Moving Forward in Reverse (23 page)

I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line, each
exhale like a passing thought flitting across her mind. She didn’t offer any comments,
though, so I went on.

‘Just take care of yourself, okay? I’ll be home this weekend and
we can talk about it more then, if you’d like.’

‘Mm-hmm. Love you.’

‘I love you, too.’

I felt the click of the line as she disconnected reverberate
inside me. It was a long time before I could lift myself from the chair and
take steps towards going to bed. Over and over, like a broken record caught in
the same groove, a single thought kept replaying in my mind:
I hadn’t been
there.

~~~

There were a few inches of snow caked on the sidewalks and
storefronts, but the roads had been meticulously cleared and dried. It was such
a stark and unnatural juxtaposition, with the road cutting through brinks of
snow like a straight, black scar slicing across the land, but for some reason
it felt right. This was the way the world was supposed to be. Not unnatural at
all, this surgical division of nature and man, but rather innate – instinctive.

As I steered the car right at a stoplight, heading across town
towards the grocery store, it began to dawn on me that this was an odd reaction
to a snow-cleared road. Why would something as mundane as that cause such a
feeling of contentment within me?

No
, I realized with sudden clarity. It wasn’t the snow and the road
at all that engendered this serenity; it was the woman, my wife, sitting in the
passenger’s seat beside me. That was what felt so right: her – us, together.

Complacency warmed inside me as I glanced at Ellen. She was
humming some obscure tune, a small smile curving her lips as she strummed her
fingers on her thigh. Tomorrow I’d be heading back to Spokane. But for today we
could be a regular married couple, living to the same rhythms of a shared home.
Man, did I miss this,
I mused and took a deep breath as if savoring the
scent of happily married life. In the counterintuitive way of things, it was
when I returned to Olympia and Ellen that I became the most acutely aware of
how much I longed for them every day we were apart.

I never miss Spokane or Gonzaga, though,
I realized with a curious
frown.
Odd.
It seemed only fair that if I could yearn for my wife so
sharply when I was in Spokane, I should feel at least some desire to return to
Gonzaga while in Olympia. But I didn’t. Quite the contrary, I was almost
dreading my return to Gonzaga. The sudden comprehension of that fact stole the
breath from my lungs and sent a nauseating weight into my stomach.
I don’t
want to go.

But I had to go. This was my dream: I was returning to interview
for the head coach position and to effectually reach the pinnacle of my career.
Everything I had been working for, striving for since fifteen, was in Gonzaga.
I couldn’t leave that behind.

But I don’t want to go.
The thought wouldn’t leave me alone. I looked at my wife,
savoring the way the light softened the depth of her hair, giving it a coppery
glow; relishing the way her lips curved in such a way that the apples of her
cheeks swelled beneath her thick lashes.
How could I ever leave you?
I
wondered and had to turn my face back to the road lest the agony of the thought
drive me into despair.

On the same note, though, how could I ever leave my career? It had
meant so much to me – everything – it had meant everything to me for so long.
Soccer was what got me out of the hospital. Soccer was the driving force of my
ambition. Soccer was the catalyst behind my dreams. I lived, breathed, ate, and
slept for soccer.

But to what end?
I wondered. In all my years of devotion, I had never stopped to
consider what else there may be to life. My vision had been tunneled, resolute,
obsessed. Blind.

How could I not see it?
Oh, it was so obvious now! My aspirations, my objective; it had
all been a quest to prove something. To prove that I could do it, with or
without hands. But I didn’t need to prove anything anymore. I already had. No
one could have foreseen my making it this far, not even me. I had a wife and
was about to walk into the Head Coaching position at a Division I school.
Everything I had striven for, I had achieved.
And then some,
I thought
as my eyes drifted back to my wife.
Never would have thought such a
beautiful, compassionate, intelligent woman would want to marry a man with no
hands.
She and her love for me amazed me every day.

‘I don’t think I should take that Gonzaga job.’ My voice cut
through the silence of the car so abruptly I couldn’t be sure it was me who had
spoken at first. But when Ellen’s eyes snapped from her window to my face, I
knew it had. I saw the bewilderment, confusion, and concern in that heartbeat
of a glance and rushed to explain.

‘I don’t need it. And it doesn’t make sense for us to move away
from here. You’re settled. You own a great practice. It doesn’t make sense to
move just so I can coach.’

She held her lip between her teeth for three breaths after I
stopped talking. ‘But this was your goal,’ she said eventually, unhappy
disquiet straining her words. ‘You wanted to be at a Division-I school.’

‘I know. I’ve busted my ass to get a shot like this, but now I
know I can do it. Making it to this level was the real challenge and now I’ve
done it. That’s enough.’

I could scarcely believe the words I was saying, and yet, even as
I uttered them I felt the veracity of the declaration. It was enough. I had
done enough and now my wife and my life with her were more important. What a
sense of freedom it was to finally realize where my heart truly lay!

‘Are you sure?’ she asked. I wanted to shout an exuberant
yes!
in
response, but she wasn’t finished speaking. ‘I mean, when I watched you coach,
you seemed so happy. I saw you on that field and knew I was seeing you in your
element. I always thought soccer is for you what medicine is for me. You really
want to give that up?’

She was right: I was happy on a soccer field, I always had been.
But the true serenity had come only when she’d arrived in my life. It was only
with Ellen beside me that everything finally felt right.

‘Yes.’

I pulled into the grocery store parking lot and took the first
empty spot that I found. After I put the car in park and turned off the
ignition, Ellen twisted in her seat to look at me face-on. Her gaze imploring
and pained, entreating and afraid, she pleaded, ‘Scott…’ I felt the syllable
reaching for me like a grasping hand and understood.

‘This isn’t about that,’ I told her, my gaze level, my voice
steady. She must never think her miscarriage had anything to do with my decision.
This was about our future.

