He faced me, the helmet cockeyed atop his pile of red hair.
“This helmet, Archie. What can we do about this helmet?” I adjusted the thing, surprised at the quivering in my lips.
“Are you going home to your parents, Pretty Reese?”
“Nah, not to my old home anyway. I’m going to another place kind of like the hospital, but smaller.”
“Take me! I want a family too.”
“Sorry, Archie, this place is girls only. That leaves you out. Hey, you remember the day we both felt sad because our mom’s hadn’t come to visit?”
“No. I want to go with you.”
“I said how lucky you were because everybody here knows you and likes you. They’re helping you get better. Right? You don’t bang your head as much or spin in circles until you fall over. The people here have helped you a lot because they care about you like family.”
“Will the people where you’re going be your family now?”
“Something like that.”
“But I’ll still be your boyfriend. I’ll always be your boyfriend.”
Over his shoulder I saw the psych tech heading our way.
“You’ll always be my friend, Archie.”
The psych tech took him by the shoulders into the cafeteria. I watched until I could no longer see the blue helmet.
*
Saturday morning I was too excited to eat breakfast. Maggie gave me permission to stay in the dorm packing and cleaning my locker. When the last of my clothes had been stuffed in the suitcase, books and letters piled in a box, I sat on the bed now stripped of linen. The dorm was deserted.
Had it really only been a year since the day Maggie stood here rattling off rules. It seemed like a lifetime ago. The terrified girl who had walked in the dorm bore little resemblance to the woman who would walk out.
“CAVANAUGH! Your ride’s here!”
I took a final look around the room, then picked up my suitcase and headed to the nurses’ station. Maggie introduced me to George Haberley, a friendly looking man with a thatch of silver hair. While he signed the paperwork I searched the dayroom. She was at our table in the back, polishing her nails.
She barely looked up, her usual tough chick expression daring anyone to interrupt.
“Hey, Angela.”
She kept polishing.
“I figured I wouldn’t be needing this anymore.” I set my Christmas purse on the table.
She stared at it for a moment, then looked up, nail-polished hand in mid-air.
“See ya, Lupercio.” I was already heading back to the nurses’ station, but I heard her.
“See ya, Cavanaugh.”
Maggie and Raoul shook their heads in disbelief I was really leaving. We hugged without a word. I led the way to the parking lot then waited for Mr. Haberley to point out his car.
It was a Chevrolet.
We made a left at the gate and wound our way down the switchbacks away from Camarillo State Hospital.
17 A New Destination
I checked the clock and counted how many progress notes I still had to chart. My shift at Ventura Community had been uneventful, a quiet Saturday. After three years working the psych unit I had earned my Monday through Friday schedule. This was a rare weekend shift. I’d had enough of those at my first job, a locked unit at the county hospital. The inpatient setting at Community felt like a vacation in comparison, so I didn’t mind trading the occasional weekend shift for a friend.
A well-built guy in jeans and a corduroy jacket came through the door. I guessed late twenties. He had a confident stride as he approached the nurses’ station. He introduced himself as Daniel Berensen and said he was here to see his friend Russ, a recent admission to the open unit.
I felt him watching as I scrolled Russ’s chart for the names of approved visitors. Daniel thanked me and started down the hall. Ten seconds later he was back.
“The thing is, I’m a little nervous. I’m not even sure Russ will want to see me. Do you think you could check with him first?”
“Of course.”
He followed me to the dayroom. “I feel a bit awkward. I know Russ is depressed. I don’t know what to say to him and I sure don’t want it to be the wrong thing.” He and Russ were doctoral candidates in chemistry at Cal Tech. Daniel had noticed his friend’s low mood. Struggling with the pressure himself he had no clue how to help.
Someone called his name. Daniel turned around to face Russ. Without breaking stride he pulled Daniel into a guy hug, both of them patting each other in reassuring slaps. They didn’t notice me slip away to the nurses’ station. The two friends sat in the day room and talked for an hour.
Daniel visited Russ every evening for the next week. He chatted with me either as he arrived or before he left. Three days of this and I found myself watching for him. Daniel didn’t fit my stereotyped image of a dorky chemist with thick glasses and a pocket protector. He was warm and engaging, and from what I could tell, interested in everything. Even poetry. One evening he arrived for his visit with a thin volume of Robert Frost for his friend.
Our passing chats grew from sixty seconds to ten minutes. The day Russ was discharged, Daniel was there to give him a ride home. He invited me to dinner and a movie the following week. Deliverance hadn’t been the ecology film Daniel thought it was, and it sure wasn’t on the Top Ten list of first date movies. We still laugh about our inauspicious beginning.
For two years, I repeatedly pushed him away. He never once failed my test. Daniel fell in love with the me who still suffered bouts of depression; the me who was excited about finishing graduate school; the me who worked late into the night on my debut novel.
The me who moved forward in baby steps as I learned to trust a lover.
Tessa was born two years after we married. My life took on some semblance of the one I’d dreamed of as a kid, only a grown-up version, rich, textured. As the thirteen-year-old girl who thought life was over after having discovered a terrible truth, I never could have dreamed such a life could be mine.
