Driving With Dead People

by Monica Holloway

  While sitting in the balcony of the theatre in a wheelchair the next night, watching another actress perform in my place, I received a large brown box from the mail room. The Watters & Watters silk bridesmaids’ suits had arrived. The wedding wouldn’t leave me alone. It was everywhere—on my message machine, on my desk calendar. It was even coming through the mail. The more wedding items I received, the more I wanted to sleep with Alex Sullivan.

  I needed to release the brake on my wheelchair and roll into a different life, one that was already figured out.

  I asked Alex to drive me to my house, where he shoved the unopened Watters & Watters box deep under my bed. I attacked him before he could even get the boxes situated, jerking his shirt off over his head, and unbuttoning his fly. Working around my cast was not a problem. A herd of stampeding elephants wouldn’t have been a problem. I didn’t realize how neglected I’d felt. There was something wrong between Daniel and me, because passion came back to me so fast, I nearly killed Alex with my enthusiasm over its resurgence.

  The next day I dialed Daniel and called off the wedding with four weeks to go.

  Daniel received a partial refund, Dad received no refund, and our wedding guests received a call from me. Each one going something like this:

  “Hi, it’s Monica calling. How are you?”

  “Fine. Are you getting ready for the wedding? Are you excited?” the guest would say.

  “No. Actually, that’s why I’m calling. I’ve decided to call off the wedding. I’m having second thoughts. It’s completely my fault. I wanted to call you myself.”

  “Oh my. Is there anything I can do?”

  “There’s nothing you can do, but thank you. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Daniel took it better than my mother, who was inconsolable. I got the impression that if it weren’t for Jim, Mom would have married Daniel herself.

  Dad told me it was better not to make a mistake, and that I needed someone more lively than Daniel anyway. He wasn’t kidding.

  Daniel helped me pack everything I owned and moved me to Brooklyn, where I settled into the basement of an old brownstone with a friend from the summer theatre.

  I wasn’t relieved. I wasn’t devastated. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I was in shock. The thought of Daniel being gone forever was excruciating, but the passion I knew I was capable of wasn’t just a sexual passion, it was a passion for life. And Daniel and I didn’t bring that out in each other. He and I shared only safe things. It was the dullness I would miss, the cotton-stuffed stifling dullness.

  Life was no longer dull; in fact, it became goddamn chaotic. I was about to understand why I had fought to stay numb. I was about to turn around and face the cause of my depression and panic attacks head-on.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Three days before Christmas, my phone rang. I was in Brooklyn, throwing warm socks and brown corduroys into a suitcase for a trip to Washington, D.C., where I’d pick JoAnn up and then drive us to Ohio. My first Christmas in five years without Daniel. It was back to Hanukkah for him.

  “Hello?” I said, tucking the receiver between my shoulder and chin while I rifled through my underwear drawer searching for my beige camisole.

  “It’s me,” JoAnn said. I had to laugh. She was checking in because I was usually late.

  “Don’t have a heart attack, but I’m on time,” I told her, finding the camisole and laying it in the suitcase.

  JoAnn had been in D.C. for five years now. She’d set up an invigorating life—a studio apartment and a career in social services.

  The only problem was she’d recently broken up with Christine, who’d sung in our choir that first Christmas with Daniel. Christine was a successful, gorgeous African-American woman who’d recently admitted to fabricating her entire life.

  She’d told everyone that she was born in Sweden to a wealthy family and that her mother was white and her father was black. In truth her entire family, including sisters and brothers no one had even heard about, didn’t live in Sweden, but in a neighborhood a few minutes away from downtown D.C.

  JoAnn had moved out of their beautiful two-bedroom apartment a couple of months before.

  “I wasn’t calling about you being on time,” JoAnn told me. “I was calling to tell you not to drive down here. I’m not going home; I’m not up for the holiday frenzy.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I’m positive. I didn’t want to add four hours to your trip for nothing. Go ahead and leave from there.” Something was up. JoAnn never missed Christmas at Mom’s.

