by Sarah White
Finding Cait
by Sarah White
Sarah White
Finding Cait
© 2013, Sarah White
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
To those who have struggled with unbearable loss and are still with us today.
Prologue
Cait
I am almost out of breath as I race ahead and cut the corner short on the inside. Court is in the rear laughing as Matt tries to regain the lead and recover from my newest trick as our bikes glide along the hot asphalt. When we reach the lot we drop our bikes and make a mad dash for the shoreline. The sun has set about two hours ago so darkness conceals the beach ahead of us and the only light we can see is the moonlight’s reflection on the ocean.
Still in front, I run as fast as my legs can carry me, looking back for just a second to see if they are catching up. We have been playing this game for years now and I know that if I can make it to the water before both of them I have a chance gaining the distance I will need to win the game once we are all submerged in the water. I can hear Matt’s breath behind me and I propel my body into the surf and dive deep below the surface swimming as far as I can away from them until my lungs insist on fresh air.
My mother has not yet left work, not that she ever cares where I am at as long as I am home when the bar closes to help clean her up and put her to bed. I know that I have at least four more hours before she will need me so I push the thoughts of her out of my head and let my body float on the surface surrounded by night, waiting for Matt to come find me. I can hear the sound of water moving to my right and I hold my breath when I feel a presence draw near me. In the silence I can feel his eyes on me but he doesn’t rush to grab my hand, secretly my favorite part of our game, but instead lingers there for just a moment and then reaches out his hand to mine.
It seems like recently he has held my hand a little bit longer each time we play and I let myself pretend he is doing it on purpose but I know it is just me being childish. I am his sister’s best friend and even if she was ever to be okay with us being together I am not naive enough to believe he would choose me over the older more curvy girls that sneak in to his room at night. For now I just look into his eyes as he let’s go of my hand and I smile when he puts one finger over his mouth to remind me to be quiet while he searches for Court. Just before he swims away from me he smiles a beautiful smile that always makes my stomach feel as though I have swallowed a million butterflies.
Once he has found Court we float out in the darkness, sharing stories about our day and laughing at each other as we splash in the ocean and attempt to pull each other under. When we are tired we let the surf carry us into shore so we can get back onto our bikes and pedal home. Even though my mother could not come looking for us, Court will have people looking for her.
Court is being adopted by the Argyles after living with them as foster parents for five years, but Matt is getting too old to be adopted and they respect his wish to join the military free of any family ties at home. If Matt ever knew what I was going home to I would die, always preferring my misery be mine only so that no one knows how fucked up my life is. Court will always keep my secret.
When we stop in front of our houses it is close to the time my mother usually comes home and I pray that she is already inside so that they won’t see her fumble out of her car with a bottle of liquor she always purchases after leaving the bar before returning to home. I secretly wish I could stay at Court’s house, leaving my mother to fend for herself while I live my childhood the way other children get to. We say goodnight to each other and I let Matt put my bike in their garage, not wanting to wake my mother if she is already passed out. Matt has looked out for me since the day they moved in and it gives me the hope that someday some other boy will love me and want to take care of me too.
As soon as I open the door I can smell vomit and I am reminded that I am alone with a woman who is destined to drink herself to death and I whisper under my breath, “Please just do it quickly so I can live my life.”
Chapter 1
Cait
I had always planned on being in practice longer than five years and had a beautiful office to prove it. It was my dream to work well past retirement age doing what I have loved for as long as I can remember. Looking at the couch that offered comfort to so many hurting clients I can’t help but to recognize the irony of the whole thing, knowing that most therapists enter the field because it is them who are damaged. I run my hand across the suede fabric and straighten the pillows one last time wishing that I did not have somewhere more important to be.
Closing the door to my office I glance at the worn sign Caitlyn Reed, Family Therapist. I can remember how proud I was the day it was posted to my office door. I had tried to pretend not to be overwhelmed by the pride I had felt knowing I had reached my goal and was on the path to what I thought would be the perfect life. I turn the key and shake the handle to ensure it is locked then head through the courtyard to the shared waiting room to say goodbye to Evelyn.
“I will call you when I know when I will be back. Please let anyone who comes looking for me know that I am taking an extended leave and will not be taking new clients.”
“Okay Cait. Should I forward your mail?” she asks as she grabs a pad of paper and a pen from her neatly organized desk.
“Please just hold it. If I need it I will send for it,” I answer, ignoring the curious look she directs to me over her small black-rimmed glasses.
I take a moment to sit in the parking lot outside the window of my office. Inside every piece of furniture is so carefully chosen to compliment the others. My clients never knew that each item had a story or that I appreciate second hand furniture because it reminds me that although someone had stopped loving it, someone else could still appreciate it. In fact the things I enjoyed the most in my office were those given to me by clients who just felt they belonged there. When I don’t come back it will make some other therapist very happy.
