by Liz Byrski
He was right about the walk. For almost a month she had struggled along doing the minimum necessary to keep herself going in the photography course. Anything more was beyond her. She was isolated in her misery, unable to talk or to write letters home, her senses frozen. Her limbs felt leaden, the slightest physical exertion exhausted her. Each time she looked in the mirror she saw that her eyes and skin were dull, and there were downward lines at the corners of her mouth which she hadn’t noticed before. She looked sick and she felt sick, as though she was being eaten away from the inside.
‘You need some air, some exercise. Get out of your head, Sally, and into your body – do something physical,’ Steve said, and she knew it made sense. She took a brief shower, hoping to clear her head, and pulled on jeans and a cotton shirt topped with a fleece vest to combat the chill of the San Francisco fog. And at the sound of the car horn she picked up her backpack, locked the apartment behind her and ran down the path to the gate where Steve was waiting in his old olive green Jaguar.
The traffic was moving fast on the Bay Bridge and they were soon heading along the final section from the wooded heart of Treasure Island through the city of San Francisco to the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin County and Mount Tamalpais. It was the first time in a month that Sally had crossed the Bay Bridge into the city. The first time since the terrible day of her second visit to the Mendelsons, when she had walked out of the Hyde Street house trembling with rage. She shivered at the memory of it as she stared across to Marin County through the rising fog.
The meeting Sally had so often dreamed of had taken place in Golden Gate Park. The movie that had always run through her head was of a sparkling young woman walking towards her. Their eyes met, there was recognition, understanding and finally tears of joy as they hugged each other. Despite what she knew, despite the Mendelsons’ warnings, Sally hadn’t let go of the dream even as she saw them there on the far side of the lake, Estelle and Oliver, the wheelchair between them. Even as she crossed the little wooden bridge she still had that vibrant Lisa with her, until Oliver turned the wheelchair towards her and she looked into her daughter’s eyes for the first time.
The car, they said, had been doing eighty miles an hour when it drifted across two lanes, mounted the central strip and rolled upside down into the path of the oncoming traffic, ending up on the passenger side. As the leaking petrol burst into flames Lisa, unconscious in the passenger seat, was trapped in their path. Estelle freed herself from the seat belt and struggled to release her. Behind her other drivers attempted to haul her from the wreckage, and the flames licked up her arms and across her chest as she dragged Lisa from the burning car.
Estelle’s burns were serious but Lisa’s were savage, scarring and distorting her face and body so that even the most experienced plastic surgeon could do little to repair the damage. And there was brain and spinal damage too, the full extent of which only became clear as the days and weeks following the accident slowly unwound in an agony of grief-stricken discovery. Lisa would never walk again; the fluttering movement she could make with her hands indicated that one day she might be able to hold a plastic cup of liquid between them. For months she lay in a pressure suit, connected to a range of drips and monitors, hovering between life and death, until eventually she began to regain some strength. She had a repertoire of sounds from which her parents and carers could interpret her needs. Strangers disturbed her but she showed a childlike affection for those she knew well. No one knew quite how much or how little she could see, hear, or understand.
It was Oliver who told the story. He was away on tour, he explained, Estelle was sleeping after a heavy dose of new antihistamine tablets to cope with an allergy. Lisa was watching a movie when a boy from school called at the house and invited her to take a ride in his brother’s car. Estelle and Oliver had already warned her away from him but Lisa, knowing that if she woke Estelle she would be forbidden to go, simply grabbed her coat and ducked out, thinking she’d be back home long before her mother woke. But shortly after midnight, when she found herself in a sleazy bar with the boy and two older friends being plied with drinks, Lisa’s own alarm bells began to ring. Scared of getting back into the car she ducked into a phone booth and called home. Estelle got up, dressed, drank several glasses of water and drove the forty miles out of town to the bar in Sunnyvale. It was on the way home, with a repentant Lisa in the front seat and the relief of a mission accomplished, that she switched on the heater and began to relax. The adrenaline that had gotten her this far burned out, the drug took over and her eyes began to close.
