ANALEE
She darts about in her narrative, this one, like a squirrel switching back and forth before dashing across a road. Of course, new clients all ramble a bit in their first session, and I let them go on for a while, so I can see better what they reveal when unfettered by my questions. But this one is taking no cues when I shift in my chair, as if to call an end to a paragraph, and I can see it will be difficult to insert a question. So I keep watching and listening. I find myself curious about her, and her story is certainly unusual. What a way to conceive a child!
She has a forlorn, waif-like affect, looking out at me from under the floppy brim of a dark blue hat. She is so thin, concave in her middle, where I bulge. I want to feed her. She helps herself to the bowl of jelly bellies I keep on my desk, eating them one at a time between thoughts. Her wide-spaced, round eyes, blue as cornflowers, framed by sliver-moon eyebrows, fool me into thinking she is much younger than her forty-six years. The only lines on her face are deep ones, at the corners of her mouth, unseen counterweights to any attempt at a smile. Certainly she is quirky, which appeals to me, and she seems to have a sense of humor, although self-deprecating. She has a colorful way of expressing herself. At the same time, I am professionally cautious; I may be seeing only the nicest part of her in this initial interview.
“Tell me a little about Dawn. What’s she like?”
“She’s my life. She’s a little ball of energy with impossibly curly hair the color of persimmons. You know how it is to come on a persimmon tree on a gray November day, when everything else is dying and then suddenly there are these balls of bright orange? That’s what it’s like to meet her. She’s cheerful, bright, curious - and very affectionate.”
“Do you have a photo of her?”
“Of course.” Karen opens her phone and lets me scroll through many shots of a carrot-headed little girl. I must have looked up at her quizzically. The child whose photo I see looks nothing like her mother. In one of my least tactful moments, I ask if Dawn is Karen’s natural child.
“Good question; most people are too polite to ask.” She explains that she had borne and birthed this child, whose embryo consisted of her sister’s egg and a donor’s sperm. I like her all the more for not taking umbrage at my blunt question.
“How did it come about that your sister became her guardian?”
“I fell into a deep depression.” Karen shakes her head slowly. “I’d never been a depressed person, and I didn’t recognize it at first, but I slipped slowly into such a funk that I barely got out of bed. Dawn would be running around the house, and I could barely get up to feed her, not to mention playing with her or making sure she didn’t get into trouble. My sister noticed it too; she knew I wasn’t feeling well and she’d come a couple times a week. Finally, she had me hospitalized for depression. When I got out, she asked whether it wouldn’t make more sense for Dawn to stay with her and her family for a time, while I sorted out my life. She and I had always been close. She was a great mother to her two kids, and even I had to admit I couldn’t handle her.” Karen shrugs, a trace of a smile on her face.
“It was a good idea at the time.”
“What about your depression? What sort of treatment did you get?”
“I was actually hospitalized, for a little less than a week, and then spent several months in a rehab center. They did a number of tests and found out it was partly hormonal; my thyroid was underperforming and they put me on a regimen of thyroid pills. They started me on antidepressants too. The first round didn’t agree with me at all: they made me anxious and nauseous. But then I was put on something gentler – and it helped. I gradually came out of it.”
“Was there anything else going on in your life that you think caused this depression?”
“You sound like my therapist – who, by the way, I really like. Well, breaking up with my last boyfriend may have had something to do with it, and getting used to being a mother. But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I still think it was changes in my own body – the thyroid and beginnings of menopause – that triggered it.”
“Are you still seeing this therapist?”
“Yes, once a week now. She and I have begun to talk about terminating therapy, but this trouble over ending the guardianship makes her think we should continue.”
“What happened when you asked Patty to terminate the guardianship?”
“I didn’t use those words; I just spoke of Dawn coming back to live with me. She told me I wasn’t ready to take full responsibility for Dawn. ‘What if it happens again?’ she throws back at me. And now, with my fall in the river, she acts as if her fears are well founded.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m well now, and it’s time for my daughter to come back home.” Karen looks at me pointedly.
“What’s your home like?”
“Well, it’s not the same home that she left.” Karen looks down for a moment. “I had a really nice house in Nevada City but lost it during my depression. I’m renting a house now in Rough and Ready. It’s kind of old, but Dawn’s bedroom is really nice.”
I ask if she has a copy of the guardianship papers, and she hauls out of her handbag a rumpled copy of the letters of guardianship, a good sign that she has come prepared. I note the date and ask Gerta to come in to photocopy it.
“This was almost two full years ago. Why did you wait so long?”
This time I am being intentionally blunt, testing her.
“I didn’t trust myself at first and then I couldn’t get Patty to agree. It’s still hard for me to think of taking my sister to court.”
