The Importance of Lists

We're talking about training dogs to not chase bicycles, and in the winding way conversations go sometimes, end up in the middle of my violent ex-husband's car accident 45 years ago.

It's prime rib night at my retirement village's restaurant. My friend Sheila whom I've known almost 60 years since our college days back in the 1960s, and Marsha whom I've known for 30, are getting to know one another because Sheila just moved here from Denver.

Marsha wonders if a shock collar would be a good thing to keep Red from chasing bicycles. She's hesitant because Red experienced a lot of abuse before Marsha rescued her and doesn't want to do anything to make Red distrust her. I say I might have been tempted to use one on Molly, my Springer Spaniel, who had basically been crazy, but never on Beau Beagle. Beau wouldn't sit, stay, or heal, and thought leashes were demeaning. But we had a lot of respect for each other, and neither of us wanted to disappoint the other, so he was an easy dog.

Marsha asks where I had gotten him, and I say from a puppy pound when I was still married to Jack. My kid Bobby's dad had sent him home from his visitation with a giant turtle they found. Jack didn't want the giant turtle around, and somehow, I still don't know how we did it, Bobby and I talked him into a dog instead. Beau was still a pup when I left Jack.

Sheila remembers how she and I had reconnected at a Broncos game in Denver—that we had lost touch for a few years.

Then bam! we're in the middle of Jack's accident. How he hit a car full of teenagers. How he was drunk. Sheila remembers the accident being on the freeway. No, he ran a stop sign. No, I didn't learn what happened to the teenagers—only that one of them got a severely broken leg. I've always felt bad I didn't find out about them. I might have talked to one of the mothers. Otherwise how did I learn about the broken leg? No one was killed—that part I was sure about.

I tell them about the afternoon of the accident and how I had found all the unpaid bills in Jack's drawer—our house payment was three months past due. Jack managed all our money. I worked and gave him my check. Jack hadn't worked for at least a year and a half. I tell them how I had called my friend Norma. She knew enough about my marriage (though not the violent parts) to say I needed to get out of there. In my memory I agreed, but now doubt I had. I may have wanted to leave, but it wouldn't have seemed like something I could do.

That Saturday night, late, a man and a pretty blond lady, both of whom had been drinking, came to my door and said Jack had been in a really bad accident and was at the hospital. I sent Bobby, just shy of nine, off with them and went to the hospital. Years later, when that night appeared in a memoir I wrote for a writing class, one of the men in the class took issue with it—he didn't think any mother would send her child off with people she didn't know, especially people who were drunk. It wasn't believable, he said. I didn't say anything. If our writing was being workshopped, we weren't supposed to speak until at the end, when we could ask questions. It was so you could hear the feedback instead of defending your writing. I felt ashamed when the man said that. Another man in the class, who said he had grown up in a violent home, said sometimes in domestic violence you don't have choices.

I tell Sheila and Marsha how in my experience (of course they know I've worked at the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence for almost 35 years), when you are living in violence, typically your boundaries get all skewed. And how I'd see women come in to shelter and a few hours later leave their kids with another resident they just met so they could go to a job interview. I see it as an act of desperation—sometimes you just do what you have to. And then we talked about how in 1978, drunk driving was overlooked most of the time. Mothers Against Drunk Driving changed all that.

When I called Jack's parents the next morning, they drove to Denver and I showed them all the unpaid bills and the checkbook that was such a mess. Jack's father, Paul, looked through the check register and asked what all the deposits were. I only recognized my paychecks. Then Doris, Jack's mother, said she had been sending him money every month. She didn't see the harm. Paul looked at her and said, "Well, Doris, why do you think he hasn't worked for the last year and a half?" He said it in such a condescending, demeaning way, I felt ashamed, like he had said it to me instead of Doris. And I told the two of them, "I expect you to help me financially." I still don't know where those words came from. I hadn't spoken up for myself probably ever. Not since I'd been with Jack anyway. Marsha said it was really brave of me. But I think it was more out of survival than bravery. The house was months behind on payments—what if we lost it? Later, I wondered if they helped because they were afraid I would leave Jack and they would wind up bailing him out anyway.

