“I don’t want to come home,” Cara repeated.
“Honey, please, I’m begging you, please come home with me. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you something awful.”
This was the first time her father had ever called her ‘honey’. Cara felt her façade crack. The crack was infinitesimally small, but it was just large enough to admit his words. With trepidation, she agreed. He had no idea how hard it would be for her to face the kids at school. They would all know what had happened with Rick. They would know she’d been in a mental hospital. She’d be dubbed the crazy girl.
Cara turned to Dr. Bowman. “I’ll go home on one condition. I want a note from you, or I want you to call the school. Tell them I have permission leave class whenever I want. I won’t leave school and I’ll keep up my grades up. I’ll go to the library or something, but give me permission to leave class if I need to, if it’s too much for me. If you do that, I’ll go home.”
Dr. Bowman agreed to do as she asked, so Cara said goodbye to Debbie and Miss Mandy. She tossed her few possessions into a paper bag and left the ward. On her way out the door, she and her father ran into James Mackie. Her father stopped to chat with the young doctor.
James said, “I’m leaving too, heading back to medical school at the University of Iowa. Good luck, Cara.”
She said, “Thank you.” She accompanied her father to the parking lot without a backward glance.
∗ ∗ ∗
Cara returned to school. She picked up right where she’d left off. She attended to her work and received excellent grades, but her classmates went out of their way to avoid her. John was her only friend. His family had moved to the Midwest from California and he sought out Cara, claiming she was the only person at this provincial high school who was weird enough for him.
Feeling something akin to desperation, Cara hung out with him. He was eager to introduce her to marijuana, LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. Cara wasn’t much into hallucinogens, but the marijuana numbed her, making it easier to function at home. She managed to be courteous to her mother and reasonably friendly to her father.
John also introduced her to Randy and his girlfriend, Jackie, both drug dealers. Cara was quick to see the advantages of hanging with them. Randy had a roving eye and he gave her a lot of freebies because he thought she was cute, but Cara knew better than to trust him. Randy could come on pretty strong at times so she made sure she was never alone with him. John accompanied her when she bought her drugs. One thing Cara wanted to avoid was a physical relationship with anybody, especially someone like Randy.
Her father was satisfied with her grades, but once again, to her mother’s never ending aggravation, she didn’t date. Cara skipped every single high school dance.
Desperate to get away, Cara accelerated her high school work and graduated a year early. She’d been looking at colleges since the previous fall and she’d applied to a number of small, elite colleges out east, hoping to get as far from home as possible. More than anything Cara wanted a fresh start in a new place among new people who didn’t know anything about her, her family, or her past.
Her father encouraged her. He talked at length about the opportunities that would be available to her when she graduated. He and Cara were thrilled when she was accepted to each of her top three schools. The two of them sat up half the night talking about her options. She hadn’t felt this close to her dad in years. Before she went off to bed, he even hugged her, telling her how proud he was. Cara felt like she’d finally given him a reason to feel that way.
“You know, you could get a summer internship with a congressman or a senator,” he said. “Maybe go to law school, get involved in politics. You’ve already thrown your hat into the ring.” He teased her about her foray into the anti-war movement.
“I don’t know about politics.” Cara flashed him a smile. “I’m more into art and literature. I’m thinking maybe a degree in art or perhaps a double major in art and art history.”
Her father leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “I’ve never told you how much I enjoy looking at your painting.” He’d hung the painting from Washington D.C. in his chambers when it had been returned last year. “People ask about it all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, lawyers, judges, law clerks. The District Attorney has told me many times how much he loves it. He’s even offered to buy it.”
Cara laughed.
Her father smiled. “It’s good to hear you laugh, honey. I don’t remember the last time I heard you laugh.”
∗ ∗ ∗
The next morning Cara ran to answer the phone. It was her father’s secretary, but the woman was incoherent. She finally managed to say, “Your father suffered a heart attack in his chambers. He’s dead. His body has been taken to the hospital.”
Cara dropped the phone and ran. The doctors had already drawn a sheet over her father, but she threw it to the floor, covering his cooking body with her own, completely unaware of her mother’s arrival.
The emergency room staff decided to call Dr. Bowman. He arrived with Debbie, and together they managed to pull Cara off her father’s corpse and sedate her. It was Cara’s grandmother who took responsibility for getting both Cara and her mother home so the body could be moved to the hospital morgue to await an autopsy.
The following day Cara found her mother in bed, unable to function. She left Cara and her grandmother to deal with the coroner and the local press, and to make the funeral arrangements. Forced to set aside her own sorrow, Cara took over the household responsibilities and went about the business of death.
∗ ∗ ∗
It seemed as if the entire town planned to attend Judge Franklin’s funeral. Cara roused her mother and helped her to bathe. Cara did her hair for her and applied her makeup, making sure to put some blush on her pale cheeks. With her grandmother’s assistance, she helped the silent woman to dress, propping her in a chair in the living room while she made herself ready.
