Friday, February 8
The morning Kate was scheduled to surrender to prison was a typical February morning in Wisconsin—frigid, with dingy piles of crusty snow everywhere you looked. Despite the parka I’d pulled on over my robe, the air bit me as I trudged to the driveway’s end to retrieve my newspaper.
A front-page above-the-fold headline in the State Journal provided another jolt—“University Researcher Reports to Prison Today.” The story, rehashing Kate’s crime and punishment, described the conditions she’d find when she reported to the federal prison camp in Dublin, California, later in the afternoon. At least they’d printed a picture other than her horrific mug shot.
When I’d kicked Kate out and relinquished my role as her babysitter, Marty Braxton’s wife Rita had jumped in with both feet.
I’d been surprised when Kate called Rosalee to report she was staying with the Braxtons—it took a lot of audacity to be a guest in the home of your former lover and his wife.
Rita, as I would come to learn, had experience dealing with two dysfunctional adult children of her own, and Kate’s neediness didn’t much faze her. After Kate’s car lease expired, Rita ferried her to counseling sessions, N.A. meetings, and urine screening appointments. I seriously doubted Kate was remaining clean and sober, but at least she’d been able to avoid bail revocation.
The day we were notified where the Bureau of Prisons had assigned Kate to serve her sentence, Rita Braxton had called me with a complete travel itinerary. She would drive Kate to Chicago for a red-eye flight from O’Hare to San Francisco; Kate’s sister, Elizabeth, would pick her up in San Francisco and drive her to Dublin, about forty minutes away. The schedule would easily allow Kate to report to the prison by two o’clock, as ordered by the court. I’d wanted to cut Rita off, but I had to admit her willingness to handle the details was a relief to me. Otherwise, as Kate’s defense attorney of record, I might also have found myself assuming the role of travel agent.
Today’s newspaper article triggered a few moments of angst, but I managed to push them aside. I sat at the kitchen counter with my second cup of coffee, engrossed in the crossword puzzle, and startled when the phone rang.
“It’s Rita,” she said, “and I hope I didn’t wake you. But I’ve been worried half to death and didn’t know who else to call.”
Shit! Can this ever really be over?
“You didn’t wake me. What’s wrong?” I asked, my back stiffening.
“After dinner last night, Kate said she wanted to go to one last N.A. meeting before she left, so I lent her my car. She was an hour late getting home—told me about an impromptu farewell party her sponsor had arranged—and I was frantic to get to Chicago on time.”
My heart skipped a beat. “You made it, didn’t you?” I asked before I could stop myself. What do you care?
“We made it on time,” Rita said. “But Kate chattered incessantly the whole way down. And some of it didn’t make much sense. Then she refused to let me park and go in with her—I mean, what was she going to do if her flight was cancelled due to weather or something? On the way home, all I could do was think of how bizarre she was acting and maybe she was back on cocaine. I did call and make sure the flight left, but there was no way to check to see if she actually got on. I tried to reach her sister Liz this morning, but only got her voice mail. And I don’t have her cell phone number—stupid of me not to get it.”
“Rita, please don’t feel guilty about what you did or didn’t do. This is Kate’s responsibility, not yours.”
“I should know that by now—I’ve been enabling my own kids for so long. And I guess I just fell into doing it with Kate, too. But she’s such a nice person, and I feel sorry for the mess she’s in.”
I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t feel that way if you knew about her and your husband!
“I’ll call Dublin later this afternoon to make sure she got there,” I said. “Don’t give it another thought.”
Before I had a chance to move, the phone rang again—this time Kate’s N.A. sponsor, Luann.
“I didn’t know if I should call, because it’s violating a confidence,” she said. “But I was expecting Kate at the meeting last night, and she called with a lame excuse. When I saw this morning’s paper and realized she was supposed to go to prison today, I got really worried.”
“She didn’t go to the meeting?”
“No.”
“You didn’t have a farewell party for her?”
“Farewell party?” She sounded genuinely puzzled. “No. In fact, she told me she’d gotten a postponement from the judge and didn’t have to go for three more weeks.”
“Shit,” I said, with a grimace. Kate was poisoning more decent folks—like Rita and Luann—and they didn’t deserve it any more than I had.
“You don’t think she’d run, do you?”
