Sometime last week, a good friend sent me a Facebook post from the subject of the previous article.  It announced that she was leaving the state after 23 years.  I had sensed that things might not have been going well.  Well, in part because I Google her every few months to keep tabs on where I need to avoid.  Sensed that her last relationship was over.  Sensed that her dream job evaporated.

I spent the last few mornings driving by her house to see if she had indeed left.  She hadn’t until just this weekend.  But, she’s gone.  I sensed her little car was not coming back and was bound for the home – the place that held her childhood horrors – to find some security.  The irony was not lost.

I also learned she has not quit drinking.  Nor has she truly hit bottom.  Having burned her realtionships of all types here, she turned to the very people she had turned her back on over a score of years ago and they will not turn her away.  Whether the bottom will ever be found is not for me to say.  I wouldn’t like to be her, not even for a minute.

But, it is good to finally stop worrying that she would find me again and finish what she’d started.

I met this woman one day online.  She lived in a nearby city area and I lived an hour or so away but was looking for work in the her area after the dot.com I worked for went dot.bust.

I placed an ad online to find friends who might show me around.  It had worked before, why not now?  I got the usual kind of replies and had made some appointments to go meet some people.  Then I got an email from a woman who had been straight to date, but thought she’d “try” women since the whole man thing didn’t seem to be working.  I basically thanked her very much but wasn’t looking for a relationship and especially not with someone who thought they might “try” me.  The images dancing in her mind were of the high-heels and long nails and lipstick male fantasy porn.

We got together a few times and it became clear she had a nice little plan of seduction and I let her have at it.  She was beautiful and smart and we shared a common Midwestern sensibility. She seemed to be everything I wanted and more.  And, on occasion, she could make me laugh.  It was lust at first sight for me.  But because of the place that lust usually stows my brain, I didn’t see what was coming.

All went well for the first few months of cohabitation.  We had the usual problems of adjustment – trying to integrate me into her place, make room for the kids, balancing our personal styles in household management.  Nothing too out of the ordinary.  One day I came home from work and realized I had thrown something into the garbage I actually needed.  I found at the bottom of the garbage can a pile of empty wine bottles.  She worked at home during the day in her own business and the first thing she did when I walked in the door was hand me a glass of wine, so I hadn’t noticed it on her breath, nor seen any real change in her behavior.  I just kind of put it all in the back of my mind.  I had no idea the drinking started after the first cup of coffee and went on until bedtime.

We domestic partnered at the bank one afternoon in front of the notary, drew wills, and trusts, and other such nonsense.

Time forged on and we moved to a shared place and ultimately bought a house together.  The sex tapered off pretty quickly, but I began to get the picture of the Michelin Man – a man with tires all around him.  Somewhere inside was a woman full of pain from an upbringing a few notches below “White Trash.” Sex was the manipulation tool of choice and once she had you and had what she needed, she parceled it out only as often as she needed to keep what you had that she wanted.  She’d morph into what she could see you needed or wanted.  The writing was all there.  All the stories of how she got involved with men who rescued her from one dire place to the next.  Each leaving because her hold was not strong enough and sex was available elsewhere without all the manipulation.  Somehow, I thought I was different or they had somehow done something heinous to deserve her wrath.

The alcoholism had started to take its toll though.  She lost her business because being available to drink was more important than selling her product.  She traveled nowhere without the tall glass of what purported to be clear soda, but always stealthily mixed with wine.  She showed up at her bankruptcy attorney’s office smelling like a drunk.  And finally, she showed up a a parent-teacher conference reeking of alcohol.  And there my firm state of denial buckled like the Bay Bridge during the earthquake of 1987.  Her ability to be the chameleon was fading with every empty bottle.

She did go into AA.  Got her 30 day chip but decided her sponsor and the rest of them were idiots.  Went dry and miserable drunk for the next nearly two years, tossing those dry days aside the day she quit the first office job she’d had in 20 years.  It was almost a relief since it somehow steadied her irrationality in moments. I still wasn’t going with my gut despite the continued wine-soaked dizzying circular conversations whenever we tried to discuss a problem.  Despite the withholding of sex and affection.  Despite the growing tendency to isolate herself from the rest of us.

One day, we all became the enemy.  Something snapped inside of her.  She’d bumped up against that place where she could no longer be the chameleon.  I wasn’t blameless, but I had long ago thought we were past those rough days.  She lashed out viciously at the children for their perceived maltreatment of her.  They were confused and avoided her whenever they could.  She ranted against one son one night with such vehemence so seriously out of balance with what had been done (he dared suggest that his sister didn’t like cabbage which was why she hadn’t eaten it) that I stepped in and insisted on an apology to the boy.  One day a friend stopped by our backyard to let her dog run across its vast expanse.  She glanced into the patio window to let it be known she was there and instead saw her screaming at my daughter, who was crying and cowering from the verbal assault.  That night, she said, “If I’d wanted kids, I would have had them.”

