When She Came Home

by Drusilla Campbell

  8. Compare the relationship Glory has with Rick to the relationship Frankie has with the General. What positive influence might a father have on his daughter when she is Glory’s age (eight) or older? What were Rick’s strengths as a father? What were the General’s?

  9. Frankie is sometimes jealous of Glory’s relationship with the General. Why is that? Is it a normal response, for a mother to envy a daughter? What other circumstances might give rise to this feeling? Is the General a bully? If you accused him of this, how would he react? How does bullying in the family compare to that which goes on in schools?

  10. Maryanne has seen two generations of Byrne Marines come home from war and knows how difficult the readjustment process can be. Do you think she was right to stay quiet about what she saw in Frankie? Should she have gotten more involved in Frankie’s problems? If so, what could she have done? Or conversely, was Maryanne wrong to speak to Rick and Glory as she did after the football game incident? How would you have handled that situation in her position?

  11. Maryanne and the General were very much in love when they were young. How has this love changed with the years? How does their forty-year marriage compare to others you might know? Why have they stuck together?

  12. Why is Domino so important to Frankie? Should Frankie have ignored Domino’s protests and called the police to go after Jason? Do you think Frankie did the right thing by bringing Domino into her home, or by doing so was she putting her own family in danger? What is the significance of Frankie’s meeting with Dawny at the Jack in the Box? With Mrs. Greenwoody at the supermarket?

  13. In some ways Frankie seems like her own worst enemy. She initially didn’t want to go to therapy and is reluctant to write in her journal or attend group sessions. She keeps secrets from her husband and won’t see a doctor about her throat. Are Frankie’s actions understandable, given the circumstances? Why or why not?

  Drusilla Campbell presents a gripping story of three generations of women who must overcome a legacy of violence, secrecy, and lies…

  Please turn this page for an excerpt from

  THE GOOD SISTER

  Chapter 1

  San Diego, California

  The State of California v. Simone Duran

  March 2010

  On the first day of Simone Duran’s trial for the attempted murder of her children, the elements conspired to throw their worst at Southern California. Arctic storms that had all winter stalled or washed out north of Los Angeles chose the second week of March to break for the south and were now lined up, a phalanx of wind and rain stretching north into Alaska. In San Diego a timid sprinkle began after midnight, gathered force around dawn, and now, with a hard northwest wind behind it, deluged the city with a driving rain. Roxanne Callahan had lived in San Diego all her life and she’d never seen weather like this.

  In the stuffy courtroom a draft found the nape of her neck, driving a shudder down her spine to the small of her back: she feared that if the temperature dropped just one degree she’d start shaking and wouldn’t be able to stop. Behind her, someone in the gallery had a persistent, bronchial cough. Roxanne had a vision of germs floating like pollen on the air. She wondered if hostile people—the gawkers and jackals, the ghoulishly curious, the home-grown experts and lurid trial junkies—carried germs more virulent than those of friends and allies. Not that there were many well-wishers in the crowd. Most of the men and women in the courtroom represented the millions of people who hated Simone Duran; and if their germs were half as lethal as their thinking, Simone would be dead by dinnertime.

  Roxanne and her brother-in-law, Johnny Duran, sat in the first row of the gallery, directly behind the defense table. As always Johnny was impeccably groomed and sleekly handsome; but new gray rimed his black hair, and there were lines engraved around his eyes and mouth that had not been there six months earlier. He was the owner and president of a multimillion-dollar construction company specializing in hotels and office complexes, a man with many friends, including the mayor and chief of police; but since the attempted murder of his children he had become reclusive, spending all his free time with his daughters. He and Roxanne had everything to say to each other and at the same time nothing. She knew the same question filled his mind as hers and each knew it was pointless to ask: what could or should they have done differently?

