The Road at My Door

by Lori Windsor Mohr

  The Road at My Door

  Lori Windsor Mohr

  Copyright © 2015 Lori Windsor Mohr

  All rights reserved. Any unauthorised broadcasting, public performance, copying or recording will constitute an infringement of copyright. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanical, including photocopying, fax, data transmittal, internet site, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  First Printing, 2015 Alfie Dog Limited

  The author can be found at: authors@alfiedog.com

  This is a work of fiction. Although based on real places it is not the intention of the author to suggest that any of these events took place and any similarity to persons alive or dead is purely co-incidental.

  Cover design: Ann Hammond

  Book title: Inspired by William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Road at My Door

  Published by

  Alfie Dog Limited

  Schilde Lodge, Tholthorpe,

  North Yorkshire, YO61 1SN

  Tel: 0207 193 33 90

  For Christine and Michael

  About the Author

  (Photo courtesy of Miki Klocke www.MikiArtisan.com )

  In her debut novel, Lori Windsor Mohr draws on her experience growing up in Southern California, where she suffered from severe depression. She believes writing about suicide is one way of fighting the stigma still associated with depressive illness. After earning a Master of Science in Nursing at UCLA, Lori worked with suicidal adolescents. Twenty years after hearing their stories, she was inspired to tell her own.

  Lori is the mother of two grown children and currently lives in Ojai with her husband and three dogs. Her short stories have been featured in breed journals, including Family Dog, Alfiedog.com, and Pug Talk, where she was a staff writer for six years.

  You can visit Lori at her website: www.LoriMohrAuthor.com or email her @ LoriWindsorMohr@gmail.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 Gift Horse

  2 Better than God

  3 The Need for Shelter

  4 See No Evil

  5 Strange Land

  6 Unraveled

  7 Downward Trajectory

  8 A New Order

  9 Family of One

  10 The Final Nail

  11 The Wanderer

  12 God Reconsiders

  13 The Search for Meaning

  14 Transformation

  15 The Road at My Door

  16 The Way Home

  17 A New Destination

  “Everything can be taken from a

  man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in

  any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

  Viktor Frankl

  Man’s Search for Meaning

  Prologue

  There’s something about a secret that makes you want to keep it. This revelation came to me late in the winter of my fourteenth year. Deep down I must have known this about myself all along. It took facing a life-changing decision to make it real. My secret had the power to kill me. In the meantime, it made me sick in every way a person could be sick.

  These were my thoughts as I made the three hour trip to visit my mother. The scenic route along Pacific Coast Highway to Laguna Beach added forty-five minutes to the freeway drive. It had been years since I’d thought about all that happened here and needed the solitude of a three-hour drive to prepare. As it was my arrival felt sudden.

  Other than flower baskets that tourists love hanging along the main drag, the place was a virtual time warp back to 1964. The familiarity was disorienting. Shaggy Eucalyptus trees and family owned businesses retained the village character lost to urban sprawl in neighboring cities.

  I turned at the Texaco station, the very one I had walked to every Saturday for the restroom rather than step inside her house with Dad. This time I drove past the lane of beach bungalows to an angular contemporary on the bluff in Emerald Bay.

  The hospice nurse led me to her bedroom. Shards of afternoon sun cut across the hardwood floor. As the room came into focus my knees went weak. There she was, shrunken and flaccid in a hospital bed. A putrid odor hung in the air. The plug-in purifier was no contest for toxins oozing from her skin with the smell of old moth balls.

  I stepped closer. The sight of her took my breath away. This was a death camp survivor, not the iconic beauty I had known. The contours that had once defined her voluptuous figure now protruded in bony peaks under the blanket. Her face was a tissue-thin layer over spider veins. She looked dead, a gurgling sound with each breath the only evidence otherwise.

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  Mom opened her eyes. I drew back, startled. They closed again before I could say hello. I found a chaise and sat down to wait in hopes the forgiveness I’d found on the road would survive the interlude, fully aware this would be our final moment.

  1 Gift Horse

  The bus driver glanced at me in the rear view mirror. My stop was next. The ride home from Saint Monica’s High to Pacific Palisades took exactly forty-three minutes, including all the stops. My house was last on the route. I didn’t mind riding alone with the driver once everyone else was off, as long as he didn’t talk. That would’ve made it unbearable, having to be social, like adding forty-three minutes to the school day.

  I jumped out the rear exit as soon as the door sprang open. The bus heaved a sigh and drove away. Alone at last. I stood at the gate to our backyard, a three-tiered oasis. Mom said Pacific Palisades was a Technicolor poster for California Living—beautiful people, tree-lined streets, the Ocean at our feet—and that we should thank the Soviet Union for making the move possible.

  According to her, the Cold War was the best thing that ever happened to the Cavanaugh family because the defense industry had become a hotbed of opportunity. For college educated men like my father, a career in aerospace meant a “guaranteed ticket to success” in 1962.

  I headed up the flagstone path to the back staircase. I felt like a foreigner in this new house in a new town in a new neighborhood, a neighborhood where yards were groomed by gardeners instead of shirtless dads on Saturday afternoon.

