But I’d already done the priest, white dress, and potluck dinner and dance at the VFW with my first husband, Brian. It was where everyone had their wedding receptions in Gatlinburg. If you didn’t know how to polka, you had the good manners to sit down until everyone had their fill of the Doghouse or the Bird Dance or was too drunk to stand any more. After the polka band put away their tubas and clarinets, the real party band (hired by the couple’s friends rather than parents) would start warming up, and the older folks would let the younger generation take over the floor. This was what everyone expected, and me and my few friends from high school hadn’t the courage to wish for anything more, or different.
My wedding to John, in comparison, was idyllic. On the beach in Santa Cruz, by a hippy friend who had gotten his minister’s license from a crackpot website as a joke. My bridal bouquet was made of wild rosemary that grew out of the cracks of my apartment building’s parking lot in San Jose, where John and I lived until we found the house in Los Gatos.
John always struck me as singularly upright. Except for the photo disagreement, he didn’t give any indication that he was on the lam from his real life. He would look anyone in the eye, and give the sort of handshake that indicated he was as upstanding as they come.
These days, my embarrassment and guilt lay heavily upon me. A lifetime of sins accumulating. I can’t look anyone in the eye, not even strangers. I have trouble swallowing, and drink gallons of water for my dry throat. I glance in my rearview mirror more than is necessary. I shake out my shoes to find out what’s secreted itself inside them. Most of all, I hide from those who know me well.
I felt this way after I ran off with Paul and Jackson still in diapers. Ashamed of my cowardice in stealing away without notice, I stayed away, not corresponding with anyone but Thomas. I never saw my mother again. I always wondered what she would have thought of who I became when I reached California—the real me, I’m convinced. Braless. Shoeless. Free of ponytail holders and bobby pins and belts. My mother was so different. Everything about her screamed restraint, from her shellacked hair to her girdle to her closed-toe shoes; even in the summer, she wore heavy shoes, even in the shower she wore a shower cap, even out of the shower she wore a robe rather than run through the house dripping in a towel. She whisked away your clothes to the laundry the minute you took off a blouse or a skirt, and it would be washed, dried, and folded neatly in your drawer while you were still searching the floor for the last place you’d dropped it.
Then she died. Dying back home while the boys were twelve and thirteen, and we were scraping things together down in Santa Cruz in that house we shared with two guys who considered themselves surfers first and students second. Mother love. Gone like that. And it was years before John, before I felt loved again and redeemed by that love. All false, as it turned out, John as duplicitous as any run-of-the-mill adulterous husband. As for me, chalk up another failure to be ashamed of.
The surfers always had the radio tuned to one obscure Santa Cruz station that played coded music for the surfers on where to find the waves. That was the year of secrets. The secret waves. My secret affair with a married father I’d met while gassing up my car between taking the boys to football practice, soccer practice, swim meets. Thomas’s secret boyfriend, who really wasn’t such a secret. And the secret my mother kept of her illness. She had been prone to bouts of sadness her whole life, and I think the breast cancer diagnosis must have felt like a relief. Two months after burying her, my father moved in with a widow from Pigeon Forge.
That was my last experience with death before John, a mother so sedated that she didn’t realize I’d been gone for eleven years when I called. She would say hello drowsily into the phone, her morphine dialed up as high as it would go, so I never really had a chance to say goodbye to her, either.
40
Samantha
SUSAN SAYS I NEED TO start showing some progress. Says she’s seen this before, a growing obsession as success eludes, and that it’s unhealthy for the officer and unproductive for the department. “Sam,” Susan says, “another two weeks and I’m pulling you off this case.”