I explain to her that if she is ready to do it now, she should act promptly because, once the guardianship lasts at least two years, Patty could ask the court to terminate her parental rights. The guardianship has been in effect for nineteen months. I catch a glance of panic in Karen’s eyes an instant before she says she wants to hire me.
I make a note to myself to get her permission to obtain her hospitalization records. I sense she has glossed over her depression and put too much emphasis on her thyroid and menopausal factors. Also, I will seek her permission next time to contact her therapist. But first I want to see for myself where she lives. I don’t want to dig a hole for myself professionally by my fascination with this unusual person. And a hike to the river will be a sort of bonus for me for the day; I love to hike and don’t get up to the Sierra foothill rivers enough.
I try to be thorough, especially if I have to go to some hick county. I have Siri talking to me from my car, but I also have a California map on the car seat next to me. Maps are my friends, sets of clues for any journey to a new place. Rough and Ready is a tiny dot on the map only five miles west of Grass Valley on a two-lane road that makes me think not many people even pass through it. When I first hear that my new client lives in Rough and Ready, I wince mentally at how even the name might prejudice a Sacramento judge. Rough and Ready conjures up front yards littered with old washing machines and outlived trucks, an Appalachian scene from James Dickey’s “land of the three-fingered people.” Competent mothers do not live in Rough and Ready. Competent mothers live in Roseville or even Nevada City, where city people take weekend outings to shop the tidy gas-lit streets of the old Gold country town.
I am a little surprised I have insisted on Karen’s allowing me to come visit her. I’ve been blind-sided before by clients, and I want to be able to convincingly describe it to the judge without being inaccurate. I also want to know what a child custody evaluator would see. But this day is to be more; Karen has invited me to take a hike along the Yuba River, to “experience her environment” the way she does. I don’t believe in socializing with my clients. I keep a professional distance to avoid misunderstandings about boundaries in the relationship. But here I am, backpack at hand, prepared for a jaunt in the country with someone I barely know but need to know better.
I already had second thoughts about giving up this day without even being able to bill for it. I could well have used this day to take my own children biking with Adam, but then again, I give up other Saturdays to give lectures or train volunteer lawyers in custody matters, so what is one more Saturday? This client can barely afford me even at the reduced rate I had quoted her. Wrong attitude, I tell myself, and decide to try to make it an adventure, by taking the back roads.
Oddly, as much as I like to know my way, I also like to meander. Often I’m less interested in the destination than in the journey. The way there, I thought, would show me the difference between where I start from and where Karen lives, especially if I take back roads. So, instead of going up 80 and 49, I take 99 North to 20 East, which winds through miles of nut tree orchards, along the edges of Yuba City with its Indian restaurants and sari shops, across a stretch of flat ranch land with horses and cattle, and finally through a few miles of homesteads with leaning weathered barns and trailers with old trucks. One has a bumper sticker that reads: ‘I brake for snakes.’ The town of Rough and Ready itself is little more than a clump of remnant buildings, a mining supply shop, a farm store, a ramshackle bar, and a post office. At the entrance to the town is a welcome sign to Rough and Ready, which reads on the second line, ‘Seceded from Union 1850.’ A faded, hand-painted billboard on the side of one building advertises Secession Day – Last Sunday in June.
The town doesn’t even have a grocery store, except for a tiny general store. I stop there, to check it out and buy an orange to take on the hike; but they don’t even sell bottled water (just rows of cold beer) and the only available fruits are a few blackened bananas and weeks’-old apples. I make a mental note to ask Karen where she shops for groceries (if she shops for groceries; it is a little test). Karen Haskins lives on Stagecoach Way, a mile or so past the town’s old cemetery. The region is littered with road signs depicting its past: Prospector Road, Riffle Box Road, To Hell and Back Lane, Black Gold Road….
The house itself looks as if it could have been a miner’s cabin a hundred years ago. The corrugated tin roof slopes down over a front porch as wide as the little house, with rocking chairs, and the four-pane windows are slightly rippled and bear the tiny bubbles of old glass. The porch creaks with reassurance of its age. I don’t need to search for a nonexistent doorbell; Karen opens the door to let me in, and the screen door thwacks behind me as I step inside.
“Welcome to the country,” Karen says with an ironic smile. “Lemonade?”
I accept and look around her as Karen goes to the refrigerator, which looks like one my mother had when she was a child, with feet and a handle you raise to open the door. Karen catches my look. “It works,” she reassures me. The kitchen sink is a broad, deep ceramic basin, with the original pump next to it. I am relieved to see it has an ordinary faucet as well. Watching me gape at her old sink, Karen reports, “this is where Dawn takes a bath.” I wonder what the bathroom will look like.