On her first visit Sally had listened in horror as Oliver described Lisa’s disabilities, and the special extension at the back of the house designed to accommodate her and a resident carer. Estelle had shrunk back into the couch as Oliver was talking, but Sally was scarcely aware of anything but shock and numbing disappointment. She wanted to get out of the house, get away on her own to find out how she really felt. She asked a few questions, though later she could not remember the answers, and she asked to see a photograph of Lisa before the accident.
Estelle got up, went to the bureau and picked up a stiff white envelope. ‘I got some copied for you,’ she said quietly. ‘I thought perhaps you’d want to look at them alone, to keep them …’ She should let them know what she wanted to do, they said. They would be happy for her to come to the house again to see Lisa, but it might be best if they met first somewhere else. Lisa seemed less disturbed by meeting people outside the house. They suggested the park, and then if Lisa was calm they could take a walk together and Sally could come back with them to Hyde Street.
She felt and thought nothing on the way home, aware only of white noise in her head. Back again in the peaceful familiarity of the apartment she began to thaw and carefully drew the photographs from their envelope. Slowly, one by one, she studied the pictures of Lisa as a baby, a toddler, a little girl in her first school uniform and the bright-eyed, glossy-haired teenager receiving an award at a school prize-giving. Even then a part of her held back, not accepting reality, keeping in her mind’s eye the final picture, Lisa’s dazzling smile on her sixteenth birthday, a couple of months before the accident.
That smile was still in her mind as two weeks later she stood in the park and looked into her daughter’s eyes, searching the small pale face with its lattice of tight and shiny crimson scars. She could see nothing of herself, nothing even of what she could remember of Simon, and nothing of the beautiful sixteen-year-old in the photograph.
‘Lisa,’ she said, taking a deep breath and leaning forward slightly to let the girl see her face. ‘My name’s Sally. I’ve heard a lot about you, it’s so nice to meet you.’ And she reached out to take one of the cool fluttering hands that slipped from her grasp almost immediately.
They strolled around the lake and Lisa cooed at the sight of children feeding a crowd of noisy brown and white ducks. The conversation was strained. Eventually Estelle bent to explain to Lisa that Sally was going home with them, and they wheeled her onto the electronic ramp of a specially adapted Volkswagen; Oliver drove them back to Hyde Street in silence. Seated at an angle in the back seat from where she could watch the girl in the chair, Sally felt her heart beating with a strange new urgency. It made her light-headed, inducing a sense of frenetic energy. Anger and resentment were building within her. She tried to make eye contact with Lisa but the nervous jerks of the girl’s head always broke the connection. As they turned the corner into the steep climb up Hyde Street she took Lisa’s hand again. This time it did not slip but was pulled away to the sound of a short inward breath. Sally felt a shaft of pain so acute that she wanted to howl. Instead she swallowed hard and turned her gaze once more to the street.
It was Estelle who suggested that Sally might like to see Lisa’s room. She pushed the chair down a glass-sided passageway that ran along the terrace connecting the extension to the main house.
‘Why doesn’t she stay in the main house?’ Sally asked. ‘Why is she shut away o
ut here?’
Estelle turned her head sharply. ‘This is hardly shut away, Sally. Lisa has her own place where she can see the garden and isn’t disturbed by strangers coming to the house. She gets very agitated by noise, and by people coming and going. We thought this would be peaceful for her. She can listen to music and watch television without getting distressed.’
The sunlit room at the end of the passage opened onto the garden and swimming pool through a wall made almost entirely of glass. There were colourful armchairs, an array of large soft toys, and an exotic mobile of sparkling fish hung from the ceiling. On the walls mounted posters of Michael Jackson and Madonna were reminders that Lisa’s life had effectively stopped thirteen years earlier. At the far end was a double-width hospital bed flanked by hoists and a drip stand; in the far corner, a second wheelchair and an oxygen cylinder.
‘The carer’s suite is through there,’ Estelle gestured. ‘And these doors open to the garden.’ She opened one of the glass doors as Sally looked around the room with a growing sense of hostility.
‘What a beautiful room, Lisa,’ she managed, knowing she sounded hopelessly artificial. Lisa made a noise that seemed to indicate agreement. She nodded her head, in the same jerky way she had done on meeting Sally.
