Misty swatted playfully at Paul.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, Stacia,” Misty said as she kneeled down in front of me. She then took my hands in hers and whispered, “This will help you, honey; you just have to believe.”
At that point, I didn’t know what to think. Was I really supposed to agree that I was going to meditate my cancer away? I was so confused, and by the looks on the men’s faces, so were they. I was glad to prolong the mystery. Then, I considered, what the hell did I have to lose?
“Alright then—bring it on,” I instructed Misty as I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair.
“First things first,” Misty began. “Keep your back as straight as you can, and clear your mind.”
Back straight and
mind clear,
I thought. How hard could that be? But, the more I tried to clear my mind, the more it raced with random thoughts. Images of death, of Evan hunting me down, ruminations of guilt for having left Evan without any explanation, ideas about where Michael might be, even a fantasy or two about Wilbur’s naked body. The neurons in my brain were firing at an epic pace. I quickly arrived at the conclusion that I sucked at meditating.
“Stacia, you’re grimacing. Concentrate on your breathing. Breathe in and out of your nose,” Misty said.
All right, that made it a little easier. Breathe in; breathe out. Breathe in; breathe out. Breathe in; breathe out. Somewhere in between breaths, I was transcended—filled with a warmth and peacefulness, surrounded by the colors of the rainbow and the calmness of a meadow. The next thing I knew, I was being tickled by what felt like the tentacles of an octopus. I opened my eyes and saw that my three companions were staring at me and giggling.
“It happened again, didn’t it? I fell asleep?”
“Your snoring was making it hard for us to meditate,” Misty said.
“Sorry, I’ve just been really tired lately.”
“It’s all right; this is a vacation for you, so sleep away. Maybe just do it in the tent so you don’t get a nasty kink in your neck.”
I followed Misty’s advice. Once inside my tent, it took all of thirty seconds to conk out again. I slept so deeply that when I finally awakened it was
dark outside and I felt as though my bladder was about to explode.
I shot o
ut of the tent like a bull chasing a matador.
“Hey, guys!” I yelped as I did a little
dance. “I really have to go to the bathroom, but I don’t want any further encounters with jave-whatevers or bobcats or Gila monsters or any other night crawlers that may be lurking out there hankering for a taste of Native American flesh. Anyone else have to go?”
Wilbur jumped up laughing, “Javelinas, and I think you’re safe from the rest. But I’d be more than happy to escort you to the facilities.”
“Whatever,” I said with a smile. I’m sure I appeared delighted, but my brain was screaming,
of course, only the hot guy would be available to be my bathroom buddy!!
I should have just asked Misty, but I saw no reason for modesty at that point. There wasn’t much unexplored territory left on my body.
As I headed off down the hill, Wilbur grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me back.
“Let’s go the other way this time, just in case.”
At that point I didn’t give a rat’s ass which way we went. I was half tempted to just squat down in front of the lot of them. But modesty prevailed and I allowed Wilbur to escort me to a new pee zone.
“Right over here should work,” Wilbur said, pointing to the base of a juniper tree.
I tried to duck around the backside of the tree but there was too much shrubbery in the way. I envisioned myself acquiring a poison oak rash where the sun doesn’t shine. So I pulled my pants down to squat, only to discover that Wilbur’s pants were unzipped well. He was actually doing his business right next to me.
“Now you’re not the only one with your pants down.”
“Great. You’re like the hot big brother I never wanted,” I groaned.
I was in the midst of laughing at my own bad joke when I spotted a pair of glowing orbs glowering down at me from the branches of the tree.
“What the hell is
that?!
” I exclaimed with more panic in my voice than I’d intended.
“Wow! That would be a Cactus Ferruginous pygmy-owl—very unusual to see out here.”
As Wilbur embarked upon a Discovery Channel diatribe on desert wildlife, I began to feel a bit woozy. Before long, his voice was replaced by a muffled warble. The last thing I remember him saying was, “Did you know that in some cultures, seeing an owl means imminent death?”
That’s when the earth jumped up and whacked me in the face.
“Umm…Stacia?” I heard Wilbur ask from what seemed like miles away.
By the time I awakened, I was
dangling in Wilbur’s arms with the blur of trees passing by in the night sky. When we arrived back at the camp, I was finally able to focus my gaze enough to notice the concerned look on Wilbur’s face.
“What happened?” I croaked.
“You fainted,” Wilbur explained as he laid me down by the flashlight “fire.”
Misty and Paul rushed over to help.
I shook my head in disbelief.
