Finding Casey: A Novel

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  He rubbed his face. “Juniper, I never suggested you were mean. Far from it. But trust me, this isn’t a good idea.”

  “Chico, I am doing this. You can sit in the car with the dog.”

  “I’m not letting you go in there alone. We can leave the dog in the car for fifteen minutes.”

  “No way, a dog can—”

  “It’s winter!” he said. “For crying out loud, the dog was living outside and eating horse feed. I think she’ll survive if we leave all the windows down a few inches. I’m coming with you, and that’s that.”

  Before today, the most ever people in Aspen’s room I counted was four—her nurse, me, a doctor, and Mrs. Clemmons. Not today. Today there were five—Dr. Armstrong, two nurses, a respiratory therapist, and a pharmacist. Dr. Armstrong wouldn’t let me go in the room, and there wasn’t any space for me. I watched from the doorway. Mrs. Clemmons stood next to me, her hands pressing down on my shoulders like if she let go I might float away. Anything that happened next—me growing wings and flying out the window—wouldn’t have surprised me one bit. Because after I wrote my name down, my mind was dizzy with remembering things. Oh, my goodness, it hurt so bad to let the memories inside. It felt like I had a cloud of bats in there, flapping their razor-sharp wings into my organs. I tried not to cry, I always tried, but this time I couldn’t make myself calm down even when I held my hands over my mouth. When I started making the sound, Mrs. Clemmons had another doctor come and listen to my breathing and my heart. She wanted to give me a shot, but I panicked because what if it was like Abel and Seth gave me, knock-out medicine in disguise? Most of the time I never saw it coming. Things would just be going along, and then Abel would grab me and the next thing I knew, I was waking up with him inside of me and I wouldn’t even know where I was or how I got there. How do you tell someone from Outside that’s how things happened and why you need to keep control?

  Mrs. Clemmons sat with me and held my hand while the doctor examined me. She explained how sometimes a person can get so upset that the best thing a doctor can do is give you medicine to relax. “No lightning,” I kept saying, “no knocking me out. I have to stay awake for Aspen.”

  The other doctor explained that I’d feel a pinprick, but that the medicine would work fast, and it would help me. Mrs. Clemmons said, “I won’t allow anyone to hurt you. Just like with Aspen’s doctors, no one will do anything without your permission. All right?”

  “All right.” It was just like the doctor said, one moment of bee sting and then a feeling of peacefulness, like after Abel died and Seth threw his body out in the desert. Once he was gone, my world got so much better.

  “I’m going to have the security guard stand outside Aspen’s room,” Mrs. Clemmons said, and this big man in a black suit stood in front of me. “Henry,” she said. “Can you explain to Mrs. Smith what your job is?”

  “Happy to, ma’am. I make sure no one goes into or out of this room.”

  “You’re a cop,” I said, though it was hard to talk with the shot inside me, slowing things down.

  “Henry is not a policeman,” Mrs. Clemmons said. “He isn’t even carrying a gun, are you, Henry?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What about lightning?”

  “Pardon me?” Henry said.

  “She’s referring to a stun gun. A Taser. Do you have one of those?”

  “No, ma’am. No weapons whatsoever. I have a radio,” he said, and smiled. “Not the kind that plays music.”

  My brain felt heavy in my head. My eyes wanted to close, but I wouldn’t let them.

  “Henry will make sure no one goes into Aspen’s room without your permission.”

  “You don’t know Seth,” I said. “He always finds a way.” Whenever I said his name I could see her getting a little bit mad, but not at me.

  “That may have been so in the past,” she said, “but in order to get to you or Aspen, he’d have to go through Henry and me. There is something I want you to start thinking about, Casey.”

  My name. My real name. She kept saying it. It was out there, she knew and pretty soon other people would know. Seth would wait until I least expected it. Then he would move through the dark, cutting, hitting, lighting things on fire.

  “When you’re feeling better, you’re going to have to speak with the police.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what Seth did to you was a crime. He has to be stopped before he does it to some other girl. The police will need your help and they’ll have lots of questions. Do you understand?”

