Things slowly became a blur after that. I found the company astoundingly interesting. I soaked up the conversations and laughed when I was supposed to. I kept sipping and loving the taste and loving my new friends until everyone was confusing to me and I felt my body move on its own. I felt it lean sideways even though I wasn’t leaning. I’d have to catch myself to stay straight. I felt the room begin to spin. Deep inside, my body was turning against the air I was breathing, turning against gravity, turning crookedly against itself.
The next morning I woke in a place unknown to me. I was in a small bedroom on a single bed. My waist-length hair was covered with something sticky and thick. I caught a whiff of a pungent odour and knew it was vomit. The pain in my head became unbearable as I shifted my body. I leaned forward, cringing, and held my head, fearing my brain would crack in two.
Eventually I managed to get up to search for a bathroom. When I entered the living room, I realized I was still in the same house. The guy who owned it was passed out on the couch. All alone.
After that wild night, I slipped easily into a lifestyle of drinking and partying. The hangover soon went away and the booze kept me at a safe distance from myself. For a few months I drifted from job to job and lived wherever I could find a bed for the night. Sometimes it was with female friends, other times with male friends, known or unknown to me. I had no contact with my parents even though they lived only twenty miles away.
One night, in a bar, I met up with a girl who had been in my class back in Geary. Linda was married to a soldier, a guy named Doug. They lived in Lincoln, halfway between Fredericton and Oromocto. Linda walked into the bar bathroom and found me crying because I’d just lost another job, this one in a candy store. I’d been late too many times and was finally let go. I had no place to live and wasn’t even sure where most of my clothes were. Linda offered to help. She told me I could come stay with her and Doug. I accepted the offer, desperately in need of some sort of permanence, having no idea I would soon meet my first husband in Linda’s home, and finally embrace the menacing instability that would nearly kill me.
STAN
When I moved into Linda’s house in Lincoln, I made a firm commitment to get my life back on track. I even decided to visit my parents so I could let them know I was alive and doing well.
“Oh, Eva, you’re all right!” my mother said, running to the door to greet me when I arrived. She wrapped her tiny arms around my back and held tightly, starting to cry.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Mom had lost weight and looked ill.
“I was so worried,” she wept into my cheek. “I prayed every night.”
I returned her hug, held on tighter, and burst into tears. She loves me, I thought. She really loves me. “I’m fine, Mom.”
My father wasn’t home from work yet and my brothers were at school, so I sat and waited with Mom as she filled the kettle for tea and set a plate of cinnamon rolls on the table in front of me.
She smiled. “One of your favourites. Eat.”
I raised a cinnamon bun to my mouth as I studied my mother. She had definitely lost weight, more than I had first observed. “Are you okay, Mom?”
She sat in the chair across from me, her eyes sad and happy at once. “After you left, I just couldn’t seem to eat much. We didn’t hear from you. I was sure something awful had happened.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t have a phone.”
She nodded. “You’re fine, though.”
“Is Dad mad at me?”
“He was worried, too.” Pausing, she watched me chew a bite of cinnamon roll. “He’ll be glad to see you. He even called the police once. And I checked the hospital.”
“I didn’t think you’d be worried.”
My mother stared at me as if remembering something distant and uncertain, then the kettle began to whistle.
When my father came home from his job as janitor at the Oromocto Shopping Centre, he didn’t say a word. He just laid down his silver lunch pail and put his arms around me, gently patting my head.
My brothers were excited to see me. They eagerly chatted about what was happening in their lives.
I stayed with my family until Linda’s husband, Doug, picked me up that evening around ten o’clock. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever felt so loved. Leaving the house in a blissful state of reassurance, I even promised Dad I’d try to make it to church the following Sunday. We were opening up to one another and expressing our feelings. My mother was worried to the point of weight loss, to the point of sickness. Was it possible we could finally be at peace with each other?
That night back in Lincoln, Doug and Linda invited a friend of theirs over to meet me. It was a blind date of sorts, although I knew I was being set up. Linda told me the man’s name was Stan and he was stationed with the Black Watch Regiment, just like Doug, at CFB Gagetown, a military base housed primarily within Oromocto town limits. When Doug mentioned Stan was also a Mohawk from Deseronto, Ontario, I grew even more eager to meet him.
Stan was three years older than I. He was a big, imposing man over two hundred pounds and as solid as a mountain. But his shyness and boyish face made him seem like a gentle giant. This time it wasn’t only the dark skin and eyes that attracted me. It was also his deep, soft-spoken voice, so low he practically mumbled, and the way his fingers moved across the neck of his Gibson guitar. He carried his guitar with him everywhere he went. Music was becoming another of my addictions, and I was easy prey to the soothing, resonant pluck of a guitar.
Stan and I didn’t talk much that first night. He spent most of his time singing country songs while we all enjoyed a few glasses of ale. I’d decided to lay off the heavy stuff and stick to beer for a while.
I knew the words to most of the songs Stan sang: old country ballads by Hank Williams and Marty Robbins, love songs by Jim Reeves and Buck Owens. When Stan started to sing “Crystal Chandelier” by Charlie Pride, I joined in and realized immediately that our voices blended seamlessly. There was a natural harmony between us. I was embarrassed and deeply touched at the same time.
“You have a nice voice,” he told me with a timid smile that showed off his full lips.
I smiled back, feeling a growing fondness toward him. “So do you.”
He stayed overnight at Doug and Linda’s. I slept in my room and he stretched out on the couch.
Over the next couple of weeks I saw Stan frequently. When he revealed truths about his lonely childhood, how he’d been cared for by grandparents until he started school because of his mother’s drinking, I felt a bond of suffering between us. As he talked about his father who had died when he was still a boy, I saw a profound sadness in his eyes.
“No one has ever really loved me,” he professed, not looking at me. We were sitting in Linda’s living room. It was 1967 and we were watching Bonanza. Stan believed Lorne Greene was a Mohawk from Ontario and therefore felt a special kinship with the actor. “Thank you for being so kind,” he told me.
In the light of this meekness I vowed to try to help alleviate some of his pain. For now my own troubled past was forgotten. I would mend someone else’s pain.
Just seventeen, I was hoping to have my own home and break free from the authority of my parents. Stan had never been a regular churchgoer, but said he’d be willing to attend my church. That should please my parents, I thought. So I followed Stan home for Christmas to Ontario to meet “the family” barely two months after we started dating.
The eighteen-hour train trip was accompanied by a forty-ouncer of Silent Sam vodka. I’d decided that this particular occasion called for something stronger than beer. We found a comfortable spot on the train on a bench across from a couple of guys with