Missing Wife or Was She My Wife?

I am not really sure where to begin this tale. I’m not even sure I want to tell it. It will make me look like a fool or a wimp or maybe even a perverted idiot. Oh well. I wonder if the ex-bitch reads stories here. That would be interesting. She will certainly recognize herself if she does.

Cue the theme from the old television show Dragnet. “The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

No they haven’t…. They have been changed to protect the GUILTY.

I drove towards my house on that fateful Saturday morning mid-spring. Even barely past dawn it was warm already in central Texas. I had just finished a double shift in the cardiac critical care unit of the hospital where my wife and I worked. She worked days in the surgical unit. I got paid a bonus to work evenings and nights. The differential offered was enough to convince us to continue with us not being home at the same time most of the time. Except for alternate weekends and the occasional days we were off at the same time, we had just a few hours of overlap before I began my shift if I worked nights. When I worked evenings, I arrived at the hospital before my wife Carol was even off work. Our only child, a daughter, was in junior high and old enough to fend for herself after school until my wife got home.

Family time, when we had it, was a precious commodity. We relished spending time together. This was our fifth year following this routine. We were all on the same sheet of music to suffer through some hardships for a few more years and bank some cash for the future. Or so I thought.

Before we went to nursing school we had very little discretionary income. We ran a small business after I left the military. We barely made ends meet. As nurses we could even take a couple weeks off to go to Disney World on a two week road trip. We drove there in a new car we bought as a family car. I still had the same piece of crap car I had from before. It had not yet turned into a parts toilet so I planned to drive it until the wheels fell off.

I passed the doughnut store a few blocks before I turned into our subdivision. I almost stopped like I did most weekend mornings. I knew a dozen warm pastries would be well received. Pastries on a Saturday morning was our usual breakfast time together. I figured my wife or teenage daughter might not be up that early and I could always make the quick trip back for some if they wanted. So I kept driving.

Our house was only the second one on the street. My wife’s sedan was not in the drive. Had she parked in the garage instead? Half of the two car garage was filled with boxes and general junk we had accumulated and while there was room for a car, we usually both parked in the driveway. The sedan she drove, the ‘family’ car, was new so we would park it inside during inclement weather. My vehicle was just good enough to transport my ass to and from work safely. Who cared if it got got dinged by the occasional hail storm.

I was puzzled but did not think much about it except to wonder if maybe my wife had gone to the doughnut shop to buy pastries and I had not seen her car as I passed. I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. I was met with a large, furry mass that pinned me back against the door. Our great pyrenees was standing on his hind feet looking me straight in the face, excited to see me. Usually his greetings were more subdued, merely dancing around in his excitement that a human had arrived to see him. I commanded him to get down. He obeyed with his tail beating a fast tempo, happy to see me. I opened the back door and called out to see if our other dog needed to go outside to relieve itself. It did not show up. I figured it was confined in my daughter’s room with her where it normally slept.

As I turned back to the living room while the dog was outside, I noticed a few strange things. Packing material. A little bubble wrap on the couch. Three collapsed cardboard boxes. Nothing else looked out of place. The knick knacks on a shelf to one side of the living room were all untouched. I saw nothing else to indicate something was wrong. I called the dog inside and stepped into the bedroom I shared with my wife. She was not there. The bed was made. Well not properly made. The top cover was pulled up like my wife insisted when I got out of bed. I walked towards the back where our large bathroom and walk in closet was. The closet door stood open like usual. What was not usual was the sight that was presented. Most of my wife’s clothes were gone. I stepped inside. My side of the closet was untouched. I turned back to my bedroom and noticed a yellow notepad on my pillow.

“We are gone. Don’t bother to try to find us. I will contact you when I am ready. (signed) C.” was all it said. My heart fell through my stomach. I rushed upstairs to my daughter’s room. Her bed was not made and there was some trash and a few articles of clothing on the floor but that was not unusual. At fifteen, my wife and I told her if she wanted to live in a pigsty, that was up to her.

It was messy like it usually was, but I could tell many things were missing off the shelves we had built to hold her memorabilia. I looked in her closet to find most of her clothes gone. The few remaining items were things she had outgrown.

I could not wrap my mind around what I was seeing. What the hell was going on? I was tired almost to the point of exhaustion from my double shift, but at the same time my heart was pounding from the adrenaline rush as I began to realize what had happened. My wife had left me. Not only that, but my fifteen year old daughter had gone with her.

As I walked numbly through the house now looking into all the rooms I tried to think of a WHY. Had I been that much of a jerk? Maybe I was. I was quick to display my temper. I never hit my wife nor my daughter but I might throw something across the room and yell. I had repaired walls where I had punched or kicked a hole several times in the past. Each time, I had regretted my impulsive actions afterwards.

My wife seemed to sometimes push my buttons deliberately. Like in the past while we were nursing students and she was in charge of the checkbook and paid all the bills. If we were short of funds she might just not pay a bill. She did not even bother to pay a token amount to show we were trying. We would get hit with a late fee which compounded the problem. And she would not tell me. When I asked how the bills were, she’d say “fine, got them covered’ and like a fool I did not check.