At last I belonged.
Yet when I least expected it, pangs of loss would catch me off guard. In those moments I yearned for Mom, for the warmth of her charisma in the few precious memories I’d salvaged from the rubble—the way she glowed at Christmastime as she transformed the house into a fantasy wonderland; how she sang to herself every Friday afternoon with the Mixmaster whirring cake batter for FD’s Twilight Zone visit; the sight of her on the living room floor surrounded by the pattern pieces making my dress for the freshman dance.
She had failed me in every way a mother can fail a child, but I loved her.
*
Hot Devil Winds slammed into town in late afternoon that day in September. I was at the dining room table with a glass of lemonade writing lecture notes for my first class at the Southern California State University when the call came.
Daniel answered. Dread came over me at the look on his face, a mix of anxiety and protectiveness I’d not seen since we had rushed Tessa to the emergency room with a spiked fever. I knew it had to be more than Kit calling to cancel dinner. Had something happened to Dad?
Daniel handed me the receiver as he mouthed the words I’m right outside.
The voice on the line sounded familiar. Still, it took a moment to register. My breath caught. It was FD. His voice was strained, an octave lower than the one he’d used as Father Popular Donnelly. He bypassed the small talk and got to the point. Mom had ovarian cancer. The disease had progressed rapidly. Hospice Care was tending her at home. Mom was near the end.
I steadied myself against the wall. It had been thirteen years since our last contact, her letter about the divorce while I was in Camarillo. There had been no subsequent letter, no forwarding address.
“Reese? Will you come?”
I ran my fingers over my forehead. There was no way she could hurt me now. I was loved, my own family a shield against her powers of destruction.
“Yes. I’ll come.”
“
There’s something I need to tell you before you see her.” His voice became tentative. “I don’t expect you to understand. I’m not sure how to say this without it sounding worse.”
“Say what?” My heart fluttered.
“When your mother and I moved to Laguna Beach, she wanted a fresh start. She thought it would be easier all around if we presented ourselves as a newly married couple.”
“No one’s going to hear it from me that you were a priest, if that’s what concerns you.”
“It’s not that. People know. It’s just that, well, she never thought she would see you or Kit again. You were so angry and Kit had washed her hands of Mom. She couldn’t bear the thought of people asking about her painful past.”
Her painful past. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. “Did what?”
“Presented ourselves as a first-time married couple. With no children.”
My mouth fell open.
“Hello?”
“I…I need a day to decide whether or not I want to see her.”
“I understand. Reese. If not for her, do this for yourself. There isn’t much time.”
For the next twenty-four hours I did everything possible to shove down the feelings. I immersed myself with frenzy in preparation for my class. I read extra stories to Tessa. I relined the kitchen drawers.
How could she do this? What kind of mother denies the existence of her children? She could’ve said we lived in another country, or even the truth, that we were estranged. I had friends who weren’t close to their mothers. They didn’t claim they were dead!
I would not be undone by my mother. She would not do this to me again. I would be strong. I would be strong.
That night I fell into restless sleep. At two in the morning I was wide awake. Daniel had a busy day ahead; I tried not to flop around. In the stillness Dr. Pallone’s words came to me. Pushing feelings down is how you give them power. They’re feelings. They can’t kill you. The way you take the power away is to let yourself feel, learn to tolerate the pain without acting on it. Then the feelings don’t control you. You control them. You’re not locked in the bomb shelter, Reese. Walk up the stairs into light.
Tears trickled over my face to the pillow. I let the feelings flood me, the agony of one last rejection. Beneath the hurt, beneath the anger, another feeling emerged, a feeling more powerful than those I’d sought to quell. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t restrain it. The feeling rose from some deep primordial place that transcended reason.
Love.
I loved my mother and needed to tell her before she died.
*
I parked across the street. Mom’s house was in an upscale neighborhood on the opposite end of town from the beach cottage on the cliff. I wondered why they had chosen to come back here, to this of all places. Was it because here their fantasy had become reality in a baby whose flesh and blood was their own?
I gathered my strength and walked to the door. Before I could ring, FD opened the door. He looked exactly as he had the last time I’d seen him at St. John’s—trim, clean-cut, the look of a man you would trust if you were in need of insurance. Or spiritual guidance.
For a moment, I was thirteen again, standing in the doorway of our house meeting this glorious man for the first time. I had given him my heart and soul the first sixty seconds because he’d bothered to ask me how I preferred to be addressed, winning me over completely with that singular display of affection.
Now I was the one outside the door, facing the man who had ruined my family, almost destroyed me, and very nearly robbed me of my God. It took years to understand I had not been abandoned at all. It was only the humans who had done that.
As FD and I stood on the porch facing each other, a half smile was all it took to bring him forward. In one giant step I was in his arms.
“Thank you for coming, Reese.”
Floor-to-ceiling glass offered a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Mexico. The hospice nurse led me down the hall to the back of the house. She said Mom was heavily medicated, conscious intermittently but lucid. We reached the darkened bedroom. I stood in the doorway, waiting for my knees to stop shaking.
