THE BOOK OF ONLYS
To My Children, Forgive me for being human.
"We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we only have one."
—Confucius
I drive the road home by dime-light, thin, glinting, and useless. Around me, the mountains rise and fall in an unbroken expanse of gray and grayer. This is heaven. This is hell.
When I speak of Clear Creek, you might remember the photos I shared of the kaleidoscope sky floating above the fallow fields that lounge in the shadow of Bull Mountain. You may recall the massive walls of snow that encapsulated the Raft River Range that record-breaking winter. I posted pictures of cowboys and cattle crossing hillsides of sage, angry storm clouds rising through canopies of quaking aspens, bold deer and timid rabbits framed in halos of golden light, a dog with glacial blue eyes, and a pair of unfortunate cats. Of course, there was no shortage of selfies of me. There was a lot to remember, but when I think of Clear Creek, I picture the road.
Straddling the border of Utah and Idaho, the mountain hamlet of Clear Creek is little more than an abeyance where double-wide trailers and shotgun clapboards cling to pockets of antique shade and pilfered water rights. Sagging fence lines catch the dust trailing a forgotten breed of men who move from one lonely ranch to another like rusty automatons, while weary lilac bushes and cracked headstones represent the women who spent their lives fighting the flies and hanging clothes in the unremitting wind.
The signs on Old Highway 81 omit mention of the mountain hamlet, yet they list Strevell, a town that hasn't existed for half a century. But it's there in the ghost of Strevell, opposite the wide asphalt scar where Bill Gunnell's gas station once stood; you leave the tar road behind—traversing three miles of cattle-worn fields until you reach the sign for the National Forest Access and turn towards the mountains.
There is only one road in and out of Clear Creek. That matters when summer lightning stalks the mountains and eyes the sage. It also matters in the winter when the wind habitually bullies the snowdrifts over the road, leaving them impassible. In the spring, it's the rain and mud. In the summer, it's dust and cattle.
Clear Creek road climbs out of the Raft Valley, slicing the foothills like a scar. The route is a steep thirteen miles of gravel and dirt funneled between the barbed wire fences with the occasional side road marked by a mailbox or a closed cattle gate. When the road reaches the base of the mountains, it turns toward the canyon that cradles the creek. Then, the way narrows and weaves as it climbs the Sawtooth National Forest, ending at the jaws of a locked gate—beyond that are the cabins of the men who come to hunt the bears and mountain lions. Life above 5280 feet is not gentle. Collapsed cabins, abandoned mines, and fallen barns litter the hillsides. Foot trails end in the graves of old avalanches.
I've always said houses aren't haunted; people are. But there's something about the peculiarity of an east-west mountain range. I'm unsure if it's the history of failure or the ground itself, but ghosts are on that mountain. I was nearly one of them.
If I'm not careful and think about the road too long, I find myself back on the ice, standing in the never-ending wind, staring at the mountains and the pall of morning fog traversing the foothills. Even now, safe in North Carolina, eating dinner on his patio, watching the gentle flow of traffic on Rosemary Street, he tries to reassure me by saying, "You wouldn't have done it."
I let him believe that because he already doesn't sleep at night. The truth is, had I not realized the dog had followed me out of the cabin that day, I'd be dead, or I would have died trying to be.
part one: i came here to die
"Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous."—Reinhold Messner
I have found the bottom of the world.
I can see an avalanche scar from my kitchen window. It's the size of a soccer field, steep and rocky. All it needs is enough snow, and it will make the perfect coffin.
I've made my decision. Now, the mountain can make hers.
THE ROAD IN
Hidden Cabin sits a quarter mile off Clear Creek Road at the end of a rough two-track driveway in the shade of two towering spruces. The heart of the house is the original hand-sawn 1880s log cabin. The additions on either side provide the necessary space for modern living. The spacious kitchen, four wood-burning stoves, two full baths, and two sets of staircases give it grandeur. The wagon wheel chandelier hanging in the great room over the vintage ping-pong table surrounded by the live-edge plank paneling is overkill.
