Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  I made the drive weekly. I came to know each bend and curl in the road as well as I knew each of Cara’s needle-pricked veins. The prices and calorie counts of rest stop fast-food menus turned as familiar as pantry items. Radio personalities became old friends: I listened to Delilah. She had a song for everyone, sometimes the same one for different people in vastly dissimilar tragedies. “Wind Beneath My Wings” for a breakup, death, favorite teacher, war hero? Sure. But what was the song for a just-raped, drug-addicted identical twin sister in a doomed marriage?

  There were no songs for us, only silence interrupted by the popping sound of prescription drug bottles.

  I focused on the condescending calm of Delilah’s voice. On her breathy sigh of condolences and convincing. I knew better than to believe her. Conversion from the land of fire to the Lord’s would never be my escape. But her voice soothed me.

  Have you lost faith? Delilah purred into her radio microphone. Have you lost hope?

  Faith? Mine was broken on a trail of glass and leaves.

  Hope? I feared having any. To lose one more shred of naïveté—that would be saying good-bye to innocence completely. I wasn’t prepared.

  Cara’s dishes, crusted with food, waited, piled high in the sink. Cara herself waited for me stoned on the couch. She never said more than “Hey” when I arrived, as if I’d journeyed no farther to visit her than from next door.

  “This house is nearly condemnable,” I’d say as I walked in the door. I never held my tongue. “This place should be boarded up, demolished!” I’d say.

  Kahlil would sit at the kitchen table, crunching away at a bag of chips, reading the newspaper. The place wasn’t breaking health codes, but no one should live that way, especially not a young lady who used to tidy up pridefully, who had liked to be the “wife” taking care of the roost.

  After the rape, tracked-in mud and snow salt shellacked the tiled floors. Pebbles of kitty litter became coated in the mud and stuck to the bottoms of bare feet. Animals whined in hunger. Spoiled milk curdled by the gallon. Soiled laundry tumbled out of baskets and closets, hung from the kitchen table onto the floor, and pushed open the doors of the china cabinet, which Cara was using as a makeshift closet. The china, packed away in the basement, awaited better times. The house was full to the rafters with clothes.

  Cara bought an endless array of outfits after her attack to help her feel dressed. She’d also pierced her nipples. She wore T-shirts without bras, her nipples blooming from beneath like rosebuds stabbed with spikes. Whenever she was feeling better, feeling more like living than dying, she’d take out the spikes and let the holes heal over. Whenever she retreated back to blackness, she’d have the piercing done again, through the scar tissue. This happened five or six times over the rest of her life. I gauged her mood by looking at her tits.

  In the new Northampton apartment, there was not enough storage for her wardrobe. Her skirts, dresses, blouses, and pants lay everywhere; there was no surface free of them. The furniture was striped with stockings and socks. It wasn’t possible to tell what was clean or dirty without a whiff test. Cara lay on top of all of it. The sofa she was once so happy to have bought held her odor and the impression of her body; her imprint had permanently reshaped its center. This could not be corrected even with a flipped cushion. She’d indented both sides. Where she propped her feet, the dust from her house slippers dirtied each arm. She’d tossed empty bottles of her antianxiety prescriptions onto the floor and kicked them under the sofa; they rattled and rolled when she got up or down. She had covered herself in blankets and with the gauze of sedation.

  I asked the question then; I ask it now: Where was her husband?

  He hid in a den crowded with his belongings—tins of half-eaten takeout stacked into a swaying tower; closets crammed with old sports equipment and barricaded shut by chairs loaded down with boxes. Kahlil stowed his collection of mixed cassette tapes from youth next to his CDs, in an open drawer, the tapes’ insides twisted and pulled out in shiny tattered ribbons. A sizable collection of CDs—free of cases and scratched to silence—were shoved beneath the twin guest bed, which was naked of sheets and pillows. I slept instead on the sofa.

  He’d tossed an ambitious collection of vintage 35mm cameras loaded with exposed film into a far corner of the room. Pictures of happier days would have to wait to be developed. They’re still waiting—stored deep in my basement with the other things Kahlil left behind. I can’t bear to take them to be processed, to witness again the days when Cara’s life promised her everything.

