Driving With Dead People (29 page)

The front door slammed shut downstairs. There was no time. Dad had found us.

The psychologist asked me a question that would change my entire view of childhood and kill my chances of ever staying in denial.

“Have you wondered if that little girl in the dream isn’t JoAnn, but you?”

“No. I thought it might mean that I knew something about what had happened to JoAnn. Maybe I saw something,” I said.

“Or maybe by focusing on JoAnn, you’re saving yourself from the pain of focusing on yourself.”

I’d read about doctors like her who put ideas into people’s heads that weren’t necessarily true. I wasn’t sure I trusted this woman.

“I don’t know anything anymore. Everything I thought to be true, isn’t,” I told her. “What if I never know what happened to me?”

“Your mind will let it come only when you’re ready. You must not be ready,” she said.

“What makes you so sure about me?” I asked.

“I’m not sure that anything directly happened to you, but I’m sure you were very seriously affected. All of you were—you had to be.”

The first thing I thought of was Whitfield. Classic move of dating your father. Was that more than just looking for a father figure? Was I looking for a specific relationship to relive with a father figure? I had no idea. I got that same squeamish feeling I’d had at the lake house with Whitfield and Dad.

The next day I drove back to Brooklyn, shaky and uncertain.

At work on Monday I walked into the office exhausted and unable to focus. Elliott came in and sat down on the corner of my desk.

“You look like you’ve lost your last friend,” he said.

“Don’t even ask,” I told him, tears already brimming.

Elliott patted my back. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“Thanks,” I managed.

My family thought therapists were for crazy people or people in emergency situations only. I didn’t find help for myself. I’d seen the kind of shape JoAnn had been in when she’d started therapy. I was much better than that.

In September I turned thirty. There was no celebration. Mom and Jim completely forgot it. I spent the day with JoAnn, playing cards.

She was out of the psychiatric facility and had rented a room in a house with two other women, but I still spent most weekends with her. There wasn’t a single Sunday night, driving back to Brooklyn, that I didn’t worry she’d need me during the week, and that I’d get there too late.

My life had become very small. I didn’t see friends, and I didn’t go to plays or parties—I worked, and I drove to Washington.

On Thursday, Mom called early in the morning.

“I need you to pay JoAnn’s car payment,” she barked.

“What?” I wasn’t even awake yet.

“Jim and I have given enough, and we are not going to pay her car payment. You’ll have to figure that out.” I was confused.

“I already paid that,” I told her.

“You paid last month’s bill, which was late. Now this month is due. They called here, threatening to tow her car away.”

“I don’t have the money, Mom. I just paid it, like I said.” I was trying to sit up in bed, but the phone cord was getting tangled.

“Right,” she said sarcastically. Mom was under the impression that I had money I was keeping from the family. I had no idea where she was getting that, but when she came to visit, she expected me to pay for everything, including her movie ticket and the restaurant bills and taxi rides.

“I can’t pay it,” I said honestly. “I’m still paying Granda’s car insurance.” I’d started paying Granda’s insurance when I got out of graduate school. It was one way I could take care of her long distance.

“Then you just get on the phone and call Becky or Jamie or whoever and find someone who can. Jim and I have given enough.” She hung up on me. I was still in bed.

Becky wasn’t going to help. She hadn’t called JoAnn or me since I’d seen her at Christmas. Becky had told Mom, “I can’t afford to lose my job and become suicidal right now. I just got my life together.”

Obviously, the situation scared her to death, had her convinced that her life would spiral away from her just as JoAnn’s had. I remembered how she’d cut Dad off that Christmas and never saw him again. Had he done something to her? During the most recent Christmas, she’d told me she didn’t remember anything, but why wouldn’t she offer even a crumb of support?

Jamie would be willing to help, but he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. He probably needed as much help as JoAnn, only none of us had ever bothered to ask.

I lay there for two hours trying to figure out how I’d made it this far with so little resources backing me up. If they towed JoAnn’s car, she would be devastated. I couldn’t worry about it right now. I had to get to work.

That weekend, I drove to Washington worrying where the car payment money would come from. It was two hundred and twenty dollars, but it might as well have been a million. I didn’t have it.

