Learning to Stay (24 page)

I like to think that after having spent a handful of years living in Marquette, on the northernmost edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I can handle any snowstorm. After all, Marquette gets upward of 150 inches of snow a year. It starts in October and sometimes keeps up until May, and if the people there were to let every storm dictate their day-to-day activities, they wouldn’t leave the house for eight months of the year. After moving to Madison, I quickly learned that the amount of snow that would shut down that city might register only as “heavy flurries” in Marquette, and to take most of the storm warnings with a handful of salt.

But there is something about this particular storm that gives me pause—partially the temperatures hovering right around thirty-two degrees, which means the roads will be either wet or iced over, depending; and partially the fierce winds that are expected to pick up as
the snow moves through the area, creating near whiteout conditions in spots according to the concerned meteorologist. Snow alone I can power through, but driving over intermittently icy roads with no visibility is not altogether unlike playing a game of vehicular Russian roulette.

For the better part of a moment I consider not going. But it has been exactly a week since I dropped off my husband to live indefinitely with his father, and today is his birthday.

I knew this storm was coming—it’s been featured on every news and radio station for the past twenty-four hours—and a smarter person might have left yesterday. The idea of jumping in my car last night, though, after a full day of meetings and two court appearances, sent me straight to sleep. I lay down on the couch at seven p.m. and woke up this morning just as the sky started to lighten, still dressed in the suit I wore to work.

Over a breakfast of cereal and a diet cola, I sift through yesterday’s mail: all junk, with the exception of my school loan payment and a second notice from the plumbing company I had to call when water started leaking out of the wall near the shower. It was a call I wouldn’t have had to make had Brad been here, but the fact that I did have to has set us back nearly nine hundred dollars. It’s a small company, though, and I know I can delay paying that bill much longer than I can my school loans or credit card payments. I am not proud of this strategy. I originally told myself that Brad was coming home, and would have a job soon. I figured incorrectly.

Not long after the sun has fully taken over, I’m on the road with a thermos of hot coffee in the cup holder and a cake from Brad’s favorite bakery on the backseat. The miles, and with them, the hours, tick by, and I negotiate the route by rote. I pass through Iron Mountain, the border town just into Michigan that tells me my trip is nearly over—only an hour and a half to go—without even realizing that I
drove through Green Bay. When Brad was arrested after the Margie Valhalla incident, I questioned how truthful he was being. How can a person forget doing something he was fully conscious for? Yet, I just did the same, and I don’t have nearly as much on my mind as Brad does. The brain is a funny computer, a prankster.

All week, my brain has been playing with me—teasing me—recalling unbidden, again and again, the memory of Zach’s hand resting on my leg.

Also unbidden is the way my stomach continues to flip at the thought of the warm, tingling sensation, the light weight of Zach’s palm on my thigh, or the replay of the conversation among Sondra, Zach, and me at the Irish pub that same night that always follows. Sondra’s words, especially, have formed a haunting chorus. Will I ever be happy with Brad again? Will I be able to stay with him and not resent him if, because he signed up for war on a whim, our home won’t ever be safe enough for me to justify bringing a child into it? Brad and I were perfectly suited for each other. As clichéd as it sounds, there are no other words to say that I married my best friend, my soul mate. But I’m starting to wonder if the man I married didn’t die in Iraq. Someone who looks a lot like him came back, but he’s not my husband.

I tried calling Brad several times over the last two days, and each time I was put straight into voice mail. I try him again now, hoping to get him on the line, to suss out if he’ll be home when I arrive. I’m greeted by his recorded voice. Again.

I imagine that he forgot to charge his phone, which he’s prone to doing, and I try to stop imagining other, less innocuous, scenarios that might explain why I can’t reach him.

But when I let myself into Mert’s house, it’s quiet and empty, and Brad’s phone is on the kitchen counter, plugged into the charger.

•  •  •

I’m no good at waiting, so I rattle around the house, picking up the living room, folding blankets and corralling weeks’ worth of the
Mining Journal
, the local source of news, into a sensible pile, and straightening the kitchen. I clean out the refrigerator, tossing bottles of salad dressing and condiments that have lived half a decade beyond their expiration dates. I wipe down refrigerator shelves and drawers with soapy water and then hand dry them. I vacuum and dust and change the bedding in Brad’s room. And then I run out of things to clean.