Because of the number of people she expected, Cara opted for a graveside service. Despite her mother’s faint protests, the casket would be closed. Cara couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing her father’s dead body. She’d picked out his favorite suit for him to wear and his secretary had given the mortuary his judicial robes. He was to be buried in them, along with his gavel.
The night before the funeral Cara went to her father’s office and pulled her painting from the wall. She removed the painting from its frame and rolled it into a cylinder, tying it with a red ribbon. She asked to mortician to place it beside her father in the casket. When she buried her father, she would bury the best piece of herself.
Cara’s sole consolation was her memory of their final conversation. Her father had made her laugh.
Any differences of opinion, any lingering animosity were forgotten for the time being as Cara and her mother stood hand in hand during the service. Cara felt her mother’s knees buckle when the casket was lowered into the ground. One of her father’s friends retrieved a lawn chair.
She was grateful for the distraction. Cara knew that if her mother hadn’t collapsed, she might have. Watching her father’s casket slide into a dark hole was the worst moment of her entire life.
After the service Cara drove herself and her mother and grandmother back to the house. The three women rode in silence. By the time they arrived home, the street was already filled with cars. The staff from her father’s office had come by to drop off flower arrangements and the front door to their home sat open. As Cara escorted her mother up the front walk, she could see that the house was full of people. Her father would have loved it. He liked nothing better than a good party.
Cara turned her mother over to the women from her Bridge Club. She retired to her room for a few moments of solitude. She pulled a small plastic bag of marijuana out of her bottom drawer, rolled a joint and lit it.
Cara sat on the floor, leaning back against her bed and inhaled deep and slow, waiting to feel the buzz. She clos
ed her eyes.
Dear god, she wanted to get so high she’d forget that her father was dead.
Cara finished that joint and rolled another one. Finally, after the third joint, she decided she was wasted enough to go downstairs and face her guests. Trading the black dress that smelled of pot smoke for a dark brown skirt and white blouse, she kicked off her shoes off and left them off. Cara glanced in her mirror. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but it didn’t matter. Everyone would assume she’d been crying.
Cara was surprised to find Debbie among the guests, along with James Mackie. From the way Debbie kept her arm through his, Cara assumed they were dating. Debbie seemed happy, though she tried hard not to seem too happy in front of Cara.
Cara said, “I didn’t thank you for rescuing me at the hospital.”
“There’s no need to thank me. I’m glad I could be there.”
Always polite, Cara turned to James. “What year are you in now in medical school?”
“I just completed my final year. I’ll be starting a residency in Internal Medicine in Iowa City this fall.”
Cara swallowed over the hard lump in her throat. “My dad died of a heart attack, you know.”
“Yes,” he replied. “I know. Debbie told me. I’m very sorry.”
“He didn’t have any warning. He just, he just died. The autopsy showed that he had some atherosclerosis, but not much. The pathologist termed it sudden cardiac death.”
“It happens sometimes. I’ve seen it happen to patients in the hospital.”
Cara absorbed his words in silence. She looked down when James put his warm hand on her arm.
“My father died when I was just a boy,” he said. “I know how you feel.”
∗ ∗ ∗
James felt like he should explain to Cara what the words sudden cardiac death meant, but at the same time he got a gut feeling she really didn’t want to know. At least not right now. She appeared to be running on fumes.
“It happens,” he repeated, wishing he could offer Cara some comfort. She seemed so very alone, exactly as she had when he’d met her two years ago. Even the air around her felt absolutely still, almost painfully so. It was as if noise of the everyday, the commonplace, of home and family, laughter and love didn’t or couldn’t reach her.
Her loss touched him more than he expected. Cara seemed so solemn, so adult. He wondered if she’d ever experienced a single carefree moment in her short life. At least she could function. He’d attempted to engage her mother, but the woman couldn’t even muster an answer to his greeting. He realized Cara must have made the funeral arrangements.
Two years ago it had always been Cara’s father, not her mother, who came to the hospital. Even though Cara had refused to see him, her father had usually made a point of swinging by the emergency room to have a word with him.
Aside from filing the formal complaint against Dr. Kent and removing the cast from Cara’s broken arm, James had no official involvement with the case. He hadn’t had access to Cara’s psychiatric chart and he’d never spoken with Dr. Bowman about her. Yet James always sensed that Judge Franklin somehow felt connected to his daughter through him, as if he’d thought of James as a conduit to Cara.
Watching Cara float through the room, James believed with his whole heart that the loss of her father had been a tremendous blow. Cara had very little to fall back upon. She couldn’t count on her mother and her grandmother appeared to be quite elderly.
Although the girl wasn’t as thin as the last time he’d seen her, she still seemed frail, and just as she had when she’d been hospitalized, she kept her eyes veiled, her face blank and smooth, making it difficult for him to read her.
Two years ago he couldn’t help being concerned for her. Even after he’d returned to medical school, he’d caught himself wondering from time to time how she was doing. Now he felt that concern resurface. James shrugged. Maybe it was force of habit. He’d just spent four years training to be concerned about nearly everything.