I knew I needed to do something and stop any more damage to those kids.  I started having panic attacks and jumped into therapy.  The outcome was that I was afraid she was going to die.  And, long before that she’d bring us all down in a pile of emotional wreckage.  So, I bucked up and left. For better or worse couldn’t mean this.  It was relatively amicable at first, but I was firm in my resolve not to carry her weight any more, something she hadn’t found a replacement body to take care of.  But, that came along in short order and before the ink was dry on the divorce, the next savior had moved in along with her money.  I was relieved.

She wanted to see the kids, who had ambivalent feelings at best about doing so.  I didn’t want her driving my kids around and knew she drank while driving.  I didn’t want the kids to see people could be replaced that quickly.  My sister dropped the kids off once and picked them up when her girlfriend wasn’t going to be around. I asked her to take the kids to an outside location to visit.  So she just didn’t visit.  For months we didn’t speak and then she asked to be allowed to visit with the kids at her house.  I relented and we made plans for that to happen starting after their Thanksgiving trip to their father’s.  She offered to drop the kids at the airport so I could depart on my own trip a few hours early, so I gave her the confirmation information.  Oddly, the day before the trip, I tried to get the boarding passes and the tickets had been canceled.  Southwest said by someone who claimed to be their stepmother.  Miraculously, their real stepmother got them reinstated.  It never occurred to me that anything was afoot, it must have been a mistake.

She took them to the airport and off they went.  She left a message they were safely airborne.  I got to my girlfriend’s house and things didn’t go well, so I decided to come home early.  I arrived to an open garage door to the house.  I stepped in to see utter decimation.  Paint thrown on the walls, countertops, pictures smashed by a foot on the floor, missing computers, CDs, stereo, tools, artwork.  The water was running in the bathroom in an atttempt to flood it.  My “toys” spread out across my bed. Key files missing from the closet.

When the police arrived we took inventory, but not before they said, “Wow, somebody must really hate you.”  I couldn’t figure out who. And strangely, though they took or damaged a lot of stuff, they did not touch anything belonging to the kids, including the labeled envelope in the drawer with $300 of the kids’ birthday money.

My sister and I were told not to touch anything and so we sat at the little table in the garage.  We dialed into her laptop and I started making the necessary calls.  We decided we were hungry so I asked her to run and get sandwiches.  The garage door was slightly cracked open so we got some air.  Off she went.  A few minutes later, a hand reached under the garage door from the outside and attempted to pull it up.  They were coming back for more.  I wasn’t expected back until the end of the week.  Startled, I yelled, “Hey,” and ran quickly to the front door to give chase.  And chase I did, but not quickly enough – I rounded the corner of the next block to find a car idling into which the figure leaped – a car still in my name, being driven by an unknown third party, probably her equally alcoholic girlfriend.  They raced off into the night and I called the police again.  By the time they got to her house, she was gone – along with all of my stuff.

The CSI was heartened because she was able to get fingerprints off the two beers they drank and smashed on the floor.  Perhaps the alcohol would be her undoing at that.

In the interim, there was a restraining order and I made plans to move.  I slept with one eye open the first two weeks and with a club under the bed, which I felt every night before shutting my eyes.

It took months to get the fingerprints back, but the detective called each of our attorney’s and let them know that he would compel them to give fingerprints the next day for comparison unless we settled.  I wanted it over and realized with certainty that she had done this terrible, hateful, vengeful thing to lash out one more time as if she didn’t play a role in the demise of what we once shared.  So, I provided her with a  dollar amount to avoid jail and it was over.

It shook me up pretty badly because I had really loved her at one time and she knew as well as I did that parting was necessary.  We both had a chance to rebuild and move on from a relatively good position.  But, she couldn’t let it rest.  I imaged this was very much like the hatred she carries around for her father.  She takes time out when visiting her hometown to piss on his grave, even in the middle of winter.  She pissed all over me and I’m sure blames me for the disaster her latest adventure had created.  She’s an alcoholic and that’s what they do.

The restraining order recently expired, now well over three years past the final court date.  I worry sometimes that she will find us.  It does still give me pause.  I’ve gone over nearly every moment of the relationship in my head a million times and know I could have done things differently or better.  I changed as a person in ways I did not like.   But, no matter what, I could never have had a true partnership.  She’d already given her heart elsewhere and forever.  The thing that tells her she has worth, warms her when her heart is cold, and lets her be anyone except the person she sees in the mirror every morning.