NOW
For all Mark’s talk about uncovering secrets, there still seemed to be plenty of them. For instance, I didn’t know how Mark had managed to hide the money he’d made from smuggling so neither the IRS nor I knew about it, or how he had crossed the Canadian border without his passport. He said that those were minor details and that I was missing the point about the honesty he talked about. In filmmaking and photos, he said, honesty was laying bare the human soul for the world to see and nobody needed to examine the editing, the tiny story shifts made in order to reveal the greater truth.
Instead, as we worked in the garden or went out harvesting berries for Angela to make into fruit leathers and jams, he would lecture me about how some indigenous societies understood that capitalism corrupted and about how white children abducted by Native tribes and then returned to their families would often escape back to their kidnappers because the way the People lived—by sharing everything and not holding one person above the others—was superior to the settlers’ ways. The happiest peoples, he claimed, were those who didn’t rely on capitalism and who didn’t regulate sex or force rules on society that made a person have to be dishonest in order to love the way they chose to love.
And yet, a few days after I’d been let out of the container, I discovered more dishonesty, and it wasn’t simply a matter of editing.
It happened as Mark was playing a game with Xander and Rudy that involved stacks of spruce cones and rocks. I was just coming out of the container after getting a sweater to ward off the chill. I was no longer being locked in and yet I couldn’t stop a twinge of anxiety whenever I went inside. I kept imagining the doors slamming closed and the bar clanging into place behind me.
As I came back outside, I saw a figure, a woman, emerging from the bridge trail. She was tall and athletic-looking, dressed in camo pants and a black turtleneck, with a large knife in a sheath at her belt. She wore hiking boots and her blond hair fell in a single thick braid down her back. A green pack hung from her shoulders and she held a fancy metal bow loosely in one hand. I recognized her immediately.
She was the woman in the photo I’d found in Mark’s studio.
Mark looked up and I went to him. “Who’s that?” I asked even though I suspected who she was.
“That’s Diana,” Mark said. “Rudy’s mom.”
“I thought you said she was on a trip.”
“She was. She’s a guide. She had back-to-back clients. I didn’t expect her back home for another day.”
“ ‘Back home’? Why didn’t you tell me she lived here too?” My voice rose so it was too loud and too sharp.
Mark’s eyes darkened. I could see a little part of him close off from me.
“How can you even begin to think this is OK?” I asked.
Most cheating husbands had one mistress. Mine had two.
The muscles in his jaw worked and I knew I’d gone too far. “You can either accept what is, Liv, or keep trying to fight and destroy yourself,” he said.
I shoved down what I was feeling, which was anger wrapped in a coating of fear. I didn’t want to be locked up again. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I was just surprised. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I thought you were trying to open up,” he said.
“I am, really. It’s just a lot to take in, you know.”
I watched Diana stride toward the cabin with long steps. Her chin was strong, her back straight.
“We’ll talk about this later. Maybe what you need is time to think,” he said, and looked pointedly at the container.
Panic bubbled up inside me. “I’m sorry,” I said, but he had already turned to the boys.
“You guys will have to finish the game without me.”
He marched across the garden and intercepted Diana as she got to the cabin’s front door. They both stopped and he leaned toward her, spoke a few words and pointed at me. She turned to look and I saw her eyes were the same pale blue as Rudy’s. A moment later, she and Mark disappeared into the cabin.
I realized that I wasn’t the only one watching. Angela had stopped picking bugs from the kale in the garden and stared after the pair, and little Rudy had dropped the rock he was holding and done the same. After a moment, he shoved his hands in his pockets, mumbled, “I gotta go,” and disappeared into the woods.
Xander was the only one who hadn’t noticed the scene. “Wanna play, Mama?” he asked. “It’s called Crack the Stack and Daddy invented it. Rudy gots four points.” He hopped up and down on one leg in excitement.
“Sure,” I said, because what else could I do? Now I’d have to grovel and apologize and hope I could repair the damage I’d done, so Mark would let down his guard again. And yet I didn’t think I was the only one affected by Diana’s arrival. I’d seen Angela’s spine go straight and something flit across her face when Mark and Diana went into the cabin.
I wasn’t sure what it was but I stored it away for later.
I hurled the stone. The spruce cones jumped and scattered.
“One cracky-stacky point, Mama,” Xander cried.