JoAnn was doing much better. She and I drove to Great Falls Park with a friend she’d met in group therapy. I watched them laughing as they climbed down to one of the waterfalls.

I hadn’t prayed since Galesburg Methodist, but I said a genuine prayer of thank you for JoAnn’s survival and for the doctor who’d suggested the specialized program—without it, I knew for sure, JoAnn wouldn’t have lived.

They had her trusting in a future. Now we had to get money to sustain her until she was functional again.

That Sunday, before I left to drive back to Brooklyn, JoAnn opened a box Mom and Jim had sent. Inside was food for her. I was glad that at least they were stepping up a little.

We opened the cardboard lid to find Lipton onion soup, Ritz crackers past their expiration date, mayonnaise, a few “Constant Comment” tea bags, and some flour. There wasn’t enough of anything in that box to make a meal. Obviously, they had gone to their cupboard and pulled out whatever was in there.

I was exasperated, but JoAnn just shrugged. “One thing you can count on in this fucked-up life is that Mom is one hundred percent predictable.” And even with the deep scars on the tops of her hands, she managed to laugh, and I did too.

“Someday, she’ll be old and sick, and we’ll mail her dehydrated Lipton onion soup as if it were a fucking miracle cure,” JoAnn said. We had tears running down our faces.

“And she can split it with Dad,” I said, laughing harder.

JoAnn looked so much happier now. I worried about her car being repossessed, and what that might do to her emotional state.

That night, I drove to Brooklyn thinking about money and how to get it. Clearly JoAnn’s unemployment would be awhile, and I was going to need the cavalry to come from somewhere. It hit me…it would have to be Dad. And I would be the one to ask him.

How had it come down to him—out of a whole family of people? He was the only hope left? A pedophile? And yet, shouldn’t he bear the responsibility?

I waited until the following Sunday, his sixty-first birthday, to call. I thought it might help soften my request for money.

I shoved a red metal stool into the kitchen of my Brooklyn apartment and sat by the phone. The sun was out, the trees were bare now, and a chilly wind was blowing through the kitchen door. I was petrified.

I dialed Dad’s number, knowing he was waiting to hear from one of us. I hadn’t missed his birthday since high school. Whatever happened on the phone would determine the fate of Dad and me forever.

I heard it ringing. He picked up.

“Dad, it’s me,” I said.

“Well, hello,” he said cheerfully. “Where have you been?” he asked.

Trying to keep JoAnn alive and functioning after all the perverted, disgusting things you did to her,
I wanted to say. “Working,” I said instead. “It’s hard to call with the time difference.”

“You can still write a note, can’t you?” he asked.

I needed to focus. JoAnn needed help. “I know it’s your birthday, but I don’t have good news, Dad. I need money to help JoAnn. She’s in the hospital. She tried to kill herself.”

“Oh no,” he said. “Oh my God.”

“She’s going to be okay.”

“What the hell happened?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “She’s having some kind of breakdown.” I was trying to lay it out so that he’d feel responsible but not threatened. I was walking a tightrope.

“A nervous breakdown?” he asked. “She’s as crazy as your mother.”

At that moment, everything shifted. I’d been through too much to let him blame her for what he had done.

He’d taken her childhood, her entire life away. And it was still unclear what the future held for her. He
would
take responsibility, and he
would
pay, one way or another. I’d find the money somewhere else if I had to.

I took a deep breath and set my trap.

“She left a suicide note in her apartment explaining why,” I told him. “I have it here and I don’t want to open it by myself.” There had never been a note.

“Don’t open it,” he said. “She wouldn’t want you to.”

“It might explain what happened,” I continued.

“Don’t open it,” he said again.

“But we’ll know what happened to her, Dad.”

“I never touched her,” he said, panicked. “I never touched that girl.”

I put the receiver in my lap and my forehead against the cool wall. He knew
exactly
what I was talking about. He denied something that no one was accusing him of doing. If he wasn’t guilty, how else would he have come up with that scenario? I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t breathe.

“Why would you say
that
?” I asked.