“I can’t begin to guess anymore. Her friend Rita dropped her at the airport, but God knows if she actually got on the plane. From what Rita said about her behavior, I suspect she was stoned.”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve seen it coming,” Luann said.
Kate sure has a way of making other people feel sorry for her fuck-ups.
“I’ll let you know if I hear anything,” I said. “But this is her responsibility, not yours.”
I hung up, found my cell phone and scrolled through it to find Liz’s number. But the words I’d already spoken twice this morning echoed in my head. It’s Kate’s responsibility, not yours. With a sense of pride and relief, I switched the phone to silent, left it on the counter, and went back to my crossword puzzle.
Just as I filled in the last blank, I heard the insistent hum of the phone vibrating against granite. I reached for the phone. Liz. Can’t you all leave me in peace?
But then I remembered what I’d heard recently on some talk show: Just because a phone rings doesn’t mean you have to answer it. How liberating! Why didn’t I think of that?
Wednesday, February 27
I sat at my desk, engrossed in highlighting a new Supreme Court case, and glanced up in irritation when the phone rang.
“Kate’s sister Liz is on line one,” Rosalee said through the intercom. “Can I put her through?”
At least six phony excuses flashed through my head, but I’d never had anything but respect for Liz. And I felt more than a little shame for ignoring her message three weeks ago. “Sure,” I said.
“Hi, Caroline,” she said. I could hear the nervousness in her voice.
“Before you go on,” I said, “I need to apologize for not returning your last call. I’d just had it up to here with Kate and behaved childishly. I’m sorry.”
“I think it’s my sister who’s behaved childishly. And I completely understand. Did you listen to my message?”
“Not until the next day,” I said sheepishly. In her message, Liz had said that Kate hadn’t voluntarily surrendered as scheduled to serve her sentence. She’d gotten on the flight from Chicago to San Francisco but had failed to meet Liz. At the time of the call, no one had known where Kate was.
George Cooper had subsequently called me to report the U.S. Marshals nabbed her two days later, after she’d tried to buy cocaine from an undercover cop. Her failure to appear had disqualified her from serving her sentence at the minimum-security camp, so Kate was sitting behind actual bars at Dublin’s secure facility.
“Mom and I visited Kate yesterday,” Liz said, “and there’s something we thought you should know.”
My stomach knotted, and I realized I was sitting on the edge of my chair. “What’s that?”
“Let me start by saying our visit with her was hell. My mom held her tongue, but I was so angry about the whole voluntary surrender fiasco and all. I confronted Kate—told her she needed to grow up. I mean, I said it quietly because we were sitting in this depressing visiting room with other inmates and their families within earshot. But Kate lashed out at me. Who did I think I was telling her how to live her life? And on and on.”
“Oh, man,” I said absently. None of this was new or unexpected—I wanted Liz to get to the point.
“Then she started playing the blame game. ‘If it weren’t for our fucking father I wouldn’t be in this mess.’ Then Mom got defensive for Dad, and Kate laid into her for putting up with a ‘pompous, selfish, womanizing bastard.’”
“I’m sorry. It sounds awful.”
“Kate was so focused on her victimhood, it was like I didn’t even know her. You were the next target for her blame. She said another inmate is helping her file an appeal because you were negligent in defense of her case. Or something along those lines.”
My heart sank: I should’ve expected this but hadn’t. I’d studied the U.S. Code section that allows prison inmates to challenge their sentences. I knew that alleging an attorney’s substandard work was a common ground for appeal. “Ineffective assistance of counsel?” I asked Liz.
“Yeah. That’s it. I don’t know if she’ll actually go through with it or not. But Mom and I thought I should at least call and warn you—and let you know she’s being negative and hateful to everyone right now.”
A finger painting of Lily’s—prominently displayed on the side of my file cabinet—caught my eye. Think of Lily—that’s what’s really important. Kate is not worth one ounce of angst.
“Thanks for the heads-up, Liz. But it’s your mom I feel badly for. She doesn’t deserve this.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“What do you plan to do about Kate?” I asked.
“Nothing. She told us to get the hell out of the prison and out of her life. We decided to take her advice. You may want to do the same.”
I didn’t tell her I already had.
**
The Internet is an incredible yet awful invention. In the next few days, I checked on-line court records countless times to see if, in fact, Kate had filed her appeal motion. Finally, I found it. It still hurt to see the notation on the court docket sheet, showing she actually had. It pained me to see in black and white that Kate believed I had done an inadequate job in representing her.