‘Oliver takes Lisa into the pool most days during the summer, and sometimes Tessa, the carer, takes her,’ Estelle said, opening the terrace doors.
‘And you, Estelle?’ Sally asked, hearing the aggression in her own voice. ‘Do you take her swimming?’
Estelle looked at her in obvious surprise. ‘No, Sally, I don’t go in the pool,’ she replied quietly, smiling across at Lisa and reaching down to straighten the girl’s skirt. ‘I’m not a good enough swimmer, am I, Lisa?’ And she stroked a lock of pale blonde hair back from her daughter’s forehead. ‘Lisa’s exercise is pretty important, you see. We have to keep her flexible for her own comfort, and that’s pretty hard physically. Oliver does a lot of that, he and Tessa.’
There was a silence heavy with something new and painful.
‘So you don’t have to do anything?’ Sally asked at last.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You, Estelle, you don’t have to do anything. You have other people to look after Lisa. The staff do it all – how fortunate you are to be able to afford all this.’ A part of Sally was amazed at what she was saying but her anger had developed a life of its own.
Estelle gave her another long look. Lisa’s hands began to wave in agitation and her face contorted as though she sensed the tension. ‘Yes, we are fortunate and we try to ensure that Lisa gets the best care we can afford.’
‘It must make it a lot easier for you.’
‘Of course,’ said Estelle. ‘She needs twenty-four-hour care. Oliver and I do all we can.’
‘And when you feel like it you can shut the door on her, shut her out of your lives, like … like Rochester’s wife. Where she won’t embarrass you and your guests.’
Estelle looked at her long and hard, and then, without saying a word, walked over to tap on the door of the carer’s apartment. A smiling young woman in a white overall opened the door, dragging her long hair up into a ponytail. ‘Sorry, Estelle, I didn’t realise you were back. Hi, Lisa – nice outing?’
Lisa made a sound of greeting and seemed to smile. The young woman said hello to Sally and took the wheelchair from Estelle. ‘C’mon, Lisa, I’ll take you to the bathroom and then you can watch TV.’
‘I realise that this has come as a terrible shock, Sally,’ Estelle said as they walked back up the passage to the house. ‘But we have tried to do everything possible to make sure that Lisa is comfortable and happy and has the best possible care and treatment.’
Sally was a stranger to herself. A seething mass of emotions raged in her, foremost among them pure hatred for Estelle, who should have cared for Lisa and whose irresponsibility had turned her from a sparkling teenager to a scarred and hopeless wreck. Now she was trying to pass off neglect and unconcern as the best of care. For the first time in her life Sally knew she was capable of physical violence. She wanted to grab Estelle by the neck and hurl her against the wall, to smash the gleaming glass wall of the passage and kick over the great earthenware pot with the tall ficus that stood in the corner. She could barely trust herself to move and she tightened her grip on her bag in an effort to control her body, her nails biting into the soft leather.
‘It seems to me, Estelle, that the best of care is the least Lisa deserves from you. It’s your fault, your reckless driving destroyed her life.’ The voice was not her own. It came from a raw, tight throat in a body in which every nerve ending seemed to have gathered on the surface of her skin.
Estelle turned to Sally, her face twisted with grief. ‘I don’t …’ she began. But Oliver, who had been waiting for them in the lounge room, moved quickly to his wife’s side and took her arm.
‘All this has naturally been a terrible shock to you, Sally,’ he said, with an authority that she had not heard before. ‘I think you should leave before you say something you may regret, although you already seem to have exceeded the limits of reasonable behaviour. You know your way to the door.’ And he led the weeping Estelle out onto the sunlit terrace.
‘I think you’re being very unfair,’ Nancy said as Sally told her the story. ‘Look, honey, this is terrible for you, but it’s terrible for them too, and they’ve been living with it for a long time. Sounds like they’re doing the best they can. It’s fortunate that they can afford to give her that care and a lovely place of her own where she’s safe and quiet. You can’t say they neglect her simply because they have some paid help. Would it be better if they were struggling in a tiny flat trying to cope with her, and getting worn to a frazzle in the process?’