The house makes a noise like settling, and I jump. It’s far too quiet in here.

I sit down at the kitchen table and twiddle my thumbs. Relaxation doesn’t come easily to me, and although I’d like to be the kind of person who reads books or knits or even naps, I fear I don’t have it in me. Every time I try, the exercise lasts only a few handfuls of minutes, and it’s like enduring torture instead of enjoying myself. I need motion and purpose to suppress the thoughts that tend to multiply like water-soaked Mogwai. Right now I don’t have either.

The front door opens and I jump again. It’s Mert.

“Hiya, Princess. He’s not here.” Mert opens the refrigerator, pulls out a can of beer, and pops it open. I stem the incredulity I feel bubbling up at the fact that it’s barely noon and to my knowledge, no one here is on vacation. Then again, this is the person I handpicked as my husband’s caretaker. Perhaps my incredulity is misplaced.

“Do you know where he is?” I ask.

Mert walks past me and into the living room, where he turns on the television and tunes it to a Red Wings game in progress.

“Mert?”

He either hasn’t heard me or is ignoring me. If I were a betting person, I’d go with the latter. He’s yelling at the television now, “Let’s go, boys! Get it down the ice!”

“Mert!”

No response. I march over to him, grab the remote, and turn off the television.

“Hey!” Mert yells. “What the—”

I sit on top of the coffee table across from him, among a scattering of ash trays I emptied and just now, wish I also scrubbed down.

“Mert, where is Brad?”

“I’m not his keeper, Princess.”

“Come on, Mert,” I say. “I’m trying to surprise him for his birthday. You did remember it was his birthday, right?”

“Didn’t forget,” Mert says. “Just haven’t seen him.”

A thought occurs to me: What if Mert knows exactly where Brad is and doesn’t want to say? What if Brad ran into an old girlfriend he’s taken to seeing?

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” I ask. I hate the way I sound—needy and suspicious. I don’t want to be like that, to feel this way. I hear my mom’s voice saying, “You feel how you feel; it’s not right or wrong, Leesy,” which is what she’d say to me when I told her I didn’t want to be scared of the dark.

Mert exhales long and slow. He runs a hand through the mess of gray hair covering his head. He shakes his head, smiling. “For Pete’s sake, Princess. He went for a hike yesterday. I don’t know where he is right this minute, but I’m sure he’s around somewhere. Now can you turn that game back on?”

“Where did he go?”

Mert shrugs, then rolls his eyes as if the answer is to be found somewhere on the ceiling or his forehead. “Dunno,” he says. “Hogsback?”

“He went hiking yesterday, and you haven’t seen him since then? And you didn’t think to go looking for him?”

“Boy’s a Marine,” Mert says, holding his hand out for the remote. “That’s what they train ’em for—to handle the elements and all that.”

“He was in the Army, Mert. The fucking Army.” I shake my head and toss the remote in Mert’s lap as I walk out of the living room and out of the house.

My mind is racing. I can envision Brad out in the woods somewhere, contemplating leaving me again. And in those horrific pictures that cycle through my head, the trigger has already been pulled, the pills swallowed, the noose made taut. In each one, I’m already too late.

I should have been more concerned when I couldn’t reach him. I should have called Mert to sound the alarm. But I assumed he was simply angry with me for bringing him up here, and then there was the promise, the only thing Brad asked of me—not to tell anyone what had almost happened. So there was no way for Mert to ever know he should be worried about Brad going out hiking, or not coming back.

Luckily, a bag with boots and snowshoes, winter pants and a vest, and hats and mittens is in my trunk. This is less a result of a Girl Scout level of preparedness and more because I ran out of storage room when we moved into our house. I kept all of this temporarily in my trunk, and temporary turned into permanent residence. I rationalized that it made sense to store these things in my car, that they would come in useful in a roadside emergency. I was thinking of being stuck in a ditch in the dead of winter, not launching a one-person search party for my husband. Regardless, I’m glad it’s all with me.

I swap my jeans and sweater for leggings and snow pants, a fleece zip-up, and a vest. I dig out the CamelBak I keep filled with water, and I lace up my Sorels. Then I grab my snowshoes and set out toward an unmarked trail a few hundred feet up the road that will lead me toward Hogsback Mountain.