Karen offers to walk me around the house, starting with Dawn’s bedroom at the back. A cheerful blue, it has been recently painted, and framed, hand-painted illustrations from children’s books hang on the walls. I go closer to look at them. Three of them are signed by Karen Haskins and dated 2000, 2002 and 2008. One is a frog with a whimsical expression on its face and up-tilted eyebrows. Another features two young children, balancing on rocks as they cross a forest stream. The third depicts a cocky blue jay with an exaggerated black crest and a sack slung over its back. Each of them depicts confidence, originality and lovely color. I note quickly that the bed is a single mattress on the floor, and that there is no chest of drawers, just a row of plastic bins with a few articles of clothing folded and stacked in them. The room has no closet.
“From your books?”
Karen nods, obviously pleased by my attention to her illustrations.
“They’re beautiful – and quite original. Are you working on another now?”
“Yes, I’ll show you later. Here’s my room.” Karen backs out of Dawn’s room into the one across from it. It too has been recently painted, an egg-yolk yellow. An antidote to her depression, I think. Karen’s bed has an old metal frame, painted white, and a well-made wedding ring quilt laid over the top. This room has a small closet, its door open, and I can see a child’s green jacket hanging alongside a few adult shirts and jackets and one or two dresses. In this room there is an unfinished pine chest of drawers with a lace runner over the top and a carved wooden box sitting on top of it. Also clean lace curtains over the windows, through which I catch a glimpse of an old outhouse in the back yard, an archetypal half moon on its door.
We walk back to the front room, which has no wall separating it from the kitchen behind it. This room has not been painted, and its planked walls are a weathered gray. Karen has arranged it such that a large brown corduroy sofa flanks one wall and a pink, child-sized upholstered chair and brown easy chair sit up against the adjacent wall. An old triangular table higher than the top of the child’s chair rests in the corner, stacked with books. A lamp made from the stump of a small tree sits on top of it. In the center of the room is a square dining table with an oilskin tablecloth and two wooden chairs tucked into the sides opposite the other furniture in the room.
“Where do you write and paint?” I ask.
“At that table. That’s why there’s oilskin on it now. I was painting earlier this morning, before you came. When I’m writing, I put my laptop on this table.”
“Where’s your television?” I realize I hadn’t seen one.
“I don’t have one, never did.” Karen shrugs. “If I want to watch movies, I watch on my computer.” I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t have a television.
“May I use your bathroom before we go?” I ask.
Karen hesitates. “Well, you have a choice. There’s the one out back,” and she points to the outhouse, “or you can use the one down the hall, but it doesn’t have a floor right now, so you have to be really careful.” Karen’s look makes this a test of my character.
It takes a nanosecond for me to choose the indoor bathroom. An old toilet sits on struts, as does the sink next to it, and the under-flooring lays about three inches below. I balance on two of the floor struts and close the door behind me, shaking my head in disbelief. Did this woman even think a child custody evaluator would allow a child to live here? I have to do a delicate turn on the two-by-four struts before I can let myself down onto the toilet. The toilet paper roll sits atop the back of the toilet. There is no paper holder on the wall, and a towel hangs by a nail next to the sink. How could she live like this?
“You have to get that fixed.” I tell Karen as soon as I come out of the bathroom. “No court evaluator will let a child live in a house with no working bathroom.”
“It does work,” she starts to say but catches my look.
“Okay, okay,” she says, but I think I catch a glimpse of Karen rolling her eyes before she turns her head away. I decide I should leave it alone until we are back in the office, but I can’t.
“How does Dawn manage with that toilet?”
“Usually we use the outhouse.” Karen looks back to catch my shocked expression.
“What if she has to go to the bathroom in the night?” I ask in disbelief.
“She wakes me and we go out together with a flashlight. Or she uses the chamber pot.”
“You’re joking.” I hope.
“Only partly. She hates the chamber pot and likes the adventure of the outhouse,” Karen says casually as we leave the house without locking the door. She stuffs two water bottles, a floppy hat and a towel into a backpack and we leave in my white Subaru. I notice she is walking with only a slight limp, and no brace.
“How’s your knee? You seem to be walking much better.” She nods and holds up her walking sticks for me to see.
“This car is really clean,” Karen notes, looking around it admiringly. “It’s going to need a bath after our trip today.”
I shrug. “That’s what car washes are for.”
Karen gives me helpful, unobtrusive directions to the river as we wind through fields and then down a steep narrow dirt road to the river. There are so many pot-holes, I worry about my car’s suspension. But I say nothing, blaming myself for this adventure.
I park at the trailhead. Karen slides out of the passenger side, dons the floppy hat, grabs her walking sticks and flings the backpack over her shoulder before I can even fetch my own backpack from the back seat. She waits, amused, as I fit myself with my own backpack. Others arrive at nearly the same time, locals wearing shorts and dusty hiking boots, or water sandals, surrounded by their various unruly dogs. Is there anyone up here except Karen who doesn’t have a dog?