  The surroundings looked different. That’s about all that had changed. Mom was still moody all the time, she and my older sister Kit still bickered all the time, Dad still walked on eggshells, I stayed out of the way, and Sunday mornings found Mom sliding celery sticks into the Bloody Marys Dad made before breakfast.

  Geraniums spilled over the stone path. I shoved them aside with my saddle shoes, which I hoped might look better dirty. A uniform wasn’t so bad. The freshman skirt and blouse I could live with. Saddle shoes were another matter entirely. A thirteen-year-old girl looked totally dorky in a bigger version of the shoes she had worn as a toddler.

  In this outfit I didn’t stand a chance with Greg Stewart. Blond and tan like just about everyone else in this beach town, he’d smiled at me in Honors English. I hadn’t smiled back. Shyness usually prevented me from anything close to flirting, which Kit said even I could do with a well-timed smile. My sister was a lot of things. Shy was not one of them.

  Daydreams about Greg Stewart would have to wait. Right now I needed to figure out how to keep my parents together. The “D” word had come through the walls of their bedroom in muffled tones as I eavesdropped at night, which was how I figured out everything that went on in my family. Divorce would mean being stuck with a mother who neither loved me nor hated me. Indifference, that’s what I got from Mom.

  My parents probably thought
I was too young to notice tension between them. I don’t think Dad’s job was the real reason we came to the Palisades at all. I think ‘moving up’ as Mom called it was Dad’s last ditch effort to save the marriage. I’d heard him say with a new job it didn’t make sense to move for another year. Mom said if he really loved her they would take out a bigger mortgage and move now.

  Two weeks before school started they put a down payment on a place in Pacific Palisades, and just like that we traded our post World War II tract house in the valley for an executive home near the beach.

  Mom would be right about the move to Pacific Palisades. The new house wouldn’t be what saved her from marital misery. It would be something else entirely. That something would become the source of my secret.

  At the back door I listened for sounds of Mom and Kit fighting before going inside. There was no sign of Mom in the kitchen. That meant she was in the bedroom buried in one of her beloved novels, the closed door a message: ‘Do Not Disturb’. I left my book bag on the washer and went through the laundry room door to the garage. Tennis racquet and ball in hand, I scooted under the heavy door to the other side.

  It was as quiet on the street as it had been in the house. The sound of kids playing in the street after school at our old house had been replaced by the buzz of power mowers from gardeners who disappeared at five.

  I slammed the ball against the door with a bounce-hit monotony that lulled me into a faraway zone. I tried to imagine divorce. Would life with a squabbling Mom and Kit be better or worse than the strain we lived with now?

  “Tell me you’re not on the tennis team.”

  I snatched the ball mid-air and spun around. Greg Stewart leaned against a sycamore with his ankles crossed. He was cuter close up than he had been across the classroom. I was still in my uniform with an untucked blouse and ponytail at half-mast. The saddle shoes might as well have been fins. “No. Just hitting.”

  He emerged from the shade. “I’m Greg Stewart. I live up the street. We’re in Honors English together.”

  I managed a half-smile. “I know. I’m Reese.”

  “I didn’t take you for one of those cheerleader-tennis-player types.”

  Of course not. I hadn’t laughed in a hundred years. The sorry state of my family was written all over me, an automatic rule out for cheerleader. That would be Kit. Mom described me as the ‘quiet, intense sister’ compared with the ‘high-spirited social one’, a differentiation I interpreted from her tone as far less appealing. I didn’t understand how belligerent and combative equaled high-spirited or how quiet intensity meant dull. That prejudice no doubt resulted from the similarity between my mother and sister. I wasn’t sure whether ‘quiet’ was my true temperament or a way to cope with chaos without adding to it.

  “You just hanging out?”

  “Pretty much.” I didn’t want to tell him I was avoiding my mother. Or vice versa.

  “Me too. Hey, you want to walk down to the empty house on the cliff, the one that’s for sale? I have a couple of cigarettes. We could smoke by the pool.”

  “I don’t really smoke.” Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  He looked at me dumbstruck, no doubt sizing up the first of what would become a growing list of deficits the longer he stuck around. A grin spread over his face. “I don’t either. Don’t tell anyone. You have another racquet?”

  “No, but we have a ping pong table on the back patio. It’s not real tennis like this,” I said with a nod toward the garage.

  “In that case I’ll win. You can buy me a pack of Marlborough’s.”

  We both chuckled. A black sedan pulled up to the house.

  “It must be Father Sebastian. Last Sunday he said he would be coming around to visit new families in the parish. I better go tell my mom.”

  “Okay, well, that old guy gives me the creeps. See you tomorrow in class, Cavanaugh.”

  “See you, Stewart.” I watched him take off down the street in a mix of disappointment and relief.

  The priest and I got to the porch at the same time. It wasn’t old Father Sebastian at all. This man didn’t look old enough to be a priest. He wasn’t as tall as Dad and his frame was lean, unlike my bear of a father. In fact, the priest wasn’t manly at all. He could’ve been one of the Beach Boys with hair bleached dry on top of his California Casual good looks. His smile, a grin really, made his whole body springy, as if his bones were held together with rubber bands.

