Free One and Only by Gerald Nicosia

Neal came home from work this one night, without any planning, without it even having entered my
head— nothing! —when he came in the door that night, it just came out of my mouth. I told him that the police had been there. I swear to you on my grandchildren—if there’s more than one—that I tried to analyze it, but I never found the real answer. As the years went by, Neal and I talked about it. Neal had his own theories. He felt that because of all these things that had happened after we got married, that it was my kind of a self-saving reaction—an unconscious thing to get myself out. But I didn’t want out. I mean, I didn’t think I wanted out. Everything was exactly the way I had always dreamed it would be. But then I did that—I went ahead and told him that the police were looking for him.
    From the moment I opened my mouth, I wanted to tell him the truth. But of course Neal was excitable enough as it was—that was just his natural state—and when anything happened that would upset him like that, there was no way to stop him from overreacting. There was no way I could’ve sat down with him and said, “Neal, I didn’t mean it, it wasn’t true.” I couldn’t have stopped him even if I had wanted to, because he probably wouldn’t have believed me. He would’ve thought I was trying to calm him down. So I put myself through this total nightmare, going through every bit of this agony with him, and every minute of it hating myself.
    He left and ran to get the bus. I had to pack all of our stuff in this trunk and lug it two blocks to the bus and get it on the bus and take it all the way to Jersey City, where Neal was waiting for me. I mean, I was going through these insane things that I was putting myself through—stuff there was no need for. We slept in parked cars. It’s just like I said. I’ve thought about it for years and years and years. If I had sat down and plotted it, or thought about it, it would have been different. But I didn’t. It just came out of my mouth without one thought about what it would lead to—what kind of reaction Neal would have.

    We went through hell. And then Neal got the bus and went up to Hartford, Connecticut, and he was still thinking about us getting back together. He wrote and told me, “I’m looking for a place for us.” Then the next letter I got from him, he said he had found a place for us to live. He wrote, “I’ve found us a room and I’ve got a job, and you can come up, in a couple of days.” In the meantime, Allen, Ed White, Hal Chase, and the others were very, very nice to me; but I think that—looking back on it—they would probably have been happy to get rid of me. Of course, at that time they didn’t know anything about me having lied about the police being after Neal, but I think they would have liked Neal just to be with them. None of them made me feel that way, really, because they all treated me very well. But as I got older, I looked back on it, and I realized that they probably sighed a sigh of relief when I left.
    They all chipped in together to buy me a bus ticket back to Denver. When they took me to the bus station that day, they left about fifteen minutes before the bus came in. It went to Chicago or St. Louis or somewhere like that first. But just before it came in, the bus to Hartford came in, and it really was the most awful decision. I wanted to go to Hartford with all my heart—I really and truly did. I loved Neal so much. More than even my love, we had so many things that we had shared together. We were like a couple of kids growing up together. We had shared so many of those dreams and agonies together that it really was a hell of a decision—Denver or Hartford.

PART TWO

    L u Anne went back to Denver on her own, but Neal had promised to catch up with her in June at the latest, when the college session was over, and they