  I wanted to understand. Just as much, though, I wanted not to think of Seth or Abel ever again, the same way I hadn’t thought of my life Before, when I was Casey for real. Say. Easy, case, yes. The memories came too fast to make any sense. “I’ll try,” I said, “but could we wait until Aspen is better first?”

  “I’m sorry, but not this time,” she said. “The police need to know as soon as possible.” She patted my arm. “I’ll stay with you the entire time, and if you need to take a break, I’ll make sure that happens. The police in California will want to talk to you, too, and they’ll help us find your family.”

  “I don’t have a family anymore.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Abel said they didn’t want me back after he, you know.” I pointed to my throat. “He said he and Seth went back at night and they killed them and my sister.”

  Mrs. Clemmons squeezed my shoulder. “If that were so, don’t you think that would have been a national news story?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll check, but you’ve got to start sorting out what they told you and what’s the truth. Abel and Seth told you lies in order to control you.”

  I didn’t believe her. “They’re gone. Killed. Abel told me how he did it. Seth won’t talk about it. Aspen’s my only real family.” I thought about Caleb, Old St. John, and Frances, how angry they would be at me for telling and ruining all the progress of the Farm. “Please, Mrs. Clemmons,” I said. “I’m worried about my animals.”

  “I’ll send someone to check on them. Try to let your mind drift, Casey. That will help bring things to the surface. California was a long time ago. Everyone will understand that you did what you had to in order to survive.”

  California. Such a big word, so much inside it. Calf, can, nail. Fail, nor, naa, no. When I shut my eyes I saw oak trees rushing water sunshine ocean waves seals a trailer horses blue jays birthday cakes Christmas trees spaghetti and meatballs a pillowcase toothpaste a rubber ducky a closet filled with clothes pouring rain new shoes Easter baskets a smiling woman and a smiling man and a sister who always got me in trouble a dog. Abel and Seth’s voice crept into every memory, staining it, like an old sweater with the silver buttons turned into tin, telling me don’t you dare say a word don’t even breathe anytime we want we can strangle you cut your throat deeper this time then what will you do when you can’t scream anymore and do you know how long it takes to bleed to death from that less than a minute your heart beat will pump your blood out in four seconds but you’ll live long enough to know you’re dying and then who’s going to take care of the brat? We are. You know what we’ll do as soon as she’s old enough? Or maybe we’ll strangle you, that will last longer and to be sure to listen for the click of bones when we fracture your larynx one little crack and then no matter how you try to breathe there is no fixing it good-bye. I thought about the times Abel did strangle me, how much it hurt for days and days. The one time with the broken bottle when he shoved and Seth pulled me away so that all I had was the long cut but it bled and bled until Seth glued the skin together and of course it pulled apart and he had to do it over and over again every day while Abel said this is all your fault you could try keeping your mouth shut which I guess I did because here I am alive and he’s not, desert stars lightning take his silver bracelet wipe off the blood, we can sell it.

  I wanted to know my dog Curly was all right, and Brown Horse and the chickens, but even t
hinking about my dog made me cry because of things Seth had done before. If you need to love something so bad, try loving me, he used to say. If you can’t find it in your spirit to be thankful for everything I do for you, then maybe you don’t deserve animals. Aw, look what you made me do, Laurel. Look hard. Take a sweat. Pray for forgiveness. Look at yourself, how ugly you are inside and out. You’ll never be able to sing that brat a lullaby. Who’d want you now? The answer is no one. No one. No one. Think about that, Laurel.

  But I was Casey now.

  Mrs. Clemmons talked on her phone. The doctors were discussing steps in the procedure. Proceed, prod, cord, cure. The student doctors wanted to watch everything, and for me to step aside and let them because they had to know how to be doctors someday. “No,” I said. I wished I could say, “Stand behind me or go away. I’m not moving,” but I was too tired to make words.

