Chapter 85

Trip Home Day 2 - Part 1

With our six o'clock start, we made pretty good time that day. The scenery after Winnipeg was a little more of trees than prairie, but still largely featureless. The part through Northwestern Ontario was mostly trees, but the terrain did start to become more interesting as we entered the Canadian Shield. It was pretty in a desolate winter sort of way, but you can only see so many trees before they become boring.

The conversation (for lack of a more descriptive word) today started when Diane asked for some anecdotes from when Carol, Riekie and I were together, especially that first summer. She was curious how our relationship actually developed. She knew the history, basically, but not the full emotional content. I think she knew instinctively that this would bring us into reliving and dissecting the big breakup that essentially ruined the three of our lives until now.

By embarking us on a trip down Nostalgia Lane, Diane was able to connect more completely with our past so she could feel more part of our present. That girl was magic that day. She managed to gently extract the whole story, sometimes in graphic detail of our year together, the subsequent break up, and the two years of the immediate aftermath. Yesterday, in recounting how our lives had been shaped and the paths they took described the fallout. Now we returned to 'ground zero'. We were able to examine, looking back twenty years just how youthfully immature and naïve we really had been.

As we recounted our tale in a depth and detail we had never shared with anyone else, we came to see how little actual planning we did toward our anticipated future together. We had never seriously discussed how we expected to stay together as a multiple marriage if I had actually gone into the Forces with its myriad global postings and long separations. Nor had we discussed where we would actually set up housekeeping beyond vague references to someday living at the farm.

Mom and Dad had taught us some basic skills at managing a household, but we never consciously laid out a plan. The only issue we had ever seriously considered and had some solid proposals for was in the event of early pregnancy from our wanton lovemaking. We had known of the risk and were prepared for the consequences. Mom and Dad had made us a serious offer to help with child rearing to allow us to continue our educations, but we'd never needed to use it

Carol's dream of becoming a commercial artist would have tied her down to a major centre, which was where the work was. Riekie could possibly have taken up a practice in a small town, but wanted to be near a teaching university. The Army would have posted me God knows where. It wouldn't be until near retirement I would be able to select a plum posting that might be close to 'home'. As we talked, we began to wonder collectively if perhaps we hadn't ourselves sown the seeds of our destruction that that man was able to exploit. Mom and Dad had warned us of pitfalls, but in the exuberance of youth, we brushed them aside, preferring to live in the moment, as the young always do. Our greatest mistake was in forgetting Mom's early warning of an 'evil' stalking us.

Riekie's mournful and frank statement of the day before, a single, simple remark, 'I didn't just lose My Man, my wife, my lovers -- I lost my two best friends', catalyzed us into truly dissecting what went wrong both externally and from within. We all realized that painful as it might be, we needed to do this to exorcise our demons and armour ourselves against a repeat.

Like the young suitor in the movie 'Shenandoah', we preferred to wallow in our love, and forgot or lost sight of the one thing we supposedly held dearest — our friendship, our 'liking' for each other. I preached, almost literally, from day one the value of friendship, but it seemed we started to give it more lip service rather than practice it.

It came out that perhaps, no, most likely, in the hard black and white terms of youth, I had totally misinterpreted my 'Cosmic Moment' that day in the barn about our three-way relationship, and that we should have been able to survive as a duo if one left us or was damaged. I had wondered for some time, especially with what had transpired recently vis-à-vis Diane and what I learned about Kit, if I hadn't misunderstood what I saw that day. It was my interpretation of that 'vision' that locked us into the tripartite arrangement that wouldn't allow the survivors to stand if one was taken from us.

My epiphany, if you could call it that, in September about an infinite soul being able to love almost an infinite number of others made that point all too clear. If Kit had survived and came to us, I would have been forced then to re-evaluate my interpretation. If I had interpreted it correctly originally, Kit would in all likelihood have been a part of our relationship before we returned home that summer. Sounds hasty, but look at the speed with which our base relationships developed. Kit, being older, may have been just the 'mature' leavening we needed at that time.

The evidence that we lost sight of our friendship began with our disagreement over me going to Camp that fateful summer. Even my mother had to take some of the blame for that, and it may be one of the reasons she worked so hard and tirelessly behind the scenes over the years. She and the girls had Seen something that scared them to death, so much so in Carol's case, it left her an emotional wreck all through July of that year. I hadn't seen much evidence of that except the devastated state she was in when I left, and Bob's comments later. None of it showed in her letters. But none of them was willing to describe what they Saw or felt in detail, only telling me in vague terms something 'bad' was going to happen. If they had even described the full intensity of their feeling of impending doom, I might have paid more attention. In hindsight, neither Carol nor Riekie could explain exactly what they felt, but now were able describe the intensity of it.

