Hide and seek June 15, 1985

 

Back in Jersey from a short, frustrating vacation that proved nothing.

Louise is hidden somewhere around a lake surrounded by houses, and my luck wasn’t good enough for me to find her.

I didn’t have nerve enough to ask too many questions of too many people, scared she might find out, scared more that I might learn too much about who she is living with and what her current condition is.

The woman at the post office looked at me as if I was a racist when I asked her to put a note in Louise’s post office box.

I regret the note because it may spook Louise and cause her to flee again, perhaps as far as Portland the way she did last time.

She’ll move quickly to change her location and will suspect if I make a second trip of Moscow, I might actually find her.

She knows me too well. I’m always tempting fate, just as I did back in 78 when she pulled this crap the last time, when I had to go to court to win visitation, when she panicked, I might steal our kid away from here and fled to Portland.

I just don’t know how close I’ve come, and it hurts to think we’ve lost all the progress we made since those bad old days, back to the old mistrust, back to making me feel guilty for things I haven’t done.

This is all part of an ugly pattern I am desperate to break, she hiding, me searching aimlessly without luck.

She told me she got religion, and once mentioned a church, so I went there assuming she would come to service as some point, but after hours of standing around nearby, she never showed.

I suspect that without her cooperation, I might never find her, and certainly, won’t win her trust by hunting out her hiding place.

I’m scared that this pattern will plague us both until we’re old and gray, a child’s game of hide and seek we can’t give up on, she needing me only as someone to blame for how badly her life turned out, me needing her for reasons I can’t explain.

Maybe I’ve never been honest with her, going back to when we met at Nevins, and I liked about my age – she being a year and half older than I was – because I thought she would not take me seriously if she knew I was still 17. I also made up stories about myself to impress her, childish tales that painted me into something I was not and could never be, no matter how much I wished I could be.

She, on the other hand, told me real stories that horrified me, how she lost her virginity in a sleeping bag while sleeping out on Garret Mountain, how she as a cheerleader did more than cheer on the boys in high school when they took her under the bleachers, or how all her dates to the dark of the movie theater ended up the same way, and later, how shocked I was when she plunged deep into the LA porn industry and I was helpless to stop her.

She has always been too real to me. And I have always been a threat to her.

Last fall, when I took my daughter for a week, I found she was a stranger, someone I knew nothing about, only getting brief glimpses of her from the occasional visit to see her.

This scared me to death. This made me realize that if I do not do something soon, I might never know her at all.

And so, I search and search, hoping fate will make up for all my life long mistakes.

 

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