Letters Between Us

Chapter One:

The Best Of Friends

You just want to send me to hell.

No, Mom, you’re doing that all by yourself. My hand starts to strangle the receiver.

What have I done to you that you hate me so much? Damn it, I almost cut myself trying to slice tomatoes for dinner, balance the phone, and swallow two Advil and one Tylenol with a gulp of cold coffee.

I don’t have any food in the house, Mom insists. I pull the phone away from my ear momentarily. I want to throw it on the floor and smash it, but I don’t. Instead, I can feel a familiar heat spreading from my neck and flushing my face. This always happens when I get mad. I gather my annoying shoulder-length hair off my neck and throw it up into a ponytail with the rubber band that was holding the celery together.

Mom, what are you talking about, Ana always makes you a nice dinner. You told me you liked her cooking. I jack up the air conditioning. The temperature in Encino today is in its usual July high 90s and inside the house the thermostat reads 82. I should have turned it on this morning, but I always think it’s best to conserve energy, and then I regret it around 4 o’clock. My temples are throbbing.

"I don’t eat her awful food. Mom’s rant continues, I’m not so stupid, dumb and blind like you tell everybody—"

If you don’t like your live-in, then I’m putting you in a home. I have to repeat myself three more times. Mom’s so deaf these days I have to shout. I hate pulling the put-you-in-a-home card, but I have no choice. Hearing loss, macular degeneration, and Alzheimer’s make my 78-year-old former powerhouse of a mother almost unrecognizable. Confrontational, disagreeable, nasty—all her native negative qualities are exacerbated by this horrendous disorder. It’s as if the loving woman who was my supportive rock died five years ago. Now all it takes, sometimes, is one inane question: Hi Mom, how are you doing, where is Ana taking you to lunch today?

Oh, so you want to put me in jail now, is that it? she barks.

I’m not having this conversation with you! I slam down the phone. This is our daily scenario, if Mom is in her Alzheimer paranoid-bitch-on-wheels mood. Other times, she talks sweetly to me code switching, as we have always done, between her native language and English: "You are so wonderful, mija. You work so hard, pobrecita, I know I’m being, uhhh being, como se dice . . . difficult." But those days of kindness and clarity are disappearing. And as the months have passed she’s begun an odd form of self-inflicted torment that requires regular clipping of her fingernails almost to the quick, which does no good. But I don’t want to think about that now.

The phone rings again, but I don’t want to answer it. I’m sure it’s Mom gunning for me, ready to spew more dementia-infused venom. The ring persists. John says I shouldn’t answer the phone when she keeps calling, but I do anyway. All right, for God sakes, all right. I wipe my hands, fill my coffee cup and sit down at the table. I might as well get some more caffeine in me for the next round.

When I first hear David’s voice on the phone, I say I’m glad to hear from him, which I’m not. I never liked him, but at this moment he sounds like he’s been crying. I ask him how Katharine is doing, afraid of the answer.

It’s pretty bad, Laura, he says.

How bad can it be? I ask, never imagining the worst. I know the worst is possible, but I don’t want to believe it would or could occur. When— Then I hear, passed away yesterday morning . . . That’s all I hear. David is talking but I’m stuck on passed away. Disjointed phrases spill so fast that I can’t grasp them all at once. He stops and then silence, and then more fragments. Something about Katharine in a garbage container. He pauses, breathes and continues.

Sheriff thinks she was probably walking along the highway, at first, but then why wasn’t she— I still can’t get beyond, Katharine passed away yesterday morning. What . . . what? How did she pass? Did she have to try hard or was it easy? She passed away yesterday morning, alone. Life snuffed out of her while she passed away.

All I can think of is when the two of us were in junior high school and Katharine passed her science test and I didn’t, even though I tried cheating off of her. Laura, she announced jumping up and down, I passed with an A-, if only I hadn’t missed number 20, I would have gotten an A! Katharine loved studying. I didn’t bother. Passing with high grades brought Katharine joy. School for me was simply a place to meet cute boys.

