Leaving Before the Rains Come (22 page)

One Wednesday in the middle of this colliding time of year, in the middle of my usual biweekly exercise class, I suddenly found myself unable to keep track of where I ended and the gym’s mirrors began. Just as suddenly I felt as if I could no longer move my appendages, as if I could make only grand flopping gestures like one of those red plastic Fortune Teller Miracle Fish. Curls Up Entirely—Passionate. Turns Over—False. Motionless—Dead One.

The class finished, and I faltered out into the parking lot. For a while I sat in my car waiting for myself to return from wherever I had gone. Then I phoned Charlie. “I’m so sorry. I think I am having some sort of breakdown,” I said. I closed my eyes and thought of the children getting out of school about now. I thought about bus stops and dinner and laundry. “I probably shouldn’t drive,” I said.

It was as if Charlie had been waiting a decade for that phone call. He arrived in minutes, hurried me into his car, and drove me to his doctor’s office. “You’ll be okay,” he kept saying.

“Thanks,” I said. Now that someone else was taking my collapse, or whatever it was, so seriously, I didn’t think I was necessarily suffering an emergency, although I knew I was in the throes of at least a smallish crisis. “I’m probably just overtired,” I said. But then I noticed the meadows by the side of the road weren’t keeping up with the speed at which we were driving. Or perhaps it was my brain, going too fast.

I’d always known my mind could hop logic and bypass tedious necessities. I was good at instinctively knowing when to dive for cover, and when to leap to my feet. I wasn’t afraid of doing things other people would have thought crazy, illogical, or risky. Of course, I realized that I simply had a higher than usual tolerance for eccentricity, but I also hoped I would know when I had crossed into madness. When I crossed into madness, I trusted it wouldn’t be my usual brand of inspiration. “A queer, divine dissatisfaction,” as Martha Graham would have had it. “A blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others.” When I finally and profoundly slipped my mental moorings, I believed it would manifest as an accursed wreck with me crumpled and undone at its center.

Charlie helped me into the examination room and stayed with me while I told his doctor what was happening: I hadn’t slept for some time, I was in some kind of mild existential extremis, I’d had an affair, I’d been drinking too much, I felt as if I was leaving my body, I thought my brain might be going a little quickly. The doctor didn’t look at me much. He stared at his computer screen and scrolled through a list of questions. Did I have a family history of mental illness and alcoholism? Did I sometimes feel hopeless and despairing? Had I ever had thoughts of suicide?

“Who doesn’t? Who hasn’t?” I said.

The doctor offered me a couple of choices. “You’re either a sociopath, or you have bipolar disorder.”

“Really?” I said. “Those are my only choices?”

The doctor was grave. “Look,” he said. “Normal people don’t lie, or think about suicide, or have affairs.”

I wanted to say, “I think normal people who are unhappily married might do all three in a single day.” Instead I said, “Okay then, I’ll go with the bipolar.”

Charlie drove me home. I had a hot bath and swallowed some pills as directed. Then I got into bed and suddenly a profound exhaustion overcame me, as if my arteries had been filled with lead. I tried to read the small print on the pharmacy printout. “Listen to this. Fainting, dizziness, fatal inability to swallow,” I said. “Good God, what’s in these things?”

“They have to say that,” Charlie reassured me. “It always sounds bad when you read the side effects.”

“Am I drooling yet?”

Charlie phoned my closest friends and assured them I was in good hands, I would be fine now, I was on the drugs I needed. But I didn’t feel fine. My tongue was the size and consistency of a mattress. Words floated to the top of my brain and reassembled into gibberish before a sentence could form. I couldn’t make my eyes focus on words anymore. Then I passed out and slept for eighteen hours without moving. When I woke up the next morning, I found a line from a U2 song had floated into my head and eddied out there. The words looped over and over. I felt a little hungover—as if I’d taken a sleeping pill with wine on top of jet lag—but also as if everything in me was back in place, like iron filings realigned on a magnet. “Maybe all I needed was a decent night’s sleep,” I said.

On such little evidence, I wasn’t convinced I was completely sane. But I was absolutely certain I didn’t have the luxury to lie around in a tranquilized state. From what Charlie had kept telling me in the past months and weeks, we weren’t going to get any less in debt, the house wasn’t going to get any less repossessed, something had to be done. I got out of bed and pulled on my clothes. “Time to shake a leg,” I said. But Charlie didn’t smile at my father’s old instruction. I said, “We’re going to be okay. It’s going to be okay, right?”