Dad was silent.

“Why did you say you didn’t touch her, Dad?” I asked again.

“Don’t tell your mother I said that,” he said. “It would only upset her.”

“JoAnn needs your help,” I told him, trying to steady my trembling voice.

“I won’t help her,” he said.

“She’s suicidal,” I reminded him.

“She’s weird and she always has been,” he said. Again, I put the phone in my lap, squeezing it between my knees. After I got the money out of him, I’d kill him with my bare hands.

“She needs money.”

“I’m not sending money.” He was mad now.

“You should help her, Dad,” I told him. “She needs you, and you know why.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

“No shit,” I said.

“Not a dime.” He hung up the phone.

I slammed down the receiver and walked around the apartment half bent over, trying to catch a breath. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. I hadn’t expected it. I certainly hadn’t expected that. Oh my God, on his birthday. He’d brought it up on his own. My dad.

It was over.

Sitting in a DuPont Circle coffee shop with JoAnn, I told her about my conversation with Dad. I explained how I told him about a suicide note and how he blurted out, “I never touched her.”

“That’s pretty amazing,” she said.

“There’s no way he could have known what I was talking about,” I said, picking up my brown Styrofoam cup of warm green tea. “If we called any father in the country and told him that his daughter was suicidal, not one of them would say, ‘I never touched her.’” I sipped my tea.

JoAnn shook her head—not devastated, not relieved, and not entirely surprised.

For JoAnn, my phone call with Dad brought closure; for me it was anything but. As JoAnn got better, I got steadily worse.

Clearly, it was time for me to figure out where I fit into all of it—the sexual abuse, the neglect.

When I returned to Brooklyn, my own overwhelming feelings (which I’d put aside while trying to stay strong for JoAnn) were screaming for my attention. I tried to ignore them. When I wasn’t working, I slept.

One evening after work I was standing on the subway platform, and had the urge to step in front of the number six train. I remembered that feeling from when Dad had visited me in San Diego. I saw the light from the train coming through the tunnel, and knew it would take away the grief and confusion, so I moved closer to the rim of the platform. The hot, stale wind of the train blew my bangs across my forehead as I stepped closer to the edge. Suddenly, a tall man in a wrinkled blue suit clutched my arm.

“Hey, watch where you’re goin’,” he said, pulling me backward. I forced a smile and gently pulled my arm away.

The train was now stopped in front of me with the doors open. I stepped inside and gripped the silver pole near the door. I usually hated crowded subways, but was oddly comforted, standing in that packed car, buffered by all those bodies, purses, and backpacks. There was life all around me, and I wanted to be a part of it, if only I could
feel
something—anything.

The train stopped at Union Square. I watched an elderly woman negotiate the platform with her walker. A young man helped her through the turnstiles. Just normal life. I couldn’t imagine it.

The next morning, I found a therapist who took my insurance.

In my first session, the calm dark-haired psychiatrist sat in her Upper East Side apartment with her brown-and-white shih tzu on her lap. After hearing almost forty minutes of my painful story, she said, “I’m not sure what to tell you, really. I’m at a complete loss. First off, your dad sounds like trailer trash; I think we’re in agreement there. And the other problem is that when I feel bad, I take myself to a nice dinner or a movie, but you can’t even afford that.” I wrote her a check and politely closed the door behind me.

If I hadn’t felt so ashamed, I would have drop-kicked that spoiled dog out her twelfth-story window just to wake her up.

The next therapist was on the Upper West Side. She wore brown leather clogs and no makeup. The session began well enough, until I heard police sirens screeching up the street. The therapist ignored them, but now they were parked close enough to her office that red flashing lights were whipping around her walls. The next thing I heard was a voice booming through a bullhorn, “Stay where you are. Someone’s coming up to get you. You don’t want to do this.” I stared at the therapist, who was now leaning closer to me, indicating that she wasn’t missing a single word I was saying.

“Are you going to ignore what’s happening out there?” I asked.

“If you want to get up and look out the window, go ahead. I don’t want you to be distracted,” she said.

“Aren’t you distracted?” I asked, standing up.

“Not really.” She shrugged.

I looked out the window. A man was crouched high on a window ledge directly across the street.

The policeman on the bullhorn said, “Sit down. SIT DOWN ON THE LEDGE. It will help you balance until we can get to you.”

Three police cars were blocking the street and an ambulance was standing by—just in case.

I looked back at the perfectly composed therapist. “A man’s jumping off a window ledge,” I told her.

She shook her head in a very understanding way, “This probably brings up a lot for you.”

I exploded. “It brings up the fact that you’re ignoring a suicide attempt outside your own office. You’re pretending it’s not even happening. How could you possibly help
me
? You’re exactly what I’m trying to avoid. You’re
exactly
like my mother—like my entire family. You’re what’s making
me
want to jump out a window.” I swooped up my coat and backpack in one hand and headed for the door.

“You owe me a check,” she had the nerve to say.

“Bill me,” I said, slamming the door behind me.

I walked into the street and looked up at the small, gray-haired man crouched on the ledge. It was about thirty degrees outside, but he was wearing only a white muscle T-shirt and cotton pajama bottoms.

I wanted to scream,
Don’t let them talk you down! You’re right! It ain’t gonna get any better! Jump!

I sat down on the curb with my backpack between my knees and watched two police officers extending their hands out the window. The old man startled and leaned forward. I slapped my hands over my ears as if stopping the sound might stop the action, giving the officers time to grab him.

Don’t fall,
I prayed.
Please don’t let him fall.
My prayer surprised me. It was as if this elderly man in the thin, striped pajama bottoms was holding my fate in his hands. If he jumped, the hopelessness that was already sinking me would win, but if he lived, the hope that was constantly fighting to be realized, would take the prize.

A woman officer poked her head out the window of the next apartment and called to the old man. When he turned to look at the woman, the other two officers leaned out and grabbed him, pulling him gently inside.

I thought of JoAnn telling me she’d planned her own suicide on the beach. I hoped there would always be hands to pull her back in. I was beginning to worry that those hands would not belong to me. I didn’t know how I was going to handle the pressure that was pushing against my own sanity.

I stood up, barely noticing the too familiar tears starting down my face and dripping onto my coat. I wanted help, was searching for it, but it was nowhere to be found.

I called Daniel from a pay phone on the corner.

“Can I come out?” I asked.

“When, tonight?” he asked.

“Right now,” I said.

“It’s so late. Are you sure you want to come this far?” Daniel had moved to New London, Connecticut, which was at least a two-hour trip.

“I’m sure.”

“Where are you?”

“On the corner of Broadway and Seventy-eighth.”

“Don’t you need to get your stuff?” he asked.

“I don’t need anything.”

“Come on out, then,” he said.

As Metro-North rumbled out of Grand Central, I placed my forehead against the chilly window and closed my eyes. It was unfair to turn to Daniel, who had always been so kind, but I couldn’t think of anyone else.

Inside me, a terror had been unleashed by the man on the ledge. I couldn’t face the night alone in Brooklyn.

The next morning Daniel got up for work and I didn’t. I didn’t get up, in fact, for five days. No eating, no teeth brushing, nothing. Daniel called his therapist, who came to the house to see me, wearing baggy corduroys and carrying a blue canvas briefcase.

After about ten minutes of sitting on the side of the bed talking to me, he sighed as he put his hands on his knees and said, “Suicidal people bore me. They’re self-centered shits who need to get off their asses and do something with their lives. Now, why don’t you just…get up?”

This added two more days to my bed vigil.

After that, my old friend Rachel, an actress I had worked with in La Jolla, called from Los Angeles. “Honey, what’s going on?” I had refused to come to the phone on three separate occasions, so she’d called back, demanding to speak to me.

“I’m having some kind of breakdown, I think.”

“Maybe you should come out here for a while. Stay with us until you get back on your feet,” she offered. She lived with the most wonderfully smart and sensitive woman.

“I don’t have any money,” I told her. “I haven’t been able to save anything.”

“You’ll get yourself a job. You always do. Come out and we’ll at least get to see you,” she said. It sounded good. Really good.