I reviewed the court documents by computer. Kate claimed I hadn’t given her an accurate estimate of the likely sentence when she decided to plead guilty, and I hadn’t objected to the guideline calculations and the probation officer’s suggestion for upward departure. She asked the court to overturn her sentence because of my negligence.
Although I knew intellectually that many of the “facts” Kate provided in her motion were outright lies, the overriding charge of negligence cut me to the quick. Try as I might, I was unable to refrain from questioning my work on the case. I told David as much when he came home that evening.
His vehemence surprised me. “You need to stop this second guessing,” he said. “It’s bad enough Kate filed the motion to begin with, but she’s flat-out wrong to misrepresent what happened. And her whole ‘poor me’ thing is pissing me off!”
David was right. Kate had repeatedly ignored my advice. She was the one who’d insisted on going forward when we had the opportunity to ask for more time to present a stronger case. And she was the one with a prior arrest record, and the one who’d associated with all manner of criminals.
But I hadn’t been vigilant enough to realize Kate’s “cooperation” against Joe Ames and Thorpe Akani would be viewed so negatively by the judge. And I should never have let her tell the probation officer she’d worked in the lab under the influence of cocaine.
**
“I can’t stop feeling guilty,” I told Dr. Brownhill during one of our sessions.
“With all due respect, you can stop,” she said, fingering the large silver bracelet she wore on one wrist. “But go ahead and tell me what you feel guilty about.”
“My life goes on. Kate’s is on hold, and will be for another couple years. Despite the hateful things she’s done and said, I still wish I’d done a better job representing her. I was too quick to let her cooperate with the cops—maybe I still identified with them too much. If I hadn’t, she might be out by now. Or at least at a halfway house.”
“Who did the crime, Caroline?”
“Kate. But—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I need to make this point. The one who does the crime has to do the time, and that’s not your fault. From what I read in the paper, she stole a lot of money and put it up her nose. And she didn’t stay clean after she got caught. So unless you helped her steal the money or forced her to use cocaine, it’s on her. I admit the criminal justice system isn’t perfect. People don’t always get the exact punishment they need or deserve, but who’s to say this isn’t what she deserves?”
“Do you think she deserved three years in prison?”
“As your psychotherapist, I shouldn’t say. But do you want my opinion as a graduate of the university she embezzled from and as a former benefactor of federal grants?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I agreed with the judge. And I hate to see what you’re allowing this to do to you. The motion Kate filed calling you ineffective was hitting below the belt. She knew your criminal law experience was on the prosecution end, and she still pressured you to take her case.”
Dr. Brownhill took a sip from her mug of tea and looked at me. “Why don’t you tell me the real reason you chose to represent her in the first place? You hedged when we talked about this before the sentencing.”
I lowered my head and closed my eyes. “It’s so hard!”
“I understand. But it’s harder in the long run to keep secrets, and the toll it takes on one’s psyche is immeasurable.”
I nodded and told her what I remembered about that Friday in January 1991, shortly after I had begun taking Valium for anxiety. I had taken one pill to help me through a presentation in my afternoon Constitutional Law class. That evening, I skipped dinner and took another one to get ready for a top-drawer fraternity’s party—I was going with a senior I'd been attracted to for a long time and was beyond nervous.
The party was disastrous from the beginning. Even through my Valium-induced haze, I could see my date had invited me only to get back at another girl. Embarrassed and self-conscious, I drank three cups of punch—made with grain alcohol—to ease my discomfiture. It wasn’t long before I passed out.
I vaguely remembered being awakened and going upstairs with two guys, guys I considered friends, before I blacked out again. When Kate barged in, interrupting what would surely have turned into a brutal sexual assault, she found me naked. Both men had their pants down and were arguing over who would go first, at the same time shouting for others to come watch. In a rage, Kate wrapped me in a blanket and demanded her date take us to the nearest emergency room. By this time, my loss of consciousness was of more concern to her than rape. Doctors pumped my stomach, detoxified my system, and hammered home how perilously close to death I'd been.
Mortified at having put myself in such a precarious situation by using alcohol on top of tranquilizers, I refused to snitch on the fraternity boys. Kate didn’t push it either. Maybe she understood it would be a no-win situation, or maybe she identified with their pedigrees and prep school ways. I told myself that other than bruises and a bruised ego, I had come to no harm.