  * * *

  Kahlil’s room was also full of cookbooks, dog-eared syrup- and butter-splattered pages of his favorite recipes. The man could cook up a storm. He favored crepes and roasted meats. In the early months of their marriage, Cara had put on fifteen extra blissful pounds. They both saw the weight as proof of their love.

  Folded-up love letters from their courtship were the only items in Kahlil’s room that were well cared for. He kept them organized and sorted by date in a scrapbook. He placed it on the very top of a tall bookshelf, away from chaos and the active bladders of the cats. When their litter pans were full, the cats pittled on the piles of clothing he left on the floor. He wore the clothes anyway.

  Kahlil stands six feet three inches tall, a disarmingly handsome man, a weathered model type with a strong chin, deep-set dark eyes, and springing warm brown curls. His arms were sleeved in tattoos. His favorite, the word VIVA in black block letters, covered his entire forearm. He got the tattoo right after he and Cara met, a reminder to live boldly.

  Instead, he sat in his room, hunched over a child-size desk, playing video games or sometimes watching basketball.

  He also spent more and more hours at work as a construction foreman, and more hours attending classes for a degree in architecture. He would come home from a long day and retreat to his hovel. The task of taking care of Cara was left to me and sometimes to my mother. I cleaned and cooked as if Kahlil were no more than another piece of clutter to be stepped over. Sometimes he’d watch a sitcom, sometimes porn. The porn infuriated Cara—a porn argument preceded her arrival at Westfield State, the first mental hospital, following a suicide attempt.

  “You could’ve erased the history.” Cara pushed the laptop at Kahlil over the breakfast table. “I didn’t care before. But now I don’t want that in my house. We’ve had enough sexual violence in our lives.”

  “Sorry, baby,” was all he could say. I sat between them through this argument, wondering how Kahlil was managing in his newly sexless home, thinking, Just let the poor guy watch porn. There was no touching Cara now. It had only been six months since the rape. She wasn’t ready. She’d barely been off the AZT.

  Edgardo had refused an HIV test, a right he had as an accused inmate in Massachusetts. As a result, my sister was subjected to monthly testing and a harsh, preventative drug regimen that left her nauseated and exhausted. With each test and pill she felt at the mercy of her rapist again, haunted, convinced of her own contamination. The tests had all been negative but she quarantined her shaving razor and sanitized her toothbrush every night with boiling water. She did not want anyone she loved to come close to her imagined infection.

  “If you’d take a shower once in a while maybe I could fuck you,” she said to Kahlil that afternoon. “I just can’t with the way you smell. You smell like him.”

  After the argument died down and I’d cleared the table, I went out. I don’t remember where, but as I left, Cara was in her usual place, on the sofa with her laptop open, writing.

  I came back to the apartment late in the afternoon to find Kahlil at the kitchen table, head in hands. He’d found Cara lying unconscious in the front yard, naked except for a bathrobe. She’d pulled all of his clothing from his room, piled it on top of the snow, and sprawled on it. A stack of Hustler magazines lay scattered around the clothes, pages turning in the winter wind. Cara had binged on pills; Kahlil had taken Cara to a locked ward.

  * * *

 
She went to many rehab centers and mental hospitals in the year following the rape. At first she’d seem better when she returned, pinker in the cheeks, rested, but the respite effect would soon fade and she’d return to her usual tricks. She’d disappear a couple of evenings a week and come home stoned, pockets full of her precious packets of white powder. I’m not sure how long after the rape it was when Cara began to use heroin. I think it began around the first Christmas. That was the first time I remember her with eyes like slits, heard her voice raspy and worn, watched her shoulders and face slump toward her dinner plate. Heroin caused her to squint, as if everything, even me, was in fine print.

  She’d check into a hospital, desperate after a suicide attempt or after Kahlil or I had found her unconscious. Sometimes her suicidal hospital peers were close to homicidal. Sometimes local homeless shelters were filled to capacity, so hospitals beds went to rowdy homeless drunks and displaced vets, who roamed the wards alongside the agitated and the addicted. In these facilities there was no real hope of medical intervention, and although Cara was safe inside their walls, she’d petition to get out as soon as she checked in. And who could blame her?

