Leaving Before the Rains Come (25 page)

L
ife doesn’t stop just because life as we know it has ended. Charlie spent four weeks in hospital. When he came home, he slept a lot, and then he spent almost every waking moment on the phone either on hold or with insurance agents and doctors. His pain ebbed and flowed: it was soothed by a quiet, dark room; it escalated with tension and stress. The equation was simple: we needed more quiet darkness, less tense stress. You’d think the bluntness of this message, if not the fact of one of us nearly dying, would be enough of the lesson we needed to slow down and pay attention to how we were living. But it was harder than you’d think it should be to get away from the ways our lives were inextricably knotted in systems designed to keep us churning ahead.

Insurance claims and bills piled up next to the bed. Charlie sifted through the envelopes, e-mails flooded his inbox, and I could hear him clicking replies. Then his head pounded with headaches of such blinding severity that they took up all his energy, and he lay still with a facecloth over his eyes breathing into the pain. Doctors told Charlie the headaches were likely a result of the strokes, but no one could tell him how long they would last, or if they would ever diminish. “We don’t know anyone who has survived what you went through,” they explained. “Or if they did, they can’t talk.”

There seemed very little I could do for Charlie except stay out of his way. I had deadlines to meet. I didn’t sleep much, worried into wakefulness by everything that had happened and everything that still needed to happen or that might happen. The house would still have to go, to the bank if no one else, and we would have to work out how to survive. And we would also have to work on the end of our marriage. “But we can stay together until you’re better,” I said. “I can be here for you.”

He said, “Will you work on the relationship then?”

I knew what that meant: it meant Charlie wanted me to work on myself, to journey away from the bits of me of which he disapproved and to arrive at a place he liked and understood and to stay there, as that fixed and dependable person. Then we would be okay. I would be unchallenging and calm in this manifestation. I would not read books that would unspin my mind from where it had been; I would not fall in love with strangers and their strange ideas; I would not have unfixed and unappeasable ideas that made me stay awake half the night. “No,” I said. “I’m done working on the relationship.”

Charlie’s face clouded. “Then we’re done.”

Friends and acquaintances came round with meatloaf and casseroles—the meals of catastrophe—and some of them offered sympathy and advice. A few said they hoped Charlie and I would stay married now, as if the accident had been an alarm that had required everyone to get belowdecks and stay there in hunkered endurance. But after all that terror and pain and fighting I knew I loved Charlie deeply and reflexively. I knew he was brave and enduring and stoic. I knew too that if I had to again, I would do everything in my power to save his life. Of course I would; that went without saying. But I also knew I couldn’t change myself into the solid thing he needed me to be and because of that I couldn’t save our marriage.
We
couldn’t save our marriage. Not with all the power in the world. The knot had tightened and loosened, and for the last time, it had untied. I do. We did. It was done.

Even now, broken in obvious and not so obvious ways, it seemed not only possible but also probable that Charlie would be better off without me and that I might be better off without him. It wasn’t so much that we weren’t right for one another, but rather the ways in which we were wrong were so intractable and damaging that nothing—however profoundly accidental or deeply deliberate—could fix us. His flaws and my flaws didn’t weave together or tear us apart; they enmeshed us. We had loved one another into an eddy in which one or both of us would eventually drown, because accidents frequently happen at the liminal line between the world’s innate chaos and the belief that your own skill and sanity can save you.

There is a perfect angle at which to break through an eddy line. Charlie understood that pure mathematical moment, the exact place at which to slice a raft from an eddy into the current. When he had first taken me whitewater rafting, I’d been amazed by his code-breaking abilities, his understanding of the language of rivers. Above us the world’s largest sheet of falling water, Victoria Falls, plunged into an intimidating recycling pool. It was infamously difficult to get out of that eddy—the Boiling Pot, they called it—but with almost casual ease, Charlie edged our raft into the current. The nose of the raft caught the current, we spun, Charlie calmly put his oars into the water and pulled back powerfully. We surged into the current and plunged headlong into the roar of the Zambezi. “This is a man who will never get stuck,” I thought.

The local paper ran a front-page story, “Ross Knows Wife Saved Him: 52-Year Old Makes Remarkable Recovery from Medical Nightmare After Horseback Accident.”
12
People I barely knew stopped me in the grocery store and in the post office and repeated reported truths and half-true bits of gossip back to me, as if I was no longer a participant in my own life but an actress in someone else’s version of a life, someone who had forgotten her lines. “But he’s alive, that’s the main thing,” they said, as if Charlie’s accident was something more imperative than his purpose. “Well, it’s
a
thing,” I said. I started to avoid public places.

I lay awake night after night mulling the same question over and over, but the answer was always the same. Charlie’s accident was not an excuse or a reason to continue an ongoing misadventure. “Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life,” Jung wrote. “Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”

Time and place circled. After a few days at home, Charlie went back to the office in the mornings, and then rested at home in the afternoons. The brown velvet curtains billowed into the bedroom. A hushed, sour atmosphere prevailed in the house. Sarah and Fuller got summer jobs in town. Sometimes they ferried messages from the other side, condolences and support from the community. My friends pooled together and paid a caterer to bring meals every evening. “No more of these nosy people dropping by with a dish,” my Utah-raised friend said with final authority. “I grew up Mormon. I know what your fridge will look like in a month.”