Dessert comes, berry cobbler with ice cream, and our dinner conversation turns light. Marsha is leaving tomorrow for a week-long hike with the Sierra Club. We talk about her struggle with plantar fasciitis and how it's fine now so she can finally get back out there in the woods.

When I get home, I can't settle. I had thought I remembered everything about that terrible night. But how had I gotten to the hospital? I don't remember driving. And how did I pick Bobby up at the blond lady's house? I couldn't read maps back then, and I would have been upset. I would never have been able to find Bobby again from just an address. I sleep fitfully. Jack appears in one of my dreams—but mercifully only as a peripheral character.

Early the next morning when I'm power-walking, it comes to me. The man who was with the blond lady drove me in our Toyota. The blond lady took Bobby home with her. The man drove us first to the hospital out in Northglenn, not far from where Jack and I lived, where the ambulance said they were taking him. Then to the hospital in South Denver where he had been helicoptered because they had better surgery facilities. When the orderly handed me a clear plastic bag filled with Jack's bloodied belongings and I said I couldn't deal with that, it must have been the man who put it in the backseat of my car. I don't remember what I did with that bag when I got home. It smelled like old blood. My car smelled like that for a long time.

I call Sheila after my walk and tell her about remembering the man driving my Toyota to the hospital. She says it makes sense I had forgotten the particulars. That's the way trauma works. I know that. I see it all the time with survivors. I guess I thought it didn't apply to me. I remember in that writing class when the man, who was surprised "the narrator" would send her child off with a drunk somebody she didn't know, also said the whole piece lacked structure. It didn't follow any sequence. It jumped around. And how another man in class, the one who had grown up in a violent home, said, "That's the way domestic violence works. It's chaotic. There is no structure." I wondered if he was looking to my writing for answers about his own childhood.

The man who drove me to the hospital must have stayed in the waiting room with me all night. He was quiet, and I don't remember talking to him. I wrote lists. My mother was a list maker, so it's in my genes. I kept a little spiral notebook in my purse to keep track of everything I kept forgetting—dry cleaning, milk, cereal, Bobby's dentist appointment, peanut butter, take trash out, bread, dog food—stuff like that.

And now: What to do if Jack lived and was fine. What to do if Jack lived and was not fine. What to do if Jack died.

I remember the Sheriff's deputy talking to me about taking a blood alcohol before Jack went in for surgery. I remember the deputy looking at me with pity. I remember Jack yelling at me to call our lawyer. I remember staring at a pool of blood on the floor and telling him to call the lawyer himself, that I was done. I remember Jack calling me a fucking bitch.

The next morning, actually that same morning, after Jack was out of surgery and it was light out, the man drove us to the blond lady's house so I could get Bobby. Bobby had been up all night eating sugar from a sack he found in her pantry. I may have, but I don't think I saw Jack in the recovery room. It wouldn't have been on any of my lists.

Bobby leapt into the car, his skinny little self all hyped up on sugar and no sleep. "So when are we going to divorce Jack?"

Jack had a bruised spleen and a ruptured bladder. Or maybe it was the other way around. There must have been other injuries as well because he was in surgery for hours. Then intensive care for weeks, I've forgotten how many. The last time I saw him, 17 years later, he walked with a limp and used a cane.

Sheila remembers I called her the day after his accident. I don't remember doing that. It was the smartest thing I ever did, even though I would have done it instinctively, not consciously. Sheila had been the one I always turned to when I was in college. Now I'm surprised I knew where I put her phone number after she gave it to me at the Broncos game. I'm guessing she was my first call—she could have fortified me for all the following calls. Jack's first wife Flo. Jack's friend John Logan. Jack's parents. My mother. Bobby's father.