We found it by chance. The small handwritten FOR SALE sign tied to the post was barely visible through the rain hitting the pitted windshield of the truck. Ben, my partner of nineteen years, and I had wandered onto that nondescript dirt road for several reasons, but none would make much sense to anyone but us. Despite Ben's motto, 'work smarter, not harder,' he always did things the hard way. If there were some longer, unpaved, questionably passable route between point A and point B, that's the one he'd choose. He was adventurous, and luckily for me, his anxiety-ridden partner, he had the skills to get in and out of the trouble it inevitably led to.
Ben's off-the-beaten-path adventures made me nervous, but they served my interest more than I cared to admit. I like broken things, including broken people. I'm fascinated with the odd and abandoned. I'm known as a dark tourist with a bad habit of trespassing. A habit I excuse by saying, 'If you fit through the hole in the fence, it's not trespassing.' Of course, I don't actually believe that, but I'm dangerously curious. Still, I prefer to avoid getting into trouble because it conflicts with my identity as a rule follower.
That leads us to another reason we were on that dirt road on a chilly spring day. After nearly two decades of fighting with the city and racking up zoning fines due to the leaning piles of Ben's salvaged building materials and steadily growing stacks of lumber littering our yard, he wanted to move somewhere with more room and fewer rules. People use the term functional alcoholic. Ben was a functional hoarder. I didn't realize how bad his problem was when we bought a house together and moved across town, away from our separate pasts and failed first marriages.
When I met Ben, he was my neighbor. We were married—but not to each other. When both our marriages fell apart, we ended up together—proximity, wine, and a couple of hikes cover the extent of our love story. There wasn't time for real romance. I had two kids, and he had one. Sixteen months later, we added our own child to the mix.
I had recently quit my job as a secretary in hospital administration and was halfway through my undergraduate courses, heading for medical school, when Ben and I got together. I joined the relationship with a good chunk of change in the bank. I had half the profits from the sale of my house. Thanks to my father's experience with real estate, my ex-husband and I had made a killing. On the other side of the equation, Ben and his ex-wife had created a lot of debt.
Funded by his parents, Ben had started a small construction company that would legally limp along until it eventually faded into a name printed on old business cards littering the floor of his truck. Ben had two mortgage payments and a construction loan in conjunction with the mountain of credit card debt, child support, and past-due utility bills. All three loans sat on the title of the same property. He owed one mortgage to the bank for the initial purchase. Second, he owed his parents when they lent him and his then-wife the money to remodel. The construction loan was then acquired after he changed his mind about remodeling the house, knocked it down, and built a new one, a project Ben would only complete once his parents purchased the home well below market value and paid him to finish it.
Our entire relationship would be dogged by Ben and his ex-wife's custody fight that lasted until their son graduated from college. My money quickly disappeared into clearing their debts, mounting lawyer's fees, and our new baby. With Ben working as a one-person construction crew and me in school, resources were stretched thin and unevenly over the his-and-hers lines we drew between us. The budget for a new house was tight, but living in Ben's unfinished house up the street from my volatile ex wasn't sustainable. That's what led us out of the posh neighborhood of Sugar House and across the tracks to the less desirable west side.
The house on Tenth West was a realtor's nightmare. A two-story, white, cinder block house that urgently required a new roof. It sat on an acre of unkept land, almost unheard of within the city limits. The rooms were so crammed with junk there were doors we couldn't open. The single-pane windows were covered by heavy floral curtains, and animal heads hung on the dingy plaster walls. The two bathrooms were tiny. The ramshackle addition of a mudroom/laundry room was practically falling off the house. To top it all off, it had the ugliest kitchen I had ever seen. The shit brown cabinets and laminate countertop crammed together on one wall looked more like a workshop than a kitchen.
A polygamist family built the house in the late 50s or early 60s, which explained the lack of outlets in the kitchen. They raised twelve children there in that small house. Most of them were boys. Later, we would find the vintage porn and erotic novels they hid under the floorboards. None of the house's shortcomings mattered to me. Ben was a master carpenter. I had no doubt he would create a beautiful home for us despite the evidence of his unfinished house warning me otherwise.