  “I’m coming to see you first. It wouldn’t be Christmas if I didn’t give you presents,” I insisted.

  “Okay, but I’m not in a cheerful mood,” she said.

  “Be any way you want. I’m coming down.” I closed the suitcase and zipped it shut.

  “Okay.”

  “I’d better hang up and get movin’. See you soon.”

  Christmas would be boring as hell without JoAnn, and Mom would be furious. It was an unspoken gospel, “No one misses Christmas in Ohio.”

  Four hours later when I arrived at JoAnn’s apartment, I saw that something was wrong. I hadn’t seen her in over two months, and a transformation had taken place. JoAnn, who usually weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, looked unusually thin and anxious.

  “Have you been sick?” I asked, setting her presents down on the kitchen table.

  “Not really,” she said. “Would you like a Mountain Dew?”

  “Sure.” She pulled two cans out of the fridge. I watched her bend over, her sweatpants sagging off her nonexistent butt.

  “Are you eating enough?” I asked.

  “I’m eating.”

  “Have you talked to Christine?” I threw my coat onto the couch.

  “She called this morning.” She handed me the soda can and a white paper napkin.

  “That must be hard,” I said.

  “It’s sad,” she said. “It’s like she’s somebody else now.”

  “She’s not the person you thought she was,” I said.

  “She loved me, though.” JoAnn sat down on a brown rattan chair, wiping off the top of the can with her napkin.

  “You loved her, too,” I said.

  “What wasn’t to love?” she asked. “Whatever I wanted her to be, poof, she became it.”

  She and Christine had had a sunny apartment filled with expensive furniture and a brand-new upright piano that Christine had bought JoAnn for her birthday. Looking around JoAnn’s studio, I could see that Christine had kept all of it. I curled into a brown beanbag chair next to JoAnn.

  “Nice of her to take the piano,” I said.

  JoAnn laughed. Her hands were shaky when she tried opening the Mountain Dew. Something wasn’t right. I looked around the apartment for a clue. It was sparkling clean, with everything in place. Even the dish towels hanging on the oven door handle were meticulously pressed and folded. JoAnn was as tidy as I was disorganized.

  Outside the window, a light snow was beginning to fall. It was gray and cold out there.

  “I can tell something’s wrong,” I finally said.

  JoAnn looked at the green and silver can in her hand, not saying anything. She fiddled with the metal tag on top until it came off in her hand, then she tossed it into the trash can beside her desk.

  “Something’s wrong,” she admitted. “I can’t go home because I can’t see Dad.”

  “Oh shit. What happened?”

  “Nothing recently,” she said. “That’s what’s so confusing.”

  “What?”

  “The reason I can’t see Dad,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “My whole life I worried there was something unimaginable about to level me and that I’d be powerless to stop it,” she explained.

  “I know what that is now.”

  I held my breath. She was describing the tidal wave of dread. “What is it?” I asked, knowing the answer would cause me to immediately
turn and look directly at whatever had been threatening to obliterate me all these years. I hoped I was strong enough to face it.

  “Dad molested me.” My expression froze in blank shock. “He did things to me for years.” She looked at her hands, which had always been smaller than mine. “Memories started bubbling up about six months ago, and now I’m flooded with them.”

  Was this my secret too? I panicked for both of us. Was this the tsunami—the thing that kept me feeling worthless and unsafe? Or was this only JoAnn’s story? I didn’t know.

  I instantly remembered JoAnn crawling over to Becky’s bed in the middle of the night when we slept in the same room. “Scoot over,” she’d whisper, and Becky would slide over and let JoAnn snuggle in. By the time we woke up, JoAnn would be back in her own bed. The three of us never discussed it. I had completely forgotten it until that exact moment.