Her control of the checkbook came to an end when I found out she had not paid the mortgage on our house for a few months. “Well, you need to pay it all. ” was her excuse. “They want what is due now and all the back payments at one time. We never had enough at one time to do that.” she explained. Our home got repossessed. I went nuts when I found out which pissed her off that I did not ‘understand’. I took over the bill paying after that.

From this you might think my wife was not too smart. Far from it. She was borderline genius. I mean she had a memory like a steel trap. Nobody I knew could compete with her at trivial pursuit. She spoke a couple languages beyond her native English. Years later, long after the events of this story, she competed on the TV show Jeopardy and won her round. Common sense and staying on top of things was NOT her forte. She’d always start out great and then some how fuck it up.

But I loved her. We’d met when she was just nineteen. I was twenty seven. We were both in the same unit in the Army. Both in Military Intelligence. We did well there and then it came time to become civilians after I got her pregnant. Years later, after a couple tried and failed, or at least replaced career paths for both of us including the aforementioned business, we went to nursing school together. Once again we did well. This time our combined pay let us buy things we had not had.

We bought a nice two story house despite having had one repossessed.. Two bedrooms and a full bath upstairs with a great master bedroom, adjoining bath and walk in closet downstairs. Vaulted ceiling, dining room. It was a great house. We could now afford to live in comfort. In addition to the house, we bought some acreage outside of town where we talked of building a home in the next few years. It was big enough to qualify as a small farm, thirty acres only a few miles from the interstate. The only thing on that acreage at the time were our horses. My wife and daughter had wanted to learn to ride so we bought horses and all the accompanying equipment and animals. Learning to jump a horse is not a cheap endeavor but since we now had a decent combined income we could afford it. We boarded a couple horses at a stable where we rode frequently and kept the others on the land we purchased.

I entertained the fantasy of building a home and moving out onto that land eventually. We had the income and we intended to fulfill our wishes. Financially we were doing great. Coming out on top after years of struggling. Until it fell apart.

One thing I neglected to mention before was when all this occurred. It was 1996. In addition to our recreation on our land, we began to indulge in the internet. When computers first became available, we had to have one. I bought a Texas instrument 99 I believe it was when it first came out. Then an Apple C. Then came the next generation machine, dial up internet access and the world was open. Neither my wife nor I bothered to learn to program but we had our toys. My daughter learned the internet and played video games.

When my wife left me she obviously had no room in her car to take our computer. It sat on the table in our third bedroom/computer room.

People were becoming enthused about this new internet thing. It had been around for a while, but now it was available for the common people. AOL was starting up offering people a way to communicate with others for a fee. Even my parents, as old as they were began to use it. You could talk to people all over the planet. Of course the connection was slow and pictures took a long time to bring up on your color monitor with a dial up connection if you decided to go that far. On the other hand you could talk to people all over about a myriad of interests. Chat rooms appeared. You could even instant message a person across the country or around the world without a long distance charge! How exciting.

I even talked with my parents now on at least a weekly basis. My mother commented one time, she got to talk with me more in the previous months than in the ten years prior.

Carol loved the television show X-files. She enjoyed talking to others about the show. I had found a group offering sex stories although I did not tell her about that.

I honestly think the internet was our downfall. Of course Carol and I might have only stayed together for a while until something else came up but the internet quickened our marriage’s demise.

She wanted to attend one of the first versions of what became Comicon. She wanted to meet in person the fans of some of the sci-fi fiction she enjoyed herself. especially the X-files. I did not subscribe to the same level of emotion and she knew it. I liked the shows but did not care to hash out how Mulder and Scully did their jobs and all the alternative story lines that might have developed. I knew she loved to discuss all this in the early version of chat rooms.

She hit me up with a proposition. “Why don’t you go to Vegas for a few days?” she said. “You’ve talked about going for a while.” I had but not without her. I had always been fascinated with the idea. She told me she did not want to go but I should go and have some fun. At her insistence, I began to learn about gambling, how to play the various games. I learned enough to not lose my ass the first ten minutes I was there. Actually I did better than that. I played and drank and walked around Vegas taking video all within the modest amount of money we had budgeted for my solo trip.

I knew of course Carol had a motive. When she told me she wanted to attend Comicon, I could not really complain. Especially when she said she was taking our daughter along. Rachael like the X-files and science fiction in general but she loved video games. Sonic the Hedgehog was one of the games she excelled at. She’d laugh her ass off at my feeble attempts to play as she told me time and time again how to make the make the little image jump and run on the screen. To be honest, even if I was good at playing the game, I would have let her beat me. But in this case, I was hopelessly outmatched,

What could happen at Comicon with my wife and daughter going together? They returned and told me how how much fun they had, even meeting some celebrity guests. I put the matter aside.

Now it all came back to haunt me. Had my wife met someone or more than one someone from that group of sci-fi groupies? How? She was with my daughter after all. I later realized she had not consummated any liaison. She had merely made a personal connection with some people she had been talking with already. later I realized she had talked with people who encouraged her to just pack up and leave if she was not happy.

