B005S8O7YE EBOK (33 page)

“Where’s me?”

An answer grew out of the nothingness and shaped itself around the person I was experiencing as not-me. It wasn’t sudden, like a thunderbolt. It was an unguent, a healing sense of possibility that slowly permeated my consciousness, a balm that soothed my
soul, reanimated my body, and infused my mind with a renewed sense of identity and purpose. I had no idea where it came from. If I’d been looking for something resembling what people define as God by whatever name, I didn’t find it. It found me.

I began to recollect what I knew about myself. My success as a songwriter, my musical gift, my joy and responsibilities as a mother, and the financial independence that had defined me in the past were all still part of my present. If I didn’t have the will to leave Rick, maybe I could learn to live with him in a more healthy way. Meanwhile, I would continue to be the best mother I could be, finish my album, and, since professional counseling was readily available in the land of la-la, I would seek such help. With clarity and resolve, I stood up, walked to the bed, climbed in, and immediately fell asleep.

A few hours later, I woke up before Rick did. I went downstairs, called a friend in a later time zone, got a name, and somehow managed to book my first therapy session without Rick finding out. For each of the next few therapy sessions I came up with what I hoped was a credible story. Each time, when Rick didn’t object, I thought it was because my explanation was plausible and nonthreatening. I didn’t know that he had rekindled his interest in something he didn’t want me to know about. I was so grateful to be able to discuss my deepest feelings with someone other than my husband that I didn’t question why he was slackening his constant oversight of me.

It took only a few sessions for me to learn that I had power within the relationship that I hadn’t been using. Perhaps the simplest, most tangible result of my therapy was my discovery that “No” was a complete sentence. I didn’t need to explain or apologize. However, discovering wasn’t the same as doing. I would have to actually say no and mean it, or nothing would change.

The first time I hazarded saying no to Rick he was sitting on
one of two sofas in the living room. I was sitting on the sofa opposite him. He had just announced that he wanted “us” to buy a sailboat as soon as I finished the album.

A sailboat??? I thought. No way! But Rick had already launched into his presentation. His eyes twinkled with anticipated pleasure as he said, “Baby, it’ll be great! Think of how much fun the kids will have!”

I pictured Levi, Molly, and Sherry on a sailboat.

“Carole. You work so hard. You deserve a real vacation. Don’t worry about Welcome Home. Our friends’ll take care of it.”

The idea of a sailing trip did sound very appealing.

“Trust me. Wasn’t I right about Welcome Home?”

His case had just slipped away. He had lost it when he said, “Trust me.” But he didn’t know that. He came over to where I was sitting, put his arms around me, and made his closing argument.

“Baby, you’ll see. Sailing on our own boat will be a great thing for you and the kids.”

No, I thought. It won’t.

Was this the right time to say no?

With Rick’s arms still around me, I marshaled my courage, lifted my head, looked him in the eye, and said, “No.”

He let go of me, pushed himself back, narrowed his eyes, and held my gaze for a long moment. I met his gaze and waited for the blow. It never came. He averted his gaze, then looked back at me with bewilderment. Then he stood up and walked out of the room. I stayed on the sofa and pondered what had just happened. He was gone for the length of time it would take to smoke a cigarette. When he returned he acted as if nothing had happened. The smell of fresh cigarette smoke on his clothes triggered a recurring childhood memory of my father coming out of the bathroom. The association might have weakened my resolve, but I was not going to allow that to happen. Rick never brought the subject up again.

On two subsequent occasions when Rick wanted something equally out of the question, each time my answer was, “No.” Each time I braced for him to be angry or violent, but he took each no passively, then acted as if he’d never mentioned the wanted thing in the first place.

Obviously everyone’s experience is different. Simply saying no may not be the best solution for everyone. But if you’re a victim of abuse, you may find it helpful to know that you’re not the only one who’s endured what you’re going through, and that no matter what your abuser tells you, what’s happening is not your fault. There are good, kind, caring people and organizations that exist to help you.

In my situation, against all logic, it seemed that the more I had tried to please Rick to avoid his wrath, the more abusive he became. As soon as I stood up for myself with confidence and clarity, his violent behavior stopped.

At the time I thought my newly acquired ability to say no was the reason Rick never hit me again. I didn’t realize that he was preoccupied with something he wanted even more than control of me.

W
hile I’d been mixing
Welcome Home
, unbeknownst to me, Rick was becoming increasingly addicted to cocaine. He wasn’t snorting it recreationally; he was shooting it. Between work and my responsibilities as a mother, using any drug in any way was the farthest thing from my mind. I was hooked on the high of living close to nature—a high I had been reluctant to interrupt, but I had to earn a living. Working in the studio without Rick had restored my confidence. I stopped resenting L.A. and treasured whatever time I could spend with my four children. Every day was a gift, a joyous celebration of rediscovery.

I had asked, Who am I?

I was
this
woman. And this woman was slow to catch on. Before 1978 I had seen no evidence of Rick using drugs. As far as I knew, my husband had two addictions—cigarettes and coffee. Later I would learn that he’d had a history of shooting speed, and that prior to meeting me he’d been living in the red van with a woman from Utah and her young son. The day before the party at which I’d met Rick she had taken her son and gone back to Utah to get away from his drug abuse and the physical violence he sometimes
visited upon her. True to form, Rick had never hit the boy—as if that made it okay.

