NOW
Mark and Angela and the boys came back. It turned out Angela had wanted to attend a talk given by a famous herbalist in Valdez and Mark needed to buy tires and spark plugs for the old rototiller and a new alternator for the Subaru. They’d decided to make a family day of it and take the boys to eat ice cream and watch sea life. The reason they hurried was they didn’t want to be late for the talk, and the duffel Angela had carried contained a wall hanging she’d made and hoped to sell at one of the art galleries there.
I didn’t see them come home. I spent the day trying to talk myself down, banging on the window with the metal lid in an attempt to break it and then lying back down before doing it all over again. At some point, I found a loose nail in the floor and spent an hour prying it up to see if I could use it to lift the bar across the container doors (it was too short). I ate one of the sandwiches, sipped some water and fell into bed, anxious and bloody fingered. When I awoke in the middle of the night and saw a light on in the cabin, I started to cry with relief and then realized I still didn’t know if Xander was OK.
Angela told me where they’d been when she came in with breakfast and I felt myself sag with release. She looked at the uneaten sandwich and apples and the small crack in the window.
“I thought you left me here,” I said lamely.
“We would never do that,” she said, and set my breakfast on the steamer trunk. “We love and care for you, Liv.”
I looked out the half-open container door and thought again about shoving my way past Angela into the fresh air. But without the key and my car, the wilderness was as much a prison as Goodridge had been, and without Xander, what was the use? Mark would just get angry, herd me back inside and clang the door shut. I needed a plan.
Angela lowered herself into the upholstered chair and gestured toward my breakfast. “Frittata with goat cheese and dandelion greens,” she announced, and said that on their drive from San Francisco to Alaska, Mark had told her my story. Now that I was here and we’d talked, she said, she realized how much alike we were.
Both of us knew what it was like to feel abandoned, she said, and we’d each grown up without love.
“Intimacy is how we heal. Intimacy is what brings us together,” she said, and began her story.
Most of her childhood, she said, had been spent in a little town in eastern Utah where pickups outnumbered cars by five to one and where haying season meant kids stayed out of school to help with the cut.
Her dad was nineteen when he married Angela’s mother and twenty-six with two children when a distracted teenager in a pickup truck broadsided her mother’s car as she pulled out of a Walmart with a trunk full of groceries.
At twenty-seven, still deep in grief over her death, Angela’s father married his first wife’s younger sister—there weren’t a lot of options in the town—and she began to crank out babies, three in five years, and also resent the presence of Angela and her brother, whom she called lazy and disrespectful. The truth was that although Angela and her brother called their aunt/stepmother “the Witch” behind her back and made it a point to disobey any order she gave them, the real reason their father’s new wife was bitter toward them was that they served as daily reminders of her older, prettier and slimmer sister, of whom she’d always been jealous. It didn’t help that Angela’s father sometimes compared her to his first wife.
When Angela turned sixteen and began to bear a startling resemblance to her late mother, the aunt/stepmother convinced her husband to farm Angela and her brother out for a summer to her older brother, an ex–Army sergeant. She said her brother was a bachelor but would know how to straighten out two children she believed were sullen and rebellious. Angela’s father—who was tired of a house full of crying babies, a nagging spouse and two older children who stubbornly refused to call their aunt “Mother,” as she demanded—agreed. The brother lived in a single-wide trailer just outside of the town of Brilliance, Utah, which had a population of 1,087 and was a two-hour drive from where they lived.
According to Angela, her uncle’s idea of straightening them out was to make them do chores—cleaning out the junk that had accumulated under his trailer, whitewashing the stones that outlined his yard and raking circles into the dirt—while he sat in a lawn chair and got drunk. If he thought they didn’t work hard enough, he reduced their supper to crackers and water. If they talked back, he duct-taped their lips shut. A month into their stay, she said, he came out to the couch where Angela slept and put one hand over her mouth and the other underneath her nightgown. After that, Angela slept out in the sagebrush, changing locations each night. Then, one day, she said, the uncle told them he was going to visit a friend in Colorado and do a little fishing. According to her, he told them he’d be home in five days and left twenty dollars on the table.