  I called her that first night at Westfield State.

  “You okay?” I asked. I heard a high-pitched wailing in the background.

  “What do you think?”

  I wasn’t sure what I thought. I heard a man’s voice. It sounded like it was coming from an intercom. “We need a nurse, stat. We have a takedown,” the voice said.

  “A guy is walking the halls with his pants around his ankles. He banged his head against the walls all night. That’s not a figure of speech.” Cara tried to persuade me to aid her in her bid to escape. The hospital in Westfield had looked perfectly fine from the outside: two stories of regal brick covered in climbing ivy, manicured lawns, a small duck pond. I’ve learned that when it comes to hospitals, grounds are never a measure of what exists behind bolted doors. “They ask him to stop and within twenty minutes he’s at it again. I have to get out of here.”

  “Can you find a quiet corner and sit and read? You just got there. You can’t leave.”

  “Quiet? Do you have any idea where I am?”

  “Kahlil and I filled out your admission paperwork.”

  “I’m in hell, that’s where I am.”

  It was difficult to argue with her. She was right. She was in purgatory at best. I hung up and I hoped she’d stay put. She did, for three days.

  The doctor at Westfield said Cara had post-traumatic stress disorder with borderline features. He said being borderline meant teetering: she could alternate between composure and the terror of being left. She might make frantic efforts to avoid being alone. This fear might be so strong that she’d want to die.

  He spoke a new language, but I understood it. I’d seen all of these qualities in her. They made perfect sense: how else should she behave given her experience?

  I visited Cara at Westfield two days after she’d checked in.

  “I knew you’d make it,” she said, as if considering every word. They’d put her on something to slow her down and take away her anxiety, but my anxiety spiked.

  Someone had replaced my sister with a mental patient in a sweat suit.

  A woman sat beside Cara at a short table, making drawings and macaroni collages. The woman’s wrists were bandaged.

  “My friend Regina helped me make this.” Cara held up a drawing of us. I traced my finger over it. Cara’d sketched herself to be almost twice my size. “I’m not really as fat as I think I am. Am I?” Cara smiled brightly.

  While she was at Westfield, Cara wrote me a letter.

  Dear Sister,

  Don’t be mad.

  I just wanted to sleep. That’s why I didn’t call. My husband drove me here. He had to leave. I get to wear pajamas all day. They give me medicine. I am contaminated. I don’t like it.

  Don’t tell Mom.

  There are other people here, too.

  They watch me all the time. I wish they wouldn’t stare so much. I want my perfume back. They took it away because it contains alcohol and has a sharp dispenser. I had to ask for my pen today. Tell them it isn’t a threat. I’ve got clean clothes so I don’t smell bad.

  I have to light my cigarettes from a push-button box outside.

  I know, I shouldn’t smoke. I’ll try to stop, promise. There is a gazebo. I can sit there until bedtime. I learned how to play chess. Now I can be more like a man. Will you learn, too? When I sleep, it’s with three other girls.

  How are you?

  Don’t worry. I didn’t leave without thinking of you.

  I’m glad you’re not here, too. Don’t be mad.

  Love,

  Me

  I thought the doctor’s diagnosis was the first step to mending her. I know now that a diagnosis is taken in like an orphaned dog. We brought it home, unsure how to care for it, to live with it. It raised its hackles, snarled, hid in the farthest corner of the room; but it was ours, her diagnosis. The diagnosis was timid and confused, and genetically wired to strike out.

  Flashbacks woke her at night from a sound sleep of nightmares. A slur lingered in her speech—and doctors couldn’t find a cause. “You don’t have brain damage,” I’d insist when she complained of feeling wobbly and seasick. Her ears rang. A high-pitched raspy chime sounded out in her head so there was never quiet. But I’d say, “Your head is fine.”

  I think I knew she’d never be fine.

  She was dizzy and often lost her footing if she stood too quickly. There was always a new bruise to explain. When she fell, she’d often bump her head. She’d shoot up and blame the purple blotches on the insides of her arms on her undiagnosable clumsiness. There was no believing her.

  I wouldn’t allow my sister the reasonable pain she was in. I couldn’t admit defeat. I denied her the space and time and outlet for which she needed to grieve. I was one of the insensitive people whose only power in a powerless situation is to deny it away, to ignore it, to hope the truth will fade.

  I was able to sidestep reality until a snowy March day, a year and a half after the rape. It was a Thursday and I was unable to get Cara on the phone. I was planning to spend the week of my spring vacation with her, on a trip to the New England coast, even though it was still winter. I had looked into Salem and had found a bed-and-breakfast that was rumored to be haunted. It was just the thing to cheer both of us up: ghosts, ocean, and the House of Seven Gables. When I still couldn’t reach her after hours of calling on that icy March afternoon, I sped through flurries and snow squalls, arriving in the early evening to find her asleep in her car in her driveway, an untouched envelope of McDonald’s French fries scattered on her lap, her hair pulled back in high pigtails.

  I knocked at her window to wake her and my rapping roused her. She brushed the French fries off of her lap and rolled her window down.

  “I thought I’d take a nap.”

  “In the driveway? With your lunch on your lap?”

  “If the mood strikes.” She reached her hand out of the window and adjusted the car’s driving mirror, looking at herself. “I feel like shit.”

  “No doubt about it.” I noticed her pupils had constricted into pins, tiny black dots lost in the sea of foggy eyes.

  Bags of groceries had spilled onto the floor of her backseat, beside bags of dirty laundry that had never made it to the Wash-n-Go.

  The last straw was broken. I demanded she get serious help. The rehab center I found was expensive. I was under the impression, the deluded perspective of the desperate, that the more money we threw at the problem of Cara’s addiction and despair, the more likely it was that she’d recover. With this logic I sent her to the kind of place where celebrities go for rest and regular families send their loved ones for fear of what will happen if they don’t. Homes are mortgaged and jewels sold to pay for the treatment there. My mother chipped in by taking a home equity loan. Amazingly, money for Cara’s stay came also from a state of Massachusetts fund for victi
ms of violent crimes, a fund that wasn’t regularly drawn upon. I don’t remember who helped us secure payment. I do recall they were surprised that anyone was asking for help.

  She had her last hurrah on the airplane to Sedona. She washed down her Klonopin with wine from the beverage cart. At the baggage terminal, overcome with drugs, she fell flat on her face onto the airport floor, chipping her front teeth and blackening one eye. This was how she arrived into the custody of her handler from The Meadows, like a has-been prizefighter gone down in the first round.

  Chapter 13

  Four weeks later, Kahlil, Mom, and I met Cara at The Meadows. We were hoping to find that she’d taken it upon herself to save her life.

  She’d written us letters, told us she was happy and ready to make amends. She’d made friends with others like her and she’d finally seen her faults. We flew to meet her weary, after a year and a half of battle. We flew to meet her rested, after the luxury of weeks without her. We flew to meet her because we had to, because it was Family Week and we were family; the code of supporting treatment, even if it means leaving your life and spending many thousands of dollars, shouldn’t be broken. And we flew to her because not meeting her would mean never rescuing her—so high are the stakes for the family of the newly rehabilitating.

  First, the three of us dropped our suitcases off at our motel—a flat-roofed, white aluminum-sided motor inn with a stardust sign and failing lights: the o and the d were out in LODGE. My mother and I shared a room. I set the week’s therapy itinerary in the top drawer, beside a King James Bible.

  Mom turned on our room’s air conditioner and pulled the crisp white covers down on her bed, stretching out on it, sounding a hearty yawn. She marveled at our luck, that we’d left cold New England for Arizona heat.

  She slept, clenching her jaw, grinding her teeth. I read pamphlets on horseback riding and jewelry making and the Navajo. I listened to Mom snore. I went outside and called Jedediah from a pay phone and described the scene. I told him about the cactus, yellow flowers, fast-moving lizards, and flatland. I hung up and looked around for an ice and soda machine, scouted for others who might be Meadows patients’ families but didn’t see anyone. Later, we’d learn that most families stayed at the Hilton.