The Wild Truth (13 page)

Watching the apartment mailbox day after day was agonizing. I knew Chris always took road trips during school breaks, but I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t visited me and I worried I would never hear from him again—that somehow our seemingly unbreakable connection had been severed. I was thrilled when I finally received his response. I had just returned from a class; Patrick was still at work. I tore the envelope open and started to read his reply in the elevator. His letter began:

How he could think that I was even
capable
of not speaking to him was beyond me. Eyes glued to the page, I made my way down the hall.

I fell to my knees and began to sob. I wanted to be able to tell Chris the truth. But I told myself everything would be okay. I would be okay. Pat wasn’t so bad. Things were going to get better. Why worry Chris over something I could easily handle myself?

My next letter to Chris was one in a duplicate set also prepared for my aunts and uncles—all except Travis. It included pictures from my wedding day, my honeymoon in Ireland, sitting in an Indy car on the track where Patrick had been given a test run, my new Honda Si, and our cushy apartment. All evidence of how wonderful my new life was and how successful I had been since leaving home.

The first letter I received back was from Chris, who politely remarked how nice the pictures made my life look. The careful wording gave me a sense that he was keenly aware that there was a hollowness behind the travel and material possessions. His closing sentence advised me to “Do good in school.” I was not yet prepared to disappoint my brother, or myself. I was determined to straighten out my relationship with Patrick before any permanent or noticeable damage was done.

Patrick had changed quickly once before; surely he could just change back.

I
LAY NAKED IN THE BED
, in silence, focused on how the warmth of my tears turned cold once they soaked into the pillow. Patrick looked back in from the doorway again. He always apologized. I had given up looking for sincerity in his words.

A warm shower helped to wash it all away. My eyes were red, my face flushed. There were no bruises to be dealt with. But I did see something new in the mirror that day. It doesn’t take long for a victim to become an enabler, and I was right on course.

“How did you get here?” I seethed at my reflection. “And why the hell are you still here?
Billie!
”

It had only been a matter of months. But that was long enough.

My inheritance from Ewie alleviated the burden of yet another escape. I scoured the yellow pages for local divorce attorneys, female only. I was taken aback by the sheer mass of professionals who could make a living from rectifying poor marital decisions. My finger stopped at a name that sounded tough and gave an impression of someone full of moxie: Jody Badger.

When I first met Jody, I understood why the word “firecracker” was sometimes used as an adjective. A new Miata buzzed into the parking space next to mine as I arrived at Jody’s office for my appointment. A stout woman in a snug business skirt and blazer popped out of the convertible and looked me over.

“Are you Mrs. Jaimeson?” she asked. The label felt cumbersome.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Okay, then, let’s get to work,” she said, and without any welcoming gesture, she walked toward the building’s entrance, her thick heels rapid against the asphalt. As I followed behind her, she reminded me of Miss Piggy with shorter hair.

Jody was the sole employee at the Badger Law Office, a professionally appointed yet no-nonsense space. The empathy I had expected to see as I sat and explained my predicament never surfaced on Jody’s face. Instead, she sat behind her desk with the same matter-of-fact expression I had observed less than a year prior on Dr. Ray.

She handed me some papers. “First thing you need to do is to take this down to the magistrate’s office to file a complaint and request a restraining order against your husband. Once it’s granted, if he comes within fifty yards of you, you call the cops,” she instructed.

“Um, okay,” I stammered and took a deep breath. It felt like she was speaking to someone else . . . or to this hard shell that looked like me while the part of me that could show dread cowered inside. But I wasn’t looking for a therapist, I reminded myself; I was looking for an advocate. And there was no doubt in my mind that Jody would help me. I
needed
someone like her to be my bulldog.

“I’ll need a check today for a retainer, and we can get started on your divorce.”

Divorce.

As I sat in Jody’s office writing out my check, I realized that I was the one who held the live bomb now, but this time I could control the end result: sovereignty from Patrick.

I didn’t tell Jody anything about my childhood, but she seemed to have a keen awareness of how I ended up in her office that day.

“You’ve taken your first opportunity at independence and made a complete mess of it,” she told me, “and it’s going to get even messier before you’re through. Pay attention and learn from the cleanup.” I didn’t say anything aloud, but I vowed I would.

SEEING JODY BADGER
was my first act of resolve. Telling Chris the truth about Patrick was the second.