~~~

‘You’ve reached Michael Roth, Director of Athletics at Gonzaga
University. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon
as possible…
Beeeep.
’

‘Hi, Mike,’ I greeted the machine. ‘This is Scott Martin. I’ve
decided that I’d like to stay in the Olympia area, so please remove my name
from consideration for the position of Head Coach of the women’s soccer
program. Thank you for your consideration. You’re doing a great job. Take
care.’

I lowered the phone into the cradle and a sigh of liberation
escaped my lips. When an echo of my own sigh whispered from the doorway, I spun
in the office chair to find Ellen standing in the doorway, her expression wavering
between remorse and anticipation. I met her uncertain gaze and she held mine in
return. It was done…

So now what?

26

 
‘We
need to move – build our own house.’

‘Huh?’ I turned to look at Ellen’s profile as we drove from Spokane
to Olympia one last time, Ellen having taken the first leg of the trip along
I-90 West. We had been driving for close to two hours now, mostly in silence,
and her sudden interjection caught me off guard. Not that I had been doing
anything in particular, alternately closing my eyes against the afternoon sun
and gazing out the window at the soggy world passing by.

Yesterday’s four inches of snow had turned into today’s slush
leaving the world damp and matted like a wet dog. I watched the rows of spindly,
lifeless trees and piles of muddy hills stream past and felt oddly left behind.
The last few weeks of the fall semester had rushed by in a downhill flood, each
moment since I told Mike of my decision disappearing before I could fully
comprehend it. The soccer season ended uneventfully. My semester coursework had
come and gone, culminating in a series of final papers which would mean nothing
now that I had left the master’s program. Everything was shifting; the
spotlight on my life slowly panning left, searching for the next focal point. I
only wished I could catch my breath long enough to decide if I did in fact feel
the need to mourn the loss of the former center of attention.

‘Next week,’ Ellen enunciated, glancing my direction as if to
visually convey her meaning into my mind. I struggled to drag my thoughts
forward to the present and concentrated on her words. ‘You should start looking
for land for us to buy and build a house on.’

Did she say land?
But I wasn’t staying at Gonzaga, so what did we need land for? I
frowned at her. Was the rest of my life going to pass in this rush? With
everyone else zooming by in the left lane while I rode the potholes on the
right?

When I didn’t offer a response, she glanced at me again, this time
more uncertainly. ‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since we saw that property
in Spokane,’ she explained, taking me back to the beginning I had clearly
missed. ‘It was so beautiful; so full of possibility…’ I watched her expression
melt into complacent reverie as her words faded to momentary silence. I, too,
stayed quiet, letting her sojourn in her mental realm of possibility for as
long as she wanted. I was in no hurry.

When a few minutes later she resurfaced with a delicate clearing
of her throat, she continued her thought as if there had been no break. It had
occurred to her, she said, that in order for us to move forward we needed to
move out of the house she had shared with her ex-husband. And she thought now
was the perfect opportunity to make such a change seeing as I’d just left
Gonzaga.