“Jesus—I don’t know what happened. We were just looking at that owl…but wait…did I pass out before or after I pulled my pants back up?”
“Uh…before.”
I was mortified. Never before had anyone outside of my lovers and my gynecologist acquired such an intimate knowledge of my private parts.
“You need to eat something, honey,” Misty prodded.
“Yeah, that’s probably it,” I agreed, although I knew better.
I think it was the “symbol of death” anecdote that had gotten to me. I wasn’t normally one to buy into the whole omen thing, but that blasted bird had me seriously spooked. It was possible that I had even less time than I’d imagined. Any one of the occasions that I fell asleep or fainted could spell the end for me. I couldn’t continue to count on the fact that I would always wake up. I could only hope that it would be less painful than it had been for my mother.
While I recovered, the others prepared dinner. I was still feeling a bit queasy and dizzy, so I
helped myself to a single piece of bread and some water despite Misty’s insistence that I needed something more substantial.
“Is that all you’re gonna eat?” Misty asked. “You’re not in jail.”
She was right. I wasn’t in jail…anymore. I had escaped the incarceration of my marriage, but I had become a prisoner of my failing body. Still, sadly enough, I preferred the latter.
“Yup, bread and water it is.”
“Okay, suit yourself. We’re gonna head out in the morning,” Misty announced. “I’m gonna check on my car, then hopefully, we’ll be back in Vegas by about two o’clock.”
I wasn’t ready to go back to Vegas. In fact, I hadn’t even considered my next move. A sudden paralyzing fear that Evan would discover my location came crashing down upon me. I imagined him lurking in some
dark corner, waiting to pounce on me like one of the horrible javelinas, just so he could let me know what a terrible disappointment I’d turned out to be.
That was when I realized that Evan hadn’t called in
days. For a moment I was filled with indignation that he’d given up on me so easily. Then it dawned on me that I was no longer in possession of my phone. And while the absence of my irritating ring tone had been nice, I became preoccupied with wondering whether Evan was still out there trying to find me.
“You know, Paul, I think I may have left my cell phone at your house. Do you think that we could stop by and get it?”
“Sure, no problem,” Paul replied easily. “Wilbur’s car is at my house anyway.”
The four of us sat around Paul’s makeshift campfire and talked for the next few hours. We discussed benign topics such as the weather and the scenery. We chatted about
my three companions’ past travel adventures, something involving pygmies and blowguns. It was as if we were all old friends. It was nice to have a lighthearted conversation; it made me feel normal. Normal was good.
It was Christmas in my dream, and I had spent
days creating the perfect Yuletide home experience for Evan and myself. The tree was decorated to perfection and the ham and accompaniments smelled divine. “Angels We Have Heard on High” was playing over the sound of the roaring fireplace. I was feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, and was eager to defrost our relationship. I couldn’t wait to give Evan his gift. I had planned so meticulously for the moment, so my disappointment was almost palpable when he opened the small, cheerfully decorated foil envelope I had given him, and his face turned to stone.
“Why the hell would I want to go to Italy?”
he demanded in the sternest voice he could muster. “Isn’t that where you were supposed to go with that moron you were dating before me?”
I was completely caught off guard. I’d never imagined there would be anyone in the world who would actually
not
want to go to Italy. I had managed to marry the lone holdout.
“Yes, I was supposed to go with Michael,…but it’s Italy—one of the most romantic places on Earth.”
“So you thought that because you had all those childish dreams of wasting productive time bumming around Europe with that dope, you could just shoehorn me in as a replacement for him? Is
that
what you thought?”
At that point, I wasn’t just disappointed by his reaction; he was actually starting to scare me.
“It’s not like that, baby. I thought we could make some memories of our own there. I saw Italy as a fresh start for us, not as a way to recapture some old dream of mine. If you want, we can trade the tickets in for—”
“Just get your money back. I don’t want these,” he barked as he thrust the envelope back into my hand and shook his head
as though I’d given him a pink tutu.
I stood there with my face furrowed, ready to give him what for, when he started in again.
“As if it wasn’t bad enough that I’d agreed to this whole Christmas thing to begin with. Do you know how much crap my mother’s given me? And, on top of it, you made a fucking ham!”
Paul’s truck came to a halt at a stoplight and I was jolted awake. The four of us were making the short drive back to Flagstaff from Sedona. It wasn’t a dream I was having; it was a nightmare I was reliving. That nightmare was my life.