Sitting there, realizing my wife and daughter had just left me and were gone was the single most devastating thing to ever happen to me. Twenty five years later, the death of my father was not as traumatic. I will admit, I was far more depressed by my father’s demise for a long time but the initial shock was no where as intense. I went numb.

After sitting for a bit on the floor, not sure what I would do. not knowing what I could do, I called one of my friends. I told him what had happened. like a true friend he asked, “Where are you? Home? I’ll be there in a bit.” He was. Mid morning and he brought beer and whisky. I had told him I was going to get drunk. That was my macho attempt to keep from bawling.

Dale had gone through something similar a few years before. I knew the basics but as we drank he told me the details. His wife was thirty three when she left (mine was thirty four) and had decided she wanted more out of marriage or at least something different. She took off to live with a friend of his. Not only was he a friend, they had a working relationship where the man sub-contracted with his business of building new houses.

I asked him how he could put up with that. He shrugged. ‘You have no idea how bad it was at first, well maybe you do, but at the end of the day I realized a couple things. One, if the cunt wanted something different, nothing I could have ever done would have stopped her. Two, my kids were still gonna be my kids. Matter of fact, my son spends more time with me than with my ex. My daughter spends most of her time there. My lawyer is working out the costs. But to tell you the truth, right now I pay the bitch full child support no matter where the kids live. This is Texas.”

“The other thing you need to know is that in Texas when you walk into divorce court they check to see what is in your pants. If it is a cock, you are named the loser. The way you play the game after that determines just how much you lose. How well your lawyer negotiates and how well you roll over might save you some money.” Needless to say I was appalled at his explanation. I knew a little of his history but had no idea how bad it was for him.

Like a true friend he stayed with me most of the day. I’m not sure what we ate, if anything at all. He finally left telling me to call him anytime I needed to talk. Somehow I survived the weekend. I had two nights off before I had to go back to work. Of course nothing is secret when you let even an inkling of what is going on. I learned Carol had resigned her position at the hospital without notice. She knew I might find out if she had let anybody know her intentions. The calculating bitch wanted to make sure her departure and destination was a secret. Nobody admitted to knowing her intentions. I saw some of her fellow surgical nurses when they brought patients up to the ICU. Several told me they had no idea. I had my doubts, but you can’t confront people in that kind of setting.

I searched her email history as best as I could. Nothing told me where I might find her. I did have her contacts. At least I knew some of the people she discussed the X-files I began to send emails asking for them to contact Carol and let her know I wanted to talk. I asked if any had an idea where she might be. I got no response at all.

At the very least we needed to go over our financial matters. Or we’d both lose our asses.

Before Carol left me, I had applied to a school to change careers. Still in the medical community but it would almost triple my earnings as a critical care nurse. Carol was fully on board and encouraged me.The classes were extremely limited. Two weeks after Carol left, I was called for an interview. I had to drive half way across the state to Houston. I knew at the end of the interview I had a place in the school. I was even more pissed at how Carol had screwed us over. The new training would mean I would have to move some three hundred miles. If she really wanted me gone, why not just wait a few weeks?

I was faced with a terrible dilemma. I could stay and try to keep up with the mortgages on our home and land, not to mention the upkeep of the horses, or let some of it go and go for the new career path. The career was so limited, it was clear I had only the one shot at it. If I gave that up and I would never have another opportunity.

Just days before I went to the interview, her lawyer sent me a letter. It told me the city where she was living and that all future contact would go through him. I offered to talk to her at a public place. I suggested the lobby of a casino there. I mean everything in a casino was observed by cameras.After the interview, I drove a few hours to hopefully see her. The ex was a no show. Her lawyer did talk to me. The only thing constructive I took away was his opinion that an ex knows what buttons to push to rile up their former mate. The ex was not ready to file. Just serve me notice.

I sought legal help at home. The lawyer was no help. She immediately told me what I would pay. We would split all community assets. Until that divide I would need to keep up payments. If not, I could lose everything. I would pay a large percentage for child support but would get visitation with my daughter on alternate weekends. My wife would have to pay the expense to deliver my daughter and I would pay to return her. The way she described it, I was not going to have anything left.

When I told her about the school, she looked at me like I had grown a third head. “Oh you are not going to be able to do that.” she said. “You will have enough trouble keeping everything afloat. Now if you will give me a thousand dollar retainer, we can serve her before she serves you. If won’t make much difference but it will give us a possible leg up later.” I walked out.

I went back to work while I waited for the class to start in six weeks. I gave my notice at the hospital. I was a basket case but professional enough to take care of my patients. I must say, I was a very good nurse.

I was certified in critical care. I once told a person, I would be a lousy golfer. I cheated. I refused to allow my patients to die on me. I’d adjust a drip, pray or anything else I needed to do to make my patient make it through my shift. In the five years I worked there I lost only five patients on my shift. I found out they tracked those stats. Some of it was blind luck and some was shear determination to keep the person going until I went home. At the time, I knew each patient or rather the family of each patient I lost. To this day I can tell you a few of them. I was over 40 and cried with those families as their loved one died.