Driving With Dead People

by Monica Holloway

  “I eat,” she said.

  “What have you been doing?” I asked.

  “I’m going to a concert this weekend. It’s on the Mall, down by the monuments.”

  “Sounds fun,” I said. “Is anybody going with you?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, have fun and call me next week.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “The city is crazy, and I just want you to be careful,” she said.

  “Okay, I’ll be careful.”

  We hung up.

  I opened my new Andy Warhol book and finished my orange chicken. Later, I brushed my teeth, talked to Daniel on the phone, and went to bed.

  That night, JoAnn didn’t want to leave, but she knew she had to go. She understood, in that quiet hour, things that only people who’ve walked tothe edge know. Dying seemed almost compassionate—a way to escape the living hell.

  She’d been stockpiling prescription drugs for a few months. She methodically filled all of them whether she planned to take them or not. She pulled out the shoe box hidden in the linen closet behind a stack of towels and looked inside. The supply was ludicrous.

  Having heard a story from a woman who had woken up alone after taking pills, JoAnn decided that there needed to be another step. She tucked a small box of single-edge razor blades into the corner of the shoe box.

  She pulled on her white sweatshirt and blue jeans, grabbed her black bag with her wallet inside, took the shoe box, and locked the apartment door behind her. It was three a.m. She decided to go to Rehoboth Beach, where she had been on weekend trips with Christine when they were together. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive, and she would get there to see the sunrise. She would start this day and end it on her terms.

  Driving away from the city, she was relieved. She’d made a decision to be in control. She would not be dependent on other people, and she would never be humiliated and scared again.

  JoAnn arrived at the beach just as the sky was beginning to brighten. She parked her Subaru on a side street that ended at the beach. As the sun peeked over the Atlantic Ocean, she tilted her head back onto the headrest and laid her hand on the shoe box. She hadn’t anticipated how difficult it was actually going to be.

  When the sun got a little higher, JoAnn got out of the car, walked into the sand, and sat down. She picked up a stick lying by her foot and started to draw concentric circles. Her plan seemed surreal yet logical—necessary. She glanced up to see a dolphin’s fin breaking the water, and it occurred to her that when she died, there might be a part of her that would float away.

  She began to panic as she realized there was a part of her, perhaps a soul, that she couldn’t actually kill. Her thoughts continued as the circles got smaller and closer together.

  If she couldn’t kill all of her, then a part of her couldn’t be killed by anyone else. There must have been a part of her that Dad couldn’t have touched, that not only had survived but might also still be innocent—pure.

  Even with this revelation, she wasn’t comforted. What if she killed herself and didn’t find mercy where she was headed? What if the Christians were right, and she’d be punished for taking her own life? What if everyone who had ever known and loved her got mad at her for doing it? What if no one ever understood? She started to cry.

  She stuck the stick into the sand and walked to her car. She thought maybe she was making a mistake by not going forward with it, but she could at least be sure that someone understood before the next time.

  That afternoon, JoAnn made it back just in time to keep an appointment with her doctor. During her session, even though JoAnn hadn’t mentioned suicide or her drive to the beach, the doctor told her about a specialized treatment center specifically devoted to working with survivors of incest. It was a psychiatric facility that had a specialized program called The Center for Abuse Recovery and Empowerment.

  JoAnn drove by on her way home. It looked like any other office building along Colorado Avenue. Empowerment —she had never thought of it that way before.

  JoAnn called the center. When she told the intake social worker she’d given notice on her apartment and that she had to be out in a week, the social worker told her to come that day.

  JoAnn thought she might as well try this one thing. If it didn’t make her feel different, she still had the shoe box and a solid plan.

  JoAnn called me at The Strategist Group on Wednesday.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. JoAnn never called me at work.

  “I’m at an in-patient facility down here. I just wanted you to know where I was so you wouldn’t worry.”

  “Is it National Hospital?”

  “No, it’s an in-patient psychiatric facility. They have a division for abuse survivors,” she explained.

  “Are you safe?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’ll tell you what happened when you get here.”

  “I’ll head down tomorrow. Unless you need me today,” I said.

  “Tomorrow’s okay.”

  “Can I have the phone number?”

  “If you call, they won’t tell you I’m here, but I’ll leave your name on the visitor’s list.” She gave me directions and hung up the phone.

  An in-patient facility? I told Elliott I was going for a walk, took the elevator seven floors down, and walked out into the chaos of the city. I was happy to be anonymous. My sister was in a mental institution but I was free to walk down Fifth Avenue, so I did. I walked and cried and took in the blue sky for the both of us. Everything had shifted—again.

  On my way down to see JoAnn, I foolishly stopped by Super Stop & Shop and bought sunflowers, trying to normalize what was anything but normal.

  When I walked into the psych ward, I was given a small cardboard box of JoAnn’s possessions: dirty white shoestrings from her Nike tennis shoes; her silver nail clippers, which she always carried with her; and a black leather belt. I stared into the box and then at the nurse.

  “We don’t allow items into the facility that might be used to injure a person, either themselves or someone else,” she explained.

