Chapter One, The Abduction Myth

I could blame it on Daisy, my bullmastiff.  Or I could blame it on my sister Christine for giving me Daisy as a birthday present.  But Daisy couldn’t help being huge, and Christine knew how much I wanted a dog.  “God knows you could use the company,” she snorted, with a sideways glance at Ethan.  He muttered something under his breath, but Christine just smiled; she loved to annoy him.  Only later would that more innocent dislike turn to hate.  “He started it,” she would tell me.  “If it weren’t for that lying piece of shit none of this would have happened.” 

Her logic held a certain appeal.  If Ethan hadn’t ended our engagement, and thus our living arrangement, I wouldn’t have been desperate to find a place that accepted giant-sized dogs.  I could have lived forever in the house his parents bought him, looking the other way whenever he came home late, with the quiet belief that no one’s life was perfect.  I’d never expected perfect.  Good enough suited me just fine.

Except that interpretation of events wouldn’t have been fair.  Yes, Ethan had cheated.  Yes, he said that he couldn’t spend the rest of his life with a “doormat” like me.  But when I became homeless, Christine did offer me and Daisy temporary shelter at her condo.  She even insisted she’d be happy for us to stay indefinitely.  And L.A., she argued, was far more exciting than the quiet college town I’d never left, to be with the boyfriend who couldn’t let his university lifestyle go.  Christine presented me with the perfect solution until I figured out just how, at the age of 32, to rebuild my life.  After all, I worked from home, so I could live wherever I wanted.  There was no need to feel chained to my dwindling life in El Prado.

Yet despite all of these good reasons to say yes to Christine’s offer, I said no.  I said no, because I hated L.A.  I said no because while I adored Christine, we were too different to make good roommates.  And I said no because I still loved Ethan.  We’d been together for eleven years—I didn’t know how to live without him.  Besides, I genuinely believed that once I was gone, he would miss our life together; I needed to be nearby for when that moment of clarity came.  Ethan did not force me to stay loyal to him.  He didn’t even ask.  I made that mistake all by myself.

My mother never let me forget that, because she’d warned me against Ethan from the start.  Of course, she’d despaired over pretty much everything I did—my family’s favourite label for me was naive.  But eventually she too found someone else to blame.  Not my late father, who had walked out on us when I was a baby.  Nor did she blame the one who nearly killed me thirty years later, in every sense of the word.  Even this monster my mother considered just a symptom, rather than the disease itself.

Instead, she focused all of her wrath on the man she loathed at first sight.  The man, she said, who made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up every time he looked at me.  He had brought me to the brink of despair, she insisted, and then gave me a gentle push just as she and Christine meant to save me.  “You must see, darling,” she wept to me, during that last conversation, “how he is responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in your life.”

I didn’t see.  I couldn’t see anything at all, no matter how hard I tried.  All I wanted was one incorruptible truth to call my own.  But truth is organic, like a strand of DNA.  It can mutate, or combine with other strands of truth, until it evolves into something that no longer bears any resemblance to its previous self.  For too long my truth did just that—twisting and changing, attaching itself to others, until it became unrecognizable.  But the monster was not built to survive.  Nothing really is.

That left just me.  Just me, and every stupid decision I ever made.

Except that this isn’t a story about blame, or about truth. 

This is a story about him.

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