He and Debbie stayed for another hour before tracking Cara down to say their goodbyes. James was struck by an odd sensation as they walked down the porch steps, he felt almost as if he was throwing Cara to the wolves. In truth, there was nothing he could do for her. He reminded himself that he wasn’t a part of her life. What she made of herself, what she did from this point on, what happened to her, was none of his business.
So James wondered why it was that his chest ached as Debbie’s car pulled away from the curb. And why his eyes traveled back to Cara standing alone on the porch, her slim profile turned away from them, her shadow stretched long across the grass.
January 1974
In hindsight, Cara often referred to the twelve months following her father’s death as her “Black Hole of Calcutta” year. She felt like she’d been shoved into a suffocating little box from which there was no escape. College was out of the question, at least for the time being. Her mother was too depressed to climb out of bed, let alone deal with insurance adjusters, fill out the forms required to receive her father’s social security payments, or make any arrangements for the transfer of her father’s pension funds.
Fortunately their house was paid for, but Cara wasn’t a signee on her parents’ accounts and despite her grandmother’s help, there was no family member other than Cara to pay bills or even buy groceries. Taking the initiative, Cara contacted one of her father’s former law partners, Phil Jackson. He agreed to help Cara with the paperwork, and her mother was relieved to hand over control of all their assets.
While her father’s insurance payout was helpful, it wasn’t enough to live on for a prolonged period of time. Neither was his pension. He hadn’t been a judge long enough to accrue much retirement. Within weeks, Cara found two jobs. Despite her mother’s feeble protests that the job was beneath her, she worked as a waitress during the lunch hour in the grill at her mother’s country club. Evenings and weekends, Cara worked at a women’s clothing store in the mall. In addition, she registered for a full load of classes at the local junior college, arranging her class schedule around her work schedule. She shopped, did laundry, cleaned the house and prepared meals for herself and her mother. Her grandmother made herself available, but as the months passed, Cara could see that her grandmother’s health was failing and it was just a matter of time before she too would need assistance.
Cara managed to scratch and crawl her way through every day for nearly eight months, until the night her grandmother suffered a stroke.
Her grandmother lay in a bed in Intensive Care, minimally responsive, for three days. When she woke from the coma her cognitive functioning remained intact, but she was paralyzed on her right side.
Sitting at the bedside, holding her grandmother’s hand, Cara listened, shocked, as the older woman apologize to her.
She spoke slowly, trying to enunciate clearly, despite the paralysis on the right side of her mouth. “I feel so sorry for you, my dear. You have so much on your shoulders.”
Cara blinked back tears. “Don’t apologize, Grandma. It’s not your fault. We’ll work it out. I promise you, we’ll work something out.”
The neurologists told Cara her grandmother’s prognosis was guarded. With physical therapy, she might regain some function and perhaps partial independence, but they didn’t hold out much hope for a full recovery. Once her grandmother was stable, she would be transferred to a rehabilitation unit and then, depending upon her progress, she’d either transfer into a nursing home or Cara would have to hire help to care for her.
An anxious Cara left the hospital that evening, intending to go straight home. She needed to check on her mother and give her an update. In recent weeks, her mother had begun to show some interest in helping out around the house, she even answered the phone on occasion.
As she pulled out of the visitors’ parking lot, Cara worried what she’d find when she got home. When her grandmother had the stroke, her mother suffered a huge setback. The news about her grandmother’s prognosis could make thing
s much worse.
Halfway home, Cara felt dizzy. It was almost as if her grip on reality began to slip. She swore she was leaving her body and standing outside, a stranger, watching.
Panic stricken, short of breath, heart thudding in her chest, Cara struggled to maintain control of the car. She had so little feeling in her body that the hands steering the car might as well have been made of ice. With an abrupt jerk, Cara turned the car down a side street, banging the front wheel against the curb. Throwing the car into park, she ripped the key from the ignition and jumped out, shaking like a leaf. Cara clutched at her chest and leaned back against the car door, struggling to get enough oxygen.
Cara was nearly overcome by the urge to run away, but she didn’t know where in the world she would run to and she had no idea what she’d be running from. Whatever this was, she knew it wasn’t anything she could see, it was inside, pounding at her along with the pounding of her heart. She might run forever and she’d just bring it along with her.
Randy, he was the solution. She had to find Randy tonight. Cara hadn’t gotten high in months, but she was desperate to get wasted now before she did something stupid, like drive into a ditch or over a bridge or hit another car head on.
She’d always stayed away from Randy unless her friend John went with her, but John and his family had moved back to California. She’d have to handle this on her own. At that moment, Cara didn’t care. She was too terrified to worry about what Randy might say or do. The need to control her fear far outweighed her fear of Randy.
Cara started the engine. Terrified she’d screw up, Cara stayed under the speed limit all the way to Randy’s neighborhood. She left her car parked down the street and walked up the hill. As she expected the main house was dark, but the van sat in its usual spot. She tapped lightly on the van’s back door. It swung open and Randy peered out, his head wreathed in pot smoke. He looked her up and down.
Come Back To Me Page 7