  He flickered with playfulness. His voice had not an ounce of mockery. “Well hello, young lady. I’m Father Donnelly, Jack Donnelly. I’m here from Corpus Christi Church to officially welcome you. Who might you be?”

  “Clarice Cavanaugh.”

  “Whoa, doesn’t that sound like a movie star name, with movie star looks to go with it. And is that what I should call you, Clarice? Or do you have a nickname?”

  Mom hadn’t been able to prevent Katherine from becoming Kit. I’d felt the need to make up for that by sticking with Clarice. Until this very moment. “Reese.”

  Father Donnelly extended his hand. No adult had ever shaken hands with me. His fingernails were immaculate, skin soft. In the less than 60 seconds it had taken to introduce himself I already liked Father Jack Donnelly.

  I scooted around him to open the door. Mom. I would have to interrupt her. With my pointer finger in the air to signal a quick return, I took off through the living room to find her. I tapped before sticking my head inside. Mom was lying on the chaise. She didn’t look up from her book.

  “Clarice, is it absolutely necessary for you to run through the house like a wild horse?”

  “Sorry. The priest is here.”

  “The prie—? Oh, Father Sebastian.” She slapped the book closed and went to check herself in the vanity mirror. “I swear. It’s always something.” She brushed one side of her hair back Lauren Bacall style with a tortoiseshell barrette to hold it in place.

  “Mom, he’s waiting.”

  “First things first, dear. It never hurts to keep a man waiting. Heightens the allure.”

  I watched her preen for the attention she was about to get, the attention Mom always got from men. She opened her mouth to a gaping maw and glided red lipstick over it. With her little finger she dabbed each corner, then pressed her lips in a rolling motion.

  If there was anything my mother loved, it was attention from men. I wasn’t sure what she meant by allure. If that’s what got men’s attention, she had it. Dad never seemed bothered. Maybe because Mom’s real talent wasn’t in attracting men but in alienating them, men and women alike. She took pride in standing apart from the crowd, cool, detached, while others lived what she called mundane lives. Kit and I had long ago accepted our mother would never be like those of our friends, mothers who drove car pool and traded recipes.

  Allure or no allure, it wasn’t going to matter to Father Donnelly. This was one man whose head Mom wouldn’t be turning. I tried not to sound righteous. “It’s not Father Sebastian. This priest is young, and super handsome.” Why not rub it in?

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? That’s a different matter entirely.” Mom yanked the skirt of her dress. The loosened bodice returned to form fitting tightness under the belt. Satisfied with the total package, she swept past me into the hall. I rolled my eyes, amazed at her assumption that any man, even a priest, would fall prey to her beauty.

  Mom introduced herself and motioned Father Donnelly into the living room. He took one club chair and she the other. I dropped on the couch between them.

  “Don’t you have homework, Clarice?”

  Her tone told me I did. I headed to my room with a dejected nod to Father Donnelly.

  “Not so fast, young lady.” He had a devilish grin. “You’re not rid of me yet, not by a long shot. Now that you and I are friends I expect you to come say hello at church.”

  I gawked at him.

  “Well, what do you say, Reese. Deal?”

  Mom did a double take at the two of us, a distinct scowl sliding over her face at his u
se of my nickname; more pointedly, at reference to a conversation to which she hadn’t been privy. Somehow I felt both were okay with the priest, this radiant man with the great big grin. He would smooth it over with Mom.

  “Deal.” In that moment Father Donnelly won me over to his corner. Not only was he an adult, he was a priest—a priest who wanted to be my friend; a priest who addressed me by the name I preferred rather than the one demanded by my mother.

  I retreated from the visit, not from the conversation. My L-shaped bedroom shared a wall with the living room. The one nickname Mom did find acceptable was Bionic Ears, an alias acquired from a career in eavesdropping. I pressed against the wall. Please God, please let Mom and Father Donnelly get along.

  They covered the basics of who we were and where we had come from, and who he was and where he had come from. They moved on to Mom’s favorite subject, sex. I could never understand why she always brought up sex—sex in marriage, sex outside of marriage, sex in the movies, homosexuality—sex, sex, sex. And he’s a priest, for God’s sake! For someone who was always quoting Miss Manners, Mom sure didn’t follow her own advice. It’s inappropriate to talk about money or politics, but sex is okay?

  The crescendo in their voices was a familiar part of the exercise. Mom’s energy would build the longer the discussion went on, as if she were momentarily released from what Kit referred to as her meatloaf life, which my sister said was the real reason Mom was grumpy all the time. At five minutes in, Father Donnelly had broken the record for talking with Mom about sex. I checked my watch to time how long he would last.

  Mom’s brazen manner was guaranteed to intimidate men, embarrass women. Talking about sex had turned out to be a brilliant repellent against actual connection with another human being. Ninety-nine percent of the time the conversation would have ended once it had served its purpose. Father Donnelly proved a worthy challenge. The one percent.