Her Doctor's Orders (12 page)

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Levi replied. “That part you can fix, and that part gets better. You just have to want it to get better, and I know you really do want that.”

Kendra clung tightly to him. “I love you, Levi,” she said.

* * *

At breakfast the next morning, Levi said as they were washing the dishes, “Kendra, I want to make sure you keep working on understanding that nothing that happened the night of the accident was your fault.”

“Oh, you know… I’m working on it,” she said, feeling her face turn red and looking away at a corner of the counter.

“That’s not very convincing,” Levi said. “Tell me why you think it was your fault.”

“Well…” Kendra thought hard. It was a lot easier when you didn’t have to think, but she knew Levi was right, so she tried to put the dread that had lived at the bottom of her heart for so long into words, as she pictured the car in her dream exploding. “Well, I had this feeling that night… and even though I had it, I didn’t even try to stop my mom from going out. I mean, I even remember praying a little—but if instead of praying I’d
done
something, and… I don’t know, kept her in…”

“But how could you have done that?”

“I don’t know. I just did the wrong thing.”

The dishes were done, and now they were just standing next to each other. Kendra knew Levi was looking at her, but she couldn’t turn to look at him.

Suddenly she blurted out, “What if you spanked me?”

“What?” Levi asked.

“What if you spanked me, for not getting over it? I mean, I’ve been totally fucking up my life for three years now, because I couldn’t let go of this idea that it was my fault. Don’t I deserve some kind of punishment for that?”

Now she finally turned to Levi and looked up at him. His eyes had the look they got when he was pondering an important question, weighing the merits on either side. As she saw him come to a decision, she loved the knowledge that she could read his face that way.

He gave a brief nod. “Kendra, I want you to go to the corner of the living room, next to the couch, and put your nose in the corner. You are going to think about how your failure to work on your guilt has caused you to spin your wheels and waste your intellect for the past three years.”

To her surprise, Kendra found that she had begun to smile at the thought of this humiliation. It wasn’t a laughing kind of smile, where she had to struggle to keep a straight face; the smile felt to her like an irrepressible ray of sunshine had just lanced through the gloom.

“Yes, sir,” she said, since it felt so natural to call him that, sometimes. She turned and went to the corner, and put her nose toward it, almost touching the wall. She heard Levi coming up behind her, and then he was reaching around to unfasten the button on her jeans. Despite the ray of sunshine, she felt her cheeks getting hot as he pulled them down to her knees, and then pulled her panties down on top of them.

“Are you thinking about what I asked you to think about?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hope having your bottom bared this way reminds you that we need to feel ashamed of not using our talents wisely.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then he left for a few moments. She wondered if he had gone to get something with which to spank her, and then tried to do as he had told her, and began to think about the relationship between her guilt about the accident and all the things she had done wrong since then. She had let the guilty thoughts take hold so thoroughly at school that she had never had a chance there. Then, when she had come back to New Mexico, she had gone in the opposite direction, and refused even to think about anything except the day to day. That was how the drinking had started, and how the thing with Bob had started. ‘Just live’ had been her motto, and all because she refused to work on her guilt.

Levi had taken a seat on the couch. After a few minutes, he said, “Come here, Kendra, and get yourself over my lap with your face to the cushion and your feet on the floor.”

Kendra shuffled over toward him, risking only a single glance at Levi’s face, and seeing it stern but also kindly, as he watched her. He held a big, long wooden spoon that made her tremble when she saw it. Awkwardly, she assumed the position he had commanded, stretching her arms out in front of her to grasp the far corners of the cushion.

“While I spank you,” she heard his voice say sternly from above her, “I want you think about the night of the accident, and I want you to think about whose fault it really was.”

Then he struck her with the spoon, very hard, on her right bottom cheek. Kendra yelped at the sting of it, but Levi began to spank her steadily, alternating between bottom cheeks, and, because the spoon’s end was small, between locations. The sensation seemed to communicate to Kendra the idea that Levi would be thorough with her; there was no part of her bottom or her thighs that would escape his attention this morning. Kendra made little puppy whines, a new one for each smack of the hard spoon.