  I turned to her. “Do you remember crawling on your hands and knees to Becky’s bed every night?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Were you afraid of Dad?”

  “Petrified,” she said. “I probably slept three hours a night.”

  “I don’t remember anything specific,” I said, my head spinning.

  “I didn’t either.” She got up and tossed her Mountain Dew can into a trash can in the kitchen area. “I wake up every morning remembering more and more. I can’t go back to Ohio because if this gets worse, I’m in big trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I feel like I’m crazy sometimes,” she said. “I worry I won’t be able to maintain my job, my life.”

  “Whatever comes, you’ll be strong enough,” I said.

  “I hope so, because I can’t stop the memories from surfacing. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  “What can I do to help?” I offered. “I’ll do anything.”

  “I know you would.” She walked over to her futon. “I need to lie down for a minute,” she said, sitting on the side of it. “Just telling you makes it a hundred times worse. It’s the beginning of it all coming out.” She lay down and put her hands on her chest. “I don’t feel very good.” She closed her eyes and, just like that, was asleep.

  I walked over and looked down. She was breathing deeply, but there were tears rolling into her hairline. I grabbed a blue cotton blanket out of the closet and tucked it around her.

  I grabbed JoAnn’s Merit cigarettes off the kitchen counter and lit one off the gas stove. I paced and smoked. I hadn’t smoked since JoAnn lived in Columbus. I wanted to be numb but I was 100 percent present.

  Dad and I had worked things out. It wasn’t perfect, but we loved each other, and I relied on him, laughed with him too. In the summer he played Tiny Bubbles on his old eight-track tape player as we toodled around on his pontoon boat with the red-and-white-striped canopy. At Christmas I went caroling with him and his funny Lake Hiawatha friends. We were father and daughter.

  What would happen now?

  I looked on JoAnn’s desk for an ashtray and saw the book. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. Holy shit.

  I turned it over. The back cover read:

  [A] comprehensive guide that offers hope and encouragement to every woman who was sexually abused as a child—and those who care about her. Although the effects of child sexual abuse are long-term and severe, healing is possible.

  My first reaction was that she didn’t need that book. It was for women we didn’t know.

  I flipped to the index, looking up and down the alphabetized list for something to assuage my swelling anxiety. I saw “Kingsolver, Barbara, 158.” I had just read her book Animal Dreams and thought it the most creative, comforting read. It was about a young woman learning how family ties and communal living are a way to heal. Suddenly, healing was the theme of the day. Recognizing Barbara Kingsolver’s name made the book seem less alien.

  I flipped to page158 and a poem entitled “Remember the Moon Survives” by Barbara Kingsolver. It said, “For Pamela.”

  Halfway through her poem, I read the stanza that reached down inside me so deeply, I could barely breathe:

  The sun is all you wait for,

  the light, guardian saint of all the children

  who lie like death on the wake

  of the household crime. You stop

  your heart like a clock: these hours

  are not your own. You hide

  your life away, the lucky coin

  tucked quickly in the shoe

  from the burglar, when he

  Comes. Because he will, as sure as shoes.

  Dad, what did you do?

  Picking up the book, I twisted the cigarette into the ashtray. I kicked off my snow boots, sat on the floor, and leaned against the futon.

  Holding the book against my chest, I closed my eyes and forced my brain back to those days (and nights) in Galesburg.

  I’m at a church picnic and I’m seven. There’s a small lake and a shelter where Mom is helping the ladies lay out food. I’m running with no shoes through the cool grass when Dad is suddenly there. He grabs the back of my shorts and jerks my shorts and underpants down at the same time. I turn in horror, realizing that I’m exposed to everyone at the picnic. I bend down with both hands to pull them both up just as Dad kicks me onto my face, exposing me even more. I roll onto my side and wiggle back into my shorts. Dad is laughing. People are staring. I jump up and run in the other direction. I see a grove of trees on the other side of the lake, where I stay until the food is served. The rest of the picnic, even during the volleyball game, I hold tightly to the elastic of my shorts, expecting Dad at any moment.

