Left for Dead (16 page)

I had complete and well-placed faith in my new partners.

April of 1977, Peach and I returned to Dallas, where I went to work at Medical City Hospital (then more of a village than a city), a three-year-old facility with approximately one hundred beds that soon would morph into a huge complex. It was built on prairie land far enough north of downtown that during dove season, staffers could saunter out just past the parking lot to blast away on their lunch hour.

Medicine demands a lot of your time. But I had made a reasonable attempt to stay fit, largely by running, which is cheap, doesn’t require much more than a set of sneakers and can be done anywhere.

During our year in Boston, I ran thirty to forty miles a week, but never in races. I just liked to run.

When we moved back to Dallas we lived for a year in a house not far from Medical City, and I’d often jog to and from work, about six miles. It was a fairly easy way to force myself to get a little exercise. I certainly did not have an image of myself as an athlete. I just liked to be fit.

But gradually I realized I was in pretty good shape. There was even the gratification of discovering people less than half my age,
athletes
, who couldn’t do what I did. These were the high school football players I encountered toward the end of my first summer back in Dallas. We shared the same running track, and I was delighted at every chance to run right around them, as if they were standing still, dying. It was one of my life’s great pleasures.

When we got back to Texas and Beck started working really long hours I did get lonely, and lonelier and lonelier. I started thinking about having children. This was not out of a strong maternal instinct. I had spent very little time around kids, and frankly had been a disaster as a baby-sitter. I am very squeamish, cannot stand the sight of blood, even my own, even on television.

Yet I really wanted to have a child, and so decided on my own that we would. I didn’t actually stop taking the Pill, as Beck has suspected. But I did sort of play Russian roulette. The result was our son, Beck, who was born in October 1978.

I was knocked flat. I didn’t know anything about marriage, but what I didn’t know about marriage paled in comparison with what I didn’t know about parenthood. Getting used to the idea was a big hurdle, like moving tectonic plates.

Beck was not crazy about helping me out. But it was very fulfilling for me to have that little boy
demanding
my love and attention. I threw all my energy into him, which made me a happier person. Beck was throwing all his energy into work, so it allowed us to coexist better, I think.

This was also the time that I started making connections with other women, most of them young mothers like myself, who later would become my indispensable circle of confidantes.

The first one I met was Pat White, whose husband, Terry, practices at Medical City with Beck. Pat and I met when we were both pregnant with our first children, at a holiday house party for the Medical City staff. By coincidence, her son, Charles, and my Bub were seated together at Meadowbrook preschool in North Dallas (both their last names begin with W) and began a friendship that has endured all the way into college. Charles and Beck were roommates for their first two years at Duke.

Another early acquaintance was Cecilia Boone. The Boones’ daughter, Aimee, attended Meadowbrook, too. Cecilia and I met when she invited me to join her carpool. Later, when the Boones bought a house near ours, their second child, Katherine, and our Meggie became—and remain—as inseparable as Bub and Charles White.

I come from the Midwest, where being straightforward is considered more normal than it is in Dallas. It’s also one of the traits I admire most in Peach. I value her opinion. We don’t always agree on everything, but 90 percent of the time we do. I think that gives us both a cup of courage. It is sort of, “Oh, you see things the way I do? Okay, I’m going to go ahead with this.”

Peach is my best friend. She has an extraordinarily practical mind, and can separate emotions from difficult situations.
When we spoke about her situation with Beck, I never got the impression that she was looking for answers. In retrospect, I don’t think she ever questioned that Beck was just the way he was, that he wasn’t going to change. The big thing to decide was if she wanted to be married to him.

Peach has called Meg my baby, and that’s true in a way. By the time she came along in August of 1981, I’d grown accustomed to parenthood. Meg was not that big a step. I’d already shifted the continents, so to speak. So instead of just being surprised, I was happy. Peach had allowed me to play superdoc during Beck’s early rearing. In her great wisdom, she decided that wasn’t going to go on anymore—I was going to participate.

I wiped that baby girl’s bottom a million times, and changed a ton of diapers. Peach made sure I read each night to Meggie, which both of us enjoyed.

Meggie instinctively knew how to communicate with me. Her older brother was quiet; he would not walk up and shake you if there was something he needed. Meggie, however, would make clear exactly what she wanted done, and how she wanted you to do it. That worked real well for me.