Our letter writing had continued fast and furious. In fact, we had some of our hardest, most intense conversations in letters over the next several months. Chris didn’t have a phone, after all—and even if he had, he wasn’t the type to talk on the phone for hours on end. And we lived too far apart for a casual visit. “I was wrong about Patrick,” I wrote one day, my hand trembling but my words resolute, “and I’ve filed for divorce.” I told him about everything that had happened and how foolish I felt. How I’d tried to make it work, warning Patrick I would leave him, but my husband had only scoffed at the threat. I wrote about how I’d gotten a restraining order against Patrick, and that since he’d been served papers I hadn’t heard from him. Our lease had been up at the apartment, anyway, and I’d left it for another, smaller apartment in the same complex. It was a dumb move. It was a luxury apartment I should have realized I couldn’t afford, but it was familiar and easy. I needed easy. And I didn’t know where else to go.

As I enlightened Chris about the facts of my failed marriage, his understanding words brought comfort. He was proud of my strength to leave an abusive man. “Mistakes are okay as long as we learn from them,” he wrote back, without directly pointing out the financial ones that I was now making. He understood I had to come to this realization on my own.

Chris had his own truths to reveal in our letters. He told me that the summer before he’d left for Emory, when he’d walked through the Mojave delivering food, he had also traveled to our old neighborhood in California and visited with former neighbors. He had asked what the neighbors knew about our family, comparing what Walt and Billie had told
them
with what our parents had told
us.
For the first time, Chris had learned the extent of our parents’ deception and the truth behind the photograph on our mother’s dresser. Marcia and Walt had not divorced amicably, as we’d been told. Walt had still been married to Marcia when Chris and I were born. We were illegitimate.

My first thought on reading his letter was
clarity
. It was like all these scattered images from my life—of Quinn, of Shannon, of my parents’ contradictory stories—came together to complete a full picture. Chris had again been senior detective, and he’d given me the final clue that made everything else make sense. I was livid, but I wasn’t talking to my parents anyway. I wasn’t about to pick up the phone and call them on their bullshit. I knew that would be a waste of time and just invite more lies. I was leading my own life now, rocky though it was.

A few days later, though, I began to feel something else: gratitude. I’d known that something was wrong with Chris when he returned from that California trip. I could see something weighing on him, and now it made sense. He’d been furious with our parents and unable to act on what he’d learned. He couldn’t confront them and stir up toxicity that he would then be leaving me alone with. He couldn’t tell me and burden me with the same anger he carried, because I had no choice but to live with them for the next three years. If he’d been an only child, I’m sure he would have vented his outrage the moment he’d returned home from California. But because of me, he’d kept it all in.

Now I had left, too. I was no longer living under Walt and Billie’s roof, and Chris could tell me the truth. It was a truth that plainly still haunted him, though he’d had three years to work through it. But as mad as he was, entirely forsaking our parents was never as easy as we thought it would be. I’d seen all the rest of our siblings do the back-and-forth dance of “I’m done with them” and “Well, maybe I’ll try again.” It was never simple.

Our mom was many people rolled into one. She was the soccer mom who brought oranges to all of Chris’s games and the epitome of organization who headed up his Indian Guide and my Girl Scout meetings. She made us elaborate and beautiful Halloween costumes and helped us put the finishing touches on every school project with her artistic talents. We learned how to drive a stick shift under the safety and guidance of her even teaching temperament. And she had a sense of humor, dressing Chris, Shannon, and Quinn up like chauffeurs whenever we went to pick my dad up from the airport after a business trip . . . in the Cadillac, of course.

And our dad wasn’t
just
volatile. He also took us to Europe and delighted in watching us experience different cultures and strange gourmet foods, sometimes ordering for us in the local language so we wouldn’t be dissuaded from trying something we would normally think was gross. Sometimes when Chris and I built forts in the family room, Dad played guitar and sang his silly songs in front of the fireplace and pretended we were camping. He gave me a children’s book about a dollhouse when I had the chicken pox, inscribed with love to his “Woo Bear.” He could speak for hours about the wonders of space exploration and had fascinating accompanying visuals, blueprints of his designs, and three-dimensional models of his image-capturing radar systems that now floated about the atmosphere we were orbiting amongst. When I was little, with every trip he returned from, he brought me treats from the plane. I loved the shiny foils and different languages on the packaging, and I loved the taste of the honey-roasted peanuts. Dad could never walk by a snack without eating it, so the fact that he had saved them for me meant the world. I don’t remember exactly when he stopped bringing me the peanuts. What I remember most is how I started hiding when he returned home, instead of running for him.

Our parents hurt us constantly, but they were our parents. We wanted to believe the warm moments showed who they genuinely were, not just another part of the show they put on.

But something had changed for Chris, and it wasn’t just time. He was finally finished. In one of his letters, he wrote why:

He’d written them a long letter, he said, that detailed all the emotional trauma and abuse we had suffered as kids. How their actions had caused him to lose all respect for both of them. He said he’d really laid it all out and explained how damaging it had been to grow up within a household filled with such painful behavior, so many lies, such hatred and contempt. He went on: