Found (11 page)

The soil of Oklahoma was red clay and the air was humid and thick enough to scoop in my hands. Uncle Larry (Bud’s younger brother) and his wife Ruth were both wrapped tight in a resigned state of poverty. Larry had been released from his military commission during cutbacks. The government had betrayed them. I saw, with vivid clarity, that Bryan did not have a happy life.

 

 

AT THE FUNERAL, Uncle Larry introduced me as Bryan’s adopted sister. I was placed in a pew a few rows back from the Lauck family. Aunt Peggy had, no doubt, told Larry that I had been insubordinate and needed to be distanced from the Lauck clan.

I held my hands in my lap and stared holes into my brother’s casket. It was a wood box that had been sealed. Bryan had apparently been outside for many days after he shot himself. His body was not fit to view.

In my head, madness played a little film where I stomped to the front of the church, threw open the casket, and yelled, “My brother is not dead.”

The desire to jump up and set the record straight was overpowering. I had to hug myself to stay put. I talked myself down. I told myself to knock it off and lay low.

 

 

IN FACT, I did have a living brother. My brother, the son of my birth mother and birth father, lived in Reno and was growing up healthy and happy. He was just two years younger than me.

The moment of madness that had overtaken me in the church that day stayed with me like an unsolved puzzle for years. I had a knowing at a cellular level, and this knowing created distinct tension and anxiety. I felt the way you feel when you are being lied to but the liar won’t admit it. It was a dissonant knowing.

For years—hauling this memory of Bryan’s funeral around—I thought I had been a madwoman going through some extraordinary grieving process. When I returned from the funeral, I went to bed. I didn’t eat. I dropped out of school. I didn’t speak. All I could do was weep until I passed out. When I woke up, I started the cycle over again.

Infants are unable to regulate their own emotions; they need their mother’s response to their cries to teach them mood normalization. And the infant doesn’t wait for any mother, she waits for her birth mother—the one with which she shared a hormonal connection while in utero. Any other caregiver is rejected.

It’s a terrible plight. A baby must endure biological and mental torture. She experiences terror, goes into shock (due to the abandonment), and loses consciousness—again and again.

Since the brain is built on experience, synapses making permanent connections, these first feelings are foundational patterns that are nearly impossible to eradicate. The brain seeks out what it knows and deepens the patterns with repetition.

After Bryan’s funeral, I was repeating that first trauma. This is how I know I was not grieving for Bryan. I was grieving for my birth mother, all over again.

If we are talking about cause and effect—karma—what is the energetic power of the traumatized brain? Is it a force of its own, like a magnet that drags terrorizing circumstances, people, and events into its path in order to reexperience traumatic responses that have become familiar and even comforting? If terror is what the mind knows, is terror then sought out? Is this how predators identify victims? Is this power what attracts cruel people into the lives of trauma victims and has them stick around year after brutal year? Had my brain—with its unique wiring and built-in responses—been drawing me into situations that resulted in rape, abuse, neglect, and cruelty?

 

 

JEFF WAS PROMOTED to a store in Montana and before he left, he came to the bed where I continued my decline and told me to snap out of it.

“Enough already,” he said. “You didn’t even like your brother.”

He was right, I didn’t like Bryan—the guy had been cruel to me but I told myself that Bryan was all I had left of my first family and now he was gone. I told myself I was just grieving.

I couldn’t possibly factor in deep, prememory feelings that pointed toward that infant trauma. No one spoke of adoptees and their silent sorrows. We were acquired, assimilated, and adapted. Our histories were hidden from us and our memories were a muddled
mess—like our lives—like my own life. All I knew at the age of twenty was that I was in pain and no one could help me. I considered suicide as an escape.

 

 

WHAT PULLED ME out of the terrible loop was a small dog—a puppy.

I had gone to a U-Haul store to get boxes and heard the sound of barking coming from a nearby store.

Spokane Pet Center had a new batch of cocker spaniel pups and there she was: a tiny runt who cowered in the corner of pine chips. I scooped the pup in my hand—this little warm ball of fluff—and the name Carmel popped into my head.

“Come home with me,” I said to the little creature with the huge brown eyes and the gentle manner. “Let me take care of you.”

SIXTEEN

THREE YEARS LATER

I MOVED BACK to Spokane, Washington, and my roommate was a full-grown Carmel.

Jeff stayed at his RadioShack store, adding up the profits and making new plans. Not more than a year after I left, he was married and on his way to making those four boys.

What ended it?

I did.

He was mean. He punched Carmel in a fit of rage and I was pretty sure I would have been next.

There were three gifts in knowing Jeff. One was that I didn’t conceive a child with him.

Two was that, thanks to a divorce procedure that allowed a name change, I became Jennifer Caste Lauck again.

Three, I used my short time in Montana to become an investigative reporter.

As soon as I arrived in Billings, at the far eastern edge of that
Big Sky State, I mothered Carmel to full doghood and also worked toward my degree in journalism at Eastern Montana College. In less than two years, I had elbowed my way into an internship at a TV station and then became a reporter for the Montana Television Network.

While Jeff worked at his RadioShack store in the Rim Rock Mall, I was the one who reported about grasshopper infestations and bank robberies on the evening news. You would have seen me at the snowy sight of a plane crash—a mail plane—where the pilot died. Fires, abductions, marijuana busts—yes, I was there. I was the one with the microphone and the snazzy short hair cut.

Jeff wanted his woman to stay home and make babies. My success infuriated him.

After the marriage vaporized, I accepted a promotion at a television station in Spokane. I couldn’t leave him or Montana fast enough.

 

 

AS A SINGLE woman, my ambitions became like a detonation within my imagination. I planned to stay in Spokane for a year or so, get a promotion to a station in Seattle or maybe Portland, Oregon, and then I’d be off to Los Angeles or perhaps New York. I could see myself working for the network or maybe becoming a foreign correspondent. I envisioned bullets whizzing overhead as I reported, live, from some trench in the desert. I’d be the first one to tell you how it was on the battle lines. I’d bring you the news you needed to know. I’d tell you the truth.

But then I met Steve.

SEVENTEEN

THE BIG FIGHT

THERE ARE SOME STORIES you can tell and others that you have no business telling, and that’s how it is with Steve.

In the end, he’s the father of Spencer and Jo and that’s the best part of the story. He walked with me into parenthood. He convinced me I could be a better mother than how I had been mothered. Steve had faith in me when I didn’t have faith in myself. That was the gift. The worst part of the story is that Steve and I couldn’t make it. We divorced when Spencer was seven and Jo was two.

The part I don’t know if I can tell is
why
we ended. I want to say it was the fighting. Steve and I argued all the time, over stupid things like paint chips, what movie to watch, and where to eat dinner. But I don’t know.

What are the details that add up to divorce? How can we map such a complex topography as that of the interior of two souls who make vows, intermingle, and create life from one another? In the end, isn’t marriage this puzzlement of staring at each other over cups
of coffee while wondering,
Who the hell are you
? Isn’t it true that to be married to another is to know you look at a stranger everyday? Can’t we all say that no matter how much we
think
we know another person, we don’t; we can’t? Isn’t a human being simply too vast and too deep to define and to know?

Or perhaps I’ve got it all wrong. Perhaps the truth of Steve and me and our end lies within me. After all, did I have any idea who I was? In living with myself, didn’t I look at a stranger in the mirror everyday? Wasn’t it true that no matter how much I
thought
I knew who I was, I didn’t; I couldn’t?

 

 

WHEN I MET Steve, it was 1987. He was twenty-seven years old and I was twenty-four.

Steve was a tall, good-looking guy with dark hair and mediumblue eyes that gave off a metallic spark when he smiled. He had a good sense of humor and could always make me laugh. Steve was also a part-time student, just finishing his degree, and for money, he worked for a company that auctioned collectable cars.

