Her: A Memoir (15 page)

In Sedona I learned to play Ping-Pong, and to touch the yellow flowers of Sonoran cacti without bleeding.

I walked the same path everyday with Mitch. Nothing but swearing from him. We wore name tags, hated them. We sifted desert sand though our fingers and counted roadrunners. We couldn’t cross the red line without alarms going off.

Love was stupidly next door in a closet, in a bathroom, a patient’s empty room. I left my wedding rings on a table. It started with a kiss. I gave Charlie my cloak as a hiding place and took his body as refuge. I wore his crown. It was makeshift, pink construction paper and paste. It read beautiful. We made plans to camp and make love near the Colorado without a tent. We got as far as Family Week and life and over.

Returning home I was the same battered girl without a throne.

*   *   *

On the plane ride home from Sedona, Cara asked Kahlil why he hadn’t come to look for her during the rape. Had he not loved her enough to notice she’d left behind her wallet and purse? Why had he not known to search the path where they always walked the dog, before sunset? Why had he waited?

Kahlil said he stayed home in case the police called. He was worried if he’d gone looking for her, he’d not be home if she returned. He said he knew something must be wrong, but didn’t know what to do.

Cara told me when they arrived home, she opened the front door on Kahlil’s mess. Bags of garbage were heaped one on top of the other as high as the kitchen table. Every dish needed washing. Bed linens were stained with dirt and food and the cats had peed on them. A small turd floated in the dog’s water dish. Maggots swarmed the sink. Empty pizza boxes littered the living room.

But now Cara was sober. She saw her home with clear eyes, and she promptly told Kahlil to leave. She hired a maid. Together they vacuumed Kahlil out of the house.

Chapter 14

Kahlil filled his pickup
truck with his belongings. He’d said he would come back for the KitchenAid mixer, his sharp paring knives, and a few pieces of drafting equipment, but he never did. Cara told me he had driven away with his clothes flapping around in the back of the truck bed. She’d stood on the porch and watched him crest the hill toward the end of the street and wondered if he’d miss her; she hadn’t planned for him not to. I’d never seen her so lonely as the months between their separation and Edgardo’s trial.

Kahlil pulled up to the courthouse for the trial in his truck, the open cargo bed still filled to the top with his clothes. Even though he’d been gone since late spring and now it was September, he still had nothing but a tarp to protect his belongings from rain and thieves. He’d moved to a hippie commune and the bed of his truck doubled as a closet.

I met him in the parking lot and tried to hurry him in. Cara and my mother were already inside. The DA was prepping her. It was her day to testify. Kahlil was late. He, too, was supposed to be informed of protocol and given a run-through in questioning before he went on the stand that afternoon. He stepped out of the truck and kicked his work boots against the truck’s front tire, dislodging chunks of mud and a few stray stones. I hadn’t seen him since the trip to Sedona five months before. He greeted me the same way we’d last parted, with an untroubled embrace. He wore torn jeans and a moth-eaten wool sweater.

“We’ve got to go,” I told him.

“I can’t yet, not wearing this.” He picked at his unraveling sweater sleeve. “Hang on.” He reached into the truck’s bed and pulled out a damp wrinkled suit jacket and a matching pair of pants. “I brought something civilized to change into,” he said, and quickly undressed in the truck. He emerged in his suit. It reeked of cat urine and showed signs of mold under the armpits. “How do I look?” he asked, in earnest.

“Just like I always remembered,” I said and put my arm around his hip.

We went through the court metal detectors and took an elevator to a third-floor waiting room where Cara and my mother sat with the DA. Court resumed an hour later.

Cara and Kahlil sat together for a while. He had something to tell her. Why he chose this day out of all days to do it, I’ll never be certain. Before Cara went on the stand, Kahlil told her he’d met another woman, and now that woman was pregnant, expecting their baby.

There would never be a man she trusted, Cara said to the room, and got up to excuse herself to cry in the hall.

I thought of my husband’s gentle embrace, the slope of his shoulders as he hugged me, his laugh for which I teased him. It sounded like a woodpecker nailing a tree, and it always answered my jokes. I was sad on Cara’s behalf, thinking of my loving spouse. She’d just not found the right man. I was certain she’d find him if she kept her will and opened herself.

