susan taylor chehak

1.

I just need to make one thing clear right from the start: I am not guilty of anything. I was not betraying anybody, I was not doing anything wrong, and I was not running away. No matter what Helen may have thought or assumed or said, to herself or to me or to anybody else who would listen to her. No matter what she said about what I was doing, what I'd done, what she thought I might still do. Because there I was an old man in an old car, headed eastward across Iowa, from Brevity to Linwood, in the middle of the winter, in the middle of the night.

Even though I wasn't due to leave until the next day, still I should have been free to come and go, to do whatever I wanted to do, as long as I could afford it, as long as I could make it happen on my own nickel, without owing anybody anything. Why should my wife have tried to tell me otherwise, even if she supposedly had only my own best interests in her heart? Whether plans had changed or not, for better or worse, it was about time and then some for me to take some initiative and do something for myself for once.

I gripped the steering wheel more tightly, taking courage from the fact that I could cling to it and how my fingers curled around it, and I said so once again, aloud—Not cheating, not lying, not guilty, not to blame. Not running away. NOT. Not. Even though I'd had to make my going good under the cover of that darkness. Even though I'd been forced to be furtive, slipping away like a thief, like a criminal, tiptoeing down the stairs and through the kitchen and out the back door to the car, warm breath steaming in the winter wind, while she dozed there in her chair in the den, as had lately become her habit. Except she wasn't dozing. Helen was flat out drunk—as usual—passed out and unsuspecting otherwise, because I'd done what I reckoned was a fairly decent job of convincing her she'd talked me out of it after all, which in fact she almost had. If Dr. Wallis—Valerie—hadn't called me when she did, I might have lost all that hard-fought resolve before the night was over. And then I'd have been phoning her instead, to say I'd changed my mind or something had come up or this or that or something else that would be reason enough for me to call the whole thing off.

And so.

But as it was, I knew I couldn't wait until morning, when my wife would surely feel compelled to start in on me again with all her reasons for why not, and I'd be tempted—again, more than ever—to give in. I didn't believe I'd ever have another chance in my lifetime to do something like that, something I wanted to do, something that would maybe give me an opportunity for some success, some accomplishment got all on my own, and so it was now or never, never mind that it was also the middle of the night, and that was just one more bit of necessary subterfuge that I absolutely was not going to allow myself to feel any guilt about just then. Even though I'd had to let the car roll down the drive to the street with its lights off before I dared to turn the key to get the motor going, before I could, finally, pull away. Like a teenage boy, sneaking off for a midnight meeting with a girl. As if.

It wasn't until I was cleanly out of sight of the house that I allowed myself to let go and breathe again. Reaching down around my knees to fumble for the knob that would turn the headlights on. The roads were empty anyway, no danger there. Farmland. Darkness all around; the moon a smudge of light, obscured by scraps of cloud. Everybody else in bed already, curtains closed, doors locked, sweet dreams. I took two left turns, blinker flashing, an embarrassment in the dark, and then a right, and there it was, the Interstate, just exactly as I'd known it would be, and there I was, too, gliding up the ramp to merge seamlessly into a flow of traffic that was already there, sparse, accepting of my slight presence in its midst.
I could have been anybody. Just that by itself should have come as a big relief.

And yet.

Even though I was also reckoning that Helen was not going to be aware for hours yet of what had happened to me, and by way of me to her, still that glance in the rearview was wary and suspicious, because it had occurred to me that maybe she had somehow second-guessed the situation and found a way to fold up out of sight in the narrow well of the back seat, as if my wife might have been able to transform herself into some monster shadow and then she might have risen up right there behind me, she might have swooped down to take me, give me back my second thoughts, she might have caused me to change my mind and she might have made me turn around, brought me back somehow, and, whether by force of body or of logic, I would have capitulated to the greater strength of her will or the superior reasoning powers of her mind.

One way or another.

I wouldn't have put it past her.

In fact, I even went so far as to pull over onto the shoulder for a moment where, heart pounding, I twisted myself around for a better view of the—empty—back seat. No room for her there anyway, of course. She was too large a woman, and I should have been sensible enough to know this. Was, in fact, but I should have trusted that, the knowing. I felt foolish then, childish, but pleased, too, as I pulled back into that easterly flow of traffic again, and resolved—again—to pay more attention to myself.
From that moment on.

And if her feelings were hurt when she woke up in the morning and realized I was gone, that would not be my fault either.

∞

I had never intended that my going should have to be such a sneaking thing as it had become. I'd meant for it to be a triumph. But there it is, she went and, in her way, turned it into that other thing instead.
Not my fault then, but hers.

It was a first for me, the taking off on my own like that, and so it was also something to be proud of, wasn't it? Or so I reasoned then. It was something to thrill over, the kind of thing that makes you only wish you had a friend to share it with.