Kate had been uncomfortable with the profuse thanks I gave her for saving my life. “Don’t mention it again,” she had said. And I hadn’t. To anyone.
I sat, spent, and wiped an errant tear from my chin.
Dr. Brownhill reached over and squeezed my hand, bringing me back to the present. “Oh, my dear,” she said. “I’m so sorry for what you went through. And that you persisted in your silence for so long. It can’t have been easy.”
“I was usually able to block it out. I read some books about victims of sexual assault and attended a seminar or two—as an anonymous observer. Those things helped me get beyond my shame. But it all came back when Kate called in the favor. She took it for granted I’d repay her by representing her.”
Dr. Brownhill nodded knowingly, but I sensed she wanted to move beyond discussing Kate. “Caroline, this was a major traumatic event in your life,” she said, “and it had to have affected you in lots of areas. Tell me about your subsequent relationships with men.”
“Oh, I didn’t even date for about a year after the incident. But going home that summer really helped. I got to see two good men—my dad and my brother—up close. They’re not glamorous guys, but they’re reliable, constant and true. That’s what I looked for in a partner. And—thank God—I found it in David.”
“Speaking of David,” Dr. Brownhill said, “I really think he needs to know.”
“You’re right,” I said, raking my hair with my fingers and consciously formulating excuses to ignore her advice.
“Tonight,” she said, looking straight through my defenses.
I didn’t respond.
“It’s important for your mental health,” she said patiently. “Don’t postpone it.”
“Okay.”
**
The timing didn’t seem right before or after dinner. And, in truth, I put off the conversation as long as I could. David was in bed reading when I went upstairs. I hurried to get ready for bed myself, intent on catching him before he dozed off, if only to fulfill my promise to Dr. Brownhill.
I climbed in beside him. “There’s something I want to tell you about, if you’re not too tired,” I said.
He lowered his book to his chest and looked at me, then reached over and rubbed his thumb against my cheek. “Sure, but let’s get this moisturizer goop off you first. It’s distracting,” he said with a grin.
“I should have told you years ago…”
I hadn’t intended to alarm him, but clearly I had. The grin vanished, and he put the book on the nightstand. “What is it?”
For the second time that day, I recounted the humiliating experience I’d tried for years to forget. I thought the second telling might be even more embarrassing, but David listened intently, seemingly without judgment or pity. And, remarkably, the story didn’t bring me to tears this time. David’s tears did.
He engulfed me in his arms, his body heaving with sobs. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said after a moment. “I want to kill those bastards—all three of them—for what they did to you.”
Overwhelmed by his strength and goodness, I said a silent prayer of thanks. We held each other until the tears passed.
“I really wish Kate would’ve called the police,” he finally said. “Like that girl’s father said at the sentencing hearing—what was her name? Bridgette? You would’ve regained some strength by testifying against those assholes. And it wouldn’t have haunted you all this time.”
“Maybe you’re right. But in grade school I learned it wasn’t cool to ‘tattle.’ And even though this was more than a classroom misdeed, I still blamed myself for getting into the situation in the first place. I was mortified and ashamed.”
He nodded.
“Any idea where those guys are now?” he asked, nonchalantly.
I pulled away and looked at him. “Don’t even think of getting back at them.”
“It’s only in the movies that SEALs engage in vigilante justice,” he said, smiling again. “Really. I’m just curious.”
“I admit I’ve Googled them,” I said. “The guy who was my ostensible date is the CEO of a company in San Jose, and I’m guessing he does okay. One of the would-be rapists died in a motorcycle accident about five years ago, and I’m not ashamed to say I was happy about it. I didn’t find anything on the other guy, so I’m hoping he’s a skid row bum. And, no, I’m not gonna tell you their names.”
Later, holding hands under the covers, David turned to me again. “You know, I can see why you felt indebted to Kate—I sure do. But if she never mentioned saving your life again, why did you feel like she was using it to manipulate you into defending her?”
No sense holding it back. He already knows her true character.
I hadn’t thought a lot about them since Kate went off to prison, but the seemingly innocuous incidents were permanently etched in my memory. I told David about Kate’s “You’d do it for me” comment and the “You owe me” note.
He shook his head. “Can’t anything about that woman be pure and simple?