Surprise

Chapter 36

The thing I remember most about lockdown is that parts of my life actually got better.

Not my marriage. That was already over long before COVID arrived. But life itself slowed down in a way that felt almost relieving to me. The rest of the world seemed trapped inside their houses losing their minds while I was secretly enjoying not rushing everywhere. For the first time in years there were no sports schedules, no school events, no constant shuffling from one obligation to the next. The outside world stopped demanding so much from me all at once, and honestly, I liked it.

I painted walls. The whole downstairs got the royal treatment. I remodeled the boys’ bathroom and turned it from an Avengers bathroom with red, white, and blue walls into something that actually looked like two boys were growing up. Both boys got room makeovers during that time. New paint. New furniture arrangements. Accent walls. Somewhere between the shutdowns and the endless news cycles, my house became my project.

I also decided I was going to become a gardener. That went about as well as you would expect. I started seeds. Tomatoes. Peppers. Herbs. Even corn. At one point I had dozens of little plants growing in every available window. Getting them to sprout was easy. Keeping them alive once they made it into the garden was another story entirely. Before long everything had grown into everything else and my carefully planned garden looked more like a tangled, overgrown mess in my backyard. A gardener I am not.

The truth is, I stayed busy because I already knew what was waiting for me if I sat still too long. And I wasn’t interested.

By Christmas I had realized my husband wasn’t going to even attempt rebuilding our marriage. When he came home from rehab, I wanted to believe things might be different. I wanted to believe we would finally get answers. That we would go to counseling. That someone could explain what had happened to our family over the previous two years. Or fifteen, depending on where you started keeping track. I had hoped there would be accountability or healing or at least an honest attempt at understanding.

But, none of that happened.

He came home because he missed his house. He missed his couch. He missed his kids. The danger seemed to have passed, but the work of repairing anything never really began. He refused marriage counseling. He never pursued a psychiatric evaluation. We never got answers. We simply went back to living together. Roommates. Except now the psychosis wasn’t being openly discussed anymore, it was just another thing that had happened that we didn’t talk about.

By the time lockdown arrived, I wasn’t confused about my marriage. I wasn’t fighting for it. I wasn’t hoping for some miraculous breakthrough. I already knew where this road ended. What COVID did was remove all of the exits. Suddenly the entire world was stuck at home, and I was stuck inside a marriage that I knew wasn’t going to survive.

Oddly enough, while my personal life felt completely stalled, work exploded.

Michigan had some of the strictest COVID restrictions of any state, which meant Baycreek couldn’t operate the way it always had. Our monthly market weekends disappeared overnight. Instead of opening for one crowded weekend each month, we decided to spread everything out over multiple days. Customers had to schedule appointments. Shopping happened in two hour time slots. Only a handful of people were allowed in the building at a time. Even staging changed. Instead of a building full of vendors moving furniture around together, only two or three of us worked at a time.

We were so afraid at first that it would hurt sales. Instead, something unexpected happened.

People slowed down.

Without the crowds and the frenzy, customers actually had time to look at things. They measured furniture. They walked through displays imagining pieces in their own homes. They made intentional decisions instead of impulse purchases.

And somehow they bought more.

For the first time in years, home mattered deeply to people. Everyone was stuck staring at the same four walls every day, and suddenly those walls mattered. And I just happened to be in the business of home decor. I finally was in the right place at the right time.

We also moved online for the first time. It didn’t last forever because it became expensive to maintain, but during that period it opened an entirely new side of the business. Looking back, COVID taught us a lot about slowing things down. We discovered that people didn’t necessarily buy less when they had more time.  They bought more.

At the same time, both boys were home with me. My youngest was only in first grade when everything shut down. Every week Mrs. Finn would pull into our driveway with a stack of schoolwork. She would drop off the next week’s assignments, pick up the previous week’s papers, and then she’d stay and spend time with us. We were always her last stop.

Sometimes she had lunch with us. Sometimes she sat in the backyard while my youngest bounced on the trampoline showing off whatever new trick he had learned that week. Somewhere along the way she stopped feeling like my son’s teacher and started feeling like a friend.

Those visits became one of the bright spots of lockdown.

Life wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t terrible either. My kids were home. Work was good. The house was improving. The constant chaos that had defined the previous two years had finally quieted down.

Then there was Bella.

God bless that dog.

The world shut down before I could ever get her into proper training classes, which meant I somehow became solely responsible for training what can only be described as the most unruly pup I’d ever encountered.  She barked constantly. Growled when corrected. Refused to move when she didn’t feel like moving. She would lay directly in the middle of the floor and stare at me while I negotiated with her with treats and toys and any distraction method I could think of.

At first I thought I had made a terrible mistake bringing her home.

