist. The closest one, a woman, was in Fairbanks. I couldn’t tell Thomas where I was going because he thought all women therapists were man-haters who talked wives into leaving their husbands.

The writing workshop was finished, and I had time on my hands once again. Twice a week, I dropped Thomas off at school in the morning and made the three-hour drive to the city. I raced back to make sure I’d be able to pick him up following his after-school lessons. I was careful always to stop and refill the gas tank to precisely the same level as when I left so that Thomas would not know I’d driven anywhere. One time I panicked when I accidentally filled the tank full, but luckily, he didn’t notice.

The family therapist’s name was Eleanor. Although there were building blocks and containers of Playdough on the brightly colored carpet, she looked like someone who would brook no nonsense. Unlike warmhearted Jill in San Jose, Eleanor— like many women in Alaska—was tough-minded and pragmatic. It took two sessions just for me to give her an account of all the events in my life in the past eighteen months. It came flooding out of me, and she hardly said a word. I told her of my acute sense of abandonment when Thomas had not come to me in California. I repeated verbatim the hurtful things he had said over the phone. “I feel like you’re already dead.” “I lucked out, I didn’t have to come down.” “You OWE me a book.” I imagined the sentences marked in charred outlines in my brain, like the signs we used to make as kids with a wood-burning kit. When I spoke of Thomas, he seemed a million miles away, while talking of Billy brought him as close as if he were sitting quietly in the other room, waiting for me. 

At the third session, I tried to explain why I was still struggling with the decision to leave Taiga and go to Billy.

 “What are you afraid of?” she asked.

“Life is hard in Eagle. Maybe I won’t be strong enough to make it there.”

“You survived a mental breakdown. That’s not nothing.”

“I worry that Eagle might not turn out to be all I’ve wished for.”

Eleanor just nodded. By the end of the hour, she seemed tired of my dithering. She spoke brusquely, but not without kindness.

 “You’re trying to think your way out of it,” she said. “Obviously you can’t. This is your homework,” Eleanor said firmly. “Go home. Sit in a place where you feel safe.”

I thought of my bedroom, clean and white and quiet.

 “Then listen.” She paused. “But don’t listen to your mind.” 

That was a welcome thought. I was sick of my brain’s ceaseless back and forths, still weighing the pros and cons.

“Don’t listen to your heart.”

Hadn’t my heart gotten me into more than enough trouble already?

“Listen to your body.”

The next morning, after I took Thomas to work, I returned home and sat on my bed. I held still and listened to my body, scanning from my fingertips to my shoulders up to the top of my head and down through the twisted knot that was my stomach to the tips of my toes tucked under the quilt. I picked up a notebook and started making a list of how my body felt: chest tight, heart thumping, can’t breathe, hair falling out, can’t eat, stomach aches, neck pain, head so heavy it might snap right off my neck, deep shuddering sighs. The list went on and on until I reached the bottom of the page.

I looked at the sheet of paper and burst into tears, feeling an incredible relief. My body was telling me a truth I hadn’t been able to hear from anyone—not myself, not Thomas or Billy, not Jill or the social worker at the hospital, not even the damaged women at the domestic violence support group.

That night I dreamt of looking for a job and a Park Service ranger in Taiga told me coldly, “There is no place for you here.”

I brought the list to my next session and handed it to Eleanor. She quickly ran her finger down the page, nodding, “Mm, hmm.” Then she clapped her hands on her thighs. “Well,” she said, “are you going to pay attention to what you’ve got here?” 

I hesitated one last time.

With scarcely disguised impatience, she said, “Ye gods, Louise, what are you still clinging to at this point?”

“Security.”

“Thomas has never given you security. What else?”

“The boys. They’ll never forgive me.”

“They’re adults. They’ll get over it. What else?” She put her hands together and leaned forward, looking me in the eye.

“Thomas is part of me.”

“He always will be. Anything more?”

 “My marital status. I don’t want to be a divorcee.” The word sprang out of me in my mother’s judgmental voice. 

“What are we, my dear, living in the fifties?” she put her head back and laughed. “There’s no shame in being a divorced woman.”

“There is to me,” I said. “I’d feel like a failure.”

“It is Thomas who has failed you,” she said quietly.

Although I did not say anything, I knew the truth: we had failed each other.

I looked out the window at the snow heaped in the parking lot and weighing down the branches of the trees. I thought of Eagle in winter, the still sweep of the frozen Yukon, the low mountains sheltering the town, the silence of Billy’s cabin. I realized that was where I needed to be. I’d tried again with Thomas. I’d given it my best shot. It was time to call it quits. I was finally ready.

We spent the rest of the session coming up with a strategy, a plan for getting out of Taiga. Knowing the danger of leaving an abusive husband, Eleanor warned me, “Be careful,” she said, “Be very careful.”

A few days before Thanksgiving, I called Billy and told him I was coming to Eagle.

“Hoo-ray,” he said, “Hoo-ray!”

I wanted to leave before our twenty-sixth anniversary. Without telling Thomas—one final deception—I boarded a bus in Taiga, bound for Fairbanks, with two suitcases and three boxes. It was the same bus service that had taken me to Tok on my way to Eagle a year and a half ago. I loaded my boxes into the back of the seven-passenger van.

The driver eyed the boxes, gave me a gap-toothed grin and asked, “Are you running away? We’ve got a seat specially reserved for runaways.” He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb at the seat behind him. “Where’re you headed?”

“I’m going to Eagle,” I said.

The bus pulled out of Taiga with the driver singing along to the radio, “Big city turn me loose and set me free.” 

I got stuck in Fairbanks; the mail plane wasn’t flying because a winter storm had blown in. While staying with a friend of Billy’s from years ago in the fire service, I came down with the flu and ran a temperature of 102 degrees. For five interminable days I kept to the bedroom lest I get anyone else in the household sick. I called Thomas and, in a hoarse but determined voice, told him where I was going. He begged me to come back. I told him, “No, this is what I have got to do.”

When the snowstorm finally stopped at noon on the fifth day, the plane took off at two o’clock. The pilot would try to get in and out of Eagle before the early dark fell.

The flight seemed to take unusually long as the plane droned on and on. For hundreds of miles, there was nothing but white mountains and ice-covered rivers. I knew the plane was cutting a wide swath through the stillness below, which closed in again behind it as we passed. The plane banked over the Yukon, and I caught sight of a few warmly lit cabins on the riverbank, the yellow lights welcoming me to this tiny outpost in the wilderness. I pressed my forehead to the window, tears streamed down my cheeks. I was home.