We didn't go to see his family. We spent the night in a hotel in Post Falls. As he slept beside me, I thought of Daniel and wept, not for the last time. I knew it was too late, though. I couldn't go back to him. If he hadn't wanted me when I was a virgin, he certainly wouldn't want me now. We wound up rambling around the country, vagabonds, gypsies....sleeping in the International Scout, and later on the side of the road or in a tent, or in homeless shelters. We went to see my dad, who begged me to leave my new husband. That would be adultery...I couldn't do that. We told him what things had been like, how Eliyah had molested us. He had me call CPS, and he left immediately and drove straight up there. When he came back, Sarah was with him. She was upset with me for telling, but seemed happy to be away from there. She stayed with my Dad and Marie, got her G.E.D., went to college, and went on to have a successful life. CPS did nothing about the abuse, because nobody who was under age would admit to what was going on. It later turned out that he had sexually abused every one of us.

I bore Vincent two children before I realized it wasn't going to work out, that my heart still pined for Daniel and would for decades. When I was pregnant with my second child, I was able to talk Vincent into taking me back to northern Idaho, and we found Daniel. He had remarried, too, and was dying of cancer. His wife and I became friends, and we caretook his little cabin while he sought out natural miracle cures for a melanoma gone wild, a weed that the surgeons had burrowed seven centimeters into his chest to try to dig out. I remembered my dream though...and I knew he would die. I wondered what had gone wrong between us, why, WHY....but I never had the courage to ask. His wife just complained a lot about how poor they were. I marveled at this, although I liked her. Daniel was hardly the man to marry if a woman wanted all the material perks in life! Nevertheless, we got along and talked often. Our sons were born within a month of one another that spring.

I found myself alone in time, raising my two children. Daniel died less than a year after the birth of his son. I never did get to talk with him....to find out what went wrong, the whole story. I have struggled since then with the sense that if I'd tried harder, if I'd fought, if only I'd told him about what Eliyah was doing, maybe things would have been different. Maybe he would have taken me home after all. Maybe I'd have seen that mole before it spread, and maybe I could have talked him into seeing a doctor. Maybe he'd still be alive. Maybe my children would have his blue eyes, his smile creasing from their eyes down into their cheeks.

Or...I think about the time we were working in the woods, after we were engaged. He told me that some day, I wouldn't have to pull the sled full of firewood or swing my maul to split it. Someday, I could stay in the house and wear dresses and live as a farmwife. He said it in such a comforting tone of voice, but it rattled me a little bit even then. Now, I wonder if he ever really knew me at all, to say something like that? I still swing my maul, and god help the man who tries to take it from me. I think about how young I was...just 17...it seems that at 35, he could have found ways to be more reliable, handle the thing more responsibly. I think of all the letters exhorting me to bear up under hardship without complaining, when he knew exactly how brutal some of that hardship was...and of him asking why I ran away, when there was ample and obvious cause, even without the sexual abuse. I think of how my role was to produce children, birthing them at home, and of how treacherous my births have been. I might not be alive today. It's easy to idealize someone who's gone; the reality might have been just as bad as the one I was fleeing.

What then? What else could I have done? By that time, phobic of people, unable to drive, hindered by elaborate and bizarre beliefs, trained to be paranoid of any outsiders, getting a job would have been next to impossible. With almost no skills for coping with the outside world, I couldn't have moved out on my own. Sometimes I've thought that I should have gone to work for a goat dairy on the West Coast. But...trained to be homophobic, unable to figure out why I was so fixated on Jaylene, why I missed her so badly when I was away from her..so much confusion, so many things just didn't make sense. Maybe I could have worked in Idaho as a farm intern somewhere. I didn't know such a thing existed, but that might have been a good introduction to gaining independence and getting a different perspective on life from other people. Above all, it's infuriating that marriage was the only option for getting my freedom, or rather, transferring it to someone else like a car title. I don't know what the answers are.

These thoughts haunt me daily. There are so many maybes, so many regrets, so many questions that will never be answered. I don't know. Nobody knows.