Randy’s mood mimicked the daylight. A steep nosedive in November followed by five months of depression. He barely left the bed. The heavy shape of his body imprinted on the mattress. I imagined a chalk outline. His electrical business had withered to nothing. I mustered up as much sympathy as I could bear, which wasn’t much. I had shelved my resolve to divorce him. It didn’t seem ethical to abandon someone so incapacitated. Was it egocentric to think he would die without me? I made him plates of dinner and cringed at the congealed carrots and zucchini days later on his night table.
He had spent December begging for forgiveness.
“I was crazy,” he muttered. “Completely crazy.”
“You really were.”
In January he made me promise to tell him if he ever got manic again.
Springtime gradually resurrected him. There was a sweet spot in May when he became himself, playing guitar to the kids, taking them to the archery range, but soon he rose high enough to spit on me. In June, the manic version resurfaced. I had dared to hope it never would again, that the change in his meds would put an end to the rollercoaster.
“Which one is the real you?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure anymore,” he said.
While packing for a camping trip, he piled toys into the truck. Archery equipment and remote control cars. He had sold the camper because we needed the money. When I stood at the tailgate, clutching our tent and wondering how it would fit, he scolded me.
“There’s no room for that,” he told me, as if it made sense to bring toys but no shelter.
At the campground, he drove a fleet of remote controlled cars over boulders and logs. An entourage of kids chased after him like he was the Pied Piper. At bedtime, he wouldn’t help me lift the cooler into the truck. This was standard practice in bear country but he told me I was being uptight.
I knew what was coming and I wasn’t willing to do it again. To weather his hostility, to monitor his drug use, to make sure the kids were safe. It was easier to leave a manic husband than a depressed one. That’s the notion I held quietly and strategically with the last of my patience.
The dry heat of July enveloped the foothills on the day I finally quit. Slivers of sunshine ran up the hood and across the windshield with each hairpin turn. I was in the passenger seat of Randy’s pickup truck, driving down the mountain to retrieve my car from the mechanic. I swiveled the vent to move cold air off my face and coached myself to be brave.
“Remember you said to tell you if I noticed any red flags?” I swiped at a pile of empty soda cans with my toe.
“No,” he said, flexing his fingers at the top of the steering wheel.
“I’m thinking you might be getting a little manic.”
His lips tightened while he let the silence fester.
“The house projects. The staying up late. The anger,” I said.
He squinted at the road.
“You’re the one who’s angry,” he snapped. It was just like him to be guttural and fierce but never loud. A severe groove ran from his nose to his jowl. The short hairs at his temple thin and colorless. On the console between us was an empty coffee cup and a pair of work gloves that held the shape of his hands.
“You promised you would listen to me the next time I saw you getting manic.”
“You’re being overly critical, as usual.” He flung the truck around the next turn and my seatbelt caught. I shut myself up so we could get down the mountain alive.
Out the window there was a bank of crooked mailboxes, a wrinkled guard rail, a pine tree clinging to a precipice. I wrapped my arms around my abdomen. Suddenly, without any fanfare, I was done. The steep turns gave way to the flatlands, traffic lights, crowds.
When we got to the mechanic, I climbed into my driver’s seat. As he drove away, I felt myself unfurling. By the time I got home I was energized and ruthless. My mind had stopped its usual calculations about child custody and financial road blocks. Instead I was laser focused. I would never share a bed with him again. I strode across the hardwood in the living room, relishing the sound of my own footsteps, and stomped down the basement stairs into the heat of Randy’s office. His floor was littered with zip ties and electrical nuts. I flung pillows off the guest bed and tugged at the sheets. Outside the window, a herd of deer grazed on a fallen pine tree. The bare mattress was heavy and uncooperative. Somehow, I hauled it out the door, down the carpeted hall and onto a very steep staircase with a ninety-degree turn. The cat and dog wove in and out of my feet. Gripping the banister with sweaty hands, strands of hair pasted to my face, I squeezed that mattress through the narrow door at the top of the stairs and skated along the wood floor to my office. The box spring was much lighter, buoyed by the framework of its own skeleton. I stacked them in my office and dressed them in fresh sheets. There was no floor space left. To get to my desk I would have to crawl over the bed.
When we first moved in, I painted the walls spring green, inspired by our cat’s eyes. A pendant light hung above my wooden desk. The glass globe was mottled brown and blue like the surface of Mercury. Randy installed the luminous little planet when everything was still new. His father helped build shelves in my closet, cutting the wood to my specifications and showing me where to drill. A prism on my windowsill cast a bouquet of rainbows onto the wall.
Recently Randy had formed the impetuous habit of removing his wedding ring every time we fought. I told myself I would never take mine off until I meant it, and some part of me had known that day would come. Crawling to the foot of the bed, I opened my desk drawer to retrieve the yellow leather box that came with my engagement ring. My rings slipped easily over my knuckle and into the box. I would miss them more than the husband, I thought, as I lay down in the solitude of my refuge.
