When Lisa awoke in the emergency room, she barely managed to open her left eye. “Mother, I can’t see out of my right eye.”
“It’s swelled shut,” Sandy said.
Lisa groaned with pain as she pulled herself up, and opened the bedside stand drawer. The mirror showed her eggplant-purple face with lumps and abrasions. Above her left eyebrow, they’d closed a two-inch laceration. Her lips were swollen to twice their normal size, and someone had put in a line of ugly black stitches on her lower lip from the midline to the right corner of her mouth.
After Rudy reached the hospital, the emergency head CT scan had revealed a collection of blood between his skull and the brain, a subdural hematoma. The neurosurgeon took him immediately to the operating room, and evacuated six ounces of blood and clots that were squeezing his brain. He remained in a coma for four days, and when he awoke, he could barely move his right side. During the weeks that followed, he made improvement, but even after vigorous rehabilitation and physical therapy, he could walk only with a cane, and had limited use of his right arm.
When they finally discharged Rudy from the hospital, he no longer felt the need to constrain his viciousness.
His memory was intact, but he processed information slowly, and became easily confused and angered. The stroke had left his face flat on one side, and kept his mouth in a permanent sneer. In addition, his injuries removed the few inhibitions that he’d had in the first place, unleashing his vile mouth as his weapon of choice, an effective substitute for physical abuse.
“You should have killed the son-of-a-bitch,” Lisa said, as Sandy waited on Rudy hand and foot. She was never able to satisfy his demands, and wallowed in the icy waters of her guilt.
Sandy and Lisa sat at the kitchen table eating the split pea soup they’d made together. Rudy’s slurred voice resounded from the family room where he remained glued in his La-Z-Boy chair before the TV. “This…tastes…like…shit,” he slurred and growled. A moment later, they jumped, startled by the crash of china on the hardwood floor.
When they entered the family room, Rudy sneered, and then smiled. “Clean…up…that…crap,” he sputtered, and then proceeded slowly, “and get me something decent to eat.”
“Clean it up, yourself,” Lisa shouted. “Mother’s not your slave.”
“It’s okay, darling,” Sandy said. “I’ll get my broom and mop.”
Lisa had observed Rudy closely, and had concluded that he could do more than he was willing to admit. Rudy, broken by his physical and sexual impotence, had only Sandy’s enslavement to use for his revenge.
Lisa Cooke felt wonderful as she sped under the bright midday sun along historic route 49 toward Grass Valley. The windows of the old Wagoneer were open wide as was her throttle. She wove through traffic, and often crossed the double white lines. When she approached Le Barr Meadows, she looked in her rear view mirror to the flashing red lights of the sheriff’s patrol car.
“Shit!”
She drove a bit farther, hoping the lights were for someone else, but then the siren made it clear that she’d been busted—again.
Lisa pulled to the side of the road, and glanced in her side-view mirror. Herman Manning stepped out of his car, stretched his broad body, and walked toward the driver’s door.
Crap. Not again, she thought, anyone, but Herman.
Lisa looked through her window at Herman’s black belt, his pistol, handcuffs, and the tuft of twenty-plus keys.
“Don’t give me any of your bullshit explanations, Lisa,” the sheriff said. “What the hell’s the matter with you? If you want to kill yourself before you reach your seventeenth birthday, be my guest, but why is it necessary to take a bunch of innocent people with you?”
She shrank into her seat. “I wasn’t going to…”
“License and registration, Miss.”
“Herman, you know me, I was just passing to…”
“License and registration.”
She fumbled through her purse, found her wallet, and showed him her California driver’s license.
“Remove it please, and hand it to me, Miss.”
After she had rummaged through the glove compartment for the registration, and had given it to the sheriff, he stood looking at the two documents. “Follow me, Miss Cooke. Maybe I can impress you more with a visit to jail than I can with speeding tickets.”
“Herman, please. Sandy’s going to kill me.”