  Following her arraignment on multiple counts of attempted murder, Simone had been sent to St. Anne’s Psychiatric Hospital for ninety days’ observation. Bail was set at a million dollars, and Johnny put the lake house up as collateral. He leased a condo on a canyon where Simone and her mother, Ellen Vadis, lived after her release from St. Anne’s. Her bail had come with heavy restrictions. She was forbidden contact with her daughters and confined to the condo, tethered by an electronic ankle bracelet and permitted to leave only with her attorney on matters pertaining to the case and with her mother for meetings with her doctor.

  Like Johnny, Roxanne visited Simone several times a week. These tense interludes did nothing to lift anyone’s spirits as far as she could tell. They spent hours on the couch watching television, sometimes holding hands; and while Roxanne often talked about her life, her work, her friends, any subject that might help the illusion that they were sisters like other sisters, Simone rarely spoke. Sometimes she asked Roxanne to read to her from a book of fairy tales she’d had since childhood. Stories of dancing princesses and enchanted swans soothed Simone much as a lullaby might a baby; and more than once Roxanne had left her, covered by a cashmere throw, asleep on the couch with the book beside her. Lately she had begun to suck her thumb as she had when she was a child. Roxanne faced the truth: the old Simone, the silly girl with her secrets and demands, her narcissism, the manic highs and the black holes where the meany-men lived, even her love, might be gone forever.

  A medicine chest of pharmaceuticals taken morning and night kept her awake and put her to sleep, eased her down from mania toward catatonia and then half up again to something like normal balance. She took drugs that elevated her mood, focused her attention, flattened her enthusiasm, stifled her anxiety, curbed her imagination, cut back her paranoia, and put a plug in her curiosity. The atmosphere in the condo was almost unbearably artificial.

  Across the nation newspapers, magazines, and blogs were filled with Simone stories passing as truth. Her picture was often on television screens, usually behind an outraged talking head. Sometimes it was the mug shot taken the day she was booked, occasionally one of the posed photos from the Judge Roy Price Dinner when she looked so beautiful but was dying inside. The radio blab-meisters could not stop ranting about her, about what a monster she was. Spinning know-it-alls jammed the call-in lines. Weekly articles in the supermarket tabloids claimed to know and tell the whole story.

  The whole story! If Roxanne had had any sense of humor left she would have cackled at such a preposterous claim. Simone’s story was also Roxanne’s. And Ellen’s and Johnny’s. They were all of them responsible for what happened that September afternoon.

  Roxanne’s husband, Ty Callahan, had offered to put his work at the Salk Institute on hold so he could attend the trial with her, but she didn’t want him there. He and her friend Elizabeth were links to the world of hopeful, optimistic, ordinary people. The courtroom would taint that.

  The night before, Roxanne and Ty had eaten Chinese takeout; and afterward, while he read, she lay with her head on his lap searching for the blank space in her mind where repose hid. They went to bed early and made love with surprising urgency, as if time pressed in upon them, and before it was too late they had to establish their connection in the most basic way. Roxanne should have slept afterward; instead she got up and watched late-night infomercials for computer careers and miraculous skin products, finally falling asleep on the couch, where Ty found her in the morning with Chowder, their yellow Labrador, snoring on the floor beside her, a ball between his front paws.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said, sitting up. “I’m a mess.”

 
“You are.” Ty handed her a mug of coffee, his smile breaking over her like sunlight. “The worst-looking woman I’ve seen this morning.”

  She rested her forehead against his chest and closed her eyes. “Tell me I don’t have to do this today.”

  He drew her to him. “We’ll get through it, Rox.”

  “But who’ll we be? When it’s over?”

  “I guess we just have to wait and see.”

  “And you’ll be here?”

  “If I think about leaving, I’ll come get you first.”

  In the courtroom she closed her eyes and pictured Ty with his postdocs gathered around him, the earnest young men and women who looked up to him in a way that Rox-anne had found sweet and faintly amusing back when she could still laugh. She knew how her husband worked, the care he took and the careful notations he made in his lab notebooks in his precise draftsman’s hand. With life falling apart and nothing certain from one day to the next, it was calming—a meditation of sorts—to think of Ty at work across the city in a lab overlooking the Pacific.