Weeks passed. Charlie’s insurance paid for him to get physical therapy, although the therapist could find little wrong with his coordination. He started to take walks along the river, and planned for when he might play tennis again. He put on weight, and his appetite returned. He slept better at night, and needed less sleep during the day. We undid our lives.

The house didn’t lift off its foundation, but we could not find a way to keep it, and it went to another family. Charlie built a new house and furnished it along clean, modern lines; I found a condominium in the middle of town and called it the “Paris Flat,” because there was mildew on the inside of the windows and that first winter the plumbing froze solid. The kids split their time between us. Dilly moved in with me, mostly. A cowboy who said he didn’t mind Big Boy’s unpredictability took him off our hands; a friend offered to board Sunday and the children’s horse.

I used my restored name to open a bank account and get a credit card. For a few frozen Tuesday afternoons that first winter I met with other women who were financially illiterate, and together we learned to read the numbers that had for so long frightened and confused us. The women were a lot like me—they had been raised by people who had taught them how to ride a horse, shoot a gun, and endure, but had somehow forgotten to teach them how to count. “Holy crap, this is certainly easier than cooking breakfast for twelve men at four in the morning,” one of the women said, when the numbers fell into place for her. “No wonder they kept it a secret.”

The divorce got difficult and antagonistic in all the usual ways. Charlie and I both felt betrayed and wronged and misunderstood. Nevertheless, long after the divorce was final, and I had sat with that decree on my lap for a full afternoon feeling immovably weighted with grief, I experienced his removal like the earth itself had been taken from under my feet. You can be the perpetrator of your own emptiness, it can be the very thing you need, and it can still undo you.

Recently I caught a glimpse of Charlie in the grocery store. I saw him before he saw me and I wondered at how well and how happy he looked. He still has his athlete’s command of the earth, he walks casually and covers ground easily, he looks fit in that way of people who live in mountain towns. His left carotid artery spontaneously reconnected, which so amazed the doctors they were helpless to explain how or why. The kids tell me his headaches are almost gone. He skis, he plays tennis, he fishes, he goes whitewater rafting. He’s even taken the children’s horse and his old saddle with its
CORSE
written across the seat and ridden in the hills around his summer cabin.

It’s not anyone’s job to make another person happy, but the truth is, people can either be very happy or very unhappy together. Happiness or unhappiness isn’t a measure of their love. You can have an intense connection to someone without being a good lifelong mate for him. Love is complicated and difficult that way.

I went back to Zambia in May. It is my favorite time of year on the farm, the end of the rainy season, but before the bush grows dry and brittle and the fires start in the valley. The second week of my visit, Dad and I walked down to the river and sat on an old dugout canoe upturned in front of the pub at the bottom of the farm. The Zambezi is wide as a lake just here, interrupted by a long, blond bar of sand at the tip of which a small crocodile was basking. Behind us, evening was happening, and the jesse bush around the pub was chattering with weavers and thrushes and chats.

It had been two years since Dad had threatened his biblical death. In that time, he’d stopped joking about his threescore years and ten and he had given up the idea of misspending his youth. Something about the Paris trip with Mum had sobered him. “Well, Bobo,” he said. “Paris will always be Paris. But I suppose I am getting a bit long in the tooth for it all.” Also, he was starting to talk about the possibility of selling the farm. “You don’t want it, do you?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said, but I knew it wasn’t really a serious offer. I’d already made a life elsewhere, and whatever else I was going to do, I wasn’t going to leave my children, or bring them here. In any case, southern Africa had changed so much in the twenty years since I’d left, it was no longer reflexively familiar to me. It wasn’t just the pace of development but also the rate of loss that had estranged me. Our forests, which had been my deepest memory of Zambia’s essence, were vanishing so fast it was like seeing someone in the unstoppable course of a disease. It was likely that elephants and lions would no longer exist in the wild here well within my lifetime. Roads hurried out of the city center to uranium mines all over the country. This was industry with heat, poverty, and dust. And it was relentless.

“I don’t think I could handle the snakes,” I said. “And the rabid dogs.” I pointed to the sandbar, to the crocodile soaking up the last of the day’s sun. “Or the crocs.”

Dad considered the crocodile silently for a while. Then he grunted. “Hm. Been there all week, that fellow. Patient things, those.” Then there was the business of restocking his pipe, and the several matches flaring before it was finally lit. A puff of smoke enveloped our heads. Dad cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I suppose I always thought there would be time for one more farm. I thought I’d have time to go back to cattle. A small ranch somewhere near Choma, you know?” He shook his head. “And then one day I realized this is it. We’re not going anywhere. This is the last farm. You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn’t. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it’s too late.”