Chapter 18 — Hidden Valley

I spent the next year in a remote area south of Ramona in a place they referred to as Hidden Valley. Within days after I got there, I quickly learned why they wanted to keep it hidden. For one, there was no outdoor swimming pool and when I mentioned it to Frank when he came by to visit, he assured me that it was under construction and by next spring “you’ll be dipping your toes right in.” And as far as those vistas were concerned, well it really didn’t matter how scenic they are when you’re legally blind. But the biggest lie of them all was the “comfortable and safe environment” bullshit.

The day I moved in, my roommate Sue Martelli announced that “she hated all fat chicks” and “wished that I had died in the accident.” The good thing, if you want to call it that, was that Sue was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair after a diving accident her senior year. So, every time she threatened me, I just made sure to stay out of reach of her wheels.

In many ways, NeuroCare was just like a prison. It was lights out at ten and we had to be up at six in the morning for breakfast. Then there were breakout sessions where we were put into groups and would talk about overcoming our struggles. As much as I hated it, I did meet some interesting people. There was Craig who had been there since the place first opened. He was a roadie for some punk metal band who was thrown from a window when their van rolled over and was found on the street, his body pinned underneath a pair of hundred-pound speakers. And Kimo, a repo-man from Hawaii, who was shot in the head by some deadbeat when he went to go get his car late at night from right out in front of his house. Then there was Kristin who was sexually assaulted and beaten by her stepdad, the last time within an inch of her life. But perhaps the most tragic was Scott who blew out his brains when his girlfriend left him, but he missed and splattered the top of his head all over the walls of his parent’s garage. He spent the next few weeks in a coma, then tried again with sleeping pills when he woke up and looked at himself in a mirror.

For the first two months, I didn’t say anything, just sat there and listened, until Daniella showed up. Daniella’s story was almost like mine, a cheating boyfriend, a joyride at night, a head split open on a dark stretch of highway, and a life draining out onto the pavement. Only she was riding on the back of a motorcycle when a pair of headlights appeared in the dark and drifted into oncoming traffic. Her boyfriend was killed on impact, and Daniella was thrown up against the windshield then summersaulted back onto the street. Her brain injury may not have been as severe, but when I met her, she was pretty fucked up.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Daniella.” The words took like twenty minutes to get out of her mouth. Yet, she was always pleasant and kind and would always refer to me as her friend. She’d even sneak me some extra snacks that she redeemed with her “good behavior points.” We also had something else in common, we both absolutely hated Sue.

“What do you say we both just kill her?” I asked Daniella when Sue told her she sounded just like Darth Vader. “We can just take her wheelchair out through the gates and leave her body for the coyotes or push her into the pool when it’s finished.”

“Now, Pam, that wouldn’t be nice,” she told me. “And besides, it wouldn’t be very Christian.”

It turns out I almost did it without her when I got back in my room and found my tapes crushed on the floor under her wheels. “Oh, I must not have seen them,” she said when I noticed.

I don’t know whether I threatened her life, but I remember I was kept under twenty-four-hour surveillance and lost all of my good behavior money. Two days later, during a therapy session, one of our counselors asked me why I was so angry.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged.

“Well then can you tell me who are you most angry with?” he asked me.

“Everyone, I guess.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “Such a beautiful girl like you deserves to be happy.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Look, my name is Rick,” he said taking my hand and holding a card with his number inside. “Call me if you ever need someone to talk to.”

It wasn’t like the way that things were back home when I could just pick up the phone and call someone whenever I wanted. There was only one phone in the room, and I didn’t want Sue listening to my conversations. Sometimes I’d call him when Sue went to sleep before the monitors came in and turned out the lights.

“Bye, I gotta go,” I’d say when I heard their voices out in the hall.

“See you tomorrow,” he’d answer, then he’d hang up.