Although Marquette and its surrounding wilderness are by no means the last frontier, it can get desolate and dangerous up here
relatively quickly, and my footsteps speed up as I think of all the other scenarios that could have befallen Brad. Each winter, news reports abound of people falling off trails that they didn’t know ended at a cliff or breaking a limb and freezing to death before being found.

There is only one real trailhead to Hogsback and it’s unmarked. This is a place the locals like to keep to themselves, unlike Sugarloaf Mountain just down the road, which has a giant parking lot, marked trails with swarms of people hiking them, and at certain points, boardwalks and steps leading to the summit. At Hogsback, you might run across another hiker only once every ten times you go.

Some of the trails here are trails. Others simply resemble trails—paths, beaten down by deer, that end abruptly. And whereas its cousin-mountain, Sugarloaf, makes you climb immediately, always pointing you up, and is flanked on the back side by a cliff that drops into Lake Superior, Hogsback takes its sweet time rising from the landscape, almost all of its six hundred feet of elevation coming in the last quarter of the hike to the summit. This means that a huge expanse lolls gently around the peak in every single direction, and it’s unnervingly easy to get turned around—something I’ve fallen prey to more than once in the past.

What this means, also, is that there is far more searchable area than I can cover. At Hogsback, you’re only relegated to certain routes in that last six hundred feet or so. Down here, just off the trailhead? You can take your pick.

I’d forgotten this quality of Hogsback, and recognizing the enormity of the task I’ve set myself is like being jolted awake. I scan the landscape around me, three hundred and sixty-five degrees of it. It’s barely a fraction of the area a person could hike here.

Brad, I realize, could be absolutely anywhere.

With a handful of hours of daylight left, there is no way I can do an effective search. But I have to do something. My other option is to
hike back to Mert’s to watch the Red Wings and slowly lose my mind with each
thwap
of the cards he deals himself.

I walk without real purpose toward the base of the mountain and call out to my husband. “Brad! Bra-ad!” The wind grabs these words from my mouth and silences them, but I keep going, one foot in front of the other. I keep calling out.

I hike around the north side of Hogsback, calling Brad’s name. Each step brings a different sort of panic—what if I’m out here in the middle of nowhere looking for Brad when he’s somewhere else entirely? What if he is out here and I don’t scan the area closely enough? What if he’s too tired or weak or injured to cry out? What will I do if I find his body? What will I do if I don’t?

I sit on a downed tree to think. I strain my ear toward every call of a bird, every creek and groan of a tree, every whistle of wind, thinking that it might be Brad. It never is. It’s nearly dusk, which means I’m running out of time.

Or—the thought occurs to me—maybe not. If Brad is out here, if he’s conscious and wanting to be found, it could actually be easier to find him at night. He’ll be able to see the beam of my headlamp dancing through the trees. Maybe he’ll be able to signal, and if he has a flashlight or is able to make a fire, that’s something easily seen in the dark. I decide to hike back to Mert’s, find Brad’s brother, Rick, and anyone else he can muster, and head back out when night falls. By the time I reach Mert’s and unstrap my snowshoes, I’m practically giddy over the brilliance of my plan.

That giddiness is quickly replaced by dread, when I return to an empty house. I don’t know Rick’s phone number, and the line to his repair shop rings and rings. Mert doesn’t believe in cell phones. I told him once that cell phones are not like God or ghosts; you don’t get to say you “don’t believe” in them. “Well, I think they’re stupid,” Mert said. “Why would I want someone to be able to call me anywhere
when I don’t even like being called here, in my house? That specific enough for ya, Princess?”

My stomach feels like it’s mutining on itself, and I realize that I’ve had nothing to eat since the skimpy bowl of cereal I poured for myself early this morning. I eye the cake on the table. I thought by now we’d all be long finished with dinner, probably burgers or brats on the grill, and would be well on to serenading Brad with “Happy Birthday” and cutting the cake. Instead, I force myself to scrounge Mert’s cabinets for some other source of sustenance. I produce bread and peanut butter and make myself a sandwich. And not knowing what else to do, I take up residence with my sandwich on the old metal glider on Mert’s porch.