I nodded, but held my tongue. I needed time to catch up; to
determine if the idea itself was what felt premature or if it was the speed
with which it was introduced. Was it me who was behind or Ellen who was ahead?
I kept my expression carefully blank as I rewound our conversation and then
played it back in slow motion – much more my speed these days.

Next week you should start looking,
she’d said. Next week was two
days away.

The perfect opportunity seeing as you’ve just left Gonzaga,
she’d said. Translation:
Without Gonzaga, I’d have a lot of time on my hands. And since I’d just given
up my lifelong career, there wouldn’t be much to occupy said time.

So this was probably her way of giving me something to immerse
myself in and fill the void left by soccer; something for the spotlight to
shine on so other things could stay in the dark.

After a few more seconds of waiting, I shrugged and turned back to
her. ‘Sounds like a good idea. Have anywhere in mind?’

We spent the rest of the drive tossing around ideas for the design
of our new home, occasionally detouring to news concerning Ellen’s clinic when
the creative juices slowed. In all the five and some odd hours we spent on the
road, soccer never came up.

~~~

I pulled the car over at the end of a cul-de-sac, not trying
overly hard to wedge it among the untamed brush that bordered the asphalt. I
hadn’t seen another human being for over a mile and it was unlikely anyone who
had wandered out here would care if my tires were still in the lane.

Only three days had passed since I’d left Spokane and Gonzaga
behind. As Ellen had predicted, I threw myself into searching out potential new
home sites. It may have been a sign of the pent-up energy I tried to ignore
that I’d already found a handful of properties to investigate.

This particular real estate was actually a collection of several
properties: A subdivision of five acre lots that were once part of a large farm
but which had never been cleared for planting and were now being partitioned
off and sold. The lots were a towering aggregation of evergreen pines and
formidable ferns, dampened and glistening from the morning’s rain. Only three
miles from the house we now lived in, it was located on the southern outskirts
of Tumwater, near enough to give Ellen an easy commute to work, but far enough
that we had space to stretch our legs and grow.

Outside the car, everything was insulatingly quiet. All that was
living seemed to be holding its communal breath, patiently waiting for winter
to come to an end. I closed my eyes, listening to the silence reverberate
deafeningly as only silence could until a frantic yelp cut through the peace.

‘All right,’ I muttered, opening the back door of my Honda CRV to
release Stuart in a jumble of limbs and excitement; barely managing to catch
the end of his leash before he was lost for good among the tree trunks and
sagging ferns.

‘Easy there, buddy,’ I said and leaned back against the leash to
root him down. Tail wagging and tongue lolling, he hefted his nose into the air
then plunged it to the ground only to raise it up once more before repeating
the gesture in a semi-circle around me as if blessing the ground we stood on.
Chuckling, I slammed the door and turned to gaze down the road. My strategy was
to start with properties which bordered the small, kidney-bean-shaped lake
which burrowed amidst the woods and then work our way north and back to the
car.

‘Well,’ I said as Stuart yanked the leash against my left leg,
trying to sniff around the back of the car, ‘come on, then.’

After backtracking out of the cul-de-sac, Stuart and I made our
way to the south side of the lake, where we walked through three properties,
each with the same species of trees and the same smells in the air. All three
had a clearly defined building site, but never more than fifty feet from the
road. What was the point of five acres if you lived on only the front quarter
acre? Even with a property line that butted against the lake, none of the lots
could inspire me to build the home Ellen and I had begun to dream up.

I looked dispiritedly at the monotony of tree trunks around me.
Surrendering to my intuition and determination not to settle, I began to pick
my way back to the road with Stuart darting freely in and out of the brush
behind me. (We had abandoned the notion of a leash after our first ten steps
off the road.)

The area was quiet, isolated, and fresh; preserved in the dead of
winter. The air held a sharp and refreshing tinge, biting your windpipe with
its chill like a gulp of ice water on a hot day. But most of all, it had
mystery. A child could get lost for hours in a forest like this; playing,
exploring, growing. And yet, each lot was still small enough that they’d never
be too far from help. As far as places to raise a family went, this one fit the
bill.

But so did the last lot we’d traversed. And the one before that;
and the one before that. They were mere continuations of each other;
indistinguishable except for the length of the driveway. It was like the
woodland version of Stepford. We were not a Stepford people.

Back at the car, I reached for the handle on the backdoor,
Stuart’s name on the tip of my tongue. The hiss of the s dissipated on my lips