  Attorney David Cabot and Simone entered the courtroom and took their places at the defense table. Cabot had been Johnny’s first choice to defend Simone. Once the quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, he had not won many games but was widely admired for qualities of leadership and character. His win-loss statistics were much better in law than in football. He had made his name trying controversial cases, and Simone’s was definitely that.

  Simone, small and thin, her back as narrow as a child’s, sat beside Cabot, conservatively dressed in a black-and-white wool dress with a matching jacket and serious shoes in which she could have hiked Cowles Mountain. In her ears she wore the silver-and-turquoise studs Johnny had given her when they became engaged. As intended, she looked mild and calm, too sweet to commit a crime worse than jaywalking.

  Conversation in the gallery hushed as the jurors entered and took their seats. One, a college student, looked sideways at Simone; but the others directed their gazes across the courtroom to the wall of rain-beaten windows. Among the twelve there were two Hispanic women in their mid-twenties, one of them a college student; three men and a woman, all retired professionals; a Vietnamese manicurist; and one middle-aged black woman, the co-owner of a copy shop. Roxanne tried to see intelligence and tolerance and wisdom in their faces, but all she saw was an ordinary sampling of San Diego residents. For them to be a true jury of Simone’s peers at least one should be a deep depressive, one extravagantly rich, and another pathologically helpless.

  Just let them be good people, Roxanne prayed. Good and sensitive and clear-thinking. Let them be honest. Let them see into my sister and know that she is not a monster.

  In this provocative story, Drusilla Campbell explores the fears that drive good people to do bad things—and the courage it takes to make things right.

  Please turn this page for an excerpt from

  LITTLE GIRL GONE

  Chapter 1

  Madora Welles was twelve when she learned that some girls are lucky in life, others not so much. On the day her father walked into the desert, she learned that luck can run out in a single day. After that, there’s no more Daddy telling the whole story of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” start to finish, in one minute flat. No more laughing Mommy standing by with a stopwatch to make sure he doesn’t cheat. Lucky girls did not have fathers who changed from happy to sad, easy to angry to tears in the space of an hour, locked themselves in the shed and banged on things with a hammer. No lucky girl ever had a father who walked into the desert and put a bullet in his brain.

  Yuma, Arizona: the town is laid out like a grid on the desert flats. Single-story buildings, fast-food joints on every corner, dust and heat and wind, lots of military, and a pretty good baseball team. That’s about it.

  Madora’s mother, Rachel, said Yuma killed her husband, said it was killing her too. To save herself she turned on the television, stepped into other people’s stories, and got lost. For a long time she forgot to care about her daughter. Failing in school, drinking, and wading into the river of drugs that ran through the middle of Yuma, Madora was seventeen when she met Willis Brock.

  Madora’s best friend was Kay-Kay, a girl from a family with slightly better luck than her own. Instead of using a gun, Kay-Kay’s father had been drinking himself to death for a few years when she and Madora latched on to each other like twins separated at birth. Rachel recognized trouble when she saw it come through the door chewing gum and smelling of tobacco, but Madora had stopped listening to her by then. Rachel fell asleep in front of the television, in the old La-Z-Boy lounger that still smelled like Old Spice.

  Madora and Kay-Kay and a boy named Randy who knew someone who knew someone else who had a car drove south of Yuma, into the desert near the border, where they had heard there was a party house and big action. Rachel had told Madora a thousand times to stay away from the border, but in the years after her father’s suicide, Madora’s life was all about escape and rebellion; and the drugs and remote setting excited her. Until the bikers came she was having a good time drinking bourbon from a bottle and smoking grass, taking her social cues from Kay-Kay. Unconsciously, she copied Kay-Kay’s slope-shouldered, world-wary posture, and she was careful not to smile too much or laugh too loudly. Not that there was ever much humor at parties like this; and what passed for conversation was dissing and one-upping, arguments and aimless, convoluted complaints and comparisons of this night to others, this weed to the stuff they smoked the week before.

