Driving With Dead People

by Monica Holloway

  “Only if you can make this go away,” I said. “Get me out of this nightmare.”

  I walked out of the psych ward angry, defeated, and exhausted. It was dark and starting to sprinkle. I climbed into my Honda hatchback and turned the key. I didn’t know my family. Everything I’d believed to be true was washing away with the rain.

  I looked at the building where JoAnn was locked up. No one walking by would suspect the horror that was being exposed in such a benign-looking place—an office building, really. I hated leaving her, but now there was no other place to take her. There was only an empty apartment, and after tomorrow, she wouldn’t even have that.

  I tilted my head back onto the headrest, and thought about Mom. I missed her. I missed my mom coming to take care of everything. The thing is, she never had taken care of things. That was never my mom. But I longed for her anyway.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and thought of a sweet moment between the two of us.

  I was six years old, and we were sitting in the nubby orange chair in the living room. I was nestled into her lap, and her breath smelled like Wrigley’s spearmint gum. As she held the green book open in front of us, it seemed like no one else was in the house, but the other kids must have been there. Mom began reading from Now We Are Six.

  “What would I do?” I said to Pooh,

  “If it wasn’t for you,” and Pooh said: “True,

  It isn’t much fun for One, but Two

  Can stick together,” says Pooh, says he.

  I opened my eyes—even a Winnie-the-Pooh story furthered the illusion that there was someone protecting me. As Mom read to me night after night, I believed the fairy tales. Why wouldn’t I? She believed them.

  It was really raining now. I started the car and headed to the Lucky Seven liquor store. I bought Bacardi rum and a six-pack of Pepsi and drove to the apartment. Tomorrow, I would need to clean it so JoAnn could get her deposit back. Tonight, I needed to drink.

  I was eager to obliterate reality. Maybe that’s the one thing Jamie was missing—the ability to deny—and that’s why he drank. He didn’t have the protection of denial, so he had to escape another way. Tonight, three thousand miles away from my brother, I would join him for a drink, understanding his alcoholism for the first time.

  When I got to the apartment, I was hungry and scared. I called Mom. I’d just paid JoAnn’s car payment, so I was also broke. I knew better than to call her, but I was still hoping for a crumb of comfort and understanding. I wasn’t ready to give up on her just yet.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “Hello to you,” she said.

  “I’ve been with JoAnn at the psych ward—,” I started to say, when she interrupted.

  “Could we not get into that tonight? I’ve had a terrible day, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But I need to talk,” I explained.

  “Call Daniel,” she said.

  “I don’t want to call Daniel. I want to talk to you,” I said.

  “Then we’re not talking about JoAnn.” She was silent.

  “You don’t even know what she looks like. She’s tiny, maybe a hundred pounds. She has cuts running the length of her arms,” I said. “I’m in a nightmare out here.”

  “Well, a gold star for you. But you aren’t the only one hurting,” she said bitterly.

  “I didn’t say I was the only one hurting, but I’m the only one here,” I said. “JoAnn doesn’t want to live. She’s under suicide watch.”

  “Jim and I are taking a short vacation,” she announced.

  “A vacation?” I exclaimed.

  “I need to get away, so Jim’s taking me to Michigan for a few days,” she said.

  “Mom, we need money. I can’t support JoAnn and me on my salary. I have to drive four hours back to Brooklyn on Sunday night just so I can work all week and come back down here. How could you go on vacation? Send that money to JoAnn; she needs it,” I urged. “I’m afraid she’s going to kill herself as it is. If she loses her car, her situation will become even more hopeless. I’ve already emptied her apartment into a storage facility.”

  Mom was furious. “You will not tell me what I need and do not need. I’m going to Michigan and I’m going to get away from all of this,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  I opened the Bacardi.

  The next morning I forced myself awake, with a pounding hangover and a sore back from sleeping on the floor. I needed Mom to prove the psychologist wrong, but she was doing the opposite. I needed her to come through, but she was leaving for Michigan, probably had already left. And to make it worse, Michigan was my haven, where my friends gathered and performed shows and swam. It was the place I was the happiest. And what I wouldn’t have given to go there myself.

  I was beginning to wonder if my relationship with Mom would survive this mess. In books and in music, people talk about always loving your mother. What I was feeling toward her was nothing like love.

  I scrubbed JoAnn’s apartment clean and dropped the keys off at the management office in her complex.

  Visiting JoAnn, I saw the blond psychologist in the hallway.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  “I’d like to not become a patient here myself, if I can help it,” I said.

  “Are you afraid you’ll end up here?”

  “I had a terrible dream last night,” I said.

  “Come on in,” she said, opening the door to her office. “Tell me about it.”

  I sat down in the chair across from her desk and tried to remember every detail.

  In my dream, Mom, Becky, Jamie, JoAnn, Dad, and I were sitting in a pew at the Galesburg Methodist Church.

  My head was bowed for a prayer when I heard a sound, muffled and steady, like someone thumping their hand on the top of a wooden bench. It was coming from the back of the church. I looked at the people in front of me, but no one else had seemed to notice. The noise was louder now. I slid my hand across the seat of the pew to discover what I already knew; my father was no longer sitting there. I turned my head slightly to my right: JoAnn was missing as well.

