It took a minute before she could muster the courage to answer him. Then finally, quietly, Cara asked, “David, what if I am wrong?”
“I don’t think it’s so much about who is right and who is wrong, Cara. I think, at this point, I think it’s just about forgiveness.”
17
Nearly a week after she’d been home, Katie sat in front of an Absolut bottle for an hour and a half. The voices in her head kept taunting her, slowly and patiently prodding her. She had no choice but to pray. She didn’t pray often, but in this case it felt both familiar and necessary. There had been a lot of praying in rehab. She shrugged off the Serenity Prayer—she was sick to death of the damn thing—and opted instead to speak with God directly. She thought maybe she’d have better luck if she could have a few of her own words with Him.
You wanna drink, Katie. Go ahead, you deserve to drink. No one knows what it’s like being here. No one knows what it’s like living here. Go on, Katie, you can have just one. Honestly, no one will ever know.
“God, please keep me sober. God, don’t let me drink this bottle. God, keep these fucking voices out of my head.”
C’mon, Katie, you can have just one and quit then. You know you want just one drink. It’ll make you feel a little better; it’ll help you through the afternoon. You can handle just one drink.
“God, you know I can’t do this without some help. Please, please get me through this. God, help me through this. I can’t stand it here, I can’t stand my life. It would be so damn much easier if I could just have one drink. But God, please don’t let me drink. Please, please, please don’t let me drink.”
She hated the sound of her own voice, begging for help. She hated how helpless she sounded, how completely lost she was. She thought about calling her sponsor, Sarah, but she knew Sarah would want to come over. She knew all the logic Sarah would use on her, and she wasn’t in the mood for any of it. She knew Sarah would encourage her to go straight to another meeting. And she wasn’t in the mood for another meeting, either.
When she heard the grinding of the garage-door opener and her mother’s car pull in and idle, she got up from the table and put the bottle back in its spot in the bar. Her mother’s presence was the most sobering thing in her life.
C’mon, Katie . . . It won’t hurt you. It’s just one little taste. You could use just one little swig. She’ll never know.
“SHUT UP!”
“Katie? Honey? Are you okay?” Cara’s voice rang out from the butler’s pantry before she came into the kitchen where Katie stood with her back against the countertop, her eyes closed to everything around her.
“In here, Mom,” Katie answered reluctantly. She was exhausted from arguing with herself; in no mood to deal with her mother now.
“Oh, hi, honey. How’re you feeling? What time did you get up? How’s your morning going? Did you have some breakfast?” Cara was in her face, bombarding her with questions one right after the next before Katie ever had the chance to answer. She reached over and tucked Katie’s hair behind her ears, pushing it back. Katie hated it that way; she had always hated it that way.
Katie sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m fine.”
Her brothers and sister were at their father’s house. Katie had refused to go. Anyone would have thought it crazy to have even asked. She hadn’t seen her father in three months; she certainly wasn’t going to start now. It was bad enough that she had to be here with her mother, 24/7. Cara had hardly left her alone for a minute. The fact that she’d convinced her mother that she’d be okay while she went out to run a few errands this morning was practically a miracle.
“I thought we’d head out before lunch and do some shopping. And I’ve made you an appointment for a haircut. We’ve simply got to get that hair under control.” She pushed at Katie’s hair again, cupping it to shape the bottom. Katie pushed her hand away.
“I like it this way. I don’t want to cut it.”
“Just a trim, honey. We’ll just give it a little shape. It could use a little shape.”
“I don’t want to cut it.”
“Really, Katie, it’ll look so much sweeter when we give it some life. Just the wee ends here and there.” Cara reached over once again to fluff Katie’s hair with the ends of her fingertips. Katie caught her at the wrist and held her tight, her fingers encircling Cara’s plump wrist.
“I. DON’T. WANT. TO. CUT. MY. HAIR.”
“Katherine,” Cara whispered, stunned, spiraling backward. Cara’s breath caught in her throat and scarlet blotches appeared on her face and arms.
“You’re not listening to me. Don’t you get it, Mom? I don’t want to cut my hair. I don’t want to cut my hair. I don’t FUCKING want to cut my hair.” She crossed her arms over her chest and hunched her shoulders, pulling away from her mother and retreating to the corner of the kitchen.
“Okay.”
“Fine.”
“You have an AA meeting this evening. Seven o’clock.” Cara’s chirpy voice had gone flat, dead. She said this matter-of-factly, without question. It was a statement and not a question. It was a fact, not an option. She left no room for negotiation.
“Fine.”
18
Melanie had broken the news to Cara first. She was pregnant; seventeen and pregnant. It was the week before graduation, steamy and muggy and humid. Mel had been fighting the nausea for three weeks, trying desperately to keep her breakfast down and take her finals.
It hadn’t exactly been a surprise to Mel. When Dermott raped her, Mel had the feeling she’d never be able to shake it off. Now she was certain of it.
What to do with the baby was never in question for Mel. She dismissed abortion immediately, never even contemplated adoption. Despite the circumstances surrounding how she got pregnant, there was a part of Mel who thought maybe she was supposed to have this baby, a part of her that thought maybe this was her way of getting back her family. Her mother had left her, abandoning her without even saying good-bye. Surely Mel could do better than that.