It was our first Christmas together, and it had turned out to be our last. Evan, being a Jew, had only reluctantly agreed to allow me to celebrate Christmas. I had committed the cardinal sin of preparing a non-kosher meal—among other things. He spent the next several days punishing me with his snide remarks and cold manner. I think I knew there and then that I had made a horrible mistake, but I’d wanted so much to please him, to make things work, and I couldn’t figure out where I’d gone wrong.
Italy was an
expansive nation. Evan’s cruel ban on the whole country couldn’t just be about the fact that Michael and I had wanted to live in Florence once upon a time. There were any number of other cities, villages, provincial pockets, islands, vineyards, and monasteries we could visit instead. I was even willing to take my top off at one of the nude beaches if it would make Evan happy. None of it was really about Italy, or Michael for that matter.
Strangely, when your reality is made up of enough illogical events, they start to make sense to you. Up and down can only be reversed so many times before you begin to lose track of which is which. The same holds true with basic logic. If you find yourself on the wrong side of someone else’s logical equation enough times, you start to actually believe that
you
are the illogical one. You are just too dense to see the reason in it all. The illogical becomes the norm and self-preservation, a monumental priority.
I started to behave in a way that I hated. I did things against my better judgment, just to avoid conflict. I fantasized on more than one occasion that I had just gone on the trip without Evan, and never looked back. Naïvely, I thought that having a baby might mellow him
out and refine his priorities. Somehow then we would share a common axis of truth. Someone or something was looking out for me in that respect; I couldn’t imagine how much therapy a child would need after receiving Evan’s version of childrearing.
Of course, every misdeed was always accompanied by a lavish gift or Evan’s version of an apology several
days later—just enough positive reinforcement to continue the up-down-up-down cycle. For brief moments I truly believed that he’d recognized the error of his ways and everything would be good from that point on, but it never lasted long. And those brief moments of contentment had grown fewer and farther in between.
With reality on the verge of bitch-slapping me in the face, I was now forced to make some difficult decisions. Should I go back and face the music at home—tell Evan that I have cancer and don’t want treatment? Tell him that I’d found more inner peace during the two
days I’d spent in Sedona, than I had in the entirety of our marriage? Make him grasp that I would rather seek enlightenment from strangers than sit around and be dictated to by a man who has his head so far up his ass he needs a periscope to watch television? As it turned out, I would need to make that decision instantaneously.
“No!” I shrieked when I spotted Evan’s black Lexus parked in front of Paul’s house. “Just keep driving, please!” I pleaded.
Paul just fixedly stared at me in confusion. Thankfully, the urgency in my eyes indicated that he should first abide by my demand, before asking, “What the hell is going on, Stacia?” as though a straight jacket might be in order.
“My husband is parked in front of your house,” I explained breathlessly.
“I’m deducing from your tone that he’s someone you’re not in favor of seeing right now?” Paul replied.
“No! I don’t know how he found me.”
“I do,” Wilbur offered nonchalantly as we drove around the block. “Didn’t you say you left your cell phone at Paul’s?”
“Um…I think I did.”
“He probably just tracked it.”
“You can do that? You don’t have to be FBI or CIA or something?” I asked, horrified.
“No—you can just be any garden-variety asshole. You can go online with your cell phone provider and use the GPS. It will actually give you an exact address,” Wilbur said.
“Evan’s no garden-variety asshole. He’s in an asshole class of his own.”
Wilbur chuckled.
“Why don’t I take you and Misty straight to the garage to pick up Misty’s car? How badly do you need your phone back?”
“Not badly enough to face a showdown with Evan,” I said. “Thanks, Wilbur. I appreciate your help.”
“Well then, I guess that means it’s good-bye for us,
baby,” Misty said to Paul.
“But what about Evan? He’s sitting in front of your house,” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” said Paul defiantly. “I can handle him.”
Paul wished us luck on our adventure and dropped us off down the street. Misty, Wilbur, and I hid behind a low hedge and watched as Paul made a big show of pulling his truck into the driveway. It only took seconds for Evan to burst out of his car and come barreling toward him. We used the time that Evan was distracted to jump into Wilbur’s car, which was parked less than
twenty feet away. Misty sat in the front and I ducked down in the back like a fugitive from the law as we did a slow drive-by to make sure neither Paul nor Evan was throttling the other. Once we determined that they were engaged in what appeared to be a civilized chat, we sped away. I prayed that Evan would just relent and leave before persuading Paul to tell him about any of my adventures over those last few days. Luckily, I had left Paul with plausible deniability regarding my intended destination, mainly because I had no freaking idea myself.