As if.

But even as that thought crossed my mind, I had to qualify it. Because, strictly speaking, that wasn't really the first time I'd left the farmhouse where I'd spent the past 15 years with Helen and the town where I'd lived for all of my whole life, but it was the first time I'd gone off with an inkling—a possibility, a hope—that I might not be coming back. Ever. And of course she must have sensed as much and that was where her resistance to the whole idea began. Even if she didn't know this for sure, even if she didn't really even realize it clearly or completely at the time, even if I had changed my mind and turned around, then or ever, still there would always have to be something to be said for that inkling.

Yes.

So in that way it felt like a milestone, a watershed event in my life, and once I was out of town, with miles and miles behind me as I headed across Iowa, west to east, over the frozen land toward Linwood, I knew that everything about the world had changed, it had shifted its position in relation to me so that I was not really that Bardsley boy or Mr. B. or even Helen Bardsley's husband anymore—not just because I was changing and moving, but also because the world was being altered by my own forward movement through it.

Or so it seemed.

Because this was just exactly what I had been—secretly—wishing for, and for a while, too. In fact, if I am to be wholly honest about it—and I do want to be, above all, honest—it's what I'd thought of since I was just a kid and came to see the limits of the world around me as if it were the skin of a bubble through which I would one day feel compelled to burst. So now it had come to this: I'd done it. No one could stop me anymore.

I didn't think.

Could they?

Although I must admit, Helen did try. She did her best and yet, there I was. That time, for once, I'd won.
Still, there was one hitch to it, and that was that I wasn't actually supposed to leave until the next morning. No one was expecting me in Linwood until then, and that part of it niggled. It caused the whole expedition was made to seem more dangerous than it should have been. I supposed I probably ought to stop somewhere along the way. If I were smart I'd pull up to the motel with the sign that was flashing forth the promised comfort of its vacancy, and I'd take a room there, just to pass the few more hours left until dawn, but I just couldn't bring myself to do that, not yet. Just when it felt as if I'd found something like my own momentum, that would have been a stall. And so instead I drove on, with both hands on the wheel, one at ten o'clock and the other at two, exactly the way my father had taught me, and I felt that for once in my life I was in complete control. The road was like a ribbon flung out over the stark flat fields, it rippled and waved, and the darkness closed in on me from all sides, as if it might have blotted me out altogether, under its careless thumb.

∞

As for Helen, she had a whole long list of reasons why I shouldn't be going off at all, should leave well enough alone, should stay put, and she brought them out for me, one by one, like cards in a hand she was holding, as the time for my going neared. The first was that it would be bad for me if I went. This was tricky. Dr. Wallis was bound to take advantage of my friendly and generous nature, Helen said, insulting and flattering me both at the same time. She would make me work harder, do more than what I was being paid for, she'd expect too much, she’d use me to help her with her research and then not give me due credit for what I'd accomplished. I wouldn't know how to protect myself, I wouldn't know how to say no, and then there I'd be, stuck, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by strangers in a ruined town, with no way out.

Tricky, maybe, but I saw right through it anyway. We'd been there before and so I was able to quickly recognize my wife's posture of concern for my welfare and know it for the lie that it had always been. Her thoughts for me then were bound to also be thoughts for herself, of course, nothing less than altogether selfish—and projective as well, by the way. Her true motives were completely transparent to me by then, and the truth is that if anybody had been taking advantage of my generous nature, that would have had to be none other than Mrs. Tim Bardsley herself.

Hadn't I always put her needs before my own? And hadn't she come to expect as much from me? And had she ever turned to me and smiled and said, simply, Thanks?

Yes.

Yes.

No.

A pot calling the kettle black.

My mother had said that about her more than once, but she was dead and gone now and had been for a while and so it was left up to me to recognize and say the same instead.

My mother had died in __. Cancer, of a particularly slow and nasty kind—her insides black and twisted with it, buckling her with pain.

And where was my brother when that happened? Henry was long gone himself. He was in Europe, of all places. Just about as far away from home as it was possible for him to get.

He had a girlfriend then, he said—a French woman, he told me her name was Colette—but I never met her or even saw a picture. When he came back for the funeral he was alone, and he stayed but he was useless. Worse than. He wouldn't talk about Colette. Eventually I began to wonder, and my father was asking questions, too, which Henry stopped answering, so it became doubtful to me whether the woman ever existed at all.

It would be just like my brother to have made that girlfriend up.

It wasn't fair and it never had been, my mother's death and that I was the one who had to stay put and take care of things, but when I bothered to complain, Henry was quick to reply, coolly: Whoever said life was supposed to be fair? He was in another world most of the time then, and angry too, although it was hard to tell who he was most mad at. He blamed Pap and he blamed me and he blamed the doctors and the nurses and the whole community that was supposed to be there when you needed them, but never were.