“Good, then she’ll save me the trouble. I’ve had it with you.”
Three hours later, Herman sat with Sandy in his office. It reeked of burnt coffee and cigars. The sheriff sat behind his ancient oak desk, which was scattered with folders, paper-clipped stacks of loose documents, and reports. Governor Brown’s portrait hung between the American and the Californian flags. Wanted posters and lookout announcements covered two large bulletin boards. They could see Lisa through the bars of her cell across the way.
“This time, she’s gone too far, Sandy. It wasn’t only speeding—we’ve seen plenty of that from your daughter, already—no, this time, she almost killed herself and several others with her reckless driving.”
“She hasn’t had it easy, Herman.”
“I know, but I’ve given her all the slack I can.”He hesitated for a moment, and then continued. “I really like Lisa. It’s as if she’s my own daughter. I’m no psychiatrist, but with all she’s been through with Rudy, it wouldn’t surprise me that something emotional is going on. I call it self-destructive, thrill-seeking behavior, Sandy. She needs help.”
“Oh, Herman, don’t make such a big deal about it. She’s just a kid.”
Rudy and Sandy, the sheriff thought. What a twosome.
“She needs someone to talk to, a professional who can help her deal with the scars of being Rudy’s daughter. Don’t fight me on this, Sandy, or I’ll ask the court to remove Lisa from your home.”
“Whatever you say, Sheriff,” she shrugged.
Lisa discovered no simple answers to her complicated problems, but she found in individual and group therapy understanding and acceptance, as well as a sense of control that she’d never before experienced.
Lisa invested all of her time toward one goal, getting away from that house. She was an excellent student, but she redoubled her efforts to improve her grades, added to her extracurricular activities, and scanned through the library and the Internet for scholarship opportunities.
In the first week of the New Year, when Lisa arrived home from school, Sandy said, “You have mail from California State University, Chico.”
Lisa stared at the envelope, said a small prayer, and then tore it open. Her hands trembled as she read, “Congratulations. The CSU Chico School of Nursing has accepted your Application for Admission.” The letter went on to state that they were offering Lisa a scholarship that would cut her tuition and room and board by eighty percent. It would also arrange for a loan to cover the remainder of the five-year RN program.
She showed Sandy the letter, and they embraced.
“I know this is going to be difficult for you, Mother, but this is my chance.”
Sandy wept as she again embraced her daughter. “You’ve earned every bit of it, Lisa. I couldn’t be any happier. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine.”
Sixty-two miles to Chico, Lisa, thought, a great divide…like crossing a desert to an oasis of freedom.
“It’s your turn, Dr. Cooper,” said Elias Cass, a brilliant, but obnoxious general surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.
Mike Cooper was now in his last year of medical school. Dr. Cass had seated Mike in the corner of the operating room, gowned and gloved, with a sterile towel over his hands.
As he approached the table, Elias looked up at the six-foot, eight inch tall, two hundred and fifty pound Mike, and said, “My God, man. You want to be a pediatrician? For a man your size, we all look like kids.”
Mike looked down at Cass. And some act like kids, he thought, but said nothing.
Elias tu
rned to the circulating nurse. “Bring in a step platform for me and anyone else who needs to keep up with our giant friend, here.”
“You’re excused now, Cheryl,” Elias said to the medical student across the table. “Take her place, Dr. Cooper.”
Cass’s use of the word, “doctor” for a medical student, sounded like an insult.
A gifted surgeon, Cass was known as well for his inflated ego, his insensitivity to anyone’s feelings, and his temper tirades, which included the launching of surgical instruments around the room.
His gifts notwithstanding, Cass was the antithesis of what Mike aspired to be as a physician, and as a man.
When Mike came to his position, Cass said, “Are you ready to assist, Doctor?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Open those ham hocks that you call hands, and grab these retractors.”
When Mike opened his hands, Cass smacked the two stainless retractors into them.
