Free The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson Page A

June, eleven months after the kidnapping.
    In July, they file for divorce.
    Mom is the one who calls, breaking the news like she’s telling me the weather. I’m sitting on the futon in the apartment I share with My First Husband, a basket of clean laundry on the coffee table, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Mom is on the phone saying they’ve decided that now is as good a time as any. Everyone is healthy and happy . I crack a joke, say, Well it’s about time . I thank her for letting me know and hang up the phone.
    I light a cigarette and pick a shirt out of the pile. I’m crying, which doesn’t surprise me. It’s all I do anymore: cry, smoke, sleep. Today the crying makes me feel like a child: so naive, the hope that my parents might learn to love one another. To forgive. To be happy. To decide, once and for all, to stay together no matter what. All these years I’ve never understood what actually went so wrong between them. Now I wonder what, if anything, ever went right.

    In August, thirteen months after the kidnapping, I quit my job at the university press and quit the internship at the literary magazine and we move from the college town where there aren’t actually any full-time jobs for college graduates, to a city that is not really a city but rather a cluster of small towns. My Older Sister has bought a big house on a tree-lined street; we’ll find jobs and live in her basement until we get on our feet. We stack the boxes of our belongings in her garage, and we set up our bed and dresser and bookshelves in the basement room that is probably supposed to be a den. It has a den-like fireplace, den-like wood paneling, and den-like shag carpet on the floor. My First Husband gets a job as a carpenter, and every morning I wake to pack his lunch into a brown paper bag. He asks what I will do today and I say, Apply for jobs! but really I will go back to sleep. In the afternoons, My Older Sister leaves for work, and in the evenings, when I am alone in the house with My First Husband, I make dinner: pescado a la Veracruzana , the way I learned from watching The Man I Used to Live With. My First Husband and I eat on the couch watching television. Each night, after the first forkful, he grunts and says Damn, this is delicious , and then when he is finished he puts his plate or bowl on the edge of the coffee table, as if he plans to take it to the sink later. Each night, he falls asleep on the couch, the dirty dish still at the edge of the coffee table, where he rests his feet, his legs crossed at the ankles.
    On the nights when My Older Sister does not work, I make dinner for us. Sometimes we eat at the table like a regular family. Sometimes we go out to bars, where the three of us play pool over cheap beers. If the weather is nice, we grill in the backyard and eat at the picnic table. Sometimes My Younger Sister comes over to the house for dinner, making the short drive from the apartment she shares with other freshmen at her school near the center of the city-that-is-not-a-city, and the three of us stay up late into the night, long after My First Husband has fallen asleep on the couch. We sit outside in the dark, smoking cigarettes and swatting at mosquitoes, making fun of one another and either or both of our parents. We talk and talk and talk. But we never talk about what happened . Not about my mountain of credit card debt, or why I start drinking vodka before I’ve eaten breakfast, or why I can’t hold down a job. Not once.

    We celebrate Christmas at our house. My Older Sister’s house. It’s the first major holiday since our parents’ divorce. Mom arrives the night before, and after we ply her with wine coolers, she says she is eager to start dating. We convince her to put on makeup and fix her hair, and then we take her picture and post it on dating websites. In the morning, My Younger Sister arrives to help cook the giant meal. We are struggling to