“What’s happening?” I say. “Where am I?”
“Christ,” the man mutters. He rolls his eyes, then throws his hat to the ground, making me jump and sending a small puff of dust into the cold air. “You’re home, Natalie,” he says. “Now, for the love of God: get inside before you catch a chill.”
“Wh-who are you?”
“I’m your goddamn husband,” he snaps. “I’m Caleb.”
Maybe this is a dream. It’s illogical like a dream, it’s terrifying like a nightmare—but then if it’s happening in my head, why aremy knees aching so horribly from the fall out of bed? Why can I feel my lungs heaving in my chest, my terror vibrating through my body like something trapped and desperate to escape?
“Take me home. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you. I have money. Lots of it. You probably know that, don’t you? Is that why you took me here? Do you want money?”
“Natalie—”
Something snaps in me. “Stop saying my name!”
He lets out an aggravated noise and begins to walk toward me again. “If you’re going to start shouting like that—”
Finally, my nervous system shifts into drive. I break into a run.
As I fly down the road, I feel the whining strain of muscles gone soft, but I don’t care. Now is not the time to worry about pulled muscles. Now is not the time to think about anything but flight. I sprint through the darkness, very distantly registering the pain in the soles of my feet as my skin is ripped apart by the gravel. Right as I begin to think ahead—whether the closest neighboring house is five miles away or eight, whether it would be smarter to run along the road, looking for a passing car, or to disappear into the woods—I trip and pitch forward andoof—
My body skids and rolls.
Just scrapes. Get up, Natalie. You can do this. Get up and run.
On the other side of my fear: shoes on gravel, coming closer.
I’m gasping and rolling on the ground, trying to find my center of gravity, trying to place my palms flat on the earth so I can push myself back up and keep running, but the night sky is so black it looks like dirt, and the dirt is so black it looks like outer space, and I keep grabbing at air, and the air is filled with dust, and my vision is rolling, and I think to myself,Get up,and I’m trying—Lord, I amtrying—but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
The footsteps disappear.
Silence.
I roll over onto my side, gasping, grabbing. Then I see the man standing a few feet away, watching me with a passive, unimpressed expression. Arms folded. “Get up,” he says, echoing my thoughts.
Run, Natalie. Fight.
I turn onto my side and scream. I tell myself to sayhelp,but I’m not sure if I do. The noise of my own voice is too loud in my ears to discern any words.
I see in my periphery the man drop to one knee. A fresh current of panic surges through me. He tries to gather me into his arms. I thrash my arms and legs. He leans forward and easily pins my arms down, then maneuvers my wrists so he’s holding both in one grip, his other hand free. In an instant, without any conscious thought, I spit into his face. This shocks him. He stares at me, cheek glistening in the moonlight as I wriggle desperately beneath him.
“Fuck you,” I snarl. The first time I’ve ever said that phrase aloud in my life.
The man wipes his face with the back of his sleeve. Then he says, “A good wife doesn’t speak to her husband that way.”
He rears back and slaps me so hard the whole world turns black.
2
I was seventeen years oldwhen I left my family for the first time. I was going to college in Boston. Harvard University. Remember what I said about being disciplined? Yeah. By the time I was twelve, I was practically running my weekly Sunday school lessons while the actual teacher—some neighborhood dad who reeked of booze and liked to hit on the girls in the confirmation class above us—slept off his hangover in the back.Sharp as a tack,my father used to say about me.Be careful, or you might get pricked.And then he would laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
That’s all I remember about my father. He died when I was ten. At least that’s what my mother told my sister and me to say when we moved to our new town in the southwestern corner of Idaho, four hours away from where we’d grown up.Tell the teachers your father is no longer with us.You had to give it to her with that rhetorical sleight of hand: she wasn’t lying, she hadn’t committed a sin, he was—technically!—no longer with us. With that phrase, my teachers would come to their own conclusions, and the conclusion would not be that Eliza Heller’s husband had fled the state with a woman from his local bowling league.
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality …
Even at a young age, my mother’s logic checked out to me.Daddy’s dead.So sad! May he rest in peace, amen. My father was the kind of man who called a woman smart only when it worked as a beer-soaked punch line for his friends at a party. I’d be lying if I said I missed him, but I did what my mother said, because this was the world I was born into: a world where good Christian women moonlighted as crisis managers for their good Christian men. The rules were laid out at Church service and Sunday school and over the dinner table each night: the job of a woman was threefold. Be a mother, be a wife, and keep the household clean. Oh—and don’t forget tosmile!
And so I came of age in a small mountain town, no grandparents or cousins to speak of, with a single mother who steadfastly refused the best efforts of other women in church to set her up on dates, since she was technically already married. By day, she was a secretary at a local law firm. By night, she crocheted baby sweaters, socks, and hats for the women in our neighborhood. Since the families in our church popped out five to nine children on average, business was always booming. The bills were always paid on time. My mother’s carpal tunnel syndrome flared up monthly, but the pain, she said, was worth it for such a good American childhood. Even so, we were not the kind of household that could afford worldly luxuries liketuition—which is why, when the full-ride offer came in the mail, there was nothing my mother could say except, “Oh my.”