  “Is she suicidal?” I asked.

  “She’s on fifteen-minute checks. We were lucky to catch her this time.”

  “She’s cut her arms before,” I naively told the nurse, as if she hadn’t seen it a million times before. “It’s not a suicide attempt,” I said. “It’s the opposite. It helps her feel alive.”

  “She admitted to being suicidal,” the nurse said. “She’s serious about dying, and if you love her, you need to be serious about it too. Her life is in danger. She needs hope and support.”

  I got it. We weren’t anywhere we’d ever been before. We’d moved into an emergency phase.

  I left the box behind to pick up on my way out and floated through a fog of shock to another set of locked doors. On some level I knew JoAnn was suicidal, but I clung to my denial like a life raft.

  I waited for JoAnn in the visitor’s lounge on a blue chair with the sunflowers across my lap. I anxiously watched patients wandering in and out. A woman was standing so close to the wall that her nose was touching it, and behind her someone was pacing back and forth and patting her cheeks with both hands. I heard screaming.

  “You tried to kill me!” A patient in light green pajamas was yelling at a nurse.

  “We’re trying to help you,” the nurse responded.

  “If I want to take pills, you can’t stop me,” she screamed. “Shoving charcoal down my throat isn’t going to stop me.” The nurse quickly escorted her down the hall, away from the visitor’s lounge. I nervously retied the bow on the sunflowers and tried to subdue the fear that was threatening to strangle me.

  JoAnn walked through the door. She was emaciated and, from the dark circles under her eyes, I could tell she hadn’t slept. Her hair wasn’t combed. I’d never seen JoAnn without her hair meticulously groomed, even when we were kids.

  She was wearing light blue sweatpants and a white s
weatshirt with long sleeves, but I could still see deep cuts on the tops of her hands. She was smiling at me, but tears were already starting to fall. I hugged her as she cried.

  Everything had spiraled out of control.

  I was so grateful that she was being watched over in this place.

  “You’re safe here,” I told her.

  “I hope so,” she said, wiping her nose on a perfectly folded Kleenex and handing one to me. Now that was the old JoAnn, someone who carried neatly folded Kleenex in her pocket at all times.

  “I brought you useless flowers,” I said, smiling through tears. She nodded.

  A week later when I came to see JoAnn, I asked the nurse where she was.

  “JoAnn’s in the smoking room.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  The nurse pointed to a large picture window to her left. On the other side of it were about ten women sitting around smoking cigarettes, and the smoke was so thick I could barely see them in there.

  “Oh, that’s the smoking room,” I said, laughing. If JoAnn was socializing, that was good, even if she was inhaling plumes of smoke while she did it. We were working on her mental health; we’d worry about her lungs later. Suddenly, the door swung open and a column of smoke billowed out around JoAnn. She looked my way.

  “I don’t think you’re getting enough nicotine,” I teased.

  “I know. It was getting a little thick in there,” she said.

  “At least there’s a place you can smoke.” She wasn’t allowed to walk outside.

  “It helps,” she said, tucking a pack of Merits into the pocket of her sweatpants. Her hair was combed, and her eyes looked brighter—more rested.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “No.” She weighed about a hundred pounds.

  “You look better,” I told her.

  “They’re finally giving me something to help me sleep. It helps with the nightmares. Let’s go into the lounge.” We sat down on a small blue sofa by the windows. “I have to ask a favor,” she said.

  “I hope it involves picking up a Big Mac or a grilled steak for you to eat.”

  “I have to move out of my apartment right away. Could you put my stuff into storage? They won’t let me out even for part of the day, or I would do it myself.”

  “Why’d you give up your apartment?” I asked. “We can still make a few more payments, don’t you think?”

  “I gave it up before I came here,” she said. I shook my head, not understanding. “I wasn’t planning on needing it anymore.”

  I stared at JoAnn. She was so frail that I felt like sitting her on my lap and rocking her. “Why wouldn’t you need a place to live?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t planning on being alive this long.” She didn’t look up.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what would help.

  “You planned your suicide?” I asked. She was listless, her hands collapsed in her lap. I sat back and looked out the window. I couldn’t imagine a world without JoAnn in it. I turned to her and said, “Do you know I always wanted to be dead?”

  “You did?” She looked at me.

  “My whole life, I wanted to be dead, but I didn’t actually do anything about it. I guess I didn’t want to be dead; I wanted relief. I wanted to be happy and peaceful.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “It’s not about dying; it’s about stopping the pain.”

  The next day I drove to different grocery stores, picking up boxes. Banana boxes were the biggest and sturdiest. I went back to JoAnn’s apartment and began carefully wrapping her dishes in newspaper and packing them away. I wrapped paintings and sculptures she had created or bought. I came across a sculpture of two women hugging, which she’d carved in Columbus. They could be pulled apart if someone visited who didn’t know she was gay. Once she moved toD.C., she didn’t pull them apart anymore.

  As I covered each precious piece of her life in newspaper, I became more irate. That son of a bitch had ruined us. He’d taken our childhoods, I knew that already, but he was taking our futures as well. I had to be braver than I had been up until now. If I confronted him, it might strengthen all of us. Until he was held accountable, he still held power over us.