But now Katharine’s passing bears a shroud weighted by the trash of civilized disposal: rotting food, torn paper, dirty plastic cups, old Pepsi and 7-Up cans, and shards of broken glass. Icons of useful disuse, misuse, and discards of wastefulness enfold an emaciated, anguished, depressed, and dirty Katharine—dead when the police found her, all thirty-nine years of her in a graffiti-ridden beige Dumpster.

After hanging up the phone, I lay my head on the pine kitchen table and stare at the wall with its white painted-over pine paneling that I hate—the paint, not the pine. In front of me I focus on the salt and pepper shakers: antique crystal and silver. Next to them is a sterling silver breadbasket filled with table napkins. I take my hand and sweep it across the table. The napkins and the basket and the antique shakers fly across the room. I stand up and see the shakers broken into many pieces on the tile floor. Funny—didn’t hear anything hit the ground. I kneel down and examine the sterling silver tops—bent and slightly misshapen. The napkins lie like fallen snow next to them; the breadbasket is upside down and undamaged. Wonder what my mother-in-law would think if she saw this right now—these were her birthday gifts to me. What would my husband say? John, where is he? At the studio in one of the usual meetings . . . don’t want to talk yet.

I throw on a short sun dress and some platforms (too hot for tight jeans), exchange the celery rubber band for a large hair clip, and leave the house as I can’t stand the silence. While driving around, tears pour down my face. The tears combine with my sweat to form rivulets down my neck dripping between my breasts. Summers in the San Fernando Valley are long and hot—even all the oak trees providing elegant shade can’t abate the relentless heat. My thighs singe from the burning leather car seat as I pull down my hem for protection. The cool air blowing from the air conditioning vent can’t work fast enough.

I pull into Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks and march into Bullocks. I find myself in the lingerie department. Silk lingerie on sale: 25% off. Yes, I’ll buy two of everything in black, pink, and red. I spend $400 and return home. I stuff the bag of purchases into the closet and there it sits. Don’t remember why I have that large bag in the closet sitting on top of my shoes. It’s just there. I’m just there, sitting on the bed staring at it.

The sunlight reflects something bright white in John’s dresser mirror. I turn around and see Katharine’s last letter, written three months earlier. It still sits folded on my roll-top desk, partially stuffed inside one of the little boxes in the middle. On a sheet of grey paper in an uneven hand, as if she couldn’t focus, but was in a hurry to get down the words, Katharine wrote:

Santa Barbara Psychiatric still...

Dear Laura,

Have I told you what I cannot . . . have never told. It’s not so much in words that I am lacking to tell you. I wanted to tell you everything, but I prefer sleep, that eternal parent that beckons . . .

Want you to have the letters in case.

David and I will probably have stopped talking by the time you read them. He refuses to bring Jillian anymore . . . Dr. Powers says it’s better for now as time is what I need, Jillian needs. . Maybe you can help Jillian understand someday. Hope you saved all of your letters and journals. We promised each other we would never stop writing. WE WOULD NEVER throw them out, didn’t we? You will know when to read . . . I don’t know anymore except that I love you . . . remember.

The dark takes form of the white and reveals it.

Can’t recall who wrote this just now, but do this for me because I can’t.

April weather keeps raining inside and out

Rain inside and out . . .

Katharine

I waited for the letters to arrive, but they never did. I called Katharine at the hospital on the designated patient pay phone, which was either busy or, when another patient answered, Katharine couldn’t come to the phone. It was never clear why. So my letters went unanswered as did my phone calls, but then came her last phone call and I knew she was lost.

I drive into the church parking lot. It’s still deserted, but for one car. I’m early, and walk inside. At the entrance I pick up an announcement card from a short stack that reads:

Sitting down in a pew, I feel the coolness of the church rush into my body. It’s so quiet in here. There’s no music, no people. I’m alone for the moment. The drive north from Los Angeles was a quick one, less than the usual hour-and-a-half. David’s description of Katharine’s final moments—hours perhaps—replays in my head.

She disappeared from the hospital, he said, two days before.

Why?

I’m not real sure, but she just walked away. The details are still sketchy.