Rick also had a roommate who hated me, though I never could figure out why. One day during meal prep, we were both in the kitchen, and I started cutting some celery when he grabbed the knife from out of my hand and cut two of my fingers. After bleeding all over the counter, the attendant wrapped my hand in a towel and took me over to the medical building where I had to get stiches. The next day they asked us what happened, but he denied doing anything wrong. Then when I told Rick about it, he said that Alex was a really good guy, but sometimes his brain misfired, and he couldn’t remember what he just did. “Such is the nature of his injury,” he said.

“Well, that’s pretty fucked!” I told him. “I have a head injury too, but I don’t go around cutting people.”

“No two head injuries are ever the same,” he said. “Do you mind if I ask, where were you injured?”

“The frontal and occipital lobe.”

“So, you also have issues with sudden aggression.”

“Not unless somebody pisses me off.” I assured, then we both laughed together.

“Someday I intend to go on to medical school and study the brain. Maybe that’s something that you should look into.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

Sometime around Thanksgiving my father came over to visit. The sun would go down behind the long row of hills sometime around three, so by the time he got there, the place was already covered in shadows. He sat down with me in the lobby, and we talked for a while before they called us over for dinner.

“What happened to your hand?” he asked me, noticing all the layers of tape.

“Cut myself in the kitchen,” I said. “But at least it got me out of having to do meal prep.”

“Why in the hell are they having you doing meal prep? Don’t they realize you can’t see?”

“It’s not like they care. No one really cares around here. All right, I take that back, maybe Rick and Daniella.”

“Well, I still care,” he said taking a hold of my bandaged hand.

“Yeah right,” I told him as I pulled it away. “By the way, where is your bitch, I mean wife?”

“Oh, Billie,” he said as he lowered his head. “We’re done. Billie and I are no longer married.”

There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but I was pretty sure I knew all the answers. Billie never loved my dad, and I wasn’t not sure that he ever loved Billie. Maybe they thought if I was out of the picture, they’d be able to make it work, but that was neither here nor there. Still, my dad wouldn’t admit that he’d made a mistake, and that included taking me here.

“So,” I finally asked him, “when will you be bringing me home?”

“When the doctors say that you’re ready to leave.”

“When is that?”

“I don’t know.”

When Don and Veronica came to visit, I found out that my father moved back to the condo with Ronnie and his friends. They called it their “bachelor pad.” That told me everything I needed to know. Sometime before Christmas, my mom and David took me back to their place then brought me back here the day after New Year’s. They told me that they had planned to get married if Ginny can keep herself sober for a year.

I wished them luck then hugged them goodbye in the lobby until one of the guards looked at his watch and said it was time, “Vacation is over.”

The following night, I couldn’t sleep, so I waited for all of the lights to go out then got up and walked out of my room. I started walking down through the hall until I got to a door, then I opened it up and went outside. I had no idea where I was, but I kept on going—a cold empty sky, an ocean of stars, the promise of freedom. The tall wet grass under my feet came to an end on a long stretch of pavement. I made it! I thought. Now if only someone would find me. The next thing I knew I was standing in front of a flashing red light and two guys getting out of a truck.

“Stop right there!” A voice called out through some sort of speaker. “Stay right where you are!”

When I got back inside, one of the counselors, I think her name was Carol—Carol or Candace—I knew her name began with a “kuh,” walked me back inside of my room then took all of my “good behavior” money away.

“You will need to earn back our trust,” she told me.

My friend Daniella lent me some of hers so I could go to the store and get soap and shampoo and toothpaste and mouthwash. She even smuggled me some of her snacks.

“Thank you!” I told her as she handed me a chocolate chip cookie.

“What are friends for?” she answered.

Sometime after that, Rick got permission to take Daniella and me to his church in Ramona each Sunday morning. After church, we went out to breakfast then out for a drive in the hills before we had to be back in our room.

“Promise me no more escapes?” he said, as he led me out of his truck.

“Promise,” I said, fingers crossed behind my back.

“Good,” he said. “Because my butts on the line!”