But Sally’s rage was as limitless as it was irrational, and it devoured her energy and her spirit. ‘Why don’t you go see a therapist?’ Nancy suggested. ‘There’s a terrific woman in Oakland. You need professional help to sort this out.’ But Sally would have none of it and Nancy came less often down the steps, less often called over the balcony to tell her that there was fresh coffee in the jug and peanut butter cookies on the table.
Unable to sleep Sally walked the apartment at night, her arms clasped like a straightjacket around her body. Other nights she surfed the television channels, searching among the assortment of old movies, soaps and exhortations to worship, in the hope of finding something to hold her attention and lift her out of her feelings. She tried to write what she felt, but after the first few words she ripped the pages from her notebook and crumpled them into the bin. She stared at her unfinished paintings in disgust, and the camera, which a few weeks earlier offered a new sort of vision, seemed to taunt her, its lens like a great reproachful eye. Now she felt blind and crippled, powerless, trapped. She felt like Lisa.
Side by side they toiled in companionable silence up the rough timber steps of the path leading along the edge of the ravine. The early fog had lifted and as the ground levelled out and the trees thinned, they were surrounded by hills scattered with poppies and cornflowers, stretching into the distance and dropping away to reveal the bay and the city tinged with hazy afternoon light.
‘Looks like it’s in soft focus,’ Steve murmured into the stillness. ‘Want to take a rest?’ She nodded and they made for a cluster of flat rocks rising above the grass. Sally took off her vest and sank exhausted onto the grass.
Steve opened his pack and pulled out a package of sandwiches and a bottle of water. ‘Turkey or pastrami, both on rye,’ he said, offering her the package. ‘How’re you feeling?’
She shrugged, looking into the distance. ‘Confused, angry, impotent,’ she said. ‘But the walk was a good idea. Thanks for bringing me, for taking the trouble.’
‘No trouble, I like company when I walk. Know something? I’m worried about you.’
‘Don’t be,’ Sally snapped, realising that she sounded just like Grace. ‘I’ll work things out eventually.’ She picked up a turke
y sandwich and bit into it.
Steve took a swig of water from the bottle and screwed the cap back on. ‘Not this way you won’t,’ he said. ‘Not until you either get some help or start asking yourself why you’re feeling this way.’
Sally’s anger rose again. ‘You sound like Nancy. She’s trying to send me off to a therapist.’
He shrugged and picked up a sandwich. ‘She wants to help, so do I. But you sure make it hard and I don’t want to see it get worse.’
Sally threw down her sandwich. ‘Hard! I make it hard! How do you think this feels for me? For Christ’s sake, Steve, it can’t get much worse than it is. For years I dream of finding my daughter and when I do, not only is she a grotesque cripple thanks to her adoptive parents, but she’s kept locked away in some specially constructed facility in the back yard. How much worse can it get?’
‘Sally! Listen to what you’re saying. From everything you told me it sounds like the Mendelsons adore Lisa. This must be their worst nightmare and they live with it every day. They love her – how d’you think this feels for them? They’re doing the best they can, a beautiful suite, someone to look after her, exercise in the pool. A lot of people would’ve put her in a home years ago. Christ, Sally, what do you want them to do, crawl around in sackcloth and ashes? This could have happened to anyone. It was an accident, not neglect. Wanna know what I think?’
‘Oh, yes please, do let me have your unprofessional opinion,’ she said, her tone heavy with sarcasm.
Steve took off his sunglasses and looked straight at her, narrowing his blue eyes against the glare. ‘This is not about finding Lisa, or about the Mendelsons and the accident. You’re an intelligent woman and none of that makes sense. This is about a terrified teenager alone and pregnant and thousands of miles away from home. You’ve been bottling up all this anger and grief for decades. It’s about you and that bastard who abandoned you. You were desperate and you gave away your baby. You abandoned Lisa, that’s what you think, and you’ve never forgiven yourself. This is not about the Mendelsons, it’s about you, your disgust at yourself, the anger and hurt that you’ve never come to terms with.’