American Wife (31 page)

I went and made myself a cup of coffee. I didn't see him anymore that week.

I didn't want the kids to know I was smoking, so instead of taking along cigarettes, I brought along some of those nicotine lozenges.

That turned out to be a bit of a mistake. I snuck one while we were standing in line for It's a Small World.

Great idea, right? Try that with a cigarette.

Except . . . within minutes I felt as if I had to heave.

“Stay in line,” I mumbled to the kids. I ran to a nearby garbage can, unburdened myself, and returned.

“Mom?” asked Bubba.

“I'm fine.”

I ended up buying a pack of cigarettes and smoked them on the balcony of the room that night while I returned some business calls.

At one point I looked down at the corner near the railing.

The frog was there.

“I'm not buying it,” I told the creature.

I went back to making calls. When I was done, the frog was still sitting in the same place. I walked over and took a few pictures. It didn't seem to care.

I
do
think that Chris was and is with me, but whether that has anything to do with the frog—I have no clue.

I don't seem to have any control over the odd occurrences, let alone the feeling that he is with me. So in the end I have to accept them. It's a kind of faith in reality beyond easy explanations, acceptance of things that neither make sense nor can be reduced to anything except what they are in themselves: like a frog on a door handle.

BUBBA'S BUCK

Among the many people Chris met while doing charity work was Randy Cupp, who invited him and Bubba out to shoot with him come deer season. When Chris passed away, Randy made it clear to me that the offer not only still stood, but that he would love to give Bubba a chance to kill his first buck.

With deer season upon us, the kids and I decided to take him up on the offer. Angel, Bubba, and I went out to his property on a beautiful morning. Setting out for the blind, I felt Chris's presence, as if he were scouting along with us. We settled into our spots and waited.

A big buck came across in front of us a short time later. It was an easy shot—except that Bubba had neglected to put his ear protection in. He scrambled to get it in, but by the time he was ready, the animal had bounded off. Deer—and opportunities—are like that.

We waited some more.

Another buck came out from the trees not five minutes later. And this one was not only in range, but it was bigger than the first: a thirteen pointer.

Chris must have scared that thing up.

“That's the one,” said Randy as the animal pranced forward.

Bubba took a shot.

The deer scooted off as the gunshot echoed. My son thought he'd missed, but Randy was sure he'd hit him. At first, we didn't see a blood trail—a bad sign, since a wounded animal generally leaves an easily spotted trail. But a few steps later, we found the body prone in the woods. Bubba had killed him with a shot to the lungs.

Like father, like son.

While Bubba left to dress the carcass, I went back to the blind with Angel to wait for another. She was excited that she might get a deer just like her brother. But when a buck walked within range, tears came to her eyes.

“I can't do it,” she said, putting down her gun.

“It's okay,” I told her.

“I just can't.”

“Do you want me to?” I asked.

She nodded.

I took aim. Even though I was married to a hard-core hunter, I had never shot a deer before. I lined up the scope, walking him into the crosshairs. A slow breath, and I squeezed the trigger. The shot surprised me—just as Chris said it should.

The deer fell. He was good meat; we eat what we kill, another of Chris's golden rules.

“You know, Angel, you're going to be my hunting partner forever,” I told her later. “You're just so calm and observant. And good luck.”

We plan to do that soon. She'll be armed with a high-powered camera, rather than a rifle.

LEGAL ENTANGLEMENTS

Now that I was in a position to, with the estate, eventually own or control 85 percent of Craft, I tried to get a clear understanding of what was going on with the company. I knew that before he died, Chris had expressed concerns about being shut out of Craft International Risk Management or CIRM, the apparently related company.

Beyond that, I was worried about Craft's general viability. Its financial struggles had led Chris to stop taking a salary in August 2012, and I saw no reason that things had improved.

The LLC Agreement included certain provisions likely intended to prohibit a spouse from participating in ownership or management of the company. But as a beneficial owner, I thought it only fair that I be allowed to look at the books. I offered to involve one of my relatives, a business expert, to help examine the operations and offer restructuring advice for free, something ordinarily worth about $50,000. But the request was spurned, and while Bo and Steven later contended in court papers that I was given full access to Craft's financials, my lawyer countered that we only received data showing general income and expenditures.

What started as a friendly inquiry as I attempted to get a handle on the estate's finances became a serious conflict as time went on. Until this point, I had cautiously thought of Chris's business partners as friends. Now they were adversaries. It was a bizarre and baffling turn of events. I couldn't understand why I wasn't being given complete information about the company. Worse, Bo and Steven insisted that they had the right to use Chris's name and likeness for the company's business. That didn't seem right either.

The bad feelings were palpable.

The Ventura lawsuit was an even heavier weight, a sort of torture I'd never encountered before. Even forgetting the effects of the negative publicity, it is amazing how much work and strain are involved in a lawsuit.

I should point out that both my husband and I tried to reach an amiable and just agreement without animosity or going to court. It takes two sides to agree, however, and no acceptable compromise could be found. Each party's position remained the same through the trial.

As the year went on, I felt I was handling my grief and depression better, but the pressures kept piling up. You don't really ever feel “comfortable” being a widow. You endure, maybe get through it, but you don't ever truly own it.

