Free Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve by Christopher Andersen

matrimony and, inevitably, bitter divorce.
    “What about my parents?” Dana asked. “They’ve been married forever and they’re still in love.”
    “Your mom and dad,” he replied with a shrug, “are the ex- ception that proves the rule.”
    Exasperated, Dana made it clear that she definitely saw marriage in her future, even if he did not see it in his. “I love you, Chris,” she told him. “But I want a family, too. I want what my parents have . . .”
    Even if he had wanted to change, Chris felt powerless to over- come his fear of marriage. While Dana fumed, Chris left for Van- couver in the summer of 1991 to make his first feature film in four years. In Morning Glory, he was cast as an ex-con who becomes involved with a recently widowed young mother (Deborah Raf- fin) in Depression-era Texas.
    Before he left New York, Chris made Dana promise that she would join him in British Columbia midway through the shoot. He made plans to charter a boat and sail from Vancouver to Galiano Island, the most ruggedly beautiful of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. There, they would stay in a suite at the island’s only oceanfront resort, the Galiano Inn.
    For the next two months, Dana and Chris burned up the phone lines between Vancouver and New York. Why was he so in- tractable on the subject of marriage? What was he really afraid of? “If you really love someone,” she said point-blank, “then to me that means you commit to the relationship—or you lose that person. Is that what you want, Chris?”
    “No, of course not,” he replied. But neither was he willing— or able—to overcome his profound feelings of dread when it came to the subject of marriage. He had been so scarred by the cycle of divorce, remarriage, and divorce that had characterized
    his childhood that Chris could offer no solutions. They had reached a stalemate.
    Conceding defeat, Dana finally called it quits. “It’s over, Chris,” she told him during one of their emotional late-night phone calls. “There is no future for us. There is just no point to going on like this if you can’t even . . . It’s . . . it’s just over.”
    Chris pleaded with her to reconsider, but she held firm. Dana did, however, reluctantly agree to go ahead with their original plans to sail to Galiano Island—one of the most breathtaking spots in the Pacific Northwest—so long as things between them re- mained strictly platonic.
    No sooner did she step onto the pier at Galiano Island than Dana realized her resolve to end their relationship would be put to the test. There were moonlight strolls along the beach, a bike ride through the island’s lush Pacific Coast forest, candlelit din- ners, and drinks by the fireside. If Dana and Chris thought there was any way they could restrain themselves from making love, it was answered their first night on the island: They could not.
    In what Chris would later describe as “the most agonizingly bittersweet time,” they both confronted the fact that, in Dana’s words, “we couldn’t live without each other. But there were go- ing to have to be some changes made.” At long last, Chris agreed to Dana’s oft-repeated plea that he seek help from a therapist in dealing with his fear of commitment.
    After months of therapy, thirty-nine-year-old Chris would fi- nally admit that, beyond the legacy of his parents’ dismal marital track record, he had his own ulterior motives for avoiding mat- rimony. “I was in a cycle of trying to maintain a relationship,” he conceded, “but secretly looking for the ultimate babe.”
    Conversely, Chris also knew that he “risked everything” if he failed to deal with his own deeply rooted anxieties. “It came down to one thing,” he later explained. “Was I going to be a damn fool and let this incredible woman walk out of my life?”
    There would soon be an added incentive for Chris to finally, in Dana’s words, “get a grip” on what was holding him back in the relationship. A few