Rick was smart enough to shoot up far from where I conducted my daily activities so I wouldn’t find out about his forays into that shadowy world. It worked. At first I was so grateful that he wasn’t hitting me and that I could see friends without him that I didn’t fully grasp the implications of the changes in his behavior. It wasn’t just the cessation of his jealousy and violence. Usually, when I came home after a mixing session, the first thing I did was check on the children. After determining that everything was as it should be, I would look around the rest of the house to see if Rick was around. He wasn’t often home, but when he was I usually found him in our bedroom pacing and muttering to himself. Sometimes I heard him preaching in a hoarse voice to a nonexistent listener about arcane spiritual and religious concepts. Other times I found him writing furiously, filling notebooks with colored-pencil drawings of spaceships, flames, and elements of American Indian design. He wrote copiously, covering pages with what he believed was visionary poetry and art.

As Rick’s bizarre behavior intensified it reminded me of my previous experience with the mental illness of a loved one. I had just made the decision to consult a medical professional and was going to do so the following day. I never got to make that call. The night I completed the final mix of
Welcome Home
I parked the car and came into the house in a celebratory mood. Rick wasn’t there, but the babysitter was with the children, and thankfully all was well. The next morning I woke up very early. Rick wasn’t in bed. I checked all the rooms upstairs, but he wasn’t in any of them. With all three of my kids still asleep, I went downstairs, put water on to boil for a cup of tea, and looked in every room downstairs. No Rick. I went back to the kitchen, put a teabag in the cup, and poured hot water over it. While it was steeping I entered
the bathroom next to the kitchen and saw several drops of dark red blood on the white tile floor. With the flash that comes when something has been right in front of your eyes the whole time but you’ve never really seen it, I understood that not only had Rick been injecting cocaine, but he had come in during the night and had shot up in the house where my children lay sleeping.

At that moment I made the decision I should have made the first time he hit me.

Not knowing how soon Rick would return, I woke all three children. Levi and Molly, still sleepy, dressed themselves while Sherry and I hastily packed a few bags, and we all left the house. We drove to Louise’s to let her know why we were leaving and make the necessary arrangements from her phone. Though Louise was living on her own and didn’t interact much with Rick, I made sure she knew that she was not to go to our house under any circumstances until further notice.

My impulse was to get as far away from Los Angeles as possible, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to go to Welcome Home. I saw my options as either New York or Maui. I have no idea why Maui came to mind, though warm weather and sandy beaches may have been factors. Probably I thought that a faraway island would be the safest place to go to figure out what to do next. A few hours later, Sherry, Molly, Levi, and I were on a plane to Hawaii. I didn’t have more than a few days of figuring before a definitive decision was made for me. Using the phone in our rented condo, Sherry called a friend of hers who also knew Rick. After listening in silence for what seemed like an unusually long time, she handed the phone to me with a horror-struck expression on her face and uttered one word.

“Mom?”

Rick had been found dead of an overdose of cocaine in a location believed to have been the shooting gallery where he’d been
buying and injecting the drug. That’s what my husband had been doing while I was recording
Welcome Home
.

Richard Edward Evers had been born on January 6, 1947. He died on March 21, 1978, nearly three months after his thirty-first birthday. He was less than two years shy of the age of demise he’d predicted for himself.

I could no more describe my jumbled emotions that night than I could describe the colors in the exquisite Maui sunset. That particular sunset was so spectacular that I wondered if Rick had sent it from wherever he was. I was filled with a deep sense of loss, not for the man Rick was when he died, but for the man with whom I had fallen in love. Before I had seen his dark side, I would have described Rick Evers as full of joy. How could that man have a dark side? How could he take himself out of this world? Had my saying no driven him to drug abuse? Was it because my work had taken us away from his beloved Idaho? Of course I wasn’t to blame for Rick’s death, but when we lose someone unexpectedly, we often ask what we had done that might have contributed to the death of our loved one, or what we didn’t do that might have saved him or her. Usually the answer is, “Nothing.” But still we ask.

The next day I flew back to Los Angeles with my kids. One question had already been answered: Idaho was our home, and Idaho was where I wanted to be. However, Idaho was not where Sherry wanted to be. When she asked if she could stay in L.A., I assented. It took several weeks to deal with the aftermath of Rick’s death and find someone to stay in the house on Appian Way. After that, Molly, Levi, and I flew back to Boise. As the plane took off and I watched L.A. recede from view, suddenly, silently, I began to cry. I had just lost someone close to me, and all the complicated parts of the story fell away. At thirty-six, I was a widow.

At Welcome Home, with spring unfolding and its abundance of life renewing, I was comforted and inspired by nature’s optimistic
outlook. While Molly attended school in Idaho City, Levi played with friends at home. I did my utmost to keep happier times with Rick foremost in my memory and those of the children. Rick’s friends helped me take care of Welcome Home, and I continued to support them financially. I worked in my garden, rode and cared for the horses, hiked up and down Ashton Creek, and did mundane, necessary tasks such as washing dishes, doing laundry, and taking out the garbage. After everything my kids had been through, they seemed to be flourishing, as were the horses and garden. Rusty was the lone exception. You could see the question in his eyes and in everything he did: Where is he? At first Rusty stayed with us, then he moved in with another Welcome Home family, then another. He belonged to all of us, and yet to none of us.

Throughout the spring and summer I allowed myself to feel grief and, yes, anger. But I also worked diligently to replace such feelings with positive memories. It had been Rick who had provided me with the extra motivation I needed to get out of L.A. He had introduced me to the mountains, the beauty of the land, and the simple decency of so many people in my adopted state. And though I would rather not have lived with an abusive person, doing so had given me compassion for people in similar situations and helped me reaffirm that if I exercised the will and determination with which I believe every one of us is born, nothing would keep me down.

It was a crisp morning toward the end of August when I walked up the hill with Molly and Levi to meet Molly’s school bus. The blue jacket on one of her classmates reminded me of the clear blue sky reflected in Rick’s eyes our first morning at Welcome Home. I remember him sitting on the front porch steps with a steaming cup of coffee cradled in his hands, watching the sunlight creeping down his beloved Idaho mountains.