John Logan came over while I was on the phone, Beau Beagle curled on my lap. He put his arm around me, and I leaned into him. What I wanted was to spend the rest of the afternoon leaning against him and maybe crying, but there were too many things on my lists. John Logan went through the bloody bag and retrieved Jack's wallet. He must have thrown away the bloody clothes. I don't remember seeing them again. He had already been to the wrecking yard and gotten Jack's belongings from what was left of his jeep. "You don't want to see it," he said referring to the jeep. After I left Jack and moved to Oregon, John Logan was killed driving drunk almost a year to the day of Jack's accident. Jack called to tell me, and the smell of that bloody bag came back in a whoosh and I threw up. I don't remember why I always called him John Logan instead of just John.

Neither Bobby nor I could sleep that first night. Bobby got to worrying over how elevators worked. We made up stories about big sweaty men with great muscly hairy arms pulling the cables up slowly, hand over hand, then lowering them back down gently.

More phone calls the next day, Monday. Now I remember calling the attorney who had handled my first divorce. When I told him what happened, his first words were, "You aren't going to stay married to this guy are you?" That was what he called Jack: "this guy." He took care of finding out if Jack had paid the car insurance and if he had ever been arrested for a previous drunk driving incident. I called a friend of Jack's who was an auditor at Colorado National Bank where we had our account to see if he could figure out how much money we had. Now I wonder if that was something he could legally even do.

Sheila remembers that after I called her the day after Jack's accident, Sunday, she met me at the hospital. I remember she met me at my house the next day, Monday. That I had forgotten to lock the front door when I left for work that morning, and we raced through the house afraid an intruder was hiding inside. Maybe both of these are true and they happened on the same night. That we met at the hospital and she followed me to my house. Maybe they happened on different nights. We both remember we ate dinner in the hospital cafeteria. Sheila said Bobby ate sugar right out of the dispenser. I don't remember that, but I imagine it's true. I hate it that I was so oblivious to what Bobby was going through.

During the weeks to follow: Drive across Denver to work; drive across Denver to pick up Bobby from the sitter's; drive across Denver to the hospital; drive across Denver to get home. Bobby waited in the hospital lobby while I went up to see Jack because kids weren't allowed on the hospital floors. A few years ago Bob told me he had believed Jack was dead and I hadn't wanted to tell him.

When I finally got home in the evenings, the phone didn't stop ringing—all Jack's drinking friends calling for updates. It makes sense to me that I wouldn't have had the wherewithal to suggest they set up a phone tree system, but I wonder now why they didn't think of it. There was no such thing as voicemail then, or answering machines. If you didn't answer the phone, it would just keep ringing. Some nights I took it off the hook, just for a little bit of quiet. Flo and Jack's parents never called. Maybe one of them, probably Flo, talked to the doctors and kept the others updated.

I told Jack I was divorcing him while he was still in intensive care, safely tethered to his hospital bed by tubes and murky bags. Just to be sure though, I stood at the foot of the bed, no closer. He moved out on Mother's Day, days after his release from the hospital. I stood on the front lawn watching his friends load up a U-Haul. Jack gripped his crutches with his armpits and sucked down a beer. John Logan walked over to me and said, "Feel guilty making him move out on crutches, with no job?" But he said it in a non-blaming way. I told him I just couldn't do it anymore. "I know," he said, putting his arm around me for a sideways hug. But I don't see how he could know. I didn't understand all that had happened myself until long afterwards. Even then, it was a slow realizing, dribbled out over the years. It's still dribbling.

Forty-five years have passed and I'm no longer thirty. I am amazed sometimes that I really did leave Jack as soon as he was out of the hospital. What had seemed an impossible task almost was. Everything is harder when you don't know how capable you actually are.

That's why lists are so important. "Divorce Jack" was the first item on two of my three lists. There was no need for it on the third.