We closed on the property and moved in the weekend before Halloween 2005. We ripped up carpets and tore down the blinds. We stripped her bare. Then we all started over. At first, the move put our newly blended family on neutral ground. It was our house. Farm boots and flip-flops lined the front door. We planted trees and a large vegetable garden, but the plans to update the kitchen and replace the failing roof remained paper promises on Ben's drafting board. There was always a reason to put it off. That's not to say he didn't make changes to the house. He most certainly did.
One day, without warning, Ben knocked out the kitchen wall with a sledgehammer and installed a second-hand sliding glass door. It fit poorly in the hammered-out hole, but Ben never bothered to trim it, leaving the jagged edges of the concrete block on full display. He did the same to the large picture window in the front room, installing a salvaged atrium that he crammed full of potted plants, all cacti. The tinted glass was dark and attracted spiders. Still, Ben liked the effect so much that he created a larger version on our front porch. He enclosed the pad using a collection of loosely attached glass doors, a corrugated piece of tin for a roof, and a section of downspout as a post. The heavy panels leaned precariously. Zoning enforcers covered their heads with their clipboards while hastily attaching violation notices to our door.
Ben was wholly unpredictable. He cut exploratory holes in the ceilings and floors. He tore out the upstairs bathroom wall to fit a wool rug he had miss-measured. The carpet could have gone downstairs, but he said it was too delicate to get ruined in a high-trafficked area.
We were already one bedroom short, but Ben still pursued a vaulted ceiling by ripping out the little room upstairs that the two youngest children used as a bedroom. It was almost a relief. The space was a death trap. More of a storage space. The door was so small even the kids had to duck to get through it, and the ceiling was so low and the pitch so prominent the only place you could stand up straight was the dead center of the room. The small oval window Ben installed was merely decoration. It didn't open, but the single-walled chimney he ran from the woodstove in the kitchen below through dried wooden rafters into the corner of the room was fully functional.
Losing that space meant all four kids would have to double up—which violated Ben's parenting agreement with his ex-wife and gave them more to fight about. The two boys didn't care, but when I moved a three-year-old into my oldest daughter's room, the high schooler politely moved into her father's house full-time by simply not returning home during our visitation weeks. Sharing a room with an alcoholic father and his meth-head girlfriend was better than living with a preschooler. Adding insult to injury, Ben refused to finish the project for years because he didn't trust the roof we hadn't replaced. He worried it would leak and ruin any drywall he would hang.
Eventually, Ben demolished the staircase to move it from the center of the house to an exterior wall, creating a great room for the hideous kitchen, with half wooden subflooring, half peeling linoleum, and a piece of plywood between them. His renovations also left half a door frame and a live wire hanging over the refrigerator. It took him over a month, but he rebuilt the stairs. He handcrafted a beautiful open staircase with reclaimed oak treads, rounded bullnoses, and a handrail made from a twisting tree branch—that he snapped at anyone who used it because he didn't want it to come loose.
The relocation of the stairs cost us the utility closet. This was an afterthought to Ben. He shoved the water heater into the mudroom on a makeshift shelf. It leaked down the concrete steps to the cellar and blocked the view of the garden from the kitchen sink. He then wedged the furnace into the exposed attic space left by the unfinished vaulted ceiling project. To get it to fit under the steep angle of the risers, he hammered the corners to match the roofline. The vent he cut in the roof leaked straight onto the dinner table. The furnace never quite worked properly after that. It always came on, but it didn't always blow hot air.
Nothing in that house worked as it should have—including Ben and me. Despite his oddness, Ben was a good guy, and we had a child together, but we weren't necessarily a good couple. Our disagreements kept boiling over. I was and still am very thin-skinned. Ben is highly opinionated and resentful of any authority or preserved criticisms. Early in the relationship, we tried counseling. It was right after we moved into the house on Tenth West. At the end of the third and final session (that's all we could afford), the counselor turned to me and said, "If you can be happy in a relationship where you never ask for anything, never even do anything that might be construed as criticizing or complaining, and can always assume that Ben is doing his best no matter what it feels or looks like, then you can stay with him." She then turned to Ben and said, "Misty just needs to feel loved."