I wasn't much better. I got my back up at what I took to be simple female and lovers' angst at separation and became uncharacteristically stubborn about going to camp. Yes, it was a feather in my cap for entrance to RMC, but by no means a requisite. I had been raised to believe in discussion and constructive compromise, but on that one issue I became absolutely obstinate, and wouldn't trust Mom's or the girls' Sight. Operative word — trust.

Carol, being the most emotionally volatile of the three of us (artist's temperament?) was distraught, and became vulnerable to her father's manipulation. Because she knew I'd lacked trust in their feelings of impending disaster, she lost faith in me, and easily fell victim to his lies, believing the stories of infidelity. Operative word — again, trust.

Riekie, perhaps a little more emotionally stable, with a brilliant analytical mind and believing strongly in friendship, didn't fall for their father's guile, but her trust was still undermined. Because Carol had lost faith in me, Riekie thought Carol had also lost it in her. When that man raped Riekie, she had no one to turn to. She only told part of the story to Carol, but Carol refused to believe — her father by this time had her so enamored of his 'good guy' status, she simply couldn't. With the violation of her trust in her father, and the emotional devastation of that, Riekie ran because she thought no one would believe her. And then, like Carol, she lost trust in herself, thinking she'd been somehow a willing partner, thus making it virtually impossible to tell the one person she still trusted — me. Again, the operative word — trust.

Carol finally did regain her trust in me over the purported infidelity, and lost faith in her father because his lies were becoming transparent, but too late. When he abused her, Carol, already emotionally fragile, lost that most valuable form of trust -- trust in herself -- believing she had somehow betrayed everything she believed in. Carol's emotional breakdown was almost complete. To this day I'm still amazed and eternally thankful that we were able to salvage her. One more time, the operative word — trust.

I was as guilty in the breakup as anyone. I didn't trust the system to work, although in hindsight (wonderful thing, that!) it probably would have. I didn't trust Carol to believe me if I told her the truth, and I didn't believe anyone else would believe, even though we had witnesses in the form of her young brothers that all that happened was a beating (All? Shit, it was brutal!). Again, with that wonderful tool called hindsight, I should have confronted their father, told Dolly at the very least, and once I figured out the full impact of what had happened, confronted Carol, even if it meant knocking down her door to do it. It may have been traumatic for her, but no worse than what she already experienced. When she most needed to be held and comforted, she didn't get it — from anyone. Like Carol, I lost trust in me, and her ability to handle the truth. Yet again, operative word — trust.

And I should have been more forceful with Riekie. I should have gone straight to her, ignoring what she said in her last letter. Hell, in that letter, she said no communication — letters or phone calls — basically a direct plea for personal contact; she didn't say what would happen if I showed up on her doorstep. I should especially have told her what happened to Carol. In this, I had a misplaced sense of trust. When I should have been telling what I knew, I kept quiet, fearing I would be violating Carol's trust. In point of fact, the only trust I would have violated, was that of the perpetrator. Knowing she wasn't alone, would have allowed Riekie to tell what happened to her. With two separate attacks, the system would have worked for sure.

So, supposedly being the 'mature beyond my years' person I was supposed to be, I handled the whole situation like almost any other seventeen year old kid would. I wimped out and waited for the 'adults' to look after it, except there was only one adult aware, and he was the perpetrator. Looking back, like my uncharacteristic stubbornness over the camp issue, this was totally out of character for me. I had stood up to the beast before. Why couldn't I then? Threats and promises of future retribution may have protected the girls from future physical violence, but did nothing to address what had actually happened. Yes, my mind was distracted by the emotional upheaval, but something more insidious clouded my judgment.

It took two years, with the news of rejection from my chosen career path before my own guilt at not intervening, which I buried for all that time, surfaced. When it did, instead of then being able to act proactively as I should have, I fell completely apart. For seventeen years after that, I carried that burden of guilt that almost at any time could possibly have been resolved with a phone call and some plane tickets -- phone call to Bob to round up his father for a confrontation, and plane tickets to get everyone together. With a little spine and resolution on my part it could possibly have been done even before they even moved to Toronto that fall.

But that is what 20/20 hindsight tells us. The reality of course, is entirely different. The resolution was left to chance and the Power or as it turned out, the lack of it. There is no right or wrong in the way the girls and I reacted. The true wrongs were perpetrated by one man. Easy to say because what he did, including the lies he told about me to Carol are patently illegal. The fault that lay with us was our youth, inexperience and naïveté, aided and abetted by our break down in trust amongst ourselves and for ourselves. Trust, the very cornerstone of friendship, and we lost it.

Looking back, Carol, Riekie and I did come to the conclusion that if — if, the biggest word in the English language — we had patched things up or not broken up at all, the next two years of high school and gained life experience plus the teachings of Mom and Dad would have better prepared us for life together. We had two years of high school and however many years of college to work out the details of our final family — where and how we'd live. We were no different at age seventeen than any other high school sweethearts, even those in 'monogamous' relationships, at that age.