Himself included?

He even tried to shift some blame to Mom herself. She was a stoic, a martyr, a Spartan soldier standing wordlessly at attention while the fox that she was hiding under the folds of her dress devoured her gut. By the time anybody knew there was something badly wrong with her, it was way past too late.

And then later it was exactly the same thing, almost, all over again, with my father. Holding his feelings in, hiding his grief, until the morning when I was looking the other way, busy with one thing or another, I suppose, and then he took that opportunity to back the old pickup truck into the shed and close the doors. Ran the motor and went to sleep. A couple of neighbor kids—up to no good—found him, and they came crying to me up at the house, and then I had to go out to the barn to see—and smell—the awesome awful fact of it for myself.

So maybe he was expecting some fairness in life, too?

After that I had no choice but to marry Helen, who had been taking care of us for a while already then. She had been my mother's friend and she was that much older than me that already she had some health issues of her own, which, as time went on and the years went by only got worse as she collapsed in on herself more and more, with the rheumatism, what she called her ailment, and what the details of that might have been were none of my business, except it had to do with pain in different parts of her body. And so after a while our farm was no longer a farm as she spent most of her time in her chair in front of the television set or at the kitchen table fussing with her papers and I was working in maintenance at the school. Twenty years of marriage, during which time she became an old woman and I became an old man man and all that time I'd been taking care of her more than she'd been taking care of me, and that was just as it should be, as far as she was concerned.

So at first Helen didn't believe that I was serious about doing what I did, going to Linwood, taking that job there. At first she dismissed the whole idea as if it were just some—another—crazy whim of mine.

A bee in your bonnet, she said, smiling. Ants in your pants, she sniffed.

But it would pass, she was sure. I'd get over it, eventually.

Like a cold. Like the flu.

From the time I first suggested the possibility, mentioning over dinner one evening that Dr. Wallis had announced to her classes that she was in need of an assistant, that she'd posted an ad on the bulletin board in the hallway outside her office, and—pushing my food around my plate—trying to be casual—as if for me it was neither here nor there—I asked my wife, quietly and seriously, did she think I should apply? Two weeks in January, that was all. To which she answered, firmly, without any hesitation, No.

Selfish.

To the day when I went in for an interview with Dr. Wallis and then when she called me back two days later to offer me the position and then all through the planning and the packing and the reading everything I could find about apocalypse and revelation, the end of the world, the end of time—all through it, Helen jeered.

What was wrong with me? Was I crazy? Had I lost my mind? This was what came of my reading all those books, she said. Why would I want to go to Linwood, that ruined place, and in the dead of winter? Wasn't Brevity cold enough for me? I would hate it there, I'd be lonely, I'd be miserable.

But then when it began to look like I wasn't listening to her and I was serious and it was not a joke, I really was going to go through with it anyway, then Helen started to complain and wheedle and whine. But what about her? What was she supposed to do without me? How could I think of leaving her? How could I just pack up like that and go?

Well, I thought, how could I not?

By then her misery had turned to anger. Another card pulled out and placed upon the table: when she accused me of all but killing my mother first, and then my father after that, and now I was trying to kill her, too. Murder by omission, she argued, because I'd done nothing to prevent those deaths. As if there had been anything for me to do.

I didn't speak to Helen for three days then, I turned my back on her and just went about my business as if she wasn't there, and maybe she was starting to see that she'd gone too far because she went back to saying again that it was only that she was worried about me, but by that time I knew better.

More than.

So she had no choice but to play the last card, her trump card you might say, and that was the cruelest of them all, as she turned cold and began to act as if she didn't care, as if it didn't matter to her, I could go ahead and make all the plans in the world, not because she'd become reconciled to the fact that I'd be gone from her for a while or forever, but because she didn't believe I'd ever be able to actually pull the whole thing off anyway. So why worry?

What hurt was that I started to fall for it. I began to believe her. Betrayed my own self that way. I'd already packed, in bags and boxes, everything I meant to take along with me—my books and papers and notebooks—but the suitcase was still lying open on the bed because I'd been having trouble deciding just exactly what of my personal belongings I wanted to include. Not just the clothes I might need, but also all the rest of the things in my room, the room and by association the self, that I would be leaving behind. So there I was, putting things in and then taking them back out again, and when Helen saw this her smile was smug, self-satisfied, because she'd told me so, hadn't she?

And, by the way, she had made us some supper, was I hungry? I was. I went downstairs and ate with her and sat with her while she drank a bottle of red wine and then poured herself a whiskey and one for me, too, while she got all weepy and nostalgic, talking about how I'd gone to her when my father died and our wedding and those first years of our marriage, when she still pretty much had her health. Asking me, Remember? Weren't we both so happy then?