  The one thing I knew for sure was that I never wanted to be called Laurel Smith again. Laurel Smith was someone whose skin I put on because my real skin was buried deep inside me, like when a tree dies from the inside out. Daphne turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo; I turned into Laurel but couldn’t escape. Pace. Peas. Sea. That day it all happened was right there inside me. I shook my head no. Mrs. Clemmons with her pearl necklace and matching earrings, her wire glasses and her brown eyes; everything about Mrs. Clemmons was a smile. “Your name is Casey McGuire,” she said, and she took hold of my hands. “You never have to be Laurel Smith again.”

  The first thing the doctors did was unhook the breathing tube from the breathing machine, just to try it, they said, like when Susie the nurse had to clean the tubes. They talked to each other in the secret language that only they understood, but I made myself listen and store the words in a list inside my head. “Hemoglobin eight,” and “Suction, please,” and “What is the patient’s ABG,” and “What is her PA02,” and “Administer bronchodilators.” I watched and listened and inside my heart I thought how weird it was that here I was, praying for real, and whatever Seth thought of that didn’t really matter. The shot doctor came back to wait with us. She said, “Would you like me to explain what the doctors are doing?”

  I nodded.

  “Aspen has been under sedation since her seizure and cardiac-arrest episode,” she said.

  “You mean the crashing?”

  “Yes. That medicine is what helped her to lie still while the ventilator breathed for her. The doctors are titrating that medicine down to see if Aspen will take a breath on her own. If she does, then they’ll slowly decrease the mandatory breaths coming from the machine, and let her fill in the gaps with her own breaths. Right now she’s at twenty breaths. Next, they’ll decrease it to eighteen and see if she breathes two breaths on her own. This could take a long time, maybe all day.”

  “If her body forgot how to do the breaths, how do they make it remember?”

  “Casey, I want you to take a look at all the people in her room. Two doctors, one nurse, one respiratory therapist, and the pharmacist. He’s in charge of the medicine. Each of them is doing one step. The respiratory therapist is making sure she starts to remember how to breathe.”

  “What if she doesn’t?”

  “Then they hook the machines back up.”

  “And if she remembers?”

  She smiled at me. “Now you’re thinking positive. Once Aspen is breathing on her own, they’ll extubate, which means that they’ll take out the tube that goes down her throat and into her lungs. It’s a critical moment.”

  “What if she forgets again? Can they put the tube back in time? What about the feeding tube?”

  “That’s why they do this in steps. If she doesn’t breathe on her own, they’ll hook her back up until she seems stronger, and they’ll try again a little later. The feeding tube will come out once she starts eating on her own. “

  Big pharma, Seth would say. Treating people like lab animals. Like he had room to talk. If it worked, I wondered how to explain to Aspen that we weren’t going back to the Farm. Then it hit me, where would we go? One week after they took me, after Abel had raped me three times in a row, I asked if I could go home now. Abel laughed. I asked if I could at least have my clothes. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my face. Please let me go, I begged, back to my family, and he said, Do you honestly think they’d want you back now?

  I said maybe since it wasn’t my fault they would want me back.

  “Too late. Seth and I went back last night and killed your parents,” he said.

  “Not my sister,” I said. “She’s still in elementary school.”

  “And that is supposed to matter to me? Maybe I took her, too. Maybe I’ve got her tied up in the van.”

  “Please don’t hurt her,” I said. “She’s still little.”