  At seventeen, Madora’s thinking was neither introspective nor analytical, but she was conscious of being different from Kay-Kay and the slackers around her and of wishing she were not. She wanted to eradicate the part of herself that was like her father: a dreamer, a hoper, a wisher upon first stars. At the party that night in the desert she kept to herself the resilient romantic notions that floated in the back of her mind. Never mind the odds against it: a handsome boy would come through the door, and he would look at her the way her father once had and she would feel as she once did, like the luckiest girl in the world.

  Instead the bikers came. Voices rose and the air snapped; the music got louder and the run-down old house vibrated to the bass beat.

  Kay-Kay put her mouth close to Madora’s ear, her breath an oily whiskey ribbon. “I’m gonna do it.” It was so noisy, she had to say it twice. “Those guys, they brought crank. I’m gonna try it.”

  Madora had been drinking and toking all night. Kay-Kay’s words didn’t really sink in, but what her friend did, she wanted to do as well. “Me too.”

  In a room at the back of the house, they sat on the floor opposite a bearded man with a gold front tooth who said his name was Jammer. Men and girls—long-haired and skin-head, pierced and tattooed and leather jacketed, all strangers to Madora—leaned against each other, stood or squatted with their backs to the wall. Jammer wore a black tank top so tight it cut into the muscles of his overdeveloped arms and shoulders and chest, and his hands were spotted with burn scabs. He held a six-inch pipe with a bulb at the end and played the flame of a lighter under the glass taking care not to touch it with the fire, rolling the pipe as he did.

  Madora watched in fascination as the pale amber cube in the bulb dissolved. Her lip hurt and she realized she was biting down on it. I shouldn’t be here, she thought, and looked at Kay-Kay. One sign that her friend wanted to leave and Madora would have popped to her feet in an instant. But Kay-Kay was mesmerized by the pipe in Jammer’s hand. She leaned forward, watching avidly as he turned and rolled it. A drop of saliva hung suspended from her lower lip.

  The others in the room passed a joint and spoke softly; occasionally Madora heard someone laugh. The door to the rest of the house was shut, but beneath her Madora felt the beat of the music. In the smoky room her eyes watered and blurred. A man crouched behind her, pressing his knees into her back. He held her shoulders and urged her to lean back.

  “Relax, chicky, you’re gonna love this.”

 
Jammer held out the pipe to Madora, and Kay-Kay elbowed her gently and grinned encouragement. Madora thought of a birthday party, the expectant moment just before the lighted cake and the singing began.

  The man behind her stroked her arm, running his fingers along her shoulder and up into her hair. He whispered, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you.”

  She took the pipe between her fingers and put her lips around the tube. She started to inhale, but just as she did, the image of the birthday party came back to her, and she saw her father holding the cake; and she was six again, and no matter what, Daddy would always take care of her. Her throat closed; her hand came up and dashed the pipe onto the floor. Someone yelled and her head exploded in white light and there was no yelling or talking, no music anywhere, just a burning pain as if her head were an egg and someone had thrown it against the wall.

  She struggled to her feet, fell to her knees, and stood up again. Someone grabbed her and pushed her against the wall. Hands groped at the front of her T-shirt and she flailed and tried to scream but her throat and her lungs had frozen shut. More hands grabbed her arms and dragged her across the floor; her ballerina slippers came off her feet, and her bare heels tore on the broken linoleum. A door opened and she fell forward into a wall of fresh air. Someone shoved her into a chair and she sat down hard, gagging for air.

  A voice growled. “Stay with her.”

  Kay-Kay’s voice came from far away. “Holy shit, are you all right?”

  Madora’s left cheek jerked as her eye blinked crazily. “You want me to call your mom? Oh, Jesus, Madora, I can’t get her to come out here.”

  Madora wanted to stop the twitching, but her hand couldn’t find her face.

  “No one’s gonna stop partying to drive you home.”

  Her hands and feet and head were attached by strings. She bobbled like a puppet.