The Runaway Wife by Elizabeth Birkelund

Author:Elizabeth Birkelund
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

HE’D HEARD THE TERM ALPENGLOW, BUT THIS WAS the first time he’d witnessed it. The enormous bowl of the sky was lit from below by the amber light of the setting sun. The few snowfields nestled inside crevices in distant peaks glowed a deep mauve.

The men were back in view. She leaned on the mountainside and stroked Hamlet’s feathers as they watched them.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked her. “Why are you hiding, running away?”

“Get a divorce, you say. You don’t know my husband.”

“No, but . . .” How could a woman of such competence feel so trapped?

“He’s running for political office.”

“It’s 2008. You can protect yourself.”

At the corner of the cave, she began to part the thick webs. Her nose was red and her cheeks were flushed.

“Do you think I haven’t already tried to extricate myself from his web?” She shook her head, then suddenly threw back her head as she laughed. He loved when she did that. It was like a fresh start to everything.

“Web, an apt word; they’re everywhere up here in these caves. Look,” she said, laughing, “they’re in my fingers, my hair. Help me, Jim! I’m stuck!”

He slid the viscous strings of web from her hair. One caught on her shoulder and he gently lifted it from her shirt. She continued to move through the webs.

“My husband thinks he can disguise his webs of manipulation. If he doesn’t wake me at all hours of the night to persuade me to stay—the exhaustion technique—he’ll spread a cloak of charm so thick around me that I won’t be able to move. He’ll laugh with me, at me, seduce me, punish me, curse me, diminish me, intimidate me, confuse me, distance himself from me to the point that I don’t exist for him (what I call the Gulag treatment), make me think I’m crazy so that I can’t trust myself, scare me with his physical strength—all of this, interchangeably, inexhaustibly, until I lose myself again and again to him. He’s a master, like that big spider up there, waiting for the fly to stop for just one moment . . .”

She placed the owlet on the cave floor and began, with one of her arrows, to strike at the webs, pulling them down one after another.

“In a moment of clarity,” she said, coughing, “after all those endless years of battling, of trying to make him see things from my perspective, I realized that this person, my husband, had no conscience, and that no matter what I said or did, nothing would change him or his mind. He is more immutable than this mountain.”

She closed her eyes as if it hurt to keep them open.

“If I go back to him now,” she continued, “he’ll charm me yet again, into my addiction. I’m a junkie—is that what you call it? A junkie for his evil. Evil! You might think that word is too extreme, but it’s not. Being up here in the clear mountain air allows me to see things as they are.

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