“Are you crazy, Mel?” Cara pleaded with her. “You can’t have a baby. You’re seventeen. And, my God, Mel, this is Dermott’s baby. He raped you.”
“I’m well aware of what he did to me, Cara,” she snapped, defensive and angry at the same time. “I know how this happened.”
“Well, then, why the hell are you even thinking about this? Why would you even contemplate it?”
“I’m not thinking about it. It’s done. This is what I’m doing.”
Cara was furious. Mel was just getting started, they all were. They were about to graduate from high school, go on and live their lives—really live their lives for the first time ever. Mel had a future she needed to consider. Sure, she didn’t have all the advantages that Cara and Leah and Paige had—she wasn’t heading off to a university the way her friends were—but there were still plenty of opportunities she could have looked at. Cara’s parents had already told Mel she could stay, even after Cara left. There was junior college, a job, a life. But not with a baby. Not with a child. Not at seventeen.
“But, Melanie, you’ve got to think this through. God, Melanie, he raped you. This baby happened because he attacked you.”
“Again, Cara, I was there. I know what happened.”
“But how can you even fathom this? How can this be something that you would want?”
Mel whipped her head around and squared Cara off, towering over her. They’d come to the park to talk and the sun was hot, blistering on the skin. Cara had been sitting on a chipped picnic table, hunched over and resting her elbows on her knees.
“Look, Cara, I don’t expect you’ll understand this. I don’t expect you’ll ever be able to get your arms around any part of this. Your life has been virtually untouched, unscarred. You have no idea what it’s like for your mother to walk out of the house and never come back. You have no idea what it was like to be left.”
“But, Mel, you’ve got to . . .”
“No, wait, Cara. You t
hink you know what this has been like because you’ve been here with me through it. You and your family have been over-the-top generous. You’ve taken me in. Your mother has single-handedly held Dermott off so that I could stay here. But this, Cara, no one knows what this feels like except me.”
Cara sat on the table quietly tracing the graffiti with her index finger, waiting for Mel to finish. The anger she had felt only moments before had subsided. Mel stood in front of her, pleading for her sanity, reaching for survival.
“No one gets to make a decision about this but me, Cara. Do you understand that? No one.”
Cara nodded slowly. It wasn’t as if she was agreeing with Mel, certainly not about her decision. She opposed Mel’s decision to her very core, there wasn’t anything redeeming about it. But Mel was right about one thing: it was her decision. Only a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, there wasn’t anyone who was going to stop her, not on this one.
When Mel gave birth she was on her own, alone and frightened, in the sterile and colorless maternity ward at the general hospital that the counselor at Planned Parenthood had instructed her to go to. The aloof and hardhearted doctor on call that night delivered Isabella in record time, lecturing Mel about getting pregnant again while he sewed up her episiotomy. She turned her head away and drifted off, letting the pain medication run thick over her muscles, and watching the nurse sponge off her daughter and wrap her tightly in a blanketed cocoon.
Mel had prayed for one thing, and that was that her child resembled no one but herself. She’d been blessed with a girl, and the resemblance to Dermott was difficult to detect, though if Mel stared long enough at Isabella’s face, as she had the entire first day she was in the hospital, Dermott appeared out of nowhere, taunting her like the Devil, hanging there in front of her the same way he had the day he’d raped her. Isabella was striking; olive skin, long eyelashes, a perfect, heart-shaped face. She possessed only one noticeable feature of Dermott’s that couldn’t be denied. Mel had spotted it right off, and in the years that followed, she grew out Isabella’s thick hair and rarely permitted her to wear it pulled back or tucked behind the long, thin ears that made Melanie cringe.
19
When Katie left, she carried what she could in her worn black duffel bag and blue backpack. She hadn’t completely unpacked in the two weeks that she’d been home so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to load the duffel and her backpack again, shoving the corners with T-shirts and sweats, folded, faded jeans and a couple of sweatshirts. She took her iPod and her cell phone, but that was about it.
After the train she’d taken had pulled into the Fourth Street station she called Mel. The city sky was bright blue, sparkly, and she found herself swimming against a crowd filing into the ballpark where the Giants were ready to start a double-header against the Padres.
She’d left no note for her mother, no card or message for Will or Luke, or even for Claire, who had been following her around for the last few days as if she was trying to make sure that she wouldn’t leave again.
Katie didn’t know what it was about home that she couldn’t take anymore, just that she couldn’t stand to be there. It was as if when she was there she was choking and couldn’t get a breath to save her life. It was as if someone was squeezing her so tightly that she couldn’t move. It was as if someone was holding her and wouldn’t let her go, wouldn’t let her run. Nothing was like it should have been, nothing felt familiar anymore.
Katie had planned her escape, plotting every little detail. She strode out of school after second period, hitchhiked home, picked up her bags and was on her way. She spent the hour on the train to the city feeling like she might as well have been three states away.