Was it suicide?

Don’t know yet. An autopsy will take four to six weeks.

Katharine’s final phone call to me echoes even louder in my brain: I’m evil, Laura, evil. I’m the devil and I need to die. I need to be punished.

Please Katharine, honey, stop it.

I’m the devil incarnate and I’m going to punish . . . punish her—

Look, sweetie, you remember what I told you once about suicide? What happens when you kill yourself and wake up on the other side? Mom had always told me that suicide was a shortcut to a death solely planned by God. If you took it, your soul would be stuck somewhere between heaven and earth, earthbound she called it. There it had to wait until the actual year, month, day, minute, and second arrived of your destined moment of death, and only then could your soul progress to the other side. Where you went depended on the way you lived your life on earth. It was one of the things she told me in childhood that I still believed. Mom does not remember telling me this anymore, but I have never forgotten it.

Dead . . . should be . . . will be dead. Evil. David says so. Everybody says so. I scare Jillian. I must be punished.

Katharine, Kitty, listen to me, just listen—

The devil says I belong—dead.

Remember what I said about ending your life before it’s your time—

I shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have slept with . . . I’m bad, responsible you know, for all of it. Wha . . .what? No . . . I‘ve got to go; they’re making me hang up now.

Katharine, I love you. Silence. Katharine, I love you.

I love you too. Click.

This was not the girl I had known since junior high school any longer. She was not the best friend I loved like a sister any longer. She was not the supportive lifelong friend who knew everything about me any longer. The gentle, reassuring, sweet mother to her baby girl I had known was gone. She was someone else, a vacant Katharine who at the same time was possessed by another. How did she get to this place and to such an end?

Laura Wells’ Journal July 13, 1989

Vista del Mar Inn

Santa Barbara

7:56 p.m.

I arrived at Katharine’s home this morning, following the memorial service. Almost every corner brought forth her presence even though she had not lived there for many months. Her Charles Keane and Rosamond prints were still up in the hall; her English pine and glass bookcase remained in the living room although empty of her books; her needlepoint throw pillows of cats and tigers still lay on the beige leather sofa with Geo and Squashy purring nearby seemingly oblivious of the group of people invading their feline space. It seemed like Katharine could walk in any minute to greet her mourners who packed the tiny house.

I took a look at her daughter playing in her room with her cousins. The little girl turned around and there was Katharine, staring back at me. Jillian wore the outfit John and I had given her for Christmas; a buffed cotton pink-flowered dress cut out at the back, accented with a pink satin bow and ruffled collar with white leather ankle-strap shoes adorned with white satin and rhinestone bows. She is Katharine almost, with a sameness yet a differentness: the almond-shaped intense blue eyes, honeyed blonde hair, a quiet and observing nature, but not that sad, bewildered, and longing countenance of Katharine’s. Today her translucent skin was flushed with the pink of intense child’s play.

Jillian’s auburn-haired cousins, seven and eight years old, were helping her search for Barbie’s Ken so he could take Barbie to a party. I slowly approached her.

Hi, Jillian, can I help?

We need Ken, we can’t find him and we need him, she pleaded. Smiling up at me, she asked, Can you help Lori and Jeannie and me find him?

Spying Ken’s foot on the bed, I said, I think if you look underneath that pillow on your bed, you might just— Jillian quickly turned around as Lori reached under the bed pillow.

Bad boy, Ken, hiding like that, thank goodness we found you! Jeannie admonished Ken. Jillian shook her finger at the doll.

I told Jillian how beautiful she looked and asked if she remembered who’d given her the outfit she was wearing. You did! she announced with her head bent over as she examined Barbie with small delicate hands.

And who am I? It had been almost a year since I’d last seen her.

"Don’t you know? You’re Laura, Mommy’s friend," Jillian said with a giggle, looking at me as if I were the child and she the adult. Her two cousins bickered over what Ken should wear on his date, a suit or his jogging outfit.

Yes, you’re right, I said, Mommy was my best friend and I loved her very much.

My mommy’s in heaven and I miss her, Jillian said while she changed Barbie from