But I had no idea what okay might look like, because for reasons that had long ago trickled out of my grasp, I had never fully, or even partially understood whole parts of our life. Beyond the certainty that we were in dire straits, financially, I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. I didn’t know how or when our taxes were due, or even how we could still owe taxes in our current financial state. I didn’t know what a second mortgage was, or why we had one. I couldn’t imagine the figures Charlie told me. How did people go about getting so powerfully in debt to begin with?

It wasn’t at all obvious. True, we had a house, a cabin, some investments, but it turned out we didn’t own any of the roofs over our heads, the bank did. We had three horses on some pasture in Idaho, those were ours, but Charlie said we’d have to sell them too, not because they were worth anything, but because we could no longer afford to feed them, we couldn’t pay the vet for their annual checkups. We didn’t have fancy cars or expensive art. I owned no good jewelry, nor did I desire it. Neither of us had much in the way of an extravagant wardrobe. We didn’t eat out often, or go on luxurious vacations although in retrospect we had clearly traveled more than we could afford. Sometimes Charlie frowned at my grocery bills—did I need to buy organic food? he wanted to know—and I disliked his habit of buying three cheap things instead of one decent thing. But I didn’t see how we could have spent ourselves into such a dead end.

“How did this happen?” I asked.

Charlie was defensive. “I’ve tried to explain. You won’t listen.”

My brain spun. “It’s not that I won’t listen. It’s that I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

Charlie had taken control of the money side of my business from the very start. When checks arrived from my agents, they went straight to him. I didn’t have a credit card in my own name; there was nothing under my own Social Security number. When I thought about it, in all ways except for putting my name to the words I wrote, I didn’t even own Alexandra Fuller. She had become a Ross—she had taken Charlie’s name, his nationality, his advice. It was as if we had taken laws from a century before and folded them into our modern lives. “A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman and her existence is entirely absorbed into that of her husband.” “A wife’s chattels real become her husband’s by some act to appropriate them.” “Money earned by a woman belongs absolutely to her husband.”
9

It wasn’t as if Charlie was a misogynist, or old-fashioned, or malicious. He was none of those things. For the most part, he was gentle and current and kind. I had been so subsumed by Charlie and by his identity, not on purpose or through any deliberate intent, but because we had fallen into those roles through necessity and expediency and now we were so far into them that getting out felt like it would take an act of God. “Until you make the unconscious conscious,” Carl Jung said, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

A
month later, in less time than it takes to read these words, everything changed forever. That’s what they say, of course. In the blink of the eye, in a single heartbeat, in one distracted moment, all the life we’ve got mapped out—however messy and uncertain—becomes certainly uncertain. And that’s not divorce, which is like a pot sitting forever on the stove suddenly coming to the boil. Nor is it children leaving home, the way they grow up and then for the last time go down the end of the driveway and disappear into their own lives. It’s not even the phone call from Vanessa saying Dad will be dead in a week. Those events still allow for denial and pretense, as if time is an open door between two rooms and we can still choose between now and the period in which we want to stay. But the blink, the heartbeat, the moment—that is the thing from which there is no coming back, that is the thing beyond which there is no reminiscing.

For months after the accident, this was the image that came to me when I closed my eyes for any length of time: the last of Charlie’s polo ponies, Big Boy, was upside down and he appeared winded or wounded or both. His legs batted the air; his great black hooves sliced first the sky, then the sagebrush. His neck lunged sideways and I could see his eyes rolling white. I could see the saddle with Charlie’s step-grandfather’s name across the back of its seat appearing and disappearing like code for something imperative:
CORSE, CORSE, CORSE
.

Underneath the horse, still improbably in the saddle, I could see Charlie. Mostly, I could see his agonized face, his straining neck. The rest of his body—legs, torso, chest—was covered and in the process of being crushed. Mint-colored dust, powdered sage, and earth surrounded the scene. Two minutes before, when decisions still felt reversible and the world was still right side up, I’d dismounted to open and close a makeshift concertina gate. Then, before I was able to put the loop over the top of the gate’s pole, I’d heard a soft commotion behind me, turned around, and seen the impossible horror of the flipped-over horse.