And still, a part of me didn't want to get beyond it. My pain was proof of my love.

One night I went over to a friend's house and just started bawling. I had been going through photos of Chris when he was in his twenties and thirties.

I'm going to be an old woman somewhere, and he's going to be young.

So many other emotions ran through me every day. People suggested that I might find someone else.

“No,” I'd tell them. “No one will ever take his place.”

School forms would ask about the kids' family situation. Were their parents married, divorced?

I'm not a single mother. I'm raising the kids with my husband! Even if he's not here. I always think about what he would want to do.

One night, alone in my bedroom, I picked up the laundry basket off the treadmill. I suddenly felt as if Chris was there with me, somehow hovering two feet off the ground.

He grinned.

“I'm working on something for you,” he said. And I knew he meant he was trying to hook me up with a man.

I jerked back. Had I really heard that? Was he really there?

The room was empty, but I had the strongest feeling that he was there. I could feel his grin.

I became furious.

“How dare you!” I screamed in my head. “I don't want anyone else. I want you! What's wrong with you?”

I walked out of the room.

I blocked him out for a while, partly because of that incident, partly because of how overwhelming the emotions were. Finally I realized I didn't want to do that. And one night toward the end of the year, I said aloud, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to block you out.”

The room was empty, but I sensed he might be with me.

“I am so sorry!” I repeated. Then I started bawling. I felt as if he came over and put his arm around my waist.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you.

His voice, in a whisper, but one I felt rather than heard:
I didn't want to hurt you.

I cried and cried. I felt a million things—sorry, crazy, insane.

I finally glanced up and looked in the mirror. I was alone.

“I'm not losing it,” I told myself. “What little I have left, I'm not losing it.”

I slumped off to bed, exhausted.

A
s much as I tried to keep my emotions in check, they found ways to escape and overwhelm me. They got worse instead of better. I'd be in the bathroom getting ready and would suddenly start to cry. One morning it went quickly to dry heaves.

Within moments I realized I couldn't stop.

I grabbed my cell phone and called my friend Karen, the doctor. I was too close to hysteria even to take an antinausea pill. Luckily, she guided me through some breathing exercises, and I finally got myself under control. But I lived in fear that I might lose it and not be able to stop.

Nearly ten months had gone by since Chris and Chad had died. Grief was a black hole in my chest threatening to consume me from the inside out. I needed an iron will to keep it at bay; eventually, even an iron will wasn't nearly strong enough anymore.

Christmas was approaching. I'd gone through nearly a year without Chris, and if anything I was feeling worse. I was completely tapped out.

The truth is, if it weren't for my kids, I'd rather have been with him.

TAPPED OUT—DECEMBER 2013

The worst thing: I wasn't taking care of my kids the way I wanted.

For any mother, that has to be the most damning thought. We can fail at business, even at being a wife, and go on. But fail our children?

One day I looked at them and realized they had grown without me even knowing it. And yet I was spending a lot of time with them: I'd be waiting when they came home from school to monitor their homework, play, and make dinner—all the time trying to ignore the constant stream of texts and emails arriving on my phone. I'd wait until after they went to bed to work—often until two or three in the morning.

That showed in the mornings, when I'd sleep through two or three alarms and had to rush to get the kids up and out.

I was working at the house with a friend when one day she looked at me very seriously.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Why?”

“You're constantly grabbing at your neck.”

I looked down and saw that my chest was red. I'd somehow developed a nervous habit—possibly, it turned out, as a strange, psychological side effect of the medication I was on. I did it without even knowing it.

There were other symptoms. My temper was shorter and shorter, and at times I felt as if I was going to have a heart attack. On the outside, I was calm. On the inside, I felt like I was just going to explode.

I think in that moment, as I unclutched my hand from my chest, I finally realized what it must feel like to return home from combat. The adrenaline and the shock to the system must be completely overwhelming.

It made me feel closer to him. I realized that he must have felt pressed on from all angles. He would have had to struggle to keep himself balanced, whole. I wish I had understood that better at the time.

I went to see a psychiatrist.

“How are you?” he asked when I walked into his office.

“Great,” I said.

“That's an answer I don't get very often.”

We talked some more. He started asking questions. As I answered them, I began to cry.

“Your husband?” he asked.

“He was murdered.”

“Oh . . .”

We adjusted the medication. The clutching at my chest stopped. The pain stayed.

CRAFT ULTIMATUM

Around mid-December, I went to New York to attend the premiere of the movie
Lone Survivor,
about Marcus Lutrell's moving ordeal in Afghanistan. Shortly after I arrived, I got an email from the Craft principals seeking to sever my interest in Craft. They indicated they would buy me out for $12,500. But I had better make my mind up quick.

I can just imagine how Chris would have responded to that. The offer was, in my opinion, ludicrous. Further, my understanding of the agreement, and the position taken by my lawyers, was that an offer to buy me out—even a legitimate one—should have been made months before.

We had reached an impasse, or maybe something worse. It seemed clear to me that Bo and Steven were not going to cooperate with me. If I wanted to find out what was going on—and if I wanted to make sure that Chris's name, likeness, and logo were only used in ways that he would approve—I had to take legal steps.