He stopped, and Kendra wondered if the spanking was over, but Levi said, “Tell me what you could have done that night, Kendra.”

The question was confusing, but then Kendra realized that Levi intended it to be confusing. Before she could piece it together, though, he had started to spank her again, more slowly. As he did so, he spoke again, “Tell me what you could have done, Kendra, to stop it from happening.”

“Ow!” Kendra said. The fourth or fifth time the spoon caught a place, it really stung.

“Tell me,” Levi said again, still spanking her steadily. Now Kendra started to cry, the tears falling down in a pool on the leather of the couch. She gripped the cushion hard, realizing she knew what the answer to the question was but that there was a resistance in her to saying it.

“Ow!”

“Kendra, I’m not going to stop spanking you until you answer the question. What could you have done?”

“Oh, God,” Kendra said, sobbing now, not just from the pain of the spanking but from the years of built-up grief. “Nothing… nothing.”

Levi stopped hitting her with the spoon, and now he was rubbing, with his wonderful big hand, there. “That’s right, sweetheart. That’s exactly right.”

He stroked her hair, her back, and then her bottom again, while Kendra just kept crying. Then, gently, he raised her up and took her into his lap, and held her tight. When her sobs had gone, and she was just breathing into his chest, loving him, he said softly, “You’re going to stop blaming yourself for what your mother did. It isn’t your fault, and it never was your fault. Your mom was wrong, and all the blame is hers.”

Kendra nodded against his chest.

“I’m not going to let you blame yourself anymore. The next time I catch you blaming yourself, or not working on something because you tell yourself you’re worthless so why bother, you’re going to go right back over my lap, and I’m going to spank you again.”

Then to Kendra’s surprise he did coax her back into the position she had been in before and, with his hand, he began to spank her again. “Like this,” he said, and kept spanking her.

Somehow, having him give her another spanking right after the spoon-spanking seemed to tell her on a level beyond words that he meant what he said. He would spank Kendra when she needed it, and he would know, and she would know that she couldn’t blame herself anymore.

* * *

She went to visit her mother in prison the next day. It was an hour drive that took her past Tucumcari, where she grew up, and Jack’s—the roadhouse bar where, when she got back from the failed semester in LA, Bob had bought her drinks because she was still underage. The sight of those places seemed to galvanize Kendra; she had finally begun to move ahead, with Levi’s help.

That feeling of progress evaporated when she saw the face of her mother, who was crying even before she sat down across the Plexiglas. Everything Levi had said, everything Kendra had been able to articulate, vanished. Kendra closed her eyes and looked down, trying to summon back the words she had planned to say. “Mom,” she had been going to say. “I need you to know that I love you, and I want to forgive you.”

Kendra felt like she almost had the words ready, when she opened her eyes and saw that her mother had the phone receiver in her hand, and wore an expression of desperate sorrow—the same kind of sorrow her face had worn after the news that Tom had been killed reached them. Lori’s brown hair was clipped short, and her slightly pudgy face, seeming to reflect Kendra’s own like some nightmarish aging mirror, made Kendra want to scream to be released from prison herself, even though she was the one who was supposed to be free.

Kendra felt her own face crumple, and seemed to watch the words she planned to say vanish without a trace. She picked up the phone.

“I’m so sorry, Kendra,” Lori Jackson said. “I’m so sorry.”

Kendra didn’t know why Lori saying she was sorry was the very worst thing her mother could have said. She found that she couldn’t even look at Lori’s mask of grief, and turned her face down to the dirty prison desk.

It’s not about you, Mom
. That was it. Lori seemed to be making this about her, about her grief, and not about what she had done to Kendra—how she had ruined Kendra’s life.

Kendra heard the sobbing in her ear, and turned her eyes back to Lori. Suddenly Kendra’s own grief turned into a terrible anger, the most negative emotion she had felt since she had met Levi. “Mom, I just came…” she managed to get out, in a voice that sounded foreign, so filled was it with fury. “I just came to tell you that I…” Kendra fought so hard with the urge to say “don’t hate you” and even with the urge to say “hate you” that she felt like her head would explode.