  The pastor was droning on about tithing as I stood and turned slowly to my left. My father was in the very back of the sanctuary, holding my sister down by the back of her neck. Her yellow Sunday school dress with the big bow in the back was hiked up over her head and he was raping her from behind, each thrust sending her small head knocking into the back of the last pew—bang, bang, bang.

  In the congregation, people started shifting in their seats. Women in small pastel pillbox hats were looking at their laps. Everyone knew what was happening, but no one turned around or made a move to rescue JoAnn.

  I stood up and hurried out to the carpeted aisle beside our pew. I held out my arms as far as they would reach and began turning, around and around and around. As I turned, the sun moved backward across the window and the Reverend Morse walked in reverse away from the pulpit and back up the aisle. I was turning back time with everything a desperate child could muster—with all the strength in the universe. And it was working. I spun until JoAnn, Dad, and I were once again sitting in the pew.

  I grabbed JoAnn’s hand and ran out the back of the church. She was slower than I was, but I pulled her along behind me. We ran down the street and around the corner to Mammaw’s house. I shoved JoAnn through the front door and up the steps to the second floor, where no one ever went and where Mammaw kept upcoming Christmas and birthday gifts piled in corners and on desks.

  I pushed JoAnn onto a double bed and grabbed the quilt off a nearby rocker. I covered her in the quilt, tucking in all three sides so tight that no one could get to her. I was sobbing and sitting next to her with my hand on her heaving chest. I watched her for hours until a miracle occurred and she slept. It was starting to get dark. The whole day had gone by. We were alone on this bed, in this dark house, and I was her only protector.

  I looked at the painting above the bed, where ballet dancers pirouetted across the middle of a gr
een background, when suddenly the colors started swirling and changing. I stared at the painting. I knew that it was telling me how to protect JoAnn, but I couldn’t decipher the message. I looked at her sleeping face and understood that the answers were being offered through this painting, but I was too numb or stupid to understand them.

  The front door slammed shut downstairs. There was no time. Dad had found us.

  The psychologist asked me a question that would change my entire view of childhood and kill my chances of ever staying in denial.

  “Have you wondered if that little girl in the dream isn’t JoAnn, but you?”

  “No. I thought it might mean that I knew something about what had happened to JoAnn. Maybe I saw something,” I said.

  “Or maybe by focusing on JoAnn, you’re saving yourself from the pain of focusing on yourself.”

  I’d read about doctors like her who put ideas into people’s heads that weren’t necessarily true. I wasn’t sure I trusted this woman.

  “I don’t know anything anymore. Everything I thought to be true, isn’t,” I told her. “What if I never know what happened to me?”

  “Your mind will let it come only when you’re ready. You must not be ready,” she said.

  “What makes you so sure about me?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure that anything directly happened to you, but I’m sure you were very seriously affected. All of you were—you had to be.”

  The first thing I thought of was Whitfield. Classic move of dating your father. Was that more than just looking for a father figure? Was I looking for a specific relationship to relive with a father figure? I had no idea. I got that same squeamish feeling I’d had at the lake house with Whitfield and Dad.

  The next day I drove back to Brooklyn, shaky and uncertain.

  At work on Monday I walked into the office exhausted and unable to focus. Elliott came in and sat down on the corner of my desk.

  “You look like you’ve lost your last friend,” he said.

  “Don’t even ask,” I told him, tears already brimming.

  Elliott patted my back. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “Thanks,” I managed.

  My family thought therapists were for crazy people or people in emergency situations only. I didn’t find help for myself. I’d seen the kind of shape JoAnn had been in when she’d started therapy. I was much better than that.

  In September I turned thirty. There was no celebration. Mom and Jim completely forgot it. I spent the day with JoAnn, playing cards.

  She was out of the psychiatric facility and had rented a room in a house with two other women, but I still spent most weekends with her. There wasn’t a single Sunday night, driving back to Brooklyn, that I didn’t worry she’d need me during the week, and that I’d get there too late.

  My life had become very small. I didn’t see friends, and I didn’t go to plays or parties—I worked, and I drove to Washington.

  On Thursday, Mom called early in the morning.

  “I need you to pay JoAnn’s car payment,” she barked.

  “What?” I wasn’t even awake yet.

  “Jim and I have given enough, and we are not going to pay her car payment. You’ll have to figure that out.” I was confused.

  “I already paid that,” I told her.

  “You paid last month’s bill, which was late. Now this month is due. They called here, threatening to tow her car away.”

  “I don’t have the money, Mom. I just paid it, like I said.” I was trying to sit up in bed, but the phone cord was getting tangled.

  “Right,” she said sarcastically. Mom was under the impression that I had money I was keeping from the family. I had no idea where she was getting that, but when she came to visit, she expected me to pay for everything, including her movie ticket and the restaurant bills and taxi rides.

  “I can’t pay it,” I said honestly. “I’m still paying Granda’s car insurance.” I’d started paying Granda’s insurance when I got out of graduate school. It was one way I could take care of her long distance.

