Chapter 37 #2
Eventually I moved into a private room and felt like I was in Appalachian Hall again.
My days were regimented. Private therapy.
Group therapy. Activities like indoor badminton, volleyball, Ping-Pong.
I didn’t make friends but was fond of my counselor Kathy.
She asked me to keep a journal, and I said I always did.
“This is different,” she explained. “I want you to write down things about yourself and let me read them.”
I wasn’t in the habit of allowing anyone to look at my journals, but I did as she asked.
It was the most helpful part of my stay at Edgehill.
I realized I had rage that I didn’t want to admit.
Some of what I wrote about certain people was vicious and hateful.
Lenore Saunders, for example. Also, my father. And Charlie.
Venting those feelings on the page caused them to diminish if not go away over time.
I learned I could forgive but that didn’t mean I forgot.
It was a good thing to remember what hurt you.
But my near-fatal car accident made me realized that the weaknesses I saw in others often were my own.
I’ve never been cruel like Lenore Saunders. But I’ve hurt people, including myself.
If I had children, how might they judge me?
How would the journalist in me judge myself?
“Terribly” was the answer to both questions as I relived mortifying news stories about me.
I remembered every shameful and stupid thing I’d ever done.
While in the throes of these powerful revelations, I was alerted by my office that Demi Moore was trying to reach me.
Too ashamed to talk to her, I instructed my staff to “politely tell her I can’t contact her for quite a while because I’m on a safari—part of my work for my new book.
” This is what I wrote in my journal at the time.
I didn’t want Demi to know where I was, and that was silly and unfair.
Of all people she would have understood.
But I ducked her, and then she didn’t try anymore.
While I was there, Dad and Rita came to see me as part of my therapy.
I was honest with him about my feelings, and he was logical like an appellate specialist before a judge.
Our relationship was better, but it would never be what I wished.
I wanted to discuss the past and ask questions.
Why did he walk out on Christmas? Why did he hate Mom so much?
The most he would say is he was afraid she’d kill him in his sleep.
But that didn’t make sense. If she was dangerous, why did he leave his children with her?
Those dark days were off-limits and always would be.
I found it almost impossible communicating with him.
If nothing else, our time together validated much of what I’d felt while growing up.
We didn’t discuss my car accident or anything personal.
Nor did I with my mother. I’d asked her to visit me in the treatment center.
But she made excuses until I gave up and told her not to bother.
I began to accept that I would never have a normal mother-daughter relationship with her. I was the parent and always had been.
But she couldn’t help it, and for the rest of her life I would take care of her.
On occasion, I brought her on trips. To Aspen, New York, London, but nothing really made her happy, her perception of reality skewed.
It wasn’t until late in my career that she would say she was proud of me.
She didn’t understand me but accepted who I am.
Dad wasn’t capable of emotionally connecting but I knew he was proud of me too.
Toward the end of his life, he would brag about me to strangers.
He’d promise to send them signed books, and then forward me their addresses.
When I asked him to stop doing that, he replied on a sheet of yellow legal paper, “You need to see a therapist.”
Some things never change, and I learned to live with his lack of warmth.
If I revised my expectations, he was manageable, even fun.
The time I spent with him in Florida after the treatment center was special because I’d given up trying to turn him into someone he wasn’t.
The only way I could repair the past was to make the best of what we had now.
I was discharged from Edgehill on April 25.
As it turned out, a judge in Los Angeles sentenced me to a month in a treatment center.
Fortunately, I’d already done it on my own.
Flying to Miami, I stayed with Dad and Rita three nights at Fort Myers Beach, spending reflective time alone walking along the ocean.
On April 29, Dad, Rita, and I went to see Indecent Proposal starring Demi. They enjoyed it, but all I could think of was what I’d been through.
“It’s hard not to look back on the hope and promise I felt,” I journaled. “I sallied forth into a world I thought I could manage… So here I am back east, convicted of a crime and sentenced to 3 months in a Los Angeles jail (suspended). That was my Hollywood debut.”
Returning to Richmond, I continued having nightmares.
I began researching how rescuers cut people out of crashed cars, wanting to know exactly what was done at the scene of my accident.
I investigated my own case while researching my fifth novel, The Body Farm, deciding to have Scarpetta’s niece Lucy survive something similar.
I got busy with research again and was back on the tennis court, life returning to some semblance of normal. Cruel and Unusual came out and was an instant bestseller. On June 12, I did a signing and sold a thousand books. The crowds were mind-boggling and would get only bigger.