Her

by Christa Parravani

  We drove through the desert to meet Cara. Mom counted the red rock monoliths. I’d read about them in a motel brochure. Once, Sedona was beneath the ocean. Over millions of years, the sea receded and layered sediment from volcanic activity formed mountains, weathered towers. Years and wind and water sculptured the sandstone into brilliant crimson buttes. Mom counted and gave them names as we drove: Coffeepot, Cathedral, Thunder Mountain, Rabbit Ears, Mother and Child, Twin Nuns.

  Mom hadn’t had a vacation in years. Kahlil couldn’t hide his excitement over seeing his sober wife. He’d missed Cara.

  We made it to The Meadows by three and signed in at the lobby and were searched for sharps (knives, needles, pens). A security guard showed us the way to Cara. We saw her for the first time in Sedona smoking in a gazebo among a group of patients, who were gathered like a losing baseball team in a dugout. They were hunched over, cigarettes dangling between their knees, kicking dirt. Cara sat next to a slender fashion designer who’d checked in for exhaustion. I recognized him right away from her description: hair waved over to the side with gel, smart tailored linen chinos, toffee spring oxfords with no socks. His shoes and pants were his uniform, his dignity. I wondered if he troubled to take his shoes off and pour them clear of sand. The horizon divided the landscape in half: sand and sky. There was no avoiding either.

  “He’s been making excellent progress,” Cara had told me over the phone the week before my trip. “Just don’t tell anyone he’s here. It’s a secret.” He’d gone downhill after the failing of his latest collection.

  “That’s fine, but I don’t think anyone we know would really care who you’re in with.”

  “There’s a guy here from TV, too, a comedian.”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “He has taken a liking to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “An alcoholic all the way. He couldn’t hack the pressure when his sitcom was canceled.”

  “Red nose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know it.”

  “And you?” I wondered what on earth my sister had spun up to tell these men about herself. It didn’t surprise me that she was getting on well with them. I’d learned over the years that some men like beauty with tragedy. A lovely woman with a dark rotten story is like sweetened chocolate with a hard caramel center that sticks in the teeth. For a certain kind of man, winning a blighted woman helps him stand taller. I hoped Cara had been careful.

  There were others at The Meadows: a rotund man with square glasses and a head like a bowling ball, midwestern and middle class. His wife had put the money up for treatment after he’d holed himself up in a Vegas hotel with hooker after hooker and spent most of the family money. His regret went only as far as his having to endure the claustrophobia of his swanky incarceration. The other patients hated him. Sex addicts were the lowest breeds at The Meadows, sorrier than drug addicts and gamblers. Love addicts were the weirdest, Cara had said.

  And there was Mitch, a depressive who had taken a liking to stimulants. He became Cara’s true friend. She nicknamed them Team High and Low, the upper and downer duo. Mitch and Cara talked weekly up until the day she died. He never wanted her; he loved her like a sister. I called him the day she died. All he could think to say was “Shit.” His answer to every detail I gave him was “Shit.” Time, cause, place. It was all shit. He was right. I hope he’s still alive now, living in California somewhere, riding his dirt bike and surfing.

  At the gazebo Cara was new, gleaming, suntanned, and sober; she was wearing a necklace of cactus flowers. This was her final week of rehab. She was twenty-eight days clean. No small feat.

  She left her tribe at first sight of us, her long white skirt swishing in the dusty yellow sand. She wrapped her arms around Kahlil and he pulled her up in embrace, lifting her feet six or more inches off the ground.

  “You look like something sweet, baby.” He buried his nose in her hair. “Honey and vanilla cream, that’s it.”

  Cara was toned and with it. She’d lost her soft middle. As she swayed back and forth with her husband, her T-shirt peaked up, exposing her girlish belly. She’d not only lost drugs, she’d lost years.

  Mom looked at her watch. “It’s time to go in and meet the therapists.”

  “I’ve got meds first.” Cara looked around at the group. “Hey, everyone, it’s meds time.”

