Escape Points Read Free Page A

my boys, and in three years was divorced from his second wife.
    After that, my ex-husband lived in three Chicago apartments in three years; the boys called the second one the “submarine” because it was a basement apartment with huge pipes across the ceiling. Over the years, I felt as if his presence in the boys’ lives was disintegratingincrementally, like a Polaroid photo that extinguishes itself in a closed drawer, the colors fading into greenish-yellow until the image is gone. I could not imagine the long term; it felt obscure, out of reach. His connection appeared to me to be an abandonment, slowly accumulating momentum until, in 2004, he abruptly left the country with a Dutch woman I’ll call Ingrid, another one who seemed bedazzled by him. I recognized the signs.
    During an otherwise unremarkable weekend visit with the boys in January 2004, their father announced he was moving to Amsterdam in two weeks. The boys were fifteen, thirteen, and ten. I had no hint of his intentions and didn’t know what he would be doing, only that Ingrid lived in the Netherlands and had a landscape business. There was some talk about her being involved in seminars on spirituality, but in the months they had been together and the few times I had met her, I admit I paid little attention. Months earlier I had even gone to dinner with her—alone—in an attempt to be cordial. I thought it might make the visits with the boys and their father go well if she was there.
    Apparently, the day their father announced he was leaving the country, he loaded his pale gray Chevy van with trash bags filled with most everything the boys had ever given him—the Father’s Day presents from kindergarten, their homemade paintings, cards and photos of themselves. He told the boys to keep it all for him in case he came back.
    Then he dropped them off at home with all his leftover reminders of their childhoods thrown into plastic bags. I was not home to catch them in this latest freefall; I had gone to dinner with a friend. That Sunday night I walked in the door and saw piles of boxes and trash bags stacked in the front hall. The house was quiet. The boys were in their rooms.
    “Whose stuff is this?” I asked when I reached the second floor. Knowing they would never go on a cleaning binge without several months of daily prodding, I was confused.
    “Dad’s,” Colin said.
    According to Colin, their father had said that the reason he was moving to Amsterdam was because all he did every other weekend was watch their wrestling tournaments, football, basketball, and baseball games, and help with homework. His life was much bigger than that, he told the boys.
    Mine is bigger because of that, I thought.
    I walked downstairs, my heart pounding, furious. I called my former husband on his cell. “What did you do?” I shrieked.
    He told me he was building a better life for himself. He was no longer a practicing litigating attorney, having left the large firm in Chicago years earlier. He became a salesman for energy products, then a salesman for something else, I never really knew. I only knew he paid less in child support every year, until he paid nothing at all.
    Whatever he did offer was never enough to cover the child care for the boys while I worked—the string of a dozen women over eighteen years to be my backup before and after school, 6:30–8:30 in the mornings, and 3:00–6:00 in the evenings. They would walk out the front door when I walked in the back door; sometimes they made dinner. Sometimes they made the beds. Sometimes they took laundry soap in plastic bags for their own laundry, and sometimes they forgot to pick up a child at practice. Sometimes they made chicken noodle soup that made the whole house smell like heaven.
    My former husband had sold the blue striped couch I lent him for his apartment, the one that my mother had given us when we moved back to Chicago. He kept the $200.
    This move to Amsterdam was all for our sons, he told me on the