Trapped (2 page)

Chapter Three

Lisa Cooke’s mother, Sandy, came from a strong family tradition of abuse. She, like her brothers and sisters, carried the “that’s the way it is” imprint, and, at an early age, she could see the festering anger that would allow the passage of this noble practice into the next generation.

I could never do that
, Sandy thought,
I couldn’t hurt a fly.

Paralyzed with fear, Sandy endured Rudy’s lessons on wifely behavior, and suffered as a silent spectator to her daughter’s cruel beatings.

Lisa’s bruises had attracted the attention of school officials, but each inquiry by the principal or Sheriff Manning only made the abuse worse.

Finally, the sheriff
had forced Rudy into an anger management program in lieu of a month in jail, but no program—not even a well-intended one—could overcome his malevolence and lack of insight.

After one of Lisa’s worst beatings, while she wept in her mother’s arms, Sandy
had voiced the feeble excuses that Lisa had heard too many times before. “It’s just the booze. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Then, there was the worst one; the one that nearly made her puke. “Don’t take it personal. He really loves you; he just doesn’t know how to show it.”

“Oh please,
Mother, how can you believe that?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly. I know what he’s done to you. I won’t let that happen to me.”

“Don’t be cruel. He has his problems, you know.”

“Leave him before he kills one of us.”

Sandy cowered
, as if Lisa had threatened her with a whip. “I can’t do that. Where would we go? What would I do? What would we live on?”

“What does it matter? We can’t go on this way
…at least I can’t. I don’t want to be cruel, Mother; but if you don’t respect yourself, okay, but you should give a damn about me.”

“Don’t talk to me that way. I’m still your mother.”

The one thing that Lisa Cooke had taken from her last beating and hospitalization was that Rudy Cooke had gone too far. Sandy wore her motherly concern as a badge of honor, even as she stood witness to Rudy’s brutality toward her family. At the end, however, she had rallied to save Lisa’s life.

When Lisa
awoke in the emergency room, she barely managed to open her left eye. “Mother, I can’t see out of my right eye.”

“It’s swelled shut,” Sandy said.

Lisa groaned with pain as she pulled herself up, and opened the bedside stand drawer. The mirror showed her eggplant-purple face with lumps and abrasions. Above her left eyebrow, they’d closed a two-inch laceration. Her lips were swollen to twice their normal size, and someone had put in a line of ugly black stitches on her lower lip from the midline to the right corner of her mouth.

After Rudy reached the hospital, the emergency head CT scan had revealed a collection of blood between his skull and the brain, a subdural hematoma. The neurosurgeon took him immediately to the operating room, and evacuated six ounces of blood and clots that were squeezing his brain. He remained in a coma for four days, and when he awoke, he could barely move his right side. During the weeks that followed, he made improvement, but even after vigorous rehabilitation and physical therapy, he could walk only with a cane, and had limited use of his right arm.

When they finally discharged Rudy from the hospital, he no longer felt the need to constrain his viciousness.

His memory was intact, but he processed information slowly
, and became easily confused and angered. The stroke had left his face flat on one side, and kept his mouth in a permanent sneer. In addition, his injuries removed the few inhibitions that he’d had in the first place, unleashing his vile mouth as his weapon of choice, an effective substitute for physical abuse.

“You should have killed the son-of-a-bitch,” Lisa said
, as Sandy waited on Rudy hand and foot. She was never able to satisfy his demands, and wallowed in the icy waters of her guilt.

Sandy and Lisa sat at the kitchen table eating the split pea soup they’d made together. Rudy’s slurred voice resounded from the family room where he remained glued in his La-Z-Boy chair
before the TV. “This…tastes…like…shit,” he slurred and growled. A moment later, they jumped, startled by the crash of china on the hardwood floor.

When they entered the family room, Rudy sneered, and then smiled.
“Clean…up…that…crap,” he sputtered, and then proceeded slowly, “and get me something decent to eat.”

“Clean it
up, yourself,” Lisa shouted. “Mother’s not your slave.”

“It’s okay, darling,” Sandy said. “I’ll get my
broom and mop.”

Lisa had observed Rudy closely, and had concluded that he could do more than he was willing to admit. Rudy, broken by his physical and sexual impotence, had only Sandy’s enslavement to
use for his revenge.

Lisa Cooke felt wonderful as she sped under the bright midday sun along historic route 49 toward Grass Valley. The windows of the old Wagoneer were open wide as was her throttle. She wove through traffic, and often crossed the double white lines. When she approached Le Barr Meadows, she looked in her rear view mirror to the flashing red lights of the sheriff’s patrol car.

“Shit!”

She drove a bit farther, hoping the lights were for someone else, but then the siren made it clear that she’d been busted—again.

Lisa pulled to the side of the road
, and glanced in her side-view mirror. Herman Manning stepped out of his car, stretched his broad body, and walked toward the driver’s door.

Crap. Not again
, she thought, a
nyone, but Herman
.

Lisa looked through her window at Herman’s black belt,
his pistol, handcuffs, and the tuft of twenty-plus keys.

“Don’t give me any of your bullshit explanations, Lisa,” the sheriff said. “What the hell’s the matter with you? If you want to kill yourself before you reach your seventeenth birthday, be my guest, but why is it necessary to take a bunch of innocent people with you?”

She shrank into her seat. “I wasn’t going to…”

“License and registration, Miss.”

“Herman, you know me, I was just passing to…”

“License and registration.”