His last name was Dorsey and I always called him the Dors-man.

The Dors-man grew up in the Spokane Valley and lived in the same house nearly all his life. His parents were quiet people who kept to themselves, and nothing, other than the weather and the seasons and time, changed in their lives. Steve’s mom was a cake decorator. Steve’s dad repaired tractor engines. He had a younger sister. Steve was the oldest.

In our early days together, I worked as reporter for an ABC
station in town and covered hard news—murders, drug busts, fires. It was good work—exciting and a little dangerous too—but at the end of the day, telling stories that had no happy ending made me tired. Human suffering wore me down.

Eventually, I took a job in Portland, Oregon, at another ABC station and Steve found a job with an auction company nearby.

Six years into each other, we got married. We would both agree this was an odd decision, considering our proclivity toward tension, which had us bickering most of the time.

We had this attraction—a live wire of energy ran between us—and arguing amped up the charge. I suppose we were addicted to each other or to the tension of our connection.

Once married, with the idea that perhaps we would start a family, I stopped working in TV and Steve and I bought an old house on a street that straddled the line between two neighborhoods called Rose City and Hollywood.

 

 

IT WAS A Sunday afternoon in 1994 and we had spent ten hours painting the living room a shade that tried to be linen yellow but looked—to me—more like lemon. Steve was in coveralls and splattered with the disappointing paint that made me think of preschool.

I wore jeans and an old work shirt.

I took a stand against the color.

Steve insisted it was fine.

I wanted to change it.

He wanted to leave it.

I pushed.

He shoved.

After three rounds, I dropped my end of the argument and dissolved into tears.

“I can’t believe we are arguing over paint,” I yelled through my tears. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I never wanted to move into this ramshackle house to begin with.”

Steve threw his hands up over his head and paced the room while he yelled at the walls.

“Oh, great, here we go again. Now you don’t want to live here, now you didn’t want to move. Now it’s all my fault since it was my idea to buy the damn house.”

My old dog, Carmel, was on the bed between us, hunched low with her snout on her paws. Her slow brown eyes shifted from Steve to me.

“Oh Steve, shut up.”

Carmel shifted her gaze over to Steve.

“Shut up! Are you telling me to shut up? ”

“Yes, Jesus! Shut up! I’m crying here! What kind of man yells at his wife while she is crying? ”

“I get it, I get it now. You don’t think I’m a good enough man. Now it’s just not about the house, it’s about being my wife. Just admit it, Jennifer. You didn’t want to move into this house and you didn’t want to get married.”

“Would you just shut up, Steve? Stop yelling at me. I can’t think.”

Carmel jumped off the bed and nosed her way into the closet. In the dark and quiet place, she settled in and listened to us scream.

 

 

IN THERAPY, THEY say that couples usually have one core issue they argue about. This was our fight. I was ambivalent about my life choices, which included being married and moving into an old house that needed years of hard work. I was ambivalent about most things. Absolute certainty belonged to others but I had not discovered that quality within myself. Steve, whose middle name might as well have been “confident,” just happened to be in the mix of my story of uncertainty.

Steve took my ambivalence personally. He would blame himself, as if he were responsible for my happiness.

A therapy session between us might go like this:

Therapist: What Jennifer is saying, Steve, is that she feels uncertain and even lost a great deal of the time. How does that make you feel?

Steve: Well, that’s bullshit. Look at her, she’s confident. She knows what she wants. She makes decisions. Jennifer is tough and strong. She’s a real go-getter.

Therapist: Are you sure that is who Jennifer is? Are you seeing the real Jennifer or your image of Jennifer?

Steve: (Tosses a dirty look at Jennifer since he didn’t want to do therapy in the first place. He shifts in his chair. He crosses one leg over the other.)

Therapist: (Observes tension between couple and defensive posture of Steve.) Let’s try a different approach. Steve, why don’t you describe your wife.