Surviving Valencia (35 page)

I’d like a chance to explain.

I always felt there were parallel universes. No one would have believed some cheerleader would think about parallel universes, but I did then. I still do. And I’m right, aren’t I? I’m forty-three years old, nearly forty-four. I’m the mother of three. I weigh a hundred and eight-eight pounds. But just two hundred miles away, I am eighteen years old forever. I am dead and gone, and beautiful. Was that really me? It still is. In Hudson, Wisconsin,
it still is
.

There are other versions of me out there. Unlimited possibilities. Like a
Choose Your Own Adventure
book with infinite pages. There are versions of us all. There are other versions of Rob, and in each of them he aches for me. I’m not telling you what I merely imagine; this is what I know.

There is the me I would have become if I’d had all the chances I deserved. I always felt that Van and I both died that night. He lost his future, so did I. What they did to me took the forks in the road of my life and turned them into a knife. I was ruined. Worse than ruined, I was humbled. Have you ever been humbled? It is better to be ruined.

Everything had been easy for me. Easy felt normal. I didn’t understand why everyone else made it look so hard. They seemed lazy and clumsy. They seemed like they made excuses. I thought if everyone would just turn it up a notch they would have it, like I did. I didn’t know that I might as well have been a different species. They were never going to catch me.

But after what happened to me, I
got
it. I became a victim, like I now realize most everyone is. I didn’t go out in public for nearly a year. Everything frightened me. A trip to the grocery store immobilized me. I second guessed myself when measuring the ingredients to make a cake. I would wash my hair over and over, unable to keep track of whether I had washed it at all or had just gotten it wet. I was too insecure to go to restaurants, afraid to order off a menu, afraid I would not leave the correct tip.

Those things that happened that night destroyed me. That’s what I want you to understand. I was no longer the Valencia my friends and teachers and family had admired. That elusive, beautiful part of me, the part I barely understood, but had always taken for granted, was murdered. Even if the rest of me lived on. I was no longer special. I couldn’t show myself. I turned to Rob not with something to give, but with desperate, broken need. He came to me as I knew he would and he learned to love someone else entirely. He did it not for the new version of myself I ashamedly presented to him, but for the girl he remembered, the way someone cares for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

He mourned the loss of Valencia, despite promising me that I had never left.

He cared for me, he cared for the green eyed child who was not his own and raised him as lovingly as he raised Coral and Mikey. He gave me a better life than Val should have had, though not the life Valencia deserved. But he kept my secrets, and that was worth more than anything.

In my world of parallel universes, there is a version of me, still beautiful, married to someone else. I am living the remarkable life that 1986 assumed was my destiny. Rob is out there too, and we run into each other at high school reunions, and his heart is broken, because of me. And he aches as deeply as he never does now. This is how it should have been. This is the life that would have happened.

It’s funny how this humdrum existence, the one I am spending all my time in, sure feels like the real thing. It’s funny how I think of those parallel universes less and less.

Oh no. Am I disappointing you? Or even worse, perhaps I am boring you. It hurts to be a bore and a disappointment. Valencia didn’t know what it felt like to be either of those.

Despite severing ties with my mother, she still holds me back. I’m like her: A victim of my past perfection. Can’t. Stop. Missing. Myself.

Really, it’s sick.

So where do I start? Actually, that is easy. Obvious, even. I start with Van. I started with Van. Literally, I began when he began. In my heart, he was my only true family. We spoke our own language when we were very young. He was never mesmerized by me, and it was such a relief. No one else was ever completely comfortable around me, and I longed to make someone comfortable. He was, though. How could he not be? It was a relief to be with him, to relax, to be a beautiful mess.

Others tried to overcompensate sometimes, in meanness. They tried to be disinterested and rude, as if that was the bait to tempt me.
Look,
their actions said,
I am different. I am one of the few who has no use for you.
They thought it would intrigue me. But I saw right through it.

I was so lonely, wanting to be normal.

Normal, it turns out, is not as great as I’d hoped.

After it happened, I needed to be alone. By alone, I mean with Rob. Only Rob. Going to him was natural, and right. But now I see how it changed us. Of course it changed us. I was still thinking like Valencia, still unable to guess the road that lay ahead of me. Not realizing by the time I called him, all my bridges back to my former self had been burned.

If I could have survived without Rob’s help, I should have tried to do so. Like a wounded animal, crawling off to be alone. Not caring if I healed or died, as long as he didn’t see my ugliness. I could have left him with Valencia forever. The preserved, beautiful version of myself that everybody else got. I didn’t know then that my vulnerability would become a burden, that my very presence would become a shadow on him.

My face and my body were mangled. Beaten. I am nearly blind in my right eye now. I escaped from a basement in the Cities, through a window. I remember finding a drive-up phone at a gas station, something they don’t even make anymore, and standing there while a family in a car waited impatiently, glaring and honking at me. I calling Rob collect. I felt crazy. I was expecting to be captured again. I could not believe I had escaped. I could not believe it was over. I was afraid the car of rude people would leave; I planned to run to it if I had to. Ironically, in the midst of this, I prayed Rob’s mother would not answer. I must have really hated her.

And he answered. His voice sounded like safety and home. I never thought I’d feel safe or whole again. And with just the sound of his voice, I started over.