*   *   *

I saw Edgardo for the first time that day. He was as I’d pictured: tall, with a wide, round head, cropped black hair, broad shoulders, stocky legs and arms, scowling mouth. He turned to look at me sitting on a court bench and smiled, showing his teeth.

We sat in the courtroom with him for nearly a week. Evidence was presented, pictures of my sister’s beaten body blown up big and pasted to flip charts. The DA pointed to the bites on Cara’s neck and back with a yardstick—the bites matched the cast taken of Edgardo’s teeth. Doctors testified that semen they’d collected from Cara was an exact match with Edgardo’s DNA. Surveillance videos from the supermarket parking lot showed him leaving the liquor store and walking toward the park. It was clear, he was guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison, many lives, consecutively.

*   *   *

Start out with a white speck. A black speck came cuddled in a leather jacket. Kahlil’s jacket had words written on it: We are all brothers under the skin and I for one am willing to skin humanity to prove it. The speck poked her nose from out of his coat. I could not hug my husband in his coat. I could not hug my husband because of his armor and his size. My arms couldn’t reach around his shoulders. The black speck leapt out from his coat. White specks leapt kamikaze from the sky. The black speck was a dog and the white specks were snow. It wasn’t going to stop, any of it: the growing dog, the failing marriage, the blizzard haunting the sky. The speck weighed two pounds before it grew to weigh seven pounds. The marriage grew from one year to three years and then it was gone.

Chapter 15

In
April 2005,
Cara
and I stood shoulder to shoulder and looked out on the city of Burgos, Spain, watching the sunrise from the balcony of my flat. I was living in Burgos for a spring semester, teaching photography in a study abroad program. Four years had passed since the rape, three years since the trial, and we were leaving for Venice the following night by train. Cara had the idea that if we stayed up all night before our trip, we’d sleep soundly through the eight-hour-long train ride.

Our bellies were full of a wheel of rich sheep’s milk cheese. Two bottles of wine from Bierzo that I’d been saving for a special occasion rolled around, empty, at our feet. We were drunk and laughing at our silliness; freely, lovingly, poking fun at each other. Early that afternoon, Cara had gone into a salon to have her hair cut. Her poor language skills and elaborate explanation of what she’d wanted had confused the stylist; Cara had left the salon with a pink-streaked asymmetrical bob. That same afternoon, at the cart in the center of the city where I’d daily ordered a cone filled with churritos, a French fry–like doughnut, I’d discovered I’d really been asking for pussy. The word for pussy was
coño
; the word for cone was
cono
. I’d switched them. That afternoon, as usual, one of the pair of women who operated the cart had stuffed my pastry, humming along to the plucky music that played over the cart’s loudspeaker (part music box, part Muzak), then handed me my
cono
, smiling mockingly. The other woman had grinned, too, leaning back, hands in her apron pockets. I’d thanked them both. I’d picked out a fry; it had dissolved sugary and oily on my tongue, and I’d turned back for home, bumping into a woman who’d been standing behind me in line. The woman was mortified. Hands clasped over her mouth. “
Basta! Basta!
” she yelled at the vendors, wagging a finger at them; then in fluent English, she said to me, “Check the dictionary,” scolding me in the way of a teacher.

On the balcony of my flat in the dawn, I stood twirling my twin’s curly neon bob in my fingers, while she sweetly called me
coño
. All of Burgos seemed a less dim, gray place with Cara at my side. The warm golds, taupes, and reds of the buildings collided with the rising sun, and the streets came alive: the local baker pulled up the gates on her
panadería
, displaying a full case of crusty breads, cookies, and tarts; the cathedral tolled its 7 a.m. bell; the police made morning rounds, joking with one another; farm trucks moved their cargoes of sheep and pigs; children cried out, skipping down the streets toward school.

I’d spent most of my first few months in Spain in solitude, keeping occasional company with students and with the boys who ran the local Internet café. My vocabulary was limited and I kept it simple at the café—please and thank you and see you tomorrow. I’d pay them and they’d slip me a piece of paper with the number for a computer terminal. Sometimes one or the other of the boys would say thank you and call me
guapa
, which they called all of the girls.