I pull my car out of the lot and onto the road. The call came two weeks ago and although I had been expecting it, it still came sooner then I had planned. She is dying. Not the kind of dying that takes years, but the kind that sneaks up on you and leaves your doctors helpless to help you. Stage four cancer, which had started in her ovaries and quickly, spread to her bones, blood and at the time of the call, her brain. She has a few weeks at best and I am on my way to see her out.
Courtney and I met when we were ten. Her parents had been killed in a car accident and with no other family she and her brother were placed in foster care with the Argyles on my street. I only had a mother and not the best one at that. She could never get over my father leaving her once he had found out about me but she drank hard each day to try. I was seventeen when she drank herself to death and I was emancipated and sent out into the world alone. If it wasn’t for Courtney I would have been placed in foster care, but her adopted family agreed to rent me the back room and told the judge they would watch over me for a few months until I turned eighteen.
Every happy memory in my life contains Courtney and now the saddest will hold her image as well. I called her when I found out that Elliot had been having an affair and again when I had confronted him and asked for a divorce. She understood in a way that only a best friend could that after losing our baby last year I could not tolerate the pain and had no energy to recover from his infidelity. As
I turn onto the freeway I look down at my left hand and run my thumb over the indent where my ring had once laid.
Elliot was my high school sweetheart. We met our junior year when Courtney and I had snuck out late to go to the movies and he and a friend were sitting right behind us. Elliot had found a way to strike up a conversation and by the end of the show he and his friend were sitting next to us. We were inseparable from that moment on. Other than kiss, he was my first everything, but does not have the honor of being my first heartbreak, a title that only my mother could hold. I knew the miscarriage would be hard on our marriage but I had no idea it would sever our friendship and destroy our commitments to each other. I was so busy grieving that I had not seen the signs until it was too late.
When Courtney dies I will have nothing left. I have lost my mother, my baby, my husband and soon my best friend. No amount of training can help me get over the emptiness I feel inside. As the cancer eats away at her body, the pain and loss devours mine as well. I have read that our body perceives loss as a physical pain; tricking our brain into thinking our heart is actually hurting. The pain I feel in my chest is indistinguishable from that of a knife wound, throbbing with my pulse and stealing my breath. A few more weeks and it will all be over.
Over the last five years I have seen two suicidal clients that stayed with me in my thoughts. The first was a young man that could never find happiness, not even in a single moment. He felt he was a disappointment to his parents, was constantly angered by the direction our society was headed, and had lost the only girl he had ever loved to his best friend. I remember asking him to please tell me if he had any thoughts of hurting himself and he responded with a concerned look, “Honey, if I am going to do it I am not going to tell you. Please just know that you did all that you could and I am just too determined to be stopped. You can’t help me but perhaps you can be there to tell my mom it was not her fault either.” I did not see him again after that.
The other was a young mother struggling with postpartum depression after giving her baby up for adoption. She too was resolved in carrying it out. Her reasoning was that she had carried the baby to term to make peace with God and she believed that He could forgive her if she could not stay here on earth any longer. She chose a wonderful family for her baby and when I questioned her about how her son might feel if he ever came looking for her and found she was dead she told me that he might be sad to hear the news but finding her alive would be worse.
I could not connect with their desperation at the time but now, driving with my car full of the only belongings I care about on the way to play nurse to my dying best friend I get it. Nothing matters anymore. Knowing the option to end it all is there will make watching Courtney die easier. I cannot bear the thought that I will have to watch her take her last breaths and then move on with my life without her. I know it seems silly but when you think of having no one to call and be connected to you suddenly feel so alone. If cancer were contagious I would have been there the day after she called, hoping to be infected with the opportunity to leave all of this behind.
The bond that I formed with Courtney was strong instantly and as deep as I imagine a sister bond would be. In college and in my professional life I have developed other friendships but none have ever completed me like my friendship with Court. I realize that soul-mate is a word reserved for great romantic love, but if ever the word could be used to describe a connection between two friends, that relationship would be between Court and me. When she leaves this earth, I know no matter what joy enters my life it will still feel empty, like completing a puzzle just to find some pieces are missing.
The drive is about an hour and as I pull into her driveway I see a woman dressed in scrubs getting into her car. I take a deep breath and open the car door. I am not sure what to expect but I know that she has been fighting the cancer for a few months now and Hospice has been visiting her weekly to make sure she has the medications she needs to be comfortable. I would have come sooner but I needed to tie up the loose ends in my practice and make sure that my clients would be taken care of. I grab my bags from the back of my car and walk up the steps to the front door. I can see her slender silhouette on the couch through the screen door and I fight to hide the surprised look on my face.