“To tell you that I love you. I…”

Lori said, “I love you too. I love you too, honey.”

Kendra closed her eyes, feeling angry even that her mother was telling her that she loved her. She opened them again and set her mouth in a tight line, looking into Lori’s weeping eyes.

“I’ll see you soon. I promise,” Kendra managed, and hung up the phone. She stood and walked away.

Kendra’s hands were shaking as she drove away. She didn’t want to think. Thinking only made it worse. She had to stop thinking.

She pulled into the parking lot of Jack’s, where Bob had bought her the drinks, three years before—the place where the downward spiral had begun. How appropriate. She texted Chloe.
Come to Jack’s. Your turn. I’m buying.

Chloe found Kendra four tequila shots in. “Kendra, what the fuck?” she said.

“Don’ ask,” Kendra replied.

“No, seriously, what the fuck?”

“If I say ‘Mom’ will you jus’ drink with me, please?” Chloe was looking a little blurry, which suited Kendra just fine.

“Oh, honey, what happened?” Chloe tried to hug Kendra, but Kendra pushed her away, losing her balance a little as she did so.

“Not tellin’. Drink.”

Chloe’s face got worried. “Okay,” she said. “I’m just going to go to the bathroom, first.”

Levi arrived twenty minutes later. Suddenly, Levi was standing next to her at the bar—the way things just seem to happen without preamble, when you’re really drunk. “Kendra,” he said, his face angrier than Kendra had ever seen it, “can you stand?”

Kendra shot Chloe a drunken, venomous look. “Kendra,” Chloe said, “you need him. You can’t see yourself right now.”

“We’ll leave your truck here, and get it tomorrow,” Levi said. “I’m not going to ask you what you were thinking, because it’s clear you weren’t.”

“Nope,” Kendra said proudly. “Didn’ wan’ to think, so didn’ think.” She tried to stand up, and nearly fell over. Levi grabbed her around the waist and started to drag her toward the door. Kendra saw him look at Chloe.

“Thanks, Chloe,” Levi said. “It means a lot to me, and I think sometime it will mean a lot to Kendra, too.”

Chapter Twelve

All the way home, Kendra kept trying to tell Levi, in a drunken way that somehow both made him angrier and made him love her more, about how she had decided not to think, and he couldn’t make her think.

“Nope. No thinkin’ for Kendra Jackson.”

“Well,” Levi said, with determination. “We’re going to change that tomorrow. You’re going to think about the choice you made, and you’re going to regret it.”

“Nope. No thinkin’. Jus’ drinkin.” Kendra giggled.

Levi managed to get the brief, sad tale of the prison visit out of Kendra in between her protestations that she wasn’t going to tell him. Her drunkenness blunted the pain of the memory; at least, it seemed to. He began to plan a Saturday of caring for Kendra, and of holding her accountable for the choice to drink under such foolish circumstances.

Levi poured Kendra into bed, on her side, around 8:00, having forced two glasses of water on her. He even had to lay her on the bed and undress her almost against her will, at which point Kendra began to claim that she didn’t deserve him, and he had to stop being nice to her.

“Don’ do that!” she kept saying. “I’m not worth anything.” When he gave her the water, she said, “Why should I?”

Levi replied patiently, “So you don’t have a terrible hangover in the morning.”

Kendra pushed the glass away. “Deserve a terrible hangover.”

“That may be true,” Levi said, “but I’m going to do my best to make you sorrier about what you did than a hangover ever could.”

He took her hand and pulled her to the bedroom, then laid her, as gently as he could, on the bed with her feet dangling off it, and started to try to get her ready for bed.

“Don’ do that,” she said, as he unfastened the button on her jeans. She tried, drunkenly, to squirm away from him. “Stop doin’ stuff for me. Jus’ stop.”

Levi sighed. “Kendra, do I have to spank you to get you into your PJs? I will—you know that.”

“Forge’ ‘bout that,” Kendra said, squirming further up the bed.

Now Levi felt his anger rising again. “Come here, Kendra,” he said.

“No,” Kendra said, shaking her head wildly. Somehow she managed to slur even so short a word.