  The patients shuffled up and walked quickly back to the main building. Cara grabbed my hand and pulled me along. I waited in line with her. A nurse stood behind a door that closed at the bottom and swung open at the top. She shook three pills into Cara’s palm and gave her a Dixie cup filled with water.

  “Swallow,” the nurse commanded politely.

  Cara obliged and tossed the pills to the back of her mouth. She opened wide for the nurse and lifted her tongue.

  The nurse nodded and moved on to the next patient.

  “They need to see that I’ve not hidden the meds in my mouth.”

  * * *

  Family Week was five days of intensive therapy. It began with a session where we were all given sketchpads, crayons, pencils, and markers and asked to draw an important memory from our childhoods.

  Cara and I both made the same picture: a car driven by our father, our luggage piled high in his open trunk. My image was of the back of the car. The license plate read: FLORIDA. Cara’s picture was a side view that showed us both sitting in the backseat, me looking small, crying, sitting directly behind our father. Cara is penciled into the car in faint lines, a smoky outline with her hands pressed onto the rolled-up windows, her mouth drawn in an O. In her picture she is screaming.

  Kahlil drew himself at eight years old, kicking the winning goal in a soccer game.

  Mom drew her family arranged around a fallen Christmas tree in their living room. Her mother stands with one hand on her hip, the other shielding her eyes. Her four siblings are scattered about in various poses of disbelief. Her father has bolts of lightning flying off of his head and dots for eyes. Mom drew sweeping lines beneath his arms to indicate movement. A broken bottle of liquor is smashed at his feet; a puddle of bourbon pools around his children. Drunk, he had knocked down their tree. Mom told the therapist he did this every year. Her brothers glued the ornaments back together and hoisted the tree back up. They all tried to imagine nothing had happened and got on with having Christmas morning.

  The week went on like this, in group sessions, until Wednesday, three days into Family Week. We’d all cried and apologized and vowed to live more honest lives. Cara was going to be clean and take it one day at a time. We were being given the tools to help her accomplish this. It was to be a family effort.

  Wednesday morning began like all the others, with decaf coffee and danishes in a conference room. The clock struck nine but as the other families made their ways into therapy suites, we were asked to report to the front office.

  We were led into a windowless room and met by a woman who had a cardboard box filled with Cara’s belongings at her feet. Cara’s clothes were stacked and neatly folded; half-full bottles of shampoo and conditioner were ziplocked tight in baggies beside bars of packaged soaps. Her diary was there on the top of the stack to be seen, with lock and key. The box was topped with a construction-paper tiara glued with plastic jewels. Cara’s name swept the front of it in a streak of silver glitter.

  We all sat down.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask Cara to leave,” the woman told us plainly.

  “We’ve traveled all this way. There must be some kind of mistake,” Mom said.

  “Your daughter has violated the rules here. She’s had sexual relations with another member of our community. As much as we’d like to, we can’t overlook it.” The woman folded her hands in her lap and pursed her lips as if she sucked a lemon.

  “There must be some kind of mistake.” Mom was confident. Being expelled by an uptight droid hardly seemed in good keeping with the spirit of Family Week.

  “I’m afraid not.” The wom
an gestured to Cara. “We’d all like you to explain, please. You know the first step. Acknowledgment.”

  “I did it.” Cara’s words were flat, matter of fact. She was entitled to her misdeed. There hadn’t been a mistake—she’d met a younger man there, Charlie, a depressive. The accusations were right. The two had not only had sex, they’d fallen in love.

  I looked over at Kahlil, who was picking at a cuticle and staring curiously at a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies in a thick, gaudy, gold plastic frame. I was furious at Cara for screwing all of this up, for humiliating her husband in front of me and my mother and this counselor. Also, strangely, I felt the weirdest kind of relief. Her infidelity offered evidence that my sister was ready to be sexual. I considered this a good sign, an indication that The Meadows was doing its job: she’d allowed herself to be desired, and this seemed like a first movement beyond the trauma of her rape.

  This is how Cara was caught: Another patient—a woman, a sex and love addict—had been watching Cara and Charlie when they snuck off. The woman had tried to strike a deal with Cara. She wouldn’t tell on the two lovers if Cara did her the simple favor of allowing the woman to smell her fingers after sex. Cara had refused.