So that’s what we did every Sunday. We went out to church then we’d sit, and we’d talk for a while. Sometimes we went to a park and we’d feed the ducks and play on the swings, as long as we were back in our rooms before three. My mom was supposed to meet us that Easter, but David called and told me she was too sick to come and that she’d try to get out there on Mother’s Day. My father showed up and met us for breakfast, but he declined my invitation to take him to church.

“At least will you pray with us for my mom?” I asked as we all joined hands at the table.

He shook his head as Rick, Daniella, and I bowed our heads and locked hands together. Then I heard him get up from his chair and walk through the door—his engine starting outside the window, wheels turning against the gravel. I asked God to not only heal my mom, but to touch my father as well.

As the temperature outside began its slow and steady climb toward the typical triple digit summer days in the Santa Maria Valley, the grasslands of the Laguna Mountains turned angry and brown, frequently casting its limestone boulders down onto the Julian Highway. One time my dad couldn’t make it to see me due to “some big fucking rock in the middle of the road.” Then the following week, my sister Veronica drove up and brought me a recipe for chilaquiles, then got stuck between here and Escondido on account of another massive slide. But that wasn’t the only thing that was hot that summer. After several weeks of good behavior, I was finally allowed back into the kitchen. I remember it was the weekend when Frank King was there, and I wanted to make him my favorite thing to eat growing up.

“What do you call that again?” he said in his exaggerated Queensland strine.

“Chilaquiles,” I said. “Just think of chili killers and you get the drift.”

The trouble was that I made them so spicy they damn near killed everyone. In fact, no one was even able to eat them, no one that is except Frank King.

“What do you say I take these home and buy us all pizza?”

“Yeah!” Everyone in the room began cheering out loud including me.

“I would never have guessed that you like spicy food,” I told him after dinner was finished.

“Love it!” he said. “If you grew up with the food in Australia, you’d like it too.”

“So, what you’re trying to tell me is that the food in Australia sucks?”

“Absolute rubbish!” he said. “Don’t listen to that bloke on TV that all we eat are shrimps on the barbie. It’s more like beetroot and vegemite sandwiches.”

We both laughed for a while, then he asked me if things were better and I told him for the most part they were, or at least I hadn’t threatened to kill anyone.

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “The staff tells me you’re about ready to move on from here.”

“You mean I can go home?”

“Not exactly,” he explained. “But closer. You’ll be doing part two up in Pasadena. We’ll have you moved in before your birthday, and if things go well, you’ll be home before Christmas.”

As the day grew near, they finally got the swimming pool finished and we spent most of our evenings hanging out and talking around it. In the mornings, I’d go out and swim a few laps after breakfast. Then one morning, Daniella came out to greet me at the edge of the water.

“So, I hear that you’re leaving,” she said in a slow somber voice. “It would have been nice of you to tell me since I believed we were friends.”

“Look, Daniella.” I said as I grabbed a towel to dry myself off. “I was going to let you know eventually.”

“When?” she asked me.

“Well, when the time was right.”

She looked at me for a moment then started walking away, but I followed her out to the gate, then she turned back around and cried in my arms.

“You are my friend!” I assured her. “We’ll always be friends. I promise that I’ll stay in touch. I’ll even come over and visit you when you get out of this place.”

“Promise?” she pleaded.

“Promise,” I said.

“Okay, then pinky swear.”

“Sorry, but I’m not going to do that!” I told her. “It’s a long story.”

The following night, I started packing when I heard a knock on my door.

“Come in,” I said. Then the door burst open.

“Rick?”

He didn’t say anything, just held me close as tears rolled down both of our cheeks. Then he told me he loved me from the moment he saw me. We promised that we would stay in touch and that when I finally got out of my new place, he’d come up and get me and take me back home to San Diego where we would get married and start a family together.

“But Orange County has always been my home.” I told him.

“Then I’ll move up there when I’m finished with school. Just promise that you’ll wait for me wherever you are.”

He kissed my cheek then walked out of my room and closed the door behind him. I never did make him that promise, “we’ll see” was all that I said as he cried on my shoulder, his hands running up and down on my back.