Three nights later, I snuck out of the container.
Mark’s threat had made me worry he planned to lock me in again, and so I tried to appear as if I’d accepted this new truth even while I wondered how, if there were no rules, punishment could be part of this life. After dinner, I even quoted Kai Huang to Mark about jealousy and selfishness not being needed if love and pleasure were plentiful. He said that jealousy was natural in a capitalistic system and that the longer I lived here, the more I’d be able to overcome those feelings and that he would be more patient with me. It was a matter of reading and reflecting on the self and letting go of material things. He said he would help me with that so I could find the happiness he had.
“This really is the only way to truly be free,” he said.
I don’t know if he thought it would make me feel better but he told me he’d never planned for Diana to be part of this life. He’d asked Alvin to email Diana from the computer at the market to tell her where he was—he didn’t want Rudy to lose track of him—and she’d showed up about four months ago, after Alvin left.
I thought, You emailed her but relied on some poem for me?
Mark said that she’d gotten a job as a hunting and fishing guide and that she’d thought that Rudy could use some time with a father figure. Her last boyfriend, a trapper, had punched Rudy in the stomach after Rudy had let a fire go dead, causing the cabin’s pipes to freeze, and she’d realized none of the men she’d been with had been good for the boy.
She’d stayed in the other bedroom with Rudy first but quickly moved into Mark’s bed. He said she was strong and independent—maybe a little too independent—but that I would come to see she wasn’t a threat to our relationship.
I started to say, What relationship? Instead, I said I would try.
When it was time for bed, I worried he would follow me to the container and lock me inside but he simply closed his book, said good night and followed Diana into his bedroom. Angela watched them, the knitting needles stilling in her hands.
Now I slipped outside and paused to let my eyes adjust to the shadowed darkness. It must have been around three a.m. I hoped Shadow wouldn’t hear me. I turned right, willing my footfalls into silence. I walked just inside the tree line. Every nerve was on high alert.
Having lived in the city for so long, I’d forgotten how to walk in the night, and I flinched at the dark outline of a boulder that resembled a crouching man, and snagged the toe of my shoe on a tree root, causing my back muscles to spasm and then tighten. I slowed my steps, trying to follow the trail that led to the bridge. Stars netted the dark sky.
Once, after I’d locked myself out of the Subaru at a client’s house, I’d gone to a hardware store, had a spare key made and hidden it in a small magnetic box in the front wheel well. I’d never had to use it again, so I hadn’t remembered it was there until yesterday, when Angela had said something about unlocking my heart to love. I still hadn’t found my keys and wallet or the phone, but after Mark’s threat, I was even more determined to leave. How could he expect me to become a carefree co-wife with two other women, or sit around waiting for someone to arrive and kill us all?
If I could find the secret key, I would hide it until Xander and I could run. I would drive and pray I didn’t get lost or run out of gas and end up stranded in the wilderness. I would do whatever it took to get us away from vengeful drug dealers and a husband I didn’t recognize anymore. I felt like that guy whose arm had gotten stuck between two boulders and had to decide between dying or sawing off the limb. Both staying and leaving were dangerous.
Halfway to the bridge, I thought I heard something move in the forest, a slight crack of wood, and my first thought was that it was the bear. Fear flashed like lightning and I crouched, my palms pressed against the soft, cool earth. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if a bear approached? Submit? Or were you supposed to make yourself big and talk to it?
The woods fell silent after that. I waited a few long moments, my heart pounding, and finally began to move again.
I crossed the bridge—it was a lot easier when I couldn’t see exactly what was below—and hurried to my car. A small blue pickup was parked next to it and I guessed that Diana had taken it to her guiding job, which was why I hadn’t seen it when I first arrived at the farm. It was probably the same truck Angela had used to pick up Mark from the bridge and drive to Alaska. I knelt by the Subaru’s front wheel and ran my hands over the spot where the hidden key should have been. I gave myself a silent cheer when my fingers found the little box. I pulled it from the car and slid the lid open.
The container was empty.
I wanted to fling the little key holder into the river in frustration. Instead, I put the magnetic box back in its place and hurried back to the shipping container before anyone could realize I was gone.
The next evening, however, when I pulled back the covers on my bed, the key holder was there.
My hands began to shake and I shoved the key holder under my pillow. It was a long time before I slept.