The Between Years

CHAPTER 1
    In school-hell, in life-I've been taught to get to the point immediately. I teach my college students never to waste a syllable. Write in a clear, concise manner, and get to the bloody point, sans rambling is my motto. So, I'll set a good example and do no less, but sometimes the small points in my life have proven to be more significant than I'd imagined. Anyway, here goes: my husband, Randy Fuller isn't dead, and yet everyone seems ready to leap to conclusions. I know nobody believes he could have survived the catastrophe that night, but until someone shows me a body, I will maintain that he is alive. Not necessarily well, but I know his heart is beating.

    When you live in a place like Fort Erie, Ontario, where everybody knows everyone, and you can toss anonymity out the window, people are set in their ways, and are determined to think whatever they want. After all, Randy is the man that so many used to see every day when they strolled into the library. The old-timers who read the newspapers loved his humor and his manners. Guys our age talked sports with him ad-nauseum. If you've ever dropped your kid off to play on the computer for an evening, odds are Randy has busted them for being too boisterous a time or two.

    If you have a picture-perfect opinion of Randy, I hate to burst your bubble. You're not wrong to think Randy's the greatest guy you've ever met, because that's how I still think of him, deep down. He's a decent, gentle man, a born father, and has more integrity in his little finger than most of us have in our bodies. But like an onion, the man had many layers, and I never peeled back the first one until the worst happened to us.

    Some people have been silly enough to suggest that I made my husband run away, like I had been some sort of unfeeling tyrant, like I had pushed the poor bastard to his limit. But no one can observe the damage caused to the house he was living in and think he ran away. His feet were firmly planted, and yet he didn't stick around for the worst, either.

    In the greater scheme of things, I feel helpless, because people will draw their conclusions based on what they've heard (or what they haven't heard), and construct a scenario for themselves. Maybe they have some preconceived notion that I'm an ice queen and Randy is a hapless victim, but I think it's important to hear both sides of an issue, to make an informed decision.

    Why am I writing this? I'm sure you're asking yourselves that. I don't know exactly. Maybe committing this diatribe to paper is therapeutic and I never meant for anyone actually to read it. Call it a personal diary, a private blog, where I can recount my life with Randy from the beginning of university until well after our marriage collapsed. I feel like writing this will help me consciously to peel away yet another layer of the onion that is Randy Fuller. But more than anything, I'm writing this to make the bad dreams go away.

    Surely, you have bad dreams too. Even if they come once a month, you know the feeling. Sometimes they are the stark, vivid image of real life torment that forces you to pop up in bed, drenched after a torrent of cold sweat. Randy appears in those dreams regularly. Sometimes he and I are walking hand in hand, and everything the utopia that our lives had set out to be, before it melts away. Other times, I dream about when he and I were at each other's throats, and no compromise could save us. However, the most vivid dreams are the ones where he tells me where he is, how I can find him, and how he wants me to join him there. I can speculate endlessly, but I know one thing for sure: I don't want to be haunted by the spectre of my living husband forever.

    Not that our broken marriage is the only heartache that haunts my dreams. The pain of losing our only son, Kenny, still tears my heart out. I still remember how my blood froze when I saw his eyes close, and his skin turn white as cream. His little arms and legs were stiff before the paramedics arrived. I remember the tears that were bottled up inside me, until my threshold burst in a flood of sorrow. If I could rewrite history-or if I could sell my soul-I would reclaim Kenny and Randy, to be the family we were destined to be. If I can write everything that haunts me, maybe I can expel those events from my soul forever.

    We all have to live with our share of regrets. I'm convinced there's no exception to that rule. Sometimes I wonder how life might have been different had I