The nurse turned and left me alone with Mom. She was asleep in a hospital bed, shallow gurgling sounds with each labored breath the only evidence of life. I stepped closer. The sight of her took my breath away. Instead of the beautiful mother I had known, a network of sallow wrinkles covered her face, the tissue-thin layer translucent over spider veins. Even under the sheet it was obvious the contours defining her voluptuous body had collapsed in a moonscape of bony peaks and deep valleys.
I let out a shaky breath in search for some sign of familiarity.
She didn’t look as if she’d wake any time soon. I spotted a chaise and dropped down to wait for her next moment of wakefulness, wondering how Mom would react to seeing me after all these years, wondering whether I would know her at all. Who was this woman who had given me life then denied my existence? Was that the ultimate price for choosing FD, fabricating a new identity in a self-imposed Witness Protection Program, always on guard for inconsistencies in her back story?
Had she been so miserable with us that choosing a life of lies was worth it? I knew what that kind of existence felt like, freedom of authenticity no longer an option. I had to remind myself that whatever the price, she had been willing to do whatever it cost to be with Jack Donnelly as real husband and wife instead of the make-believe version she had lived so long.
In denying our existence Mom had buried herself along with us. Vivienne Cavanaugh was nothing more than the nagging vestige of a former life.
Who are we if not the culmination of our past? It may not define who we become, yet the past shapes and influences us on the way. Hadn’t I learned that in therapy and seen it in Viktor Frankl—that we can’t always control the circumstances of our lives, or the choices made by others who have control over us. It’s how we exercise free will and respond to that over which we have no control that defines who we are.
Mom groaned. Late afternoon light slipped through the shutters. I tiptoed to the bed to see if she was awake. Mom opened her eyes, those cobalt eyes, faded luster still captivating. The Mom I had known was still there. We studied each other, her measuring the changes in me, my recovering from the sight of her. I wondered if we might find anything salvageable in our twenty-nine year history.
She lifted her head. It fell back on the pillow. “Clarice.”
“Shhhh. You just rest.”
“Clarice…” Any words she might have wanted to say refused to cooperate with her drug-addled brain. I pulled a lemon stick from the pack on the side table. She followed my eyes as I slid the swab across her top lip, then the bottom, repeating the move until the jagged skin was soaked in moisture. She placed her cold hand over my warm one on the bedrail. The veins in her neck pulsated with her effort to speak.
“Clarice, please listen. I never meant to hurt you kids. Or your father.”
The honesty of her words caught me off guard. I felt the sudden urge to hug her. I held my breath and waited for the feeling to subside. “I know, Mom.”
“You must know deep down that I’ve always—”
The bedroom door flung open. FD switched on the light, bursting our bubble with his well-honed levity. It was only in this moment I realized that that was how he guarded against real feelings. It was all performance art.
He approached the bed with the same arrogance of ownership he had demonstrated the day he negotiated Kit’s smoking, as if he were Dad and Kit his daughter. I wondered why he’d barged in now, just as Mom had woken. Was he afraid of what she might say on her deathbed?
Mom didn’t acknowledge his presence. She kept her eyes on me. Her mouth formed a straight line in resentment at his interruption. With a slight shake of my head, I let her know I had heard what she said without her needing to finish. FD nudged me further up the bedrail where eye contact with Mom was impossible. I squeezed her
hand and let it slip from mine.
I returned to the chaise and waited while the nurse cleared the IV port. Mom groaned at her touch. As the morphine found its pathway through her body, she closed her eyes and settled. FD said he’d leave us to each other and return momentarily.
Mom opened her eyes and twisted in search of me, breathing hard as she strained. I resumed my place along the bedrail where we could see each other.
A warm smile came over her face. I knew that smile. It was the smile of Vivienne Cavanaugh. I felt transfixed by the tenderness in her expression. That’s when I was certain. I was in the presence of my mother. It was Saturday morning. She was just waking up as I walked in the room with her coffee.
Mom lifted her hand toward the bedrail. I took hers in mine, feeling every one of its twenty-seven skeletal bones. It took every ounce of willpower I possessed to hold it together in what would be the last words we would ever exchange. I willed the tears to hold back and my voice to stay calm. She motioned me to come closer.
“I need to tell you, Clarice.” A cough sent spasms running the length of her body. She closed her eyes, waiting for the next breath. “I…”
“Mom.” I lifted my free hand to her face. It was burning, dry. I stroked her cheek. FD was heading down the hall. “Mom, there’s no need to explain anything. I know you loved me. I know you never stopped loving me.”
She held my eyes, grateful yet questioning, searching for something more.
I leaned close and whispered in her ear. “And I never stopped loving you.”
She exhaled heavily. As FD walked in, she let her hand slip from mine. With a final glance at me, she closed her eyes.
That night Mom slipped from consciousness. She died the next morning at dawn.
*
Pepper trees lining the long driveway had grown since the last time I’d seen them. At the gate, I stopped and let the car idle in front of the new sign. The California State University system had finally added a new campus in Ventura County after years of funding delays. Land had become too expensive to justify building a campus from the ground up, especially when the state could convert an abandoned facility it already owned: Camarillo State Hospital.
The Road at My Door Page 24