Of course, now, I can hear it as you do. The counselor was telling me I should consider leaving, but back then, her words were landing on three decades of untreated wounds. I had secrets that crawled around in my head. They contaminated my perception. I was raised by a father who should have had sons but only had daughters. I was loved and cared for by a mother with no say-so in her own life. A woman desperately clinging to a man she believed was her only chance for salvation—just as he had been her ticket out of abject poverty and the squaller and hoarding of her mentally ill mother when, at the age of eighteen, my parents slipped out of a church picnic and eloped.
Even though I had long since left the long wooden church benches behind, I spent my childhood in a religion where the only value of women was marriage and children. It sounds archaic, but to this very day, the Mormon Church openly preaches from its worldwide pulpits that women belong in the home. It didn't matter that I disagreed. The masses believed, and that belief permeated the culture of the entire state. Misogyny was the only backdrop I knew.
I had already let my father down. I had failed to save my first marriage—or, more accurately, I had refused to try. After eleven years of hiding the truth, I showed up on my parents' doorstep with a backpack and two young children. My father told me to go home and fix my marriage to a man he never approved of. We were standing in the driveway. I pulled out the only card I held.
"Dad, Adam is an abusive alcoholic." I had never dared to speak those words to anyone before that moment, no matter who they were and how hard they tried to get me to admit it.
My father looked me square and said, "He was like that when you married him. Go home and fix your marriage." Decades later, sitting beside my father's bed, only hours before I'd reenter the room and discover his lifeless body, he told me that he always wished I had stayed with Adam for the sake of the children.
"…never ask for anything, never even do anything that might be construed as criticizing or complaining…then you can stay…" Those words echoed church doctrine, "Keep sweet and obey." I thought the counselor was giving me the recipe to save my family—if I could only learn to shut up. I did my best to control myself in my relationship with Ben. It worked. We quit fighting, but we also stopped existing as a couple. Of course, we didn't realize that. Ben got to do what he wanted, and he seemed happy. Unable to advocate for myself, my needs fell to the back of every line. My resentment grew until it got so big it suffocated all the love. The erosion of our relationship was my fault. I can admit that, but on the other hand, had I heard it differently and left then, it also would have been my fault.
Meanwhile, buckets of drill bits, hinges, light fixtures, pipe fittings, and brackets spilled out of Ben's truck and trailers. The mess spread to the driveway and the garage. Attempting to hide it, we built a fence and parked our cars on the street. He built a greenhouse, and the piles migrated in. Stacks of salvaged building materials cluttered the edges of the large vegetable garden and climbed the steps of the front and back porches. He built a beautiful workshop for himself, stuffed full long before he finished roofing it.
I tried implementing creative solutions to hide the mess and dodge the messages from the zoning and building departments, but it was like bailing out a boat moored under a waterfall. Ben began salvaging larger construction materials. He bought a semi-trailer filled with doors and windows that he parked half in the front yard and half in the back, making keeping the dogs in the yard impossible.
Then my sister died. I quit school. I was always sick. The house on Tenth West rebuilt its hairshirt of junk. The paint peeled, pipes froze, and small black spirals of mold crept out of the corners. The kids were embarrassed to bring friends home. Eventually, the roof we never replaced began to leak. I moved chairs and rugs to conceal the holes in the floors. I taped the children's art over broken windows and hung curtains where there should have been walls.
We raised our four kids in a slowly crumbling house with the sweet green smell of the Jordan River drifting in and out. At night, the trains lulled them to sleep. By the time the kids were grown, the house was surrounded by leaning stacks of discarded granite, piles of broken tile, and rows of salvaged windows and doors. Stacks of slate and roofing tiles pressed against the garden fences, pipes, oak banisters, and old water heaters scattered throughout the yard. Then Ben bought a portable sawmill, and the yard began filling with towering stacks of lumber.