  Abel took hold of my neck and I shut my eyes. He whispered into my ear, “If you want me to be nice to you, then you’d better start being nicer to me.” Then he tied my hands up behind my back and left, locking the door. Shutting out the light. I had to do deep breaths to not panic at being closed in, in the dark at first. I cried that night, but by morning I realized he was telling me the truth about one thing; I had to be nicer. It wasn’t until much later on that I accepted that he’d never tell me the truth, but that never stopped me from hoping. Probably my family didn’t want me back. But they deserved to live. They worked hard and took care of me, made all those dinners and bought me new clothes for school. They weren’t stupid, like me, to think running away would change anything. I couldn’t really see their faces in my mind. Just flashes of things: my mom’s silver bracelet with the moon face. The hairs on my dad’s wrist that went under the face of his watch and then came back out the other side. My sister was only a set of braids in my mind. She ruined my clothes, touched my things. Maybe sometimes my mom wasn’t as nice as I wanted her to be, but after Abel and Seth took me, I would have rather been beaten every day of my life and on restriction forever than go through what Abel, and later Seth, did to me. When Aspen was born I thought that meant I had to marry Abel. That we’d become a family and then Aspen would go to school and I would have to make the dinner and vacuum the floors. Things wouldn’t be great, but it would be a different way, something I could learn to do so he didn’t get angry and hurt me. There was so much I didn’t want to think about, that I had to forget about my Before life.

  Instead, it was like living a new life in the camp with the redwood trees. It was our life until the cops started coming around, and then it turned into something different on that car ride from California to the Farm. The first night we stopped in the desert to go to the bathroom at this rest stop. They wanted me to sleep, and gave me pills, but they made me sick to my stomach and I threw them up, so eventually they stopped trying and told me I could stay awake, but they’d better not hear one peep out of me or they’d leave me in the middle of nowhere. They both took drugs back then, smoked things, and sometimes like during the drive, Abel said they needed to get “jacked up” so they could drive all night. I pretended to be sleeping when they got into the terrible fight, but that was one thing I remembered. It was so real in my mind it could have happened yesterday.

  The tube was unhooked now, and the doctors were talking in louder voices, asking, “What are her SATS?” and “What’s her PEEP?” And “tidal volume,” as if Aspen had been under the ocean all this time, waiting for us to pull her to the surface. Mrs. Clemmons and the shot doctor talked on the phone to other people and whispered to each other. I kept my eyes on Henry without a gun. Sometimes he smiled. Once he even winked. I wondered what had happened to him that he could stand there that long, not saying a word. Had he known someone like Abel? Was he secretly a cop, with a gun hidden somewhere in his uniform? Maybe I could get his kind of job in the Outside World because I could go without talking for the longest time, too. Even after my neck healed I could be silent. Not Abel, though. All “jacked up” he talked nonstop about things that made no sense like alien abductions and radio frequencies and secret un
derground radioactive government shelters in case of nuclear war. Five times during that drive Seth told him to shut up, but he wouldn’t.

  When they stopped at the rest stop, Seth took me into the pit toilet so I could pee. When we came out, Abel was smoking a cigarette of Seth’s, and that did it. Seth yelled and Abel yelled back and Abel took out his knife and Seth grabbed it, cutting his hand and it must have hurt really bad because he made the noise, and then he turned the knife around, and it happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to scream. Seth cut Abel’s neck the way Abel cut mine, but deeper, and he was right, it was only four seconds before he stopped being alive.

  Seth put Abel in the backseat and told me to get in the front or I would be next. “This is your fault,” he said. “I’m tired of taking care of you. Now that you have the brat you’re even more expensive. What the f——am I supposed to do with you?”

  I said, “You could let us go.” It was the wrong answer. “Hit me,” I said, “not Aspen,” and he did.

  Abel took drugs he was only supposed to sell. He’d get himself all “wired,” his pupils huge, and he did stupid things like call attention to himself, which was why cops came, and we had to leave. Just get in the car and go.

  Was I lonely and afraid? Yes, but after Aspen I could stand it. Before, when Abel and Seth were arguing, I used to wish they would hit each other so hard they would both fall down and die. If that couldn’t happen, I wished they’d hurt each other so bad they would need my help. I would help. I’d show them how to be a nice person. I’d help them go back into the Outside World. But after Abel died, we drove around for hours until Seth found a place to leave his body. Take his bracelet. That’s worth money. After that, I just wanted the car ride to be over, for us to be at the next place we were going to, so I could change Aspen’s diaper and then I could go to sleep.