Evan was never violent, not really—although he hated being walked away from. He’d grabbed my arm a couple of times in the past when I’d tried to walk away out of sheer frustration with his all-talk-and-no-listen mode of communication. Most of the time, our arguments couldn’t even be classified as exchanges of grievances. They were more along the lines of high-volume lectures directed at me. Evan’s laundry list of red-flag behaviors, criticisms, and “helpful hints” was ever growing. He had an insatiable appetite for trying to mold me into his version of the perfect wife. I’d been forced to come to terms with the fact that this was a goal that could never be achieved because Evan kept moving the goalpost. I hadn’t ascertained whether this was because he was a masochist, secretly scheming against his own ability to be happy with anything or anyone, or a sadist intent on keeping
me
as unhappy as possible. It didn’t matter much which motive drove him because both results had become our de facto reality; the two of us were irreconcilably miserable with each other. Why did it have to take a tumor for me to realize that simple truth?
The fact remained that even though I had no further use for Evan, it was never my goal to see him hurt. I hoped his encounter with Paul wouldn’t become one of those moments that would put him over the edge. He was generally quite charming with strangers. In fact, everybody loved him—everyone who wasn’t married to him, that is. However, confronting a man that was in possession of his wife’s cell phone—and possibly his
wife
—was likely to make him less than charming. The implications of my missing phone would be clear to him, even if they were patently untrue. I started to worry.
“Maybe we should go back. I don’t want to leave Paul to have to deal with him,” I finally managed.
“Don’t worry, darling; Paul’s got a black belt in Tai Chi,” Misty chuckled.
Wilbur laughed along with her, but I didn’t see the humor in the situation. One glimpse of Evan, and all the good that the last few
days had done me vanished into a blur of anxiety. At least he had served the purpose of catapulting me into the realization that I wasn’t ready to go back, and never would be.
We arrived at the Quick Fix Garage to retrieve Misty’s Bug just as they were opening.
“There’s Old Reliable,” Misty purred as she pointed to her little beater in the garage bay.
Misty jumped out of the car even before Wilbur had come to a complete stop. She gleefully rushed over to talk to the mechanic, leaving Wilbur and me alone in the car. I glanced
at him awkwardly, embarrassed by my seemingly odd avoidance of Evan.
“I’m officially never getting married,” Wilbur laughed.
I reddened, but I couldn’t blame him.
“I don’t think that my situation with Evan is the example you should be using to make any sort of judgment about marriage.”
Wilbur was about to refute my statement when Misty plopped back into his car.
“O
kay, on to plan B. Car won’t be ready for a couple more days; she needs major fixing. It’s more than the head gasket—Old Reliable needs a rebuilt engine.”
“Oh, bummer. What’s plan B?” I inquired.
“I was hoping
you
would know,” Misty chuckled.
I panicked as Wilbur and Misty both turned to me for an answer. Evan had never looked to me to make a decision, and when I would contribute one, it was always met with harsh criticism. I
finally had complete freedom. There were millions of different options for me, and yet I couldn’t come up with a single one.
“I’ll take you back,” Wilbur offered. “I could check in on the Arizona boys on the way back home.”
I looked at Misty.
“Arizona boys? Please translate.”
“Wilbur owns a company that specializes in traveling to hard-to-reach places.”
“In Arizona?”
“All over, actually,” Wilbur replied. “But Arizona does have a couple of spots.”
“Well, if you don’t mind,…” Misty said to Wilbur.
“Not in the least. I enjoy the company.”
Misty texted Paul to inform him of our plan B, and asked if Evan was still there harassing him. Paul texted back that Evan had grudgingly vacated the premises only after Paul tried to convince him that there was some sort of mistake. That process, according to Paul, had taken almost forty-five minutes. He’d even let Evan make a sweep of the house while he kicked my phone under the couch.
“Do you want to go back for your phone now that the coast is clear?” Misty offered.
“That’s all right; I don’t think I want or need it,” I said. “But it would be great if Paul could run it over with the truck a couple of times.”
When we arrived in Las Vegas, Wilbur drove Misty to her condo first. It was a modern building with a pool and all the amenities. The inside was a stark contrast to the outside. It was a modern-day hippie haven. It even contained a meditation corner. The smell of incense was still lingering from what must have been days before. I gave her a hug while silently hoping that I would have the opportunity to see her again before the end came knocking. I thanked her profusely for taking me along on her adventure.
Wilbur then drove me to the Imperial Palace parking structure. As his car ascended the switchbacks of the claustrophobic garage, Wilbur asked, “Are you gonna stay in Vegas?”
“I don’t think so. He tracked me down with the credit card already. I just have to find some quiet motel somewhere that will take cash.”