A muddy black mongrel with a blunt, aggressive nose butts my backpack. Instinctively, I back away, but that only encourages the invader as he presses with more assurance at the bottom of the backpack, then sticks his head into my crotch. “Go away,” I order, pushing away his wet neck. Its owner, smirking, calls his dog back to his side, and the mongrel trots instead toward a pair of border collies sitting next to the young woman with them, stirring them into a trio of sniffers, each with its nose at the other’s rear end. I take out a handy-wipe and clean my hands with it, then stuff it into a pocket of the backpack. Karen suggests we wait until the other hikers have gone ahead a bit.
A cat would never act this way, I know, barging into a stranger’s intimate parts and demanding a sniff. A cat would take its time to assess a stranger, approaching aslant, and maybe glide next to a leg to test whether the stranger will welcome it. You have to know a cat pretty well before it will trust you with the barest contact with its nose. I love the self-sufficiency of cats and resent the rude, bumping dependency of dogs on contact, contact, contact. Dogs need to be walked, bathed and cleaned up after, while cats can do everything themselves. I’ve always wondered about my neighbors who trail their dogs in the morning, plastic bags in hand, bending over to collect their steaming turds as if collecting relics of a sacred being.
A crooked, low-leaning branch obscures the trailhead, but Karen knows where the trail begins and holds the branch to one side while I pass. When she releases it, it springs back like a screen door. Karen strides ahead with the familiarity of home ground, barely a limp in her gait. “There should be a patch of wild ginger up here soon,” she predicts and then kneels before some heart-shaped leaves. “Under here,” she points, “is the flower.”
“Can you use it for cooking?” I ask as she bends down obligingly to show me.
“I never thought of it,” Karen replies.
I wonder to myself why anyone would be interested in some obscure brown bowl of a flower hidden on the ground. But I like the brisk pace that Karen sets on the trail, even limping slightly, and want to get some exercise today because I hadn’t run this morning and it will be too hot by the time I get back to Sacramento.
Unfortunately for me, the woods are full of wildflowers, and Karen stops to admire them and explain something about each one to me. “See this one?” Karen points to a small pink head of blossoms. “That’s twining brodiaea. It finds some other plant to cling to and twines itself around the other plant’s stem.”
“Uh-huh,” I acknowledge, barely, and swat away the insects crowding my face.
After a while, Karen still bends to admire each new flower she sees, but no longer bothers to explain them to me. But she warns me to watch out for poison oak. That, I assure her, I recognize.
The trail winds alongside the Yuba River, at first just above it, its flow sloshing noisily; but then gradually we climb and the river becomes a ribbon of gold-flecked green below us. At times, the edge of the trail is a cliff; at others, the woods slope more gradually, hiding the river. I notice Karen cringe slightly at the cliff sides and walk on the inside edge. Heights don’t bother me.
What has begun as a warm day becomes sweltering. I feel the sweat running down the front of me and my head begins to ache. I have no hat. I pull a bottle of water from my backpack and drink nearly half of the bottle. How much farther, I want to ask, but don’t. Karen gives me her hat, saying she is more used to the heat. I take it gratefully and gradually feel stronger. When Karen bends down to look at yet another wildflower, I step around her and go on ahead.
The heat is unrelenting, even with Karen’s hat. I keep my eyes down and focus on plodding one foot in front of the other. As I round a sharp curve in the path, I nearly trip over the black dog that had so ingratiated itself with me at the trailhead.
It barks fiercely, and I jump back. Barking repeatedly, it stands directly in front of me but facing the other way. When the barking pauses, I think I hear a dry rattling, like seeds in a husk. The dog backs toward me a little, and I back up to the edge of the curve in the path. The dog growls, its tail pointed and twitching. Finally, I can see what has caused the alarm: a large rattlesnake lies curled in the center of the trail, its tail buzzing with irritation. I might have walked right into it but for the dog, which is now backing up further. Its owner appears from around another curve ahead of them on the trail, calling “Ranger.”
“Careful!” I call to him. “There’s a rattlesnake. On the path.”
“I see it,” the man calls back. He grabs a long stick and comes toward the snake with it. I back up further and call for Ranger to come. The dog comes to me and sits at my side. I pat its head tentatively, my heart still pounding. The dog’s owner pokes at the snake from behind, forcing it to turn around. I fear it will strike at him. Instead, it slithers off the path, down the hill. The man comes back to where Ranger sits beside me. He kneels and hugs his dog, lavishing “good boy” on him repeatedly.
“He was amazing,” I say gratefully.
Karen catches up with me at this point. I explain how the dog had saved me from the rattlesnake. Karen shakes her head, smiling.
“I was wondering why you were suddenly best friends with the dog.”