  I thought of the money, the care that had been put into our last-ditch effort to help Cara get well. “What about the pervert who tried to get off on their fumes?” I was boiling, hating the sex addicts as much as anyone else there did. I’d been converted to the ways of The Meadows in just a few short days. “She’s going home, too?”

  “The other patient has been talked to and put in an intensive session for caving to her whims. She’ll remain here. The young man will also be expelled.”

  “This is ludicrous.” I pulled out a pamphlet for The Meadows from my pocket and scanned the patient rules.

  There was nothing to indicate the sex addict should go.

  “I can’t go.” Cara fell to her knees on the floor and wept. She begged the woman to reconsider. “I just want to get well,” Cara sobbed. “I can’t do that if I don’t have the extra week here. Please.”

  But I could see she was sobbing crocodile tears. She wasn’t sorry for the sex. She was sorry she’d been caught.

  “Cara, please take your belongings.” The woman got up and attempted to shake my mother’s hand. Mom rejected the gesture.

  “Cara, get off the floor. Kahlil, grab the box.” Mom picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. “Let’s go.” She smiled wickedly at the woman. “We’ll gladly take our exit.” She grabbed Cara’s hand and pulled her toward the door. “We’ve been kicked out of classier places.”

  * * *

  We rode horses at a ranch after Cara’s eviction from rehab, took a daybreak beginner’s ride. Mom wasn’t wasting a perfectly good vacation. Our guide took us through the desert with her trusty dog, a blue point mutt, a herder with matted gray fur and swift feet. He nipped at our horses’ heels. We rode on through flatland and through dust kicked up from the horses’ hooves, all of us silent except for the chatter of our guide. We passed over winding cliffs on narrow paths into a valley scattered with junked-out cars. We crossed over sun-beaten railroad tracks that had been forsaken long ago for highways. Mom says what she remembers of the ride is that the landscape was colorless except for the growth of an occasional pink flower. She says the desert is like an old hand-colored black-and-white photograph of a baby holding a rose.

  We traveled through Arizona all that week. Our last trip was to the Grand Canyon.

  * * *

  Remember this time last year? We drove through Sedona on our way back from the Canyon. You kept asking, “How many people do you think fell in?” I stood as close to the edge as you would allow, near enough that I could see the distant green river at the bottom. There were awkward pauses in conversation—you didn’t know what to do with the too clean me. Mom hit the brake and then the shift. It was a rental. I was red cliffs, towering.

  In Sedona I learned to play Ping-Pong, and to touch the yellow flowers of Sonoran cacti without bleeding.

  I walked the same path everyday with Mitch. Nothing but swearing from him. We wore name tags, hated them. We sifted desert sand though our fingers and counted roadrunners. We couldn’t cross the red line without alarms going off.

  Love was stupidly next door in a closet, in a bathroom, a patient’s empty room. I left my wedding rings on a table. It started with a kiss. I gave Charlie my cloak as a hiding place and took his body as refuge. I wore his crown. It was makeshift, pink construction paper and paste. It read beautiful. We made plans to camp and make love near the Colorado without a tent. We got as far as Family Week and life and over.

  Returning home I was the same battered girl without a throne.

  * * *

  On the plane ride home from Sedona, Cara asked Kahlil why he hadn’t come to look for her during the rape. Had he not loved her enough to notice she’d left behind her wallet and purse? Why had he not known to search the path where they always walked the dog, before sunset? Why had he waited?

  Kahlil said he stayed home in case the police called. He was worried if he’d gone looking for her, he’d not be home if she returned. He said he knew something must be wrong, but didn’t know what to do.

  Cara told me when they arrived home, she opened the front door on Kahlil’s mess. Bags of garbage were heaped one on top of the other as high as the kitchen table. Every dish needed washing. Bed linens were stained with dirt and food and the cats had peed on them. A small turd floated in the dog’s water dish. Maggots swarmed the sink. Empty pizza boxes littered the living room.

  But now Cara was sober. She saw her home with clear eyes, and she promptly told Kahlil to leave. She hired a maid. Together they vacuumed Kahlil out of the house.

