We'd had some good times together, but what I missed most was the day to day grind. The little idiosyncrasies and misfires that can sometimes ruin a relationship. Or make it wonderful. The constant daily scouring process of smoothing out the lumps in each other. Till we ended up fitting together like two perfectly joined pieces of wood on a fine work of cabinetry. The highs and the lows that make up a rich relationship. The companionship of facing the woes of the world together. And the joy of sharing everything, from the concern over the most inconsequential zit on your baby's butt to the endorphin saturated elation of a thirty mile run.
Of course it was the run, or I should say the running, that led to her disappearance. Things had gotten a little frustrating around the house, all the conflicting responsibilities of work and childcare and shuttling kids to school events had cut into our family recreation time. No trips to the woods for an entire summer. And we hadn't run or climbed together, just her and me, for a long, long while. My new job was demanding more and more of my time. And taking more and more of my interest. So she decided to start training for an Ultra.
An Ultra is any run over thirty miles. Which, as you might expect, takes some training. To work up to one you need to run every day for a certain amount of miles. They call them base miles. Then you try to get in one long run a week. Or, if possible, two. The idea is to rack up the miles spent on your feet. Running, jogging, power walking, it doesn't matter, you just keep upright and keep going. She had taken to running home from work on Wednesdays. It was about ten miles on the main roads, and if she felt up to it, she would add various back trails and loops on the route to notch it up to twelve or fifteen. All well and good while we were enjoying our Northwest late twilight. But as December approached, and her training intensified in preparation for the "Fat Ass Fifty" she wanted to run at Tiger Mountain that January, there just wasn't enough daylight in a day to hold both work and horse-feeding and kid-getting-off-to-school and running. So, self-sacrificial person that she was, she ran in the dark.
Right out of our life.
We'd had a special trunk show at work that night to feature a new shoe line. I ended up staying later than usual. When I got home from work there was no sign of her. The kids were restless and making noises about who was going to make dinner and when. Mir wondered if maybe her mom had gone straight to the stables to feed Rusty already. We waited. And waited. And waited.
Finally I got in the car and went looking, trying to retrace her presumed route. Unfortunately, I had only a rough idea of what that route was. She had never been particularly detailed about the way she took when she ran home and, truth be told, she changed it every time anyhow. By the time I had criss-crossed all the different possibilities, and cursed the driving rain the kept obscuring the various corners and byways, it was midnight. The kids were pretty anxious by this time. As was I. We called the police. Their attitude was less than energetic. They said to wait twenty-four hours and if we still hadn't heard from her they'd start a search. I remember vividly what the officer told me that night.
"Lotsa times wives need a little `shelter' Mr. Carson. I don't suppose you've had an argument lately have you? Maybe a heated argument...?"
And that was the course it took for some time after that. I was the main focus of suspicion and no trace of where she might have been snatched from or who may have done the snatching was ever found. I sometimes think if I had been a little more convincing as a distraught husband they would have worked a little harder at trying to find her. Instead, I am cursed with the lack of emotional expression I developed as a defensive mechanism in my small and bullied youth. Which led the police to think I knew more about my bride's disappearance than I was telling. The hour I couldn't account for when I closed down the store after the trunk show didn't help. I had been tired that night. Everybody else had gone home. And it had taken a while to put the store back to normal after the rearranging we had done that day to accommodate the event. Honest, Officer.
I miss her though. And I wonder what led me to neglect her enough to not run with her on that night, or suggest some other time when we could train together. At least express my concern that she endanger herself in that way. But I wasn't paying attention. I had got too caught up in my own life. My thrill over taking on a new position and proving myself in the new challenge of a new store with an entirely new clientele. If I stopped to think about her evening endeavor at all, it was as a "little run." Heck, she ran all the time in our neighborhood. What could possibly go wrong?
If I had it all to do over I'd say my piece. Tell her I thought she was wrong to put herself at that kind of risk. But she'd probably do it anyhow. She was nothing if not spirited. And if she thought she wanted to do something, or train for something, nothing would stand in her way. Her single-mindedness had led many a person to portray her as stubborn. I just knew one thing: When she set out to accomplish anything, she was going to end up accomplishing it.
And I'd seen the triathlon medals to prove it. My lovely wife couldn't swim worth a darn. She had so much lean body mass she sank like a stone. But every triathlon she'd ever entered forced her to swim at least a quarter of a mile, kicking and sputtering and having her goggles knocked off by the flailing limbs of her aquatically faster adversaries, before she got to the parts of the race that she was really good at, the bike and the run. And she always finished the race. Many times with a ribbon and a hunk of metal.
So I guess I was kind of happy she was training for an Ultra. At least she wouldn't drown. Who'd have thought she'd disappear off the face of the earth. And lead us to all the doubts and all the wondering and all the uncertainty about where she was and what had happened to her.
There's still only one thing I know for sure.
I miss her.