This is one sick man, Mike thought.
Cass positioned the retractors, one under the abdominal wall, and the other under the right lobe of the liver. “Maybe I can get some decent exposure for a change with King Kong here.”
Mike watched with fascination as the virtuoso hands moved over the surgical field, while the attached mouth chattered away about the anatomy and pathology that they were seeing, but he never missed an opportunity to criticize his surgical resident or the nurses.
Cass was nearing the completion of his resection of part of the liver, when he said, “Good work, Dr. Cooper. At last, someone with the strength to give me the exposure I need. I may ask you to join us, again.”
Great.
Cass looked at Mike for a reaction, and, seeing none, said, “Let’s see how those paws work.”
He turned to the resident. “Give Dr. Cooper your scissors, so he can cut the sutures as I tie them.”
The stainless steel instrument looked small in Mike’s palm as he forced his fingers into the loops.
“You can manage this small task, can’t you, Doctor?”
Mike felt himself flushing. “Certainly, Dr. Cass. How do you want me to cut the sutures, too long, or too short?”
The room burst out into short-lived laughter, and then went into guilty silence. Cass’s dark eyes beamed with hatred toward Mike, and after a moment, he said, “Thank you, Dr. Cooper. You’re excused.”
Mike stared down at the smaller man. “Perhaps you want to meet with me later in private, Dr. Cass. I feel like we’re just getting to know each other.”
“You’re excused.”
Mike smiled. Thank you, asshole. I don’t have time for your cruel conceits, or your shit.
Chapter Four
Lisa Cooke crammed the dilapidated 1992 Wagoneer full of her books and personal possessions. Once the Cooke’s family car, Sandy insisted that Lisa use the Jeep while she was away at school in Chico. Rudy bitched and moaned about the car, but since he could do nothing about it, Sandy prevailed.
“Goodbye, Dad,” she said to Rudy. He ignored her, and turned up the volume on the Jerry Springer Show.
Lisa kissed and hugged her mother.
Sandy held Lisa’s shoulders between her strong hands, studied her daughter’s face, and then returned the embrace. Sandy clung to her daughter like a life preserver at sea, and then wept. After blowing her nose, she said, “I’m going to miss you.”
I’m not going to cry, Lisa promised herself.
She brushed the fallen leaves from her windshield, and then drove down the long driveway.
When she looked into her rearview mirror, Sandy was standing at the front door, watching after her. Overwhelmed with emotion, she, too, wept. When Lisa turned onto the main road and stepped on the accelerator, she lowered the windows, and bathed in the fresh air of her newfound freedom.
Lisa moved into an old Victorian house on Ivy Street, south of the Chico campus. Her roommates—three from the San Francisco Bay Area, and two from Southern California, had enrolled in the nursing program. They were away from home for the first time, and were trying too hard to prove their independence.
Lisa avoided, as much as possible, the frenzy of freshman year by focusing on her studies. At the end of her second year, she knew that she’d make it. She worked part-time at the Enloe Medical Center gift shop, and volunteered there, working her way into the pediatric unit. Pediatrics, in some form, became her final objective.
Lisa was friendly with her roommates, but was close with only one, Phoebe Davis, whose family were displaced New Yorkers. They’d lived in San Francisco, but, like many provincials from the Big Apple, anywhere else was Nowhere’s Land. Phoebe recalled her childhood…
Seth Davis, everyone called him Lefty, his wife, Adele, and their four children, lived in Bensonhurst, the Italian-Jewish section of Brooklyn best known as the setting for Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners. To hear Lefty talk about this area and its crushed-together row homes, it was paradise.
Phoebe was the youngest, with three older brothers. She was thirteen the night Lefty came home and said, “We’re moving to San Francisco.”
To the Davis family, provincial New Yorkers, he might as well have told them that they were moving to the moon.
Adele spent the first seven years of Phoebe’s life trying to make her what she’d never be, a perfect little girl.