  Chapter 14

  Kahlil filled his pickup truck with his belongings. He’d said he would come back for the KitchenAid mixer, his sharp paring knives, and a few pieces of drafting equipment, but he never did. Cara told me he had driven away with his clothes flapping around in the back of the truck bed. She’d stood on the porch and watched him crest the hill toward the end of the street and wondered if he’d miss her; she hadn’t planned for him not to. I’d never seen her so lonely as the months between their separation and Edgardo’s trial.

  Kahlil pulled up to the courthouse for the trial in his truck, the open cargo bed still filled to the top with his clothes. Even though he’d been gone since late spring and now it was September, he still had nothing but a tarp to protect his belongings from rain and thieves. He’d moved to a hippie commune and the bed of his truck doubled as a closet.

  I met him in the parking lot and tried to hurry him in. Cara and my mother were already inside. The DA was prepping her. It was her day to testify. Kahlil was late. He, too, was supposed to be informed of protocol and given a run-through in questioning before he went on the stand that afternoon. He stepped out of the truck and kicked his work boots against the truck’s front tire, dislodging chunks of mud and a few stray stones. I hadn’t seen him since the trip to Sedona five months before. He greeted me the same way we’d last parted, with an untroubled embrace. He wore torn jeans and a moth-eaten wool sweater.

  “We’ve got to go,” I told him.

  “I can’t yet, not wearing this.” He picked at his unraveling sweater sleeve. “Hang on.” He reached into the truck’s bed and pulled out a damp wrinkled suit jacket and a matching pair of pants. “I brought something civilized to change into,” he said, and quickly undressed in the truck. He emerged in his suit. It reeked of cat urine and showed signs of mold under the armpits. “How do I look?” he asked, in earnest.

  “Just like I always remembered,” I said and put my arm around his hip.

  We went through the court metal detectors and took an elevator to a third-floor waiting room where Cara and my mother sat with the DA. Court resumed an hour later.

  Cara and Kahlil sat together for a while. He had something to tell her. Why he chose this day out of all days to do it
, I’ll never be certain. Before Cara went on the stand, Kahlil told her he’d met another woman, and now that woman was pregnant, expecting their baby.

  There would never be a man she trusted, Cara said to the room, and got up to excuse herself to cry in the hall.

  I thought of my husband’s gentle embrace, the slope of his shoulders as he hugged me, his laugh for which I teased him. It sounded like a woodpecker nailing a tree, and it always answered my jokes. I was sad on Cara’s behalf, thinking of my loving spouse. She’d just not found the right man. I was certain she’d find him if she kept her will and opened herself.

  * * *

  I saw Edgardo for the first time that day. He was as I’d pictured: tall, with a wide, round head, cropped black hair, broad shoulders, stocky legs and arms, scowling mouth. He turned to look at me sitting on a court bench and smiled, showing his teeth.

  We sat in the courtroom with him for nearly a week. Evidence was presented, pictures of my sister’s beaten body blown up big and pasted to flip charts. The DA pointed to the bites on Cara’s neck and back with a yardstick—the bites matched the cast taken of Edgardo’s teeth. Doctors testified that semen they’d collected from Cara was an exact match with Edgardo’s DNA. Surveillance videos from the supermarket parking lot showed him leaving the liquor store and walking toward the park. It was clear, he was guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison, many lives, consecutively.

  * * *

  Start out with a white speck. A black speck came cuddled in a leather jacket. Kahlil’s jacket had words written on it: We are all brothers under the skin and I for one am willing to skin humanity to prove it. The speck poked her nose from out of his coat. I could not hug my husband in his coat. I could not hug my husband because of his armor and his size. My arms couldn’t reach around his shoulders. The black speck leapt out from his coat. White specks leapt kamikaze from the sky. The black speck was a dog and the white specks were snow. It wasn’t going to stop, any of it: the growing dog, the failing marriage, the blizzard haunting the sky. The speck weighed two pounds before it grew to weigh seven pounds. The marriage grew from one year to three years and then it was gone.