She fumbled through her purse, found her wallet, and showed him her California driver’s license.

“Remove it please, and hand it to me, Miss.”

After she had rummaged through the glove compartment for the registration, and had given it to the sheriff, he stood looking at the two documents. “Follow me, Miss Cooke. Maybe I can impress you more with a visit to jail than I can with speeding tickets.”

“Herman, please. Sandy’s going to kill me.”

“Good, then she’ll save me the trouble. I’ve had it with you.”

Three hours later, Herman sat with Sandy in his office. It reeked of burnt coffee and cigars. The sheriff sat behind his ancient oak desk, which was scattered with folders, paper-clipped stacks of loose documents, and reports. Governor Brown’s portrait hung between the American and the Californian flags. Wanted posters and lookout announcements covered two large bulletin boards. They could see Lisa through the bars of her cell across the way.

“This time, she’s gone too far, Sandy. It wasn’t only
speeding—we’ve seen plenty of that from your daughter, already—no, this time, she almost killed herself and several others with her reckless driving.”

“She hasn’t had it easy, Herman.”

“I know, but I’ve given her all the slack I can.”He hesitated for a moment, and then continued. “I really like Lisa. It’s as if she’s my own daughter. I’m no psychiatrist, but with all she’s been through with Rudy, it wouldn’t surprise me that something emotional is going on. I call it self-destructive, thrill-seeking behavior, Sandy. She needs help.”

“Oh, Herman, don’t make such a big deal about it. She’s just a kid.”

Rudy and Sandy
, the sheriff thought.
What a twosome
.

“She needs someone to talk to
, a professional who can help her deal with the scars of being Rudy’s daughter. Don’t fight me on this, Sandy, or I’ll ask the court to remove Lisa from your home.”

“Whatever you say, Sheriff,” she shrugged.

Lisa discovered no simple answers to her complicated problems, but she found in individual and group therapy understanding an
d acceptance, as well as a sense of control that she’d never before experienced.

Lisa invested all of her time toward one goal
, getting away from that house. She was an excellent student, but she redoubled her efforts to improve her grades, added to her extracurricular activities, and scanned through the library and the Internet for scholarship opportunities.

In the first week of the New Year, when Lisa arrived home from school, Sandy said, “You have mail from California State University, Chico.”

Lisa stared at the envelope, said a small prayer, and then tore it open. Her hands trembled as she read, “Congratulations. The CSU Chico School of Nursing has accepted your Application for Admission.”
The letter went on to state that they were offering Lisa a scholarship that would cut her tuition and room and board by eighty percent. It would also arrange for a loan to cover the remainder of the five-year RN program.

She showed Sandy the letter, and they embraced.

“I know this is going to be difficult for you, Mother, but this is my chance.”

Sandy wept as she again embraced her daughter. “You’ve earned every bit of it, Lisa. I couldn’t be any happier. Don’t worry about me
; I’ll be fine.”

Sixty-two miles to Chico
,
Lisa
,
thought, a
great divide…like crossing a desert to an oasis of freedom.

“It’s your turn, Dr. Cooper,” said Elias Cass, a brilliant, but obnoxious general surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.

Mike Cooper was
now in his last year of medical school. Dr. Cass had seated Mike in the corner of the operating room, gowned and gloved, with a sterile towel over his hands.

As he approached the table, Elias looked up at the six-foot
, eight inch tall, two hundred and fifty pound Mike, and said, “My God, man. You want to be a pediatrician? For a man your size, we all look like kids.”

Mike looked down at Cass.
And some act like kids
, he thought, but said nothing.

Elias turned to the circulating nurse. “Bring in a step platform for me and anyone else who needs to keep up with our giant friend
, here.”

“You’re excused now, Cheryl,” Elias said to the medical student across the table. “Take her place, Dr. Cooper.”

Cass’s use of the word, “doctor” for a medical student, sounded like an insult.

A
gifted surgeon, Cass was known as well for his inflated ego, his insensitivity to anyone’s feelings, and his temper tirades, which included the launching of surgical instruments around the room.

His gifts notwithstanding, Cass was the antithesis of what Mike aspired to be as a physician
, and as a man.

When Mike came to his position, Cass said, “Are you ready to assist, Doctor?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Open those ham hocks
that you call hands, and grab these retractors.”

When Mike opened his hands, Cass smacked the two stainless retractors into
them.

This is one sick man,
Mike thought.

Cass positioned the retractors
, one under the abdominal wall, and the other under the right lobe of the liver. “Maybe I can get some decent exposure for a change with King Kong here.”

Mike watched with fascination as the virtuoso hands moved over the surgical field
, while the attached mouth chattered away about the anatomy and pathology that they were seeing, but he never missed an opportunity to criticize his surgical resident or the nurses.

Cass was nearing
the completion of his resection of part of the liver, when he said, “Good work, Dr. Cooper. At last, someone with the strength to give me the exposure I need. I may ask you to join us, again.”

Great.

Cass looked at Mike for a reaction, and, seeing none, said, “Let’s see how those paws work.”

He turned to the resident. “Give Dr. Cooper your scissors
, so he can cut the sutures as I tie them.”

The stainless steel instrument looked small in Mike’s palm as he forced his fingers into the loops.

“You can manage this small task, can’t you, Doctor?”

Mike felt himself flushing. “Certainly, Dr. Cass. How do you want me to cut the sutures,
too long, or too short?”