Eight days later, Angela called her father to tell him that their caretaker had left and that they were out of money and food and wanted to come home. Angela’s father, however, said that as much as he wanted them to return, it wasn’t a good time. Their aunt/stepmother was suffering from terrible morning sickness and the two youngest children had strep throat. He mailed them forty dollars and assured them their uncle would come back and they should be patient. Over the next weeks, other envelopes with cash in amounts ranging from thirty to a hundred dollars appeared but never their father—or their uncle. Sheriff’s deputies were called but they said unless there were signs of foul play, an adult was able to go wherever he or she wanted without needing to tell anybody.
“Maybe he just found a new place to stick his fishing pole,” one of the officers said, and winked at his partner.
The deputies told Angela’s father he needed to retrieve his kids or they would notify Child and Family Services. Neither he nor the cops kept their promise. Their father made excuses: He had gotten a new job and was working six days a week; his wife was suffering from a bad case of nerves; the car had blown the head gasket and needed to be repaired. Within two months, Angela and her brother had turned feral. They skipped school, slept in until noon each day, ate junk food and stole pills from their neighbors, including a forgetful old woman who had a bad back and a doctor who happily resupplied her with OxyContin whenever she ran out. When Angela’s brother was fourteen, he hitchhiked out of town, intending to go to LA. A few days later, Angela convinced a truck driver she met at the Pilot truck stop to take her west with him. She ditched the trucker in Salt Lake City when he demanded a blow job in exchange for breakfast, and she spent two wasted years in the capital city, smoking heroin and selling herself to middle-aged men to get money. She discovered Kai Huang while living with a dozen other misfits in a remote canyon outside of town where she learned about herbs and how to weave. She quit the drugs and moved to California.
“I never felt safe or loved or good enough until I met Mark,” she told me. “He was the first person to make me feel worthy and I suspect it was the same with you.”
Her story made me see her in a different light and I felt sad for what she’d had to endure. How could a father pick a jealous wife over his children, and what would it do to a child not only to lose their mother but to be sent off to live with a drunken abuser? Tears brimmed in Angela’s eyes when she was finished, and I let her take my hand for a moment. It surprised me how close she’d come to the truth about me and Mark. Meeting him had been the thing that allowed me to finally believe it was possible for someone to love me.
“I’m sorry about how you had to grow up,” I said.
Angela squeezed my hand and then let go. The skin on her neck was blotched red. “I’m not the only woman who was raised under the thumb of the patriarchy, who had her voice silenced,” she said. “Your father silenced your mother’s voice and yours too. Just like the world does every single day. The men who rule us, the fat-cat politicians and righteous-sounding preachers, are afraid of the power women hold, so they try to leash us with rules in an attempt to possess us. They want us to be the virgin whore, then the submissive wife and finally the devoted mother who wants nothing more than children and home. They convince us we need to be married, to be faithful, but all that does is make love wilt and die. But if you let love be free, then it will grow. It will be abundant.”
“But that’s where I’m different,” I said. “I think monogamy, loving one person completely, is actually freedom.”
“I’m not saying monogamy kills love. I’m saying that the insecurity, power struggles and jealousy that usually come with monogamy kill it. If you don’t consider something ‘cheating,’ then it doesn’t bother you. ‘Let the river flow and it will bring you what you need’ is how Kai Huang puts it. That’s why I want to help you. I want you to be happy. I want Mark to be happy. I want you to live with joy.”
I asked her how I could see this so-called joy if they kept me locked up.
“Just read the book, and when you do, Mark will see that you’re trying and trust you again.”
“What about letting me see Xander?”
Angela looked away. “I’m still working on it.”
“And what about Rudy? Mark called him his ‘son.’ ”
She stood and picked up the remains of my breakfast. “That’s a question to ask Mark, not me.” She started to leave, then turned. “You have to trust me, Liv.”