Dad is very direct. He’d just say to me, “I love you!” And under my breath I’d say, “I love you, too, Dad,” just hoping none of my friends were around.

Or we’d be watching TV. We always watched a show called
Rescue 911
in which people would be saved from various dangerous situations. Dad would be sitting there eating his mashed potatoes with big tears in his eyes. When I asked him why he was crying he said, “When I see that sort of thing, I put you or your sister in that situation and it just tears me up.”

I was Daddy’s little girl. I remember he used to read to me a lot. Oh gosh, I loved that! It was a big deal for me, and we did it, like, every night for years.

I liked it that he expressed himself. We’d be sitting around and suddenly he’d say, “You know, I really love you!” It’s great to have a father who’s not afraid to tell you that he loves you.

I also remember him crying during
Rescue 911
. We watched that all the time. You don’t expect to see your parents cry. It was kind of touching.

When something engages me, it engages me fully. I was never bothered when adults on
Rescue 911
were wounded and maimed. Any time a child was endangered, however, I could not watch with any sort of detachment, even when I knew the child was going to be okay. I had to get up and leave the room.

The other new addition to our family was Muffin the cat.

Growing up, I was always around cats, and I always talked to them, created personalities for them. When I got married and
found myself alone again, I returned to the habit. The fact that Beck was working so late every night in those years gave me lots of time to develop Muffin’s personality.

Beck filled his days up, and I talked to the cat.

She became another presence in our house, a coping mechanism, a way for us to communicate because we couldn’t talk directly to each other. Muffin, who was the meanest cat ever, became a release valve, a messenger, a foil. Through her we used humor as a conduit—it was going to be either humor or anger.

I basically got sucked into it because it was intriguing. There never has been a more inappropriately named animal than Muffin the cat. Vlad the Impaler was more like it. Demon seed. And that was the point. For sheer malevolence, black-furred Muffin was unequaled throughout her lifetime, a fifteen-or sixteen-year reign of terror broken only by her death.

Then would come Baby, who, if anything, was worse.

Muffin, in our elaborate fantasy, was incredibly worldly: a writer, a bon vivant and celebrity accustomed to dealing with the paparazzi. She moved in circles Peach and I only dreamed of. She brooked no insults whatsoever. Look at her cross-eyed and she lay teeth into you. She traveled by limousine and drank saucers of champagne and was always drunk.

This personality for Muffin just kept expanding and expanding. She wrote articles and books, was celebrated in
Southern Kitten
magazine.

We’d play out these scenarios. I, for instance, was constantly being sued because Muffin had laid into someone. So we had to have a full-time legal staff on retainer. She also hated Peach, and regarded her basically as the Woman Who Carries Me Around. Muffin wanted to know why I still had Peach under contract. Totally dismissive of her.

This feature of Muffin’s personality alone provided Peach ample latitude to slice and dice me, always with a smile.

Toward the end of her life, Muffin got into the dark arts, and started writing a book about demonology and spells. This helped explain bad things happening anywhere in the world, but especially in our family. Of course, Muffin would never do anything to harm
me
. However, if I got in the way of something else, it was just too damn bad.

We also acquired Missy, a little sheltie, in this period. Missy is as cute as she possibly could be. One day Meg put Missy on a leash to go show her off to the people across the street. Unfortunately for Missy, the family owned a huge rottweiler named Hannah, who blew through a chain-link fence, took Missy in her teeth and tore the poor little dog five ways from Sunday—with Meg still hanging on to her leash. It was astonishing that Missy was not killed.

We ran over, wrapped the dog in some towels and took her up to the vet, who stitched Missy back together. She came home looking like the Bride of Frankenstein—a mess. She couldn’t move, because everything hurt.

We didn’t want to leave her alone, so for the next few nights I slept with Missy on the kitchen floor. I think it was the second night that she was just able to move a little bit. Missy stood up,
quivering, and walked over and licked me on the nose. Then she lay down next to me.

After that moment, no matter how angry and tired everyone else got with Dad, I still knew that when I walked in the door, Missy would greet me as if I’d been gone forever, and had just returned with the lost treasures of the Orient.