When the kids got home from camp, they leaped onto my bed and asked me why I had moved it. An afternoon gust seeped through the screen and set the Mercury light in motion.
“I wanted to try sleeping in my own room,” I told them.
We lay down and closed our eyes while the cicadas chattered outside. They pressed up against my shoulders. Chloe was still and Rowan was restless. Soon, he sat up to pry one of my eyelids open and peer in.
“Are you mad at Daddy?” he asked.
I tried to read his brown irises. Could I bullshit him? The weight of it all crushed me then. I was upending the only life they had known. Would it break them if I left Randy? Would it break them if I didn’t? Rowan hadn’t blinked or looked away. He was waiting for an answer. I said the only thing that felt authentic because I had never once gotten away with lying to him.
“I am mad at Daddy.”
He nodded seriously. “I don’t like that.”
“I don’t either,” I said.
“Are you going to sleep in here, Mommy?” Chloe tugged my earring gently.
“I’ll try it out and see how it feels,” I said.
If Randy had an opinion about my new bedroom, he kept it to himself. He must have noticed my naked ring finger but he ignored that too. I put the kids to bed and retreated to my green room. Sometimes I ruminated about my marriage but mostly I fantasized about rock climbing. I had been going to the climbing gym three times a week and it was so present for me that I found myself mentally working out boulder problems in my bedroom. In my imaginings, the baseboard heater became my first foothold. From there I gripped the edge of the window frame and ascended the blue bookshelf. I chimneyed through the closet and lunged for the doorframe, wedged myself into a corner and circumnavigated the remaining walls.
When I was first learning to climb, I dreaded the fall. There’s a lot of gear that’s designed to catch you, but depending on the type of climbing, you could potentially plummet twelve feet or more before it engages. I had been top-roping for decades, and that was easy, but over the past few years I had learned to lead climb. That meant I had to set my own protection as I climbed, and falls were more scary. I had to desensitize myself in order to combat the fear. The first time I had the guts to face it head-on I placed my quickdraws as I ascended. Clipping the rope to each one was like assembling a zipper tooth by tooth. Each time I rose above my last piece of protection I knew I was risking a long fall. I dipped a sweaty hand into my bag of chalk, sifting the cool powder through my fingers to wick away the moisture and shook the excess into the air like fairy dust. While it drifted down to the floor thirty feet below, I located a handhold above my line of sight and nestled my fingertips onto the rough surface until they fit just right. My mind was singly focused as I reached down to the rope, which got heavier the higher I climbed. I hauled the weight of it up toward the anchor knowing that as soon as it was safely clipped, any potential fall would be much less dramatic. I glanced down at my belayer who held my life in his hands. My breath quickened. My legs began to shake and instead of safely tucking the rope into the carabiner, I intentionally flung myself off the wall.
The first split second in the air was a feathery breathless feeling. Tingling feet and flailing arms. All sounds vanished and thoughts were a pinpoint. After dropping twice my height, the rope caught, sending me into a pendulum of chaos. My knee hit the wall. I spun. The leg loops of my harness gouged my thighs. My heart rate peaked and then settled. I sat in the air, inhaling gallons of oxygen. There it was, the terrible thing, the unknown. I was suspended right at the epicenter of it and I was alive and intact, even exhilarated. The cure for my fear of falling was to fall.
This is what I thought about in my room while my marriage was crumbling. How I had tightened my grip and clung to the rock for so many months. But now I began to wonder. What would my life be if it wasn’t this? Lying in the green sunlight, my trepidation morphed into curiosity. What if I were to leap right into the terrible gravity of the thing I feared?
By mid August the kids had started second grade. I was busy gauging Randy’s mood and he had come down from his summer heights. He was hovering in the place above depression where he could carry on a rational conversation. Normally this would give me hope for our marriage, but my wedding ring was still in its box and I had never put it back on. I moved down the hall and through the living room like I was levitating. Randy stood at the deck railing, his eyes on the view. I approached the gap in the sliding glass door and stood on the sharp threshold in sock feet. My mind was surprisingly empty. I only knew I couldn’t hang on a minute longer.
“Randy,” I said to the back of his head.
He turned and looked at me with soft eyes, which gave me the confidence to forge ahead. He wouldn’t launch an attack.
“Can we talk about what it would look like if we separated?”
He took a long pause. The trees rustled. A squirrel chattered, its claws tapping on bark.
“I’ve been having the same thought.”
I stepped onto the wooden slats of the deck, “I can’t stay in this house.”
“I love this house,” he said.
“I’m worried about the kids,” I said. “I need them more than fifty percent of the time.”
“I’m fine with that,” he said.
I was surprised and not surprised.
Suddenly it all seemed possible, even desirable.
“Please tell me we aren’t going wind up hating each other,” I said.
“We’ll make sure we don’t. For the kids.”
The span of thirteen years unwound, like a climbing rope. I felt the texture of every inch traveling through my hands. From the first day in Jeri’s office, through the slow deconstruction of our home, to the very end here on the deck in the bright August light.