Mel’s assistant answered the phone on the second ring. Mel was in the middle of a shoot with a temperamental hand model who spent more time rubbing lotion across his knuckles and cuticles than he did on camera. The caretaking of his hands—his lifeblood—was more than a little disturbing.
Gloria, Mel’s trusted right-hand apprentice, had the good sense to whisper in her ear. “It’s Katie,” she said through a cupped hand. “And she’s in San Francisco.” Melanie took the cell phone from Gloria and excused herself, covering her left ear so that she could hear better. Over her shoulder, she saw the hand model cover his goods in a pair of pink chenille socks to keep them warm, dry and protected.
“Katie?” Mel asked. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
“At the train station. Um, look Mel, I need you to do me a favor. I need a place to stay, just for a little while. I can’t stay at home anymore. And, well, I don’t know where else to go. I don’t know who else to call.” Katie was breathless, full of information and brimming with details before Mel could get a word in edgewise. “If I can’t stay with you, well, I guess I understand, but I can’t go home. I just can’t; not anymore.”
Mel took a deep breath. “Where does your mother think you are?” she asked her.
It wasn’t all that important to her, really. She’d take Katie in in a heartbeat, no questions asked. But she figured she better know what she was up against. And she had a hunch that, given it was sometime around noon on a Tuesday afternoon, Cara had no idea that Katie was standing in the middle of San Francisco somewhere.
“School, I guess.”
“So you didn’t tell her you were leaving. Did you at least leave her a note?”
“Yeah, sure. I told her I’d call her later,” Katie fibbed. She’d worked up the story in her head, the intimate details so that the lie tumbled easily out of her mouth without a second thought, without even stumbling. Mel never would have guessed that she was lying.
“Where exactly are you?” Mel asked her again. “I’ll send Glo to pick you up in the van. I’d come myself but I’m right in the middle of a shoot.”
Katie breathed a huge sigh of relief. Mel would have her; she knew it. It had been the right decision to come. She looked around her at the people shuffling in and out of the station, people of all races, genders, ages. They ignored her and went about their business. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and hunched down lower, dragging her duffel closer to her. She blended right in with the other teenagers, those who should have been in school as well. She wondered who they were, if they were as lost and lonely as she was.
“I came up on the train. I’m right at China Basin, over by the ballpark. I can wait here if you need me to. Tell Gloria to take her time.”
“She’ll be there soon. Just wait right out front; don’t go anywhere else, okay? Just wait right there.” Mel hesitated, fiercely protective and having little understanding of what kind of shape Katie was really in. The last time she’d seen her had been a few days before she was due to go home. She had seemed eager then, ready to go at last. And she seemed strong. Strong enough to get through what was ahead of her. But this Katie, the one who had called from the train station, was different. Clearly something had happened, otherwise why would she be here?
“I’ll be fine, Mel.”
All things considered, Melanie wasn’t so sure.
The agreement that Cara and Katie had struck was that Katie would be allowed to stay home afternoons on her own so long as she called Cara as soon as she got home. No friends, no car, and absolutely no drinking, but it was a first step in regaining her freedom; the first step in repairing the damaged trust.
When Cara hadn’t heard from her daughter by three o’clock—their daily check-in time—she called home. When Katie hadn’t returned the call fifteen minutes later, she called again. Then she left a voice mail on Katie’s cell phone. By half past the hour, in the middle of an input session for a new client, her mind was wandering. At four o’clock, she panicked, excused herself and drove straight home, alternately calling the home number, Katie’s cell phone and a multitude of Jack’s numbers—office, cell, home—all of which led to one voice mail box after another. Cara frantically tried to re-create the conversation she’d had with Katie that morning. Had she for
gotten a commitment? Was her daughter at school? Working on a special assignment somewhere? Had she given her permission to do something after school and forgotten about it? And if so, why the hell wasn’t she answering her cell phone?
By dinnertime, panic had given way to horror. Katie was gone. Her closet and drawers had been emptied of her favorite outfits; her favorite stuffed animal—an old, ratty pink pig—was not in its normal spot on her pillow. Her toothbrush and comb and blow dryer had disappeared. Without a doubt, Katie was gone.
Cara called Jack again, frenzied. He answered on the second ring, agitation seeping into his voice. “I’ve been in a meeting all afternoon, Cara. What in God’s name is so damn important that you have to call my cell phone every half hour?”
“You mean you knew I was calling and you couldn’t pick up the goddamn phone?” she screamed at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Jack?”
“What is so important?”
“Katie’s gone. I have no idea where she is but she’s gone. Her duffel and backpack aren’t here and she’s taken some of her favorite things.”
“Gone where?”
“Goddamn it, Jack, do you think I’d be calling you if I had any idea where our daughter was? I have no fucking idea. Do you know where she is? Has she called you?”
“No, Cara, you couldn’t possibly think that she’d be with me. She isn’t even speaking to me.”
Cara wanted to scream at him. And whose fault is that?
“So you have no idea where she’s gone? No idea whatsoever?” Cara asked.
“No, Cara. I don’t know where she is. Have you called her friends’ houses? She’s probably just spending the night somewhere and forgot to tell you.”
When I'm Not Myself Page 20