  I packed Granda’s brown-and-white afghan she’d given JoAnn as a birthday gift. I remembered it spread out across the back of Granda’s couch when we were little.

  On JoAnn’s dresser was the gold ring I’d given her for her birthday the year before. It was two hands entwined. I’d written in her card that it was her and me, that neither one of us would go through anything alone ever again. Not when we had each other. I had let her down. She was going through this alone. There was no other way for her to recover but to let the memories come, and I couldn’t do that for her.

  I slipped the ring onto my index finger. I’d seen her wear it so many times. Sobs finally came. I didn’t think they ever would. This packing up of everything she owned was as if JoAnn had killed herself. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to keep her alive even after she got out. I wasn’t sure of anything except that I felt like I was sitting in the waiting room of the mortuary alone, helplessly waiting for the body I was sure would arrive. I needed the psychiatric facility to come through for her. I needed them to save her life.

  After the apartment was packed, Daniel, whom I had called to come down and help me, arrived and we moved those boxes across town and into a storage facility with long hollow aisles. After we shoved everything inside, I looked at the stacked boxes and wondered if the next time I saw them I’d be standing next to JoAnn or mourning her. For once, Mom couldn’t accuse me of being dramatic.

  I didn’t want to close the door, but it was getting late. I still had to drive four hours to Brooklyn.

  “You look terrible,” Daniel said. This brought on another surge of tears. I was so grateful just to have someone looking at me. Thinking about me. I hadn’t realized how much I needed someone to help shoulder some of the pressure and sadness.

  “I know.” I laughed, sniffing. “I bet you’d be scared if you met me now.”

  “You don’t scare me,” he said, wrapping his arm around my neck and pulling me close.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said. “After what I did, you shouldn’t even be talking to me.”

  “I’ll always talk to you,” he said, and then he locked up JoAnn’s belongings and walked me back down the empty hallway.

  I followed him as we both drove north. When I saw him take the exit for Connecticut, I felt another lump in my throat. I’d backed the wrong horse. My family was nowhere to be found, but Daniel was right there. I thought, If he and I were together, it would be incredibly comforting.

  When I got to my apartment in Brooklyn, I needed to talk to a friend, so I called Julie Kilner for the first time in a year. She had a new baby boy and sounded happy, still living in Ohio. I didn’t tell her what was happening to my family.

  “Are you going to Florida to visit your dad this summer?” she asked.

  “No,” I said quickly. He must have been on vacation. It was the first news I’d had of him since Christmas.

  “Then maybe you can come out and stay with all of us in Ohio,” she suggested.

  “I’d love to, believe me, but I can’t leave work.”

  We talked a little more and then hung up. Dad was in Florida.

  The following weekend, JoAnn and I met with a heavyset blond psychologist at the psych ward.

  The doctor asked me, “What do you think about all of this coming to light?”

  “I’m in shock,” I replied.

  “Still?” she asked.

  “Is there a moratorium on being in shock?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she replied.

  “I’m shocked that JoAnn’s in a mental hospital,” I said. “I can’t believe this is happening to my family.”

  “This was a surprise?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I reiterated.

  “In families where this level of sexual abuse has taken pla
ce, it’s not unusual for children to repress it,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about JoAnn or me.

  “I don’t remember the level of abuse that JoAnn remembers,” I explained. “Being the youngest, maybe I missed the worst of it,” I said.

  “But you two slept in the same bedroom until JoAnn was fifteen, correct?” she asked.

  “Correct,” I said, my stomach flipping over.

  “And what about your mom?” she asked.

  “I don’t think she was involved, was she?” I turned to JoAnn.

  The doctor interrupted. “Long-term sexual abuse cannot take place unless everyone in the house is following the same dynamic. It’s the family dynamic that allows something this horrific and violent to occur—especially over a long period of time,” she said.

  “A father abuses his daughter and the mother gets blamed!” I said, incensed.

  “No, I’m saying that if your mother had been a different person, the abuse could not possibly have gotten to the level it did,” she said. “I know your father’s a major piece in all of this, but I would suggest that when you start looking at your mother, whom you actually trusted to keep you safe when you were young children, that’s going to be the worst piece. The place you’ll feel the most betrayed.”

  “But I don’t remember anything specific. I don’t think this happened to me,” I insisted.

  “The entire family sets the scene, and there is an unspoken agreement to ignore and forget. You might not remember, but you sure felt the effects of what went on in that house. You had to have been influenced whether you were actually molested or not.”

  Actually molested? In my sorrow and rage for JoAnn, I’d stopped wondering if I might have my own experiences locked away. Staring at the psychologist, who was talking to JoAnn, I began to wonder, If Dad came to her in the bedroom, and Becky and I were also there, did we see anything? Was it realistic to think that he left us alone? Or was this psychologist messing with my head? Maybe this had nothing to do with me. Maybe it was just JoAnn.

  “Monica, is there any way I can help you before we end the session?” she asked.