“Hideous? I know,” she says as I let myself in.
“Well, a few more pounds and I might actually be able to see your spleen through your skin...then you will be runway ready.”
She laughs her beautiful laugh and tilts her head back causing the shadows to cast on the hollows of her cheeks. I swallow the lump in my throat the best I can and try to keep my voice even as I ask, “What now?”
“I am done with chemo and radiation, this cancer is going to kill me and I will be damned if it takes every last good moment I have left.” She tips her head towards the door and says, “Candy there is trying to make me comfortable but to be honest I hurt.”
“Candy? Really? Who names their daughter Candy?” I ask in an effort to lighten the mood.
“Don’t ask her, I made that mistake the first day. Something to do with her mother being young when she had her. She is nice and relatively gentle compared to the others so don’t go chasing her off with your Freudian questioning.”
“Candy it is then,” I say with a wink, “...how long?” knowing I didn’t want to know the answer to the question I was asking.
“Two weeks.”
“Then two weeks it is,” I say settling into the couch next to her. Courtney curls up and rests her head on my lap. I adjust the scarf she has wrapped around her bald head and then let my hand run from her forehead to her neck trying to gather the strength to fight the tears I felt burning my eyes and suffocating my throat. As hard as I try I cannot hide the jump in my chest as I begin to sob.
“Fuck cancer,” she says as she closes her teary eyes and squeezes my legs in a small hug.
“Fuck cancer,” I manage to get out between the sobs.
Chapter 2
Cait
We have sat for two hours in the same spot of the couch. The room is filled with darkness when Courtney speaks again, “I called Matt this morning to tell him it was time.” I am surprised she could get ahold of her brother given he has been deployed for as long as I can remember. He had enlisted at 17 when he was about to age out of the system and has been serving our country ever since.
“Where was he?” I ask as she adjusts on my lap.
“I don’t know. It was the hardest phone call I have ever made. He insisted on coming home and to be honest I couldn’t turn him down. You two are the only people I have left and when I die I need you both here. He said he would be here sometime tonight and that he would stay in the extra room incase you needed help with lifting me.”
If I wasn’t so grief stricken I would be excited at the thought of seeing Matt after all these years. He is older than us by two years and it was hard to not notice him as a teenager. He had dark hair that he always cut short and blue eyes that could melt you if you looked long enough. He was known for fighting when we were younger and would spend hours working out in the garage. I know this about him because my room was the perfect spot for viewing those workouts.
Being stunning and abrasive attracted many girls for him and I was also a witness to the endless parade of beautiful girls that would sneak in and out through the garage the entire time he lived across the street from me. I can remember watching one night in particular as he escorted a girl back out through the garage at an unheard of time in the morning. The giggling had woke me up and I had slid over to my window to see who the conquest was this time. She was tall and blonde with legs that never ended and she had her shoes dangling from her finger as he wrapped his arms around her waist and drew her into him for a kiss.
I must have smiled as I thought of that memory because Courtney sighs and says, “Oh, I wish you would have just snuck in one night and got it over with!”
“Courtney he was your brother, and I will always be just a little s
ister to him.”
“Keep telling yourself that Cait. Could have been fun.”
“Oh yes that would have been fun. Into the garage one minute, out the next...never to return again.”
Courtney laughs, “You are probably right but at least the short distance lusting could have ended.”
“Drop it Court. Has he continued his conquests in every port or is he still with that steady girlfriend?”
“You mean Sandra? No, she left him when he deployed voluntarily to stay with his unit. She said she couldn’t do long distance without the commitment of marriage. When he wouldn’t commit she got even by finding her way into his friend’s bed.”
“Gross. I bet he kicked his ass.”
“Twice I believe! Once when he got home and again when they ran into each other at a bar in town.” We both laugh at the thought of Matt getting even. We had seen his rage so many times and we even had to play the get away car a few times when things got a little too rough and the cops were on their way to whatever bar we had managed to sneak into.
“I would give anything for one more of those nights you know,” Courtney says as she closes her eyes again, clearly recalling the same memories I was.
“I know, me too.” I say as I begin to stroke her forehead again.
Chapter 3
Matt
The heat is so intense it extracts from me any energy my body can create. We have been out on patrol now in this small convoy for over four hours and the sweat has drenched through every layer and yet still fails to offer me any relief. Over the radio there are calls that an IED has taken out the lead vehicle in our sister company’s convoy following far behind us and I wonder what made us so lucky to not be it’s victim. I am supposed to be scanning the streets as I walk beside the vehicle for any threats but my thoughts keep wandering back to home and the beach from my childhood.