  “Then you just get on the phone and call Becky or Jamie or whoever and find someone who can. Jim and I have given enough.” She hung up on me. I was still in bed.

  Becky wasn’t going to help. She hadn’t called JoAnn or me since I’d seen her at Christmas. Becky had told Mom, “I can’t afford to lose my job and become suicidal right now. I just got my life together.”

  Obviously, the situation scared her to death, had her convinced that her life would spiral away from her just as JoAnn’s had. I remembered how she’d cut Dad off that Christmas and never saw him again. Had he done something to her? During the most recent Christmas, she’d told me she didn’t remember anything, but why wouldn’t she offer even a crumb of support?

  Jamie would be willing to help, but he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. He probably needed as much help as JoAnn, only none of us had ever bothered to ask.

  I lay there for two hours trying to figure out how I’d made it this far with so little resources backing me up. If they towed JoAnn’s car, she would be devastated. I couldn’t worry about it right now. I had to get to work.

  That weekend, I drove to Washington worrying where the car payment money would come from. It was two hundred and twenty dollars, but it might as well have been a million. I didn’t have it.

  JoAnn was doing much better. She and I drove to Great Falls Park with a friend she’d met in group therapy. I watched them laughing as they climbed down to one of the waterfalls.

  I hadn’t prayed since Galesburg Methodist, but I said a genuine prayer of thank you for JoAnn’s survival and for the doctor who’d suggested the specialized program—without it, I knew for sure, JoAnn wouldn’t have lived.

  They had her trusting in a future. Now we had to get money to sustain her until she was functional again.

  That Sunday, before I left to drive back to Brooklyn, JoAnn opened a box Mom and Jim had sent. Inside was food for her. I was glad that at least they were stepping up a little.

  We opened the cardboard lid to find Lipton onion soup, Ritz crackers past their expiration date, mayonnaise, a few “Constant Comment” tea bags, and some flour. There wasn’t enough of anything in that box to make a meal. Obviously, they had gone to their cupboard and pulled out whatever was in there.

  I was exasperated, but JoAnn just shrugged. “One thing you can count on in this fucked-up life is that Mom is one hundred percent predictable.” And even with the deep scars on the tops of her hands, she managed to laugh, and I did too.

  “Someday, she’ll be old and sick, and we’ll mail her dehydrated Lipton onion soup as if it were a fucking miracle cure,” JoAnn said. We had tears running down our faces.

  “And she can split it with Dad,” I said, laughing harder.

  JoAnn looked so much happier now. I worried about her car being repossessed, and what that might do to her emotional state.

  That night, I drove to Brooklyn thinking about money and how to get it. Clearly JoAnn’s unemployment would be awhile, and I was going to need the cavalry to come from somewhere. It hit me…it would have to be Dad. And I would be the one to ask him.

  How had it come down to him—out of a whole family of people? He was the only hope left? A pedophile? And yet, shouldn’t he bear the responsibility?

  I waited until the following Sunday, his sixty-first birthday, to call. I thought it might help soften my request for money.

  I shoved a red metal stool into the kitchen of my Brooklyn apartment and sat by the phone. The sun was out, the trees were bare now, and a chilly wind was blowing through the kitchen door. I was petrified.

  I dialed Dad’s number, knowing he was waiting to hear from one of us. I hadn’t missed his birthday since high school. Whatever happened on the phone would determine the fate of Dad and me forever.

  I heard it ringing. He picked up.

  “Dad, it’s me,” I said.

  “Well, hello,” he said cheer
fully. “Where have you been?” he asked.

  Trying to keep JoAnn alive and functioning after all the perverted, disgusting things you did to her, I wanted to say. “Working,” I said instead. “It’s hard to call with the time difference.”

  “You can still write a note, can’t you?” he asked.

  I needed to focus. JoAnn needed help. “I know it’s your birthday, but I don’t have good news, Dad. I need money to help JoAnn. She’s in the hospital. She tried to kill herself.”

  “Oh no,” he said. “Oh my God.”

  “She’s going to be okay.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “She’s having some kind of breakdown.” I was trying to lay it out so that he’d feel responsible but not threatened. I was walking a tightrope.

  “A nervous breakdown?” he asked. “She’s as crazy as your mother.”

  At that moment, everything shifted. I’d been through too much to let him blame her for what he had done.

  He’d taken her childhood, her entire life away. And it was still unclear what the future held for her. He would take responsibility, and he would pay, one way or another. I’d find the money somewhere else if I had to.

  I took a deep breath and set my trap.

  “She left a suicide note in her apartment explaining why,” I told him. “I have it here and I don’t want to open it by myself.” There had never been a note.

  “Don’t open it,” he said. “She wouldn’t want you to.”

  “It might explain what happened,” I continued.

  “Don’t open it,” he said again.

  “But we’ll know what happened to her, Dad.”

  “I never touched her,” he said, panicked. “I never touched that girl.”

  I put the receiver in my lap and my forehead against the cool wall. He knew exactly what I was talking about. He denied something that no one was accusing him of doing. If he wasn’t guilty, how else would he have come up with that scenario? I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Why would you say that?” I asked.

  Dad was silent.

  “Why did you say you didn’t touch her, Dad?” I asked again.