Retreat was the only move left. Lucky for us, by then, the promised wave of gentrification was finally flooding the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. Despite the severity of the house's deterioration, we could sell it for the value of the land and make a small fortune doing it. It was a fortune we didn't deserve. We walked from the house on Tenth West, knowing the home we created together resulted in a house unfit for people to live in. We had planned to be so much more. I was going to be a doctor. Ben was going to build beautiful homes. We were going live happily ever after. The story we left in the dust was one of broken promises and all my dreams of ever being anything other than Wendi's little sister.
The night is a ribbon tied in my hair. I wear it in my soft bed of feathers and fur. It comes loose on my pillow while I dream. Strings of darkness and silk slip through my ears,
kissing my lips on the way to the cold bones of the wooden floor.
This is how we become unraveled.
Salt Lake City July 28, 2006
I was less than three miles away when her body was found. She was lying face down, wedged between the toilet and tub. The box fan shoved in the window of her third-floor apartment did little to soften the sharp July heat and nothing to erase the smell. It was the landlord who found her. He called the police, and they called her parents. I suppose that's our parents. After all, the thirty-six-year-old woman discovered lying in a viscous pool of human broth was my sister.
I was on campus, in the bookstore, purchasing my textbooks. I was driving home when they loaded Wendi into the Medical Examiner's van. We might have passed in the crowd of rush-hour traffic. It's all very tragic. As children, we had been inseparable. We shared a perfect Mormon childhood. A crayon drawing of an ideal life, a white house with green grass on a tree-lined street, chlorine summers, and salted winter sidewalks. But what if our perfect life was all a mirage, a velvet veneer, or worse, a lie? It certainly would make none of what happened my fault. The problem is I'm an unreliable narrator, so you don't have to believe me, but you might want to hear how I'm solely responsible for how she died.
You could probably live without knowing the gory details. Like what happens to a body that rots unnoticed for days in the sweltering heat—the smell, the blood, the flies. You certainly don't want to know how her skin split and spilled under the weight and pressure of decomposition and her hair sluffed away. And later, how the Medical Examiner would have to apologize for not having a photo of her face to identify her body because there wasn't one. I identified her using pictures of the scars on her wrists and thighs. That's what decomposed really means.
If I close my eyes, I can see myself driving home to the sad little cinder block house on Tenth West, blissfully unaware. I can imagine a life where my sister doesn't die, and the wolves stay hidden in the forest, but she did. I went home loaded with several heavy bags. I stepped around the moat of clutter, unlocked the door, and went inside. In the kitchen, the phone was ringing. I set the textbooks I would never use on the table. Then, on the last ordinary summer day in a desert city built of granite and glass, the city of salt and salvation, I picked up the receiver and said, "Hello."
Wendi struggled in school. I was a good student. She loved The Wizard of Oz. I was terrified of the flying monkeys and the sand slipping through the witch's hourglass. Wendi hated Peter Pan, but I liked the idea that children could open the nursery window and fly away. We planned to move to California together and live inside Disneyland on Tom Swayer’s Island, like the Lost Boys in Neverland. We played in the sprinklers and lay our tanned bodies on the concrete. Streetlights, swing sets, and grape jam, our childhood was endless because, as girls, we had no future.
We wanted acceptance. What we got were labels and lies. According to Mormon doctrine, only men can hold the highest priesthood, the Melchizedek priesthood. For a woman to reach the highest kingdom in heaven, she must marry a Melchizedek Priesthood holder. Daughters are disposable, having no merit on their own. I wanted to matter. Wendi wanted to be all-consuming. When I grew up, I wanted to be a boy. Wendi never wanted to grow up. Both of our endless childhoods ended on a bathroom floor, but only one of us got what we wanted. The other got what she deserved.
Overnight, the wind has created a cocoon of fog and silence. The cabin's windows weep curious threads of light onto the fresh snow. My footsteps from yesterday are gone. I shower with my eyes closed to stare into my sister's face.
It's either that or count my scars like constellations.