Eventually I realized Bella wasn’t poorly behaved. She was a true alpha female. Underneath all that stubbornness was fierce loyalty. If voices got too loud in the house, Bella inserted herself between people. If I yelled at my kids, she’d stand between me and the kid like he was hers. Not mine. If my husband raised his voice, she stepped directly between us. She always knew exactly where she stood.

On my kids’ side first, and then mine. There is something kind of magical about a dog that won’t even let their own mother come near them. A stranger would have no chance.

Later that summer, after months of being trapped at home, I loaded up both boys, Bella, and Chloe and drove to Hilton Head Island. We rented a condo, stayed mostly to ourselves, and spent our days at the beach.

It was Bella’s first time seeing the ocean.

One evening we took her down to the beach after 6pm when the dog restrictions lifted. I had her attached to a ridiculously long leash because there was absolutely no chance I trusted her off leash near an ocean. She was still a puppy and had absolutely no recall. If she ran, I was convinced we would never see her again.

At some point a woman walked over and asked why I had Bella tied up.

“Because she’s a puppy,” I told her. “If I let her go, I’ll never see her again.”

The woman laughed and told me that wasn’t how dogs worked. She explained that Bella would run around, play with the other dogs, wear herself out, and then come back to me when she was ready.

I remember looking at her like she had lost her mind. This woman had clearly never met Bella.

But eventually, against every instinct in my body, I unclipped the leash. As I cringed just knowing this was the end of having Bella, she ran free.

For the next hour Bella ran like she had been set free from prison. She chased the waves, played with other dogs and sprinted circles through the sand like she had discovered paradise.

And then, exactly like the woman promised, she came back. She walked straight over to me, laid her wet sandy head in my lap, and sighed.

The woman was right.

The boys spent their days body surfing in the waves, catching tiny lizards around the pool, and enjoying a freedom none of us had felt in months. We got stung by jellyfish, ate simple meals back at the condo and stayed mostly to ourselves.

We even ended up staying an extra night because none of us were ready to go home.

What I didn’t know at the time was that it would be Chloe’s last trip.

Chloe had been mine long before my husband ever was.

She was my baby before I had babies.

I got her during one of our many breakups before we finally got married. At the time that I picked her out, I was living in the townhouse I had bought for myself and working summers at Put-in-Bay, a little island in the middle of Lake Erie that was full of bars.

When you work on an island, you don’t go home after your shift. You stay there because the ferries are the only way back to the mainland and they stopped running at 11pm. So, I not only had my townhouse, but, I also had my little island room I rented that summer.

I wasn’t supposed to have a puppy, but my boss was also my landlord and somehow I convinced her to let me bring her with me anyway. When she saw her little squishy face, she couldn’t say no.

That decision may have changed Chloe’s entire personality.

She arrived as an eight week old black and white Shih Tzu and immediately became everyone’s dog. I would go to work and come back hours later having absolutely no idea where she was. Someone always “borrowed” her.

Maybe it was one of the ferry crew members. Or,  one of the bartenders. Or, somebody from one of the restaurants. Perhaps she spent her day on a boat.

Eventually whomever borrowed her, would bring her back to me.

Nobody locked their doors on the island. Nobody locked their cars. It was a completely different world back then, and Chloe treated the entire island like her personal backyard. By the end of that summer she had probably ridden the ferry more than the workers.

She was fearless, social, and completely convinced that every human being existed specifically to love her.

For nineteen years she followed me through nearly every version of my adult life.

But, by the end, she wasn’t the little island celebrity anymore.

She was blind. Mostly deaf. Stiff and confused. Sometimes she wandered into corners and couldn’t figure out how to turn herself around. Sometimes she stood staring at walls. She became like a stuffed animal you had to take care of.

The vet had always told me she would let me know when she was ready. And, for a long time, she wasn’t. She really didn’t seem to be in pain, just lost, as if she had dementia.

Then one day she started crying.

Not barking.

Not whining.

Crying.

And I knew.

Nineteen years felt impossibly long and nowhere near long enough at the same time.

The next day I took her in. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was also the kindest. My ride or die little girl crossed the rainbow bridge and took a piece of me with her.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it—months of worrying about work and homeschooling and marriage and dogs and all the uncertainty that came with that year—I found myself looking for a memory. At least, that’s what I told myself.

The truth is, I was lonely. I was lonely for adult companionship. Lonely for big conversations. Lonely for someone who knew me outside of the roles I spent my days carrying.

So I opened an old email account, intending to reread a few messages Paul and I had exchanged years before. I wanted proof that what I remembered had actually happened. Proof that the connection I remembered so vividly had been real.

What I found instead stopped me cold.

Sitting there waiting for me were years of emails from Paul.

Unread.

One after another.

While I had been busy surviving my own life, he had been trying to reach me.

The entire time.

And I had no idea.

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