prematurely, though, as my eyes roamed over the trees. Where I had parked, a
mass of impregnable pines butted against the road as if daring civilization to
try encroaching any farther. Ferns taller than Stuart’s back filled in the gaps
at the bases of their branch-less trunks. Everywhere I looked was populated by
wild growth, untouched and pristine: just as Mother Nature had intended it.

Where was the building site?

On each of the other properties I had been able to see at least
the boundary of the clearing where a house would go with my feet still planted
on the street. But as I spun in a slow circle from this corner of the property,
all I could see was a continuous wall of nature. Even squinting through the
gaps between tree branches and above the ferns, I couldn’t get a sense for
where the house was meant to stand. I thought back:
Did we pass the building
site for this lot without my noticing it?
All I could remember was this
woodland scenery in an uninterrupted bulwark.

Slowly, I withdrew the fingers of the left myo from the door
handle. This barricade of forbidding wilderness had piqued my curiosity with
its building site concealed like the prize at the end of a treasure hunt.

‘One more,’ I told Stuart as I approached the pines on the right
side of the road. ‘One more lot.’

We waded into the shadowy depths of the trees, darting after
squirrels if we were on four legs and sniffing out better home sites if we were
on two. After a bit of foraging and hopping a small creek that seemed to weave
through the property like a seam stitching the two halves together, Stuart and
I emerged onto a flat patch of earth populated by a slew of leafless, white
aspens. I frowned, considering. By my estimation, the space was large enough
for a generously sized home and the aspens with their frail, lanky trunks could
easily be cleared.

Stuart and I circled the area like a couple of wolves closing in
on unwitting prey. At the back of the aspen grove was another stream, this one
larger and more determined than the one we’d hopped earlier. More of a creek,
really. I inched up to its bank, stopping when my feet began to sink into the
sponge-like earth at its edge. This one would take a bit more ambition to
cross. It cut a winding, burbling path through the tree trunks and foliage,
likely flowing into the lake farther south. When my view of its route hit a
snag, I thought at first I had reached the point where the waters were absorbed
by the land. They disappeared beneath a pile of leafless grey twigs I
determined to be the probable remnants of a tree which had breathed its last
breath in a winter storm. It didn’t occur to me that a fallen tree could hardly
create this jumble of sticks until a motion caught my eye.

There, on top of the heap of sticks, something small and brown
stared at me. I could sense its gaze – feel its consciousness like a spider
crawling across my skin – before I located its source. And by then it had gone
still so my eyes almost didn’t recognize any life in it at all. But as I inched
nearer, elongating my neck in its direction, the round bulge of a head took
shape and below it a pudgy, rotund body with two tiny hands and a wide flat
tail.

A beaver,
I exclaimed silently, holding my breath as if that small action
alone would prevent it from scampering off.
And that must be its dam,
I
realized, looking at the pile of twigs which now had clear intent behind them.
I watched the little creature watch me, feeling a childlike excitement welling
inside me. Time seemed to pause and resume playing in reverse, years slipping
away from me breath by breath. I felt like a boy again, foraging for adventures
and new discoveries as if there were nothing more to life than that.

Before I knew it, though, the sensation had vanished. One instant
I was making eye contact with a woodland beaver and the next with Stuart’s
spotted behind as he tore into the stream in hot pursuit. I opened my mouth to
yell but before the scolds could take shape, I was an adult once more.

I smiled and straightened – hadn’t even realize I’d crouched – and
watched Stuart sniff frantically and inconclusively about the dam.

~~~

We purchased the lot in January and just after Thanksgiving of the
same year everything in the old house was boxed up and hauled into the woods in
backcountry Tumwater.

Just over eleven months from purchase to completion,
I thought as we pulled onto
the winding gravel driveway and crawled the last quarter mile to our front
door.
Even having visited the property on a near daily basis for
the duration of the building process, I felt the telltale jolt beneath my
ribcage and constriction across my chest engendered by genuine excitement.

As we emerged from the final curve of the driveway, the parapet of
pines gave way to a gable-roofed home with green trim and large exposed
timbers. Light grey walls with a touch of an earthy green caught the sunlight
and sent it bouncing back into the woods beyond. The trees had been
meticulously cleared just far enough for a house to fit nestled within their
protective depths.

As I slid from the passenger seat of the van, I smiled welcomingly
at our home, exactly the way we had designed it to be. I felt Ellen’s arm slide
around my back. In my arms, I cradled the most essential item of the unpacking
process: the stereo.