Surviving Valencia

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.