No. Speak for yourself.

Soon enough she fell asleep in her chair in front of the television, as usual, and I was originally planning to get to bed early and be up early and all set to go when Dr. Wallis came for me first thing in the morning, but by then I'd pretty much lost my resolve. Helen had taken it from me, just as she'd meant to do, just as she'd done many times before, and if Dr. Wallis hadn't phoned at just exactly that moment, well it's hard to know what I might have done.
Probably nothing at all.

∞

Dr. Wallis's voice was like a lifeline, cast out to pull me free. No, on second thought it was more like a slap in the face that brought me back to consciousness again. At first I supposed she was calling to remind me that she would be there in the morning to pick me up and to ask whether I was all set and ready to go, and then I was going to have to tell her about Helen and that it was complicated but I had obligations, I had a commitment to my wife, she was old, she was not in good health, she needed me, and so on and so forth, and then that would be the end of that. But soon it was clear that Dr. Wallis had only called to tell me that she was in Chicago, she'd been delayed by a bit of personal business, nothing to be concerned about but she was going to have to meet me in Linwood tomorrow night. Could I somehow find a way to get there on my own? Drive or get a ride with someone or take the bus? A room was all arranged and paid for. Then she gave me the address of the bed-and-breakfast where we'd be staying. Homeward House, it was called—did I think I could find it all right?

Yes, of course.

But was she laughing? Did I hear music? A party?

I assured her I had everything I needed, no there was nothing wrong, no problem, I'd be on my way in the morning, and I reasoned it would be good to have some time to familiarize myself with the place, even take a few photographs, so that when she did show up I'd know my way around well enough to show her, too.

And that was why I couldn't wait one more minute more but had to leave right then, after I'd hung up the phone and sneaked a peek at Helen, who was still asleep in her chair with the lamplight spilling over her face and the hound at her feet and the television yammering at them both. Her face, in sleep, was slack and youthful-looking, as if she might have been a young woman again, wanting only what might be best for me, her husband. Except I knew that if she woke up and started talking, if I gave her half a chance to go back to arguing with me some more, I wouldn't be able to stand it, but would give in, break down, and change my mind and stay. And then that would be the end of that.

There would be no going anywhere for me then. This was to be my last chance.

So I slipped upstairs and snapped the suitcase shut—never mind what was in it, or what was not—and carried it quietly downstairs and out the back door to the car. Two more trips up the stairs and down again for the boxes and the books, hushing the dog and holding my breath, keeping an ear cocked for Helen, expecting her to stop me any time—her hand on my arm, my name on her lips—but she never did wake up, and so my getaway was good.

And it turned out to be the very thrill of sneaking off in the middle of the night like that that was enough to get my heart pounding and keep me focused and unwavering and strong.
So that was it. I got away all right, and that was something, wasn't it? I had to smile, in spite of myself. Or was it a grimace? Of pleasure, or of pain? Weren't my teeth bared, and wasn't that a feral sort of growling in my throat? Of determination. A grunt of the effort that it took for me to hold the car to the road, to ride the rise and fall of landscape as the flat prairie turned to rolling hills.

And that flutter in my gut? Was it thrill or was it, still, just the same old familiar, sickening flurry of fear?

∞

I remember another time now, thinking back, a road trip we took—when was that? Hard to say, exactly. Maybe I was ten, and Henry was sprawled asleep on the seat beside me, his head on my knees, his hair sun-bleached, feathery and fine, his skin rosy and burned. Where were we going? To the river? To a lake? It was summertime and very hot and very dark and we were driving along a road that was also just like the one into Linwood, except there was my father at the wheel and my mother on the seat beside him, leaning with her head cocked against his shoulder, and he drove with one hand, his other arm around her, and I eyed them from the back seat with my cheek pressed against the window glass. The radio was playing, and I felt the glass against my skin and looked out to see the looming dark shapes of the houses as we passed, rising up, then slipping away again, and I wondered what would it be like to be somebody else, not yourself, not Tim Bardsley, but another boy who lived there, or there, or even there, in that dilapidated old rundown place.
What if?

∞

I was approaching the glow that was the lights of Linwood's outer edge. I realized now that I had always wanted nothing more than just exactly that, to go away, to be someone else, to become other, and then, there it was, the time had come at last, and I was going. I had gone.
Once I was in Nowhere, I'd be safe, I thought. All I had to do was follow the directions. It wasn't complicated, not at all. And I'd see Hollow Hill there anyway, Dr. Wallis had said. So I'd know. Just head for that.

But what she didn't reckon for was that I'd be driving at night. It would be dark. And the Hill would not be lit.