“You should hear the mouth on that girl,” Adele complained to Lefty after dinner. “I’m embarrassed to repeat the words she used in front of old Mrs. Zimmerman.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Lefty said, “for the thousandth time.”
While in most ways, Phoebe was vintage Tomboy, she remained Daddy’s little girl, and worked it to perfection.
She read well at age three, and found school boring. When her teachers and the principal suggested that Phoebe might benefit from an evaluation for ADD or ADHD, Lefty told them in no uncertain terms what he thought of a system more committed to order than to education.
When Phoebe hit her terrible teens, and discovered boys, Adele wondered if they’d accept a Jewish girl into a nunnery. In spite of her often obnoxious behavior and know-it-all attitude, she excelled in high school, and became an honor student and a National Merit Scholar.
During her junior year, Phoebe set out to lose her virginity. She chose Ronnie Hartwell, the senior class president, and a certified jock.
Afterward she had said, “Thanks, Ronnie, that was great.”
“Great?”
“Yes, it was fun. I needed to get rid of the pressure to maintain my virginity.” She hesitated, smiled, and then said, “And, I enjoyed seeing an intact one.”
“Intact what?”
“You know. Your thing…your dick…your cock.”
When he reddened, Phoebe burst out in laughter. “It’s a bit late for the bashful routine, don’t you think?”
Once her parents recognized Phoebe’s intelligence, and that she could do whatever she wanted, Lefty lobbied for her to train in computer science, and Adele wanted her to teach, careers that they both loved. Phoebe identified with the bright and independent health care professionals on ER and other prime time medical dramas. She thought of becoming a physician, but opted instead on a more hands-on approach to helping people, nursing.
If there was such a thing as an east coast personality, Phoebe had it. She was smart, painfully honest, and often abrasive. At first, Phoebe’s caustic wit and biting comments offended Lisa, but she soon came to see her new friend as a prickly pear, spiny outside, but soft and sweet at the core.
Lisa dated freshmen and sophomores, but discovered more of an affinity for upperclassmen and graduate students. Her one long-term relationship, four months, was with Harvey Stern, a neurology resident at the hospital.
“I don’t know what you see in that guy,” Phoebe said, “he’s a putz.”
“A putz?” Lisa asked.
“You know, a schmuck.”
“Well, Phoebe,” Lisa,” said, “in spite of your charming characterization, I like him.�
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Harvey Stern was, in all ways, the polar opposite of Lisa’s father. He was easygoing, considerate, and entertaining.
“Does he turn you on?” Phoebe asked. “Do you have trouble keeping your hands off the man? If not, then you’re wasting your time, sweetie.”
Lisa knew that life was unlikely to imitate her favorite romance novels, but as much as she tried, she saw that Phoebe knew her better than she knew herself. This relationship with the bland Harvey Stern would never give Lisa what she needed the most, passion.
Lisa and Phoebe filled their free time with Yoga, Pilates, and book clubs. Phoebe was into kickboxing, but Lisa found it too violent. She’d seen enough violence in her life.
Phoebe dragged Lisa to lectures on personal growth and spirituality, and she was constantly after Lisa to join her in the evenings at the dance clubs.
“Astrology, Phoebe,” Lisa said, “you must be kidding.”
“Who would have believed,” Phoebe said, as she rifled through reams of papers and charts. “Some of this stuff is right on. Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll grow out of it.”
Nevada City was too close to Chico to excuse not going home from time to time. After each visit, Lisa’s mother’s image faded like a photo kept in the sun too long. Rudy, in every way, except for his mouth, was diminished. From the very moment she arrived, she counted the days until her departure.
“Why don’t you come and spend a week or so with me in Chico, Mom?” Lisa asked. “We have plenty of room.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. Who’d take care of your father?”
“Please, Mother, think about it. I’ll pay for someone to come in and take care of him.” Lisa said, and then grasped Sandy’s hands. “You deserve a break, you know.”
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