  I checked on JoAnn. She wasn’t crying anymore, just sleeping. What else could I remember that might piece some of this together?

  I thought of Mom lining Becky, JoAnn, and me up on her bed every night and slathering Vaseline on our genitals and across our butts. I needed it because I was always red and chapped from lying in urine-soaked pajamas and sheets, but Becky and JoAnn looked okay. Still, every night she’d do that.

  Was she preparing us for him? Was it unconscious? Maybe it had nothing to do with Dad. I had gooseflesh. I carefully pulled a corner of JoAnn’s blue blanket over my shoulders, careful not to wake her.

  I tried to meditate the way Stanley had taught us at UCSD. I breathed deeply into my diaphragm, blowing out the bad air and taking in the good.

  I am nine and Mom has brought me to the urologist. She asks the doctor, “Why is she wetting the bed? What’s wrong with her?”

  “There’s nothing physically wrong that would prevent her from waking up. Bed-wetting is usually a psychological problem. Is there anything going on in your house? At school?”

  “Of course not,” Mom says.

  In terms of Dad, I remembered small things.

  Dad’s reaction to JoAnn being gay was completely out of character. He seemed almost happy about it. He hated African Americans and homosexuals, and Christine was both. Yet when JoAnn brought Christine to dinner at his house, he even hugged her.

  As we walked to the car, Dad told Christine, “Take care of JoAnn for me.”

  I stared at him, puzzled. Why would Dad be glad JoAnn was gay and not care that she was dating a black woman? In light of who he was, it made zero sense.

  I am thirteen and riding with Dad in the cramped cab of his pickup from Elk Grove to Galesburg. His hand accidentally brushes the side of my leg. I am so alarmed, I involuntarily startle, jumping so high, my head hits the top of the cab.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he yells. “You’re goddamn crazy. Nervous as cats, every one of you.”

  It wasn’t his touching my leg that disturbed me, it was my over-reaction. I was sure, as irrational as it seemed at the time, that Dad was going to do something inappropriate. Afterward, I felt exactly the way Dad had described: crazy and nervous. Mostly I was embarrassed. He thought I was nuts, but it couldn’t have come from nowhere.

  When I was nineteen, Dad told me he’d
slept with a young waitress in Elk Grove. He said that he “still had what it took.”

  But I didn’t remember what JoAnn remembered.

  I opened my eyes.

  I wanted another cigarette. I got up and searched the refrigerator in vain for a Pepsi. I still didn’t like to smoke without one, but this was an emergency so I settled for another Mountain Dew. I was already jumpy, and after more caffeine, I’d never get to sleep. I didn’t care.

  I popped open the can, sat down at JoAnn’s desk with The Courage to Heal, and looked through the table of contents. “Believing It Happened,” “Breaking the Silence,” “Grieving and Mourning”—all of these seemed very far from us. I turned the page.

  When a person speaks out about the abuse for the first time, it disrupts the family’s system of denial. The family might refuse to believe her or even disown her so they can keep up the false pretense under which they have been living.

  Mom would believe JoAnn, but Dad would disown her. I believed her and yet it seemed impossible at the same time. I continued to read.

  A woman wrote:

  It’s like you came home and your home has been robbed, and everything has been thrown in the middle of the room, and the window is open and the curtain is blowing in the wind, and the cat is gone. You know somebody robbed you, but you’re never going to know who. So what are you going to do? Sit there and try to figure it out while your stuff lies around? No, you start to clean it up. You put bars on the windows. You assume somebody was there because the damage is there.

  I thought about all the irrational fears I carried around. My entire life I’d been afraid of being in a bedroom with the door closed and a light shining underneath it. I couldn’t quit staring at that light, waiting for a shadow to cross it, indicating someone was coming in. In my apartment the bedroom door had to be open.