Sweet Rob.

There is no love like the love a man has for a perfect woman. It’s very rare. You’ve probably never experienced it. It is the predecessor to eternal disappointment. It is impossible to recover from.

He had thought I was dead. He was shocked. Overjoyed. He came for me and wanted to take me to the hospital but I wouldn’t let him. He said we needed to go to the police and tell them what happened, but I told him I could not remember how I got to the gas station. It was not true; I didn’t care about anything but getting out of there.

“Just take me to your house,” I told him.

“Should we go to your parents’ house first? Should I call them?”

“No. Not yet.”

So Rob took me to his house. His mother was in the hospital the whole time, dying. I was there, in his bedroom, hiding, trying to accept my new, destroyed self. Within walking distance of everyone I had ever known. I knew they thought I was dead. I didn’t care. I was pregnant and we knew it was not Rob’s. I told Rob I wished I had died too, and then I did not say it again when I saw how much it hurt him. He took care of me, dividing his time between his mother and me.

I was in Rob’s bed as a suffering shut-in instead of as his lover, waiting to rise again, waiting to once again become the girl who ruled the world. I thought perhaps one day I would find my way back to those I’d left behind, when I was strong and beautiful again. I wasn’t afraid of being forgiven. They would always forgive me.

This was my daydream. My distraction. I was afraid to be alone, and Rob kept leaving me to go to his mother. This fantasy calmed me and gave me something to look forward to. But as time went by, it became harder to picture it working out like I’d planned.

Lying there in bed, agonized and still, I see clearly now that I was cutting and unraveling the ties that connected me to Hudson.  I was not someone who behaved without intention, back then. The first few days became a week. A week became two weeks. At first Rob tried to make me call my parents, or friends. He had this infuriating notion that what had happened to me gave me an obligation to speak up. I felt the opposite: that I would never be obligated again.

I was afraid they’d show up anyway. Standing at the foot of the bed when I awoke, with Rob standing guiltily by, mouthing
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry..
. They’d bring reporters and turn me into their mangled celebrity. I was afraid he’d betray me. “Please, please don’t call anyone,” I begged him each time he threatened to go to them. He never did. He kept my secret.

So I waited. To be well. To be whole. To rise up from devastation.

Temporary devastation.

But I did not rise.

It wasn’t because I didn’t try. Everything easy was now impossible.

So I faded away instead.

We all learn how to accept being less than we dreamed we would be. We all take the easy way out. And there came a point when Rob and I stopped pretending there was anything left for us in Hudson.

I went into labor the day after Rob’s mother was buried, later than I should have gone, as if the baby had decided to politely wait for the right time. So I knew even before I saw him that he was from the young guy, not from the old man. We were in La Crosse, driving west, planning to find an apartment where we would settle while Rob cleaned out the house. I could not be there anymore. Relatives were coming, offering to help him settle things.

I went into labor and Rob found a hospital. He said I was his wife. I don’t know how any of it worked out, because now I don’t think a person can disappear and reappear like that. But we just took each moment as it came, dealt with everything, the way normal people deal.

A few years ago, back in 2007 actually, a funny thing happened to me. Coral was crowned Prom Queen or Homecoming Queen, and Rob and I went to see her. As we were leaving the school I put my lighter in my purse, and I felt a ring in there. It was
mine
. My own class ring. From high school. I couldn’t understand how it got there. It really freaked me out. The timing was so strange, being back in a high school, watching my daughter win that dance. Rob thought it was a sign that I should go back to Hudson.

So we returned. Neither of us had been back for years. Rob had no close family, no ties there of his own. I don’t know what we thought we were going to say or do. We went to my parents’ house. Not necessarily to visit, but just to see it. They were gone.

“Do the Lodens still live here?” Rob asked some young neighbors across the street, new people I did not recognize.

“They’re gone. There was a fire and they moved away,” they told us.

So we left Hudson again, for what I think was the last time. It is for the best.

Now the kids are all gone. Grown up and moved away. Rob is down in his workshop most every night after work and I am up here, watching television. I find myself absorbed in the drama on TV more than my real life these days. Rob and I joke that
Dancing with the Stars
makes me
almost
want to dance and
Iron Chef
makes me
almost
want to cook.

Lately I have been really into a show called
Cut-Throat Couture.
It’s a reality show about designing clothes. There is a woman on there I recognize. I think she was one of the kids’ teachers. I remember seeing her around their school, I think. She makes dresses mainly and she is just great. I think she is going to win it all.

Not much else to say. I am lucky to be alive, I suppose. I still wonder, sometimes, what could have been if things had gone differently. Who Van might have grown up to become, and opportunities I may have had, if we had taken a different route, or had left a half hour earlier that night. Then I remind myself that in a parallel universe, I am still Valencia, and always will be. And that is good enough for me.

Holly Tierney-Bedord lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the author of several books including the novels
Bellamy’s Redemption, Right Under Your Nose,
and
Coached
, and the children’s book
Bagels for Barkly.

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Surviving Valencia
.
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www.hollytierneybedord.com
.

"...I was undeniably hooked just a few pages in..."
- Sara Steven, Chick Lit Central
 

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See more details or buy Bellamy’s Redemption.