An animal sense of impending slaughter prevailed; there was nothing to be done or said; nothing to be undone or unsaid, either. Charlie was going to die, of that I was certain. I dropped the gate I was in the process of closing, I dropped Sunday’s reins too and she wandered off, unconcerned, to graze. Dilly hurried anxiously between the huge, thrashing horse and me, as if trying to convey the horrifying urgency of the situation to someone who could fix it.

The seconds swelled and grew and burst; fat drops of very distinct time. Big Boy made an effort to right himself, pitching over sideways time and time again. I glimpsed Charlie’s crumpled body, free of the horse, but then Big Boy, unable to rectify himself, rolled back onto him again. It seemed like several more minutes before Big Boy at last found purchase, his hooves connecting with the ground. Slowly he heaved himself up. Then he stood next to Charlie’s body, head hanging, flanks pumping, legs quivering. A thick thread of blood dribbled from his nose and there was a gash on his knee. The ground around him was flattened; sagebrush folded down on itself, grass mashed into the earth.

I thought, “It’s not supposed to happen
this
way.” This was supposed to be our calm, reasonable, reasoned way out of the marriage. We were supposed to be out for a quiet Saturday afternoon ride to discuss how we could end our stalemate. It was five days after our nineteenth wedding anniversary; Charlie had spent it alone in Wyoming, and I had spent it surrounded by two hundred Lakota Sioux on a magazine assignment near the Black Hills. Charlie was planning to leave the next day to accompany our son on a school-sponsored trip to Washington,
D.C.
I was planning to leave in a week back to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

I suppose we thought we didn’t have much time. And we were wary of being in the house together, of arguing in front of the kids. But I don’t know why we had decided to go riding. For one thing, there’s something unthinking and unseemly about getting on a horse to talk about divorce. In some cultures it’s expressly taboo to ride in an altered state of mind, without clear and benevolent intention. “Even into battle,” a Lakota elder told me afterward, and then amended that to, “Especially into battle.” For another thing, I’d just ridden more than a hundred miles from Fort Robison, Nebraska, to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A few hundred Lakota take part in the ride annually to commemorate the murder, in 1877, of their leader, Crazy Horse. “Today is a good day to die,” he is supposed to have said on the morning of his death. “For all the things of my life are present.”

I had found the Lakota were fearless horsemen—skilled and tough and careless. Most had forsworn saddles, and a few had little more than a strap of leather or halter rope between them and their mount’s mouth. Some of the horses were barely green-broke. Even before the ride started, one horse bolted around the perimeter of the field where we had gathered at dawn, bucking wildly and dumping its rider hard on the June-verdant grass. No one helped the fallen rider to his feet. “Hey, you been hanging around the fort too long?” someone yelled. “Have you been shot at, or what?” someone else asked. “Camera wasn’t rollin’. Go again.” There was a lot of laughter.

But Charlie had pointed out that we would always have a reason to postpone this conversation. Also, we would soon have to get rid of our horses, sell their pasture, give up that life. We should ride while we still could, he argued. Besides, he reminded me, we needed to figure out the financial mess we were in sooner rather than later. Then the fighting started. Me saying again that I didn’t understand our investments; that I had trusted him not to get us here in the first place. Him saying that he had been trying to tell me all along things hadn’t worked out so well for us; that I had been an active participant in our economic demise.

“Easy there,” I told Big Boy, taking his reins and moving him away from Charlie. Then I crouched down next to Charlie. He was still alive, but he was lying utterly motionless, and was strangely bloodless, by which I mean not only was he not bleeding—and it seemed as if he should have been—but all blood appeared to have left his body: his face was gray, his lips were slack and colorless, his eyes were open but unfocused. I thought it couldn’t be long before a breath left his lips and no new breath came in.

“Hang on,” I told him. “Please hang on.”

I didn’t tell him, “It’s going to be all right,” because I knew that would be a lie, and I knew if Charlie could hear me, he wouldn’t want me to say something pointless and untrue. “I love you,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” And then I spun down the trail we had just ridden up, back toward some mountain bikers we had seen earlier, and I was shouting as loudly as I could. But even as I came tearing down the road toward help, that single word pouring out of my mouth, I couldn’t make the world do what I wanted it to do. The two men and the woman in their mud-spattered Lycra remained fixed in place against the tailgate of their car, a still life of bemusement. And Charlie remained on the trail in the hills, dead or dying alone.