It turned out that my new place was only about a block away from the parade route on Colorado Blvd. Each year when I was a child, I had wanted to go see it in person, but this time when New Year’s Eve came, I wanted to be back home watching it all on TV. The rooms here were smaller, but I had my own, so I didn’t mind. After breakfast, they put us in classes to teach us things like cooking and cleaning and tending the garden they kept on the premises. There were also lots of books to read, but I still couldn’t see well enough, so they started giving them to me on tape. We also had a weekly class on public speaking, and before too long, I not only got pretty good, but they couldn’t seem to shut me up. Soon one of the counselors had an idea.

“Look, we’re right down the street from your favorite station,” he told me.

“Really what’s that?”

“KROQ.”

“KROQ, rock of the 80’s!” I interjected. “So, what about it?”

“Well, they’re always looking for interns, you know someone to answer the phones and take requests. I know some people down there and I can put in a good word for you.”

That’s how I got started in radio. Twice a week after I had finished my chores, one of the counselors would take me down the street where I’d work at the station for a few hours, then he’d pick me up and bring me back. After a month or so, one of the producers suggested that because of my voice, if I worked really hard and learned all the ropes that someday I could even get on the air.

“It would just be a few commercial spots here and there, but who knows,” he said. “You certainly have a voice for radio.”

I told my dad when he came over to visit that week, but he just smiled and nodded his head. “I’m proud of you, honey. I really am. But this weekend I’m taking you over to David’s.”

“Why? What’s the matter?” I asked.

“It’s your mom,” he answered. “She’s in the hospital and it doesn’t look good. I told her you would be coming to see her.”

I walked in through the door that I had been wheeled into three years ago—the smell of the halls and the outstretched arms of its patron saint on every statue. I was taken up to the

Oncology ward where my father helped me put on an apron and gloves, then was led by the hand around to her room where my siblings were already sitting outside.

“Pammy!” she said when I walked into see her. “I know, I know, it’s Pamela now.”

“Hi, Mommy,” I said as my dad walked me over to the side her bed.

When I leaned over to give her a hug, I could sense that she wasn’t doing too well. Her hands were brittle and rough, and from what I could see, her skin had turned from light beige to a sickly dull yellow. Underneath her sheet was a thin black gown like the kind that she wore when she was at home.

“I asked the nurses if I could wear this today,” she said, her voice now barely a whisper. “I wanted to be in your favorite colors, black and yellow, just like that band that you like.”

“You mean Stryper?” I said.

“Yeah, you know when I first saw the name on one of your tapes, I thought it was ‘Stripper’,” she said and we both started to laugh. “Anyway, it’s so nice to see that you’re doing so well.”

“It’s good to see you too, Mommy,” I said taking her hand in mine. “You need to get well so you can spend Thanksgiving Day with us.”

“I don’t think so, Pammy,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “I’m in so much pain. I can’t even get out of bed.” Then, freeing her hand from mine, she turned toward the wall and started to cough.

“I’m sorry, Pammy. I’m sorry for everything. I wasn’t very well back then either.”

I wanted to ask what she meant, but since I already knew I just said nothing.

“Mommy, remember what you used to tell me when I was in therapy? No pain, no gain. That’s what you said to me right? No pain, no gain?” I said as tears started streaming down my face. “So, I get it. What you’re telling me now is it works for me but not for you?”

I could see my mother beginning to cry, then a pair of hands reached over to pull me away, taking ahold of each of my shoulders.

“Come on, Pam,” my father insisted. “You’re upsetting her.”

“I love you, Mom!” I wailed as he led me out through the hall. “I love you so much!”

My dad took me over to David’s then picked me up on Sunday night to take me back to Pasadena. He told me that he’d talk to the staff and try and have me back for Thanksgiving weekend. He said he’d let me know as soon as he could and that he’d give me a call for me to be ready. The following Monday, the phone rang inside of my room and I rushed over to pick it up.

“Daddy,” I answered. “I see. I see. Tell me you’re kidding! No! NO! OH GOD, OH GOD NO!”