I checked my e-mail as often as possible, looking for word from Jedediah. He figured his time alone would be the perfect opportunity to get a leg up on writing his novel, a noir about a detective who investigated crimes people committed while they slept. And I’d needed to take the job in Spain; the teaching experience and pay were both necessities for us. We were bringing in very little money; after Jedediah sold his book we’d begin thinking about starting a family, he said. By then we hoped I’d be able to secure a full-time teaching position in a city we both liked. The idea of my time in Spain had seemed reasonable, practically speaking, but emotionally I wasn’t prepared to handle the time away. And Jedediah had not counted on a miserable wife, a furious and sexually frustrated wife, phoning constantly, weeping into the headset provided for phone conversations at the Internet café. The howling winter wind whipped my bare legs on the walk from my flat to the café.

“I’m exhausted,” I cried into my headset one evening. “I’m not sleeping without help.”

“Help?”

“Ambien,” I told him.

“Don’t we have enough on our hands with your sister?” Jedediah twisted the H knob of our kitchen sink, the one we’d bought at Ikea and installed just before my trip. I recognized the high-pitched squealing sound the faucet made as the hot water rushed into the pipes; as the rumble of water on metal faded, the pitch of my rage grew. Jedediah had visited for seven weeks, but that time had felt much shorter than it was. He regularly sent thoughtful messages and photographs via e-mail, but they only made my homesickness worse: our dog, Tillie, dreaming in front of a blazing fireplace; the geranium in bloom, reaching toward the window for a drink of muted winter light; the first sprouts of spring grass, poking through melting snow.

Unlike Jedediah, Cara had been making the effort to visit me monthly from Massachusetts; she had discovered that the
pharmacia
across the street from me in Burgos dispensed Klonopin without a prescription. She’d go to the
pharmacia
during the afternoons I taught and fill her cart with boxes of Klonopin. But Cara couldn’t keep her pills a secret. One afternoon, while she napped, I opened her suitcase and found her diary; I picked its lock, read it as if it were my right. I needed to know what she’d been taking. She deserved that the door be closed on her affairs; I could never give her that. There were so many drugs.

Cara’s penmanship, a bubbly cursive, looked harmless. She wrote in purple ink. The paper stock of her journal was imprinted with a sunflower field in full bloom, buzzing bees at the margin. On that cheery paper, she railed against Kahlil for divorcing her, not so much angry as bereft. There were suitors she mentioned with hope, but never more than a page went by before one name disappeared and was replaced by another. She’d sometimes write about her shame in turning back to heroin.

MARCH SOMETHING, SHITTY MASSACHUSETTS

Dear Diary,

I don’t care to write anything that sounds beautiful. Relapse. I’m a drug addict: veins dead, bitter, drunk on powder. I’m the twin to be ashamed of. Sister would never do such things. How did I become that one person in every family who is sick and needs to be kept hidden?

The lovers that I have taken are sour replacements for my husband. My wedding rings are on my dresser. Pictures of my husband are in the bureau drawer. When I can’t recognize myself, I remember that egg-frying antidrug commercial from the ’80s:

Cara, this is your brain. This is your brain after rape. This is your lonely rape grief on drugs. This is the marriage you shoved your husband out of. I can’t ask any questions. There are many, too many to ask—there are things that need doing: miss Christa, forget to dream, sew my skirt.

In her suitcase, next to her diary, I found five boxes of Klonopin stacked neatly one on top of the other, held together by a thin rubber band stretched to capacity. She’d wrapped the bundle—about a month’s worth of pills—in a light green scarf printed with a tarot motif from the Crowley deck. She’d return to Spain when her supply ran low.

My husband didn’t move with me to Spain because he had his head buried in a book. My sister visited me because she needed to bury herself in pills.

In the years since The Meadows, things had spiraled downward. Now that Cara lived alone, she’d disappear for days and tell elaborate lies about where she’d been. I’d been stood up for dinner more times than I could count, only to find her beat-up car parked in front of the dive motel where everyone went to score in Northampton. It became my duty, nearly weekly, to check on Cara in her apartment to make sure she hadn’t offed herself by hanging herself from a chandelier or by finally coming across something sharp enough to slice instead of cut. I didn’t have keys to her place, but I learned how to jump high enough to pull up onto her building’s fire escape, climb the four flights of rickety metal all the way to her kitchen window, and slip inside from there. Of course, I’d never found her dead; I’d only found her with the TV turned up too loud, shopping eBay, speeding on Ritalin.