I managed to say what it was I needed to say: Charlie had been crushed by an eighteen-hundred-pound horse, and he was in grave if not critical condition. My mind attached to the definition of those words, as if the accuracy of what I was saying was now somehow linked to Charlie’s odds of survival. “Extremely critical,” I said. Someone had the sense to dial 911, but it wasn’t me. Afterward, I read in a
Harper’s
magazine’s “Findings” that African Americans are more likely to call a friend in a crisis than they are to call emergency services. That was my instinct too, perhaps because growing up I had never known a single person who had been in an ambulance, or really even believed in them. In the countries of my youth—Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia—we rescued ourselves and went to each other’s aid. If you waited for official help, you’d die waiting.

When I got back to him, Charlie was sitting up, supported by one of the mountain bikers. He wasn’t able to talk—pain and shortness of wind prohibited—but he could respond enough for us to know he had remained conscious for the entire ordeal. “It’s going to be okay,” one of the men told me. “He’s all right.” But I had seen the accident, and I knew enough about the overriding effects of adrenaline to feel a discomforting wave of doubt. I took off my sweater and put it over Charlie’s shoulders. “Just keep breathing,” I said. “An ambulance is on the way.”

By the time we got to the hospital, news of the accident had sizzled up and down lines of communication and friends were waiting for us in the emergency room. The doctor arrived and inspected Charlie. He had the cursory bedside manner of a man used to dealing with thrown cowboys, tractor-crushed farmers, and smashed-up bullriders. In the room next door, a man who had turned his four-wheeler onto himself was shouting in distress. The doctor sighed and told us we’d be there for a while.

Charlie phoned his doctor in Wyoming and his parents in Pennsylvania. He told everyone he was sore, but he didn’t think he was in any real danger. He was hoping the doctor would just order him bandaged up and send him on his way. He phoned our son and said he’d be on the plane to
D.C.
the next day, no matter what. One of our friends went to fetch food, an impromptu summer picnic in an unlikely setting. Someone else made Dilly comfortable in the back of a car. Another friend wondered aloud if anyone other than himself would benefit from the calming effects of a Pabst Blue Ribbon. The mood lifted a little. Everyone kept saying, “It’s going to be okay now, Bobo.”

It was an hour or two before the nurses wheeled Charlie out for an
MRI
. Then we had to wait for the results. “We don’t read them here,” the doctor said, by way of not much explanation. “They’re interpreted by a person in Australia or India or somewhere.” Another hour or two passed. Charlie got restlessly agitated. He was on the same stretcher the ambulance crew had loaded him onto at the scene of the accident hours earlier and the back of his head hurt where it had been strapped down tightly to the inflexible board. Could they not just loosen the strap a bit? Why couldn’t they just wrap his ribs and let him go home? And he was terribly thirsty, but he was still not allowed to drink. Instead, we could give him rations from a small sponge on a stick dipped into a cup of water. His lips were cracked. We smeared them with Vaseline.

Then the doctor reappeared. “The news isn’t good,” he said. Charlie had a ruptured spleen, it was possible a lung had been punctured, and it looked as if his liver and lower intestine had been perforated. It had been four and a half hours since the accident and we didn’t have time to waste, we needed to get to a level two trauma hospital fast. The man who had turned the four-wheeler over on himself was in the only ambulance being raced to Idaho Falls as we spoke. The doctor would order a life flight out of here.

I went into the corridor outside the emergency room and slid down the wall onto my haunches. I called the kids and told them everything was going to be okay, but we needed to get Daddy to a bigger hospital and I was going with him. I told them they should be brave and cook supper and have their baths. I called Bryan, who has always felt like my one-phone-call friend, the person I’d call from jail, maybe because he was a lawyer and has an analytical mind, or maybe because he’s now an investigative reporter and nothing surprises him. He said, “Do you need me there?” And I thought yes, but I said no.

Then I began to negotiate with everyone I could find. What could we do to make Charlie more comfortable? When would the helicopter be here? And what did I have to do to get on it? The doctor said the helicopter would be here in twenty minutes. And the pilot would have to make the decision about whether or not I could go with Charlie. Air ambulance crews were worried about patients’ wives getting airsick or hysterical, he said. I’d been in some lesser version of this place a time or two before. This was not, as they say, my first rodeo.

“Well, I bet it’s your worst horse wreck,” he said, as if he took personal pride in the probability.

“Hands down,” I agreed.