Daniel bought me a very expensive plane ticket, and I flew to L.A. two days later. He was relieved to have the weeping woman gone, and I didn’t blame him. Maybe the cross-country distance would give me perspective.

Everyone at The Strategist Group understood I needed to leave. I hadn’t shared everything with Elliott, but he trusted me. I was doing what I had to do.

Once I was in L.A., I stayed in Rachel’s guest house. We’d become close friends in the six years since we acted in that play in San Diego, and now she had swooped in and saved me.

I called Mom. “JoAnn’s much better, which is good, because I can’t be responsible for her any longer.” I didn’t pause for Mom to interrupt. “I’ve moved to L.A. The weight of everything that’s happened has finally caught up with me. I feel lost and panicked.” There was a long pause.

“Why don’t you call back when you’re feeling better,” Mom said.

I laughed as I slammed down the phone. I laughed because I was tired of crying. I laughed at the absurdity of turning to my mother for help.

If feeling better meant I’d have to call Mom back, I wouldn’t be feeling better for a
long
time.

Rachel introduced me to a psychologist who was completing her training in analysis and needed a patient to work with. She was charging a small amount of money, and my insurance would cover what little she was charging. (Elliott had kept me on COBRA at The Strategist Group.)

In time, I found a job working with Daniel’s cousin, Beth, at a personnel-recruiting agency in West Hollywood. This not only helped me afford therapy and a studio apartment, but gave me an opportunity to meet new friends.

While trying to understand my part in the abuse, I continued going to therapy five mornings a week and read as many books as I could on the subject.

In the books and articles, I read about cases where memories were unearthed after a person had been coerced by a psychiatrist. So I questioned myself. Would that happen to me? But in my sessions, my therapist refused to offer any of her own opinions or speculations. I talked and she listened.

The things I remembered about myself were disturbing, but nothing compared to what JoAnn had gone through.

For instance, Dad was always staring at us. Even when he wasn’t home, I imagined he was watching me—even in the bathroom. When I realized I still had that paranoia, I was finally able to let go of it.

And I used to think that Dad pulling down my pants in public was to humiliate me, and that was part of it, but I now think that he wanted to see me naked; that he wanted to look, and that there was a sexual aspect to it. Even now I feel the heat of embarrassment—the shame of being publicly exposed.

When the one solid memory I had of Dad’s abuse finally surfaced, it didn’t happen in therapy, it happened in my dentist’s office.

I was waiting to get my teeth cleaned when I picked up a magazine. I opened to an article about a young woman who had been raped on her college campus. What struck me most about her experience was that while it was horrific to be raped, she described the sex as “eerily ordinary” in the back of the rapist’s car. “It wasn’t violent or rough, it was clumsy and ridiculously ‘normal.’” And almost as if a switch clicked on, I realized I was looking for the wrong thing.

I was trying to remember being held down and viciously raped—especially after JoAnn’s harrowing journey. But it was less frequent and more “ordinary” for me. I hadn’t counted on abuse feeling so chronically familiar, instead of excruciatingly violent.

I was less than six years old when it happened, because it took place in our bedroom at the old house—the bedroom with the grate in the floor.

My father was not brutal or crazy when he came in the night, he was tender and loving, making it a bedtime ritual, a silly game. He even had a name for it, but I can’t recall what it was. This was by far the biggest betrayal. After he was so mean, how confusing and twisted it was to have him choose the middle of the night to say he loved me.

He manipulated love into something perverse, confusing me about what love is, causing me to sexualize friendships and relationships, teaching me without words what I was worth. Violence would have been more honest.

And with that memory, I had the orgasm mystery solved. It was Dad, and it was during the night, only I pretended to sleep while he touched me. I tried to move away from his hand, but it was pointless. After a while, I couldn’t feel his hand. I couldn’t feel anything, not even my arms or legs, which is why I was afraid of being immo-bile in my casket with Dad walking by. It’s why I was afraid of his hands when he accidentally touched me in the cab of his truck. And when the orgasm finally came, it was the one feeling I couldn’t numb out. It actually felt good, and there was nothing I could do about it.