Epilogue
Count All This — Final Chapter: after the butterflies
Just when Jo Kasten’s son encounters schizophrenia, she discovers she has breast cancer. Meanwhile, her marriage faces a test. Count All This is a story about love and loyalty, addiction and madness. This is the last of its 27 chapters. Find the first one here.
After the radical mastectomy, and after the first frightening chemo, and after my hair started coming out of my head in handfuls, but before a hideous cold sore flowered on my lip for a week, Rose suggested that we spend a day together. “Let’s do something, Mom,” she said sweetly in October. So we came up with a plan.
“You know what I’d really like to do?” I replied with some enthusiasm — the new, lower-quality enthusiasm I’d been generating since starting chemo. “I’d really like to drive down to Santa Cruz to see the Monarch butterflies. I’ve heard they stop there every year on their way to Mexico, but I’ve never had time off in October to go.”
Rose arrived by BART the day before our excursion and spent the night in her old room so we could get an early start. Larry would be working and Michael had to go to school, so the plan was for us to adventure alone and then come home for dinner after our day on the coast. But then, in the morning, just as we were getting into the car, Eddy showed up in a surprising big black cowboy hat, so we invited him to join. I wasn’t sure if I was happy about that — or not.
“You have to sit in the back seat,” I told him, half hoping he’d decide not to come. “And you have to do what I say. This is supposed to be my day, my treat from Rose, so no fair trying to talk me into something I don’t want to do.”
“Okay,” he submitted without argument, which was completely out of character. I didn’t know what to think.
After being released from the psych ward the second time, Eddy had found a place to live with roommates and re-enrolled in UC Berkeley, which everyone figured must mean that he was doing okay. But we weren’t sure. He wasn’t good about checking in or answering his phone. He was secretive, not willing to discuss his medications or treatment. And we started to wonder if maybe we were in for a long haul.
After he squeezed into the back seat, we took off. Rose was in the driver’s seat. I sat in the passenger seat with a scarf over my head to keep my last few hairs from falling out. We planned to take the beautiful route — the Pacific Coast Highway. As soon as we got to Highway 92, the two-lane road over the Santa Cruz mountains that winds up to the summit and then down to Half Moon Bay through fields of pumpkins and flowers and Christmas trees, we came into traffic — a long line of cars creeping behind a big truck which couldn’t accelerate uphill. We settled in for a lengthy ride.
“How are you doing, Mom?” Rose asked.
“I’m okay, I guess.”
“Is the chemo difficult?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like?”
“I already told you, Rose.” I looked out of the window, tapping my knuckle on the glass. “The chemicals they put into me stink, and they’re scary. One is bright red, like Kool-aid — I get two huge cylinders full of that. The nurse couldn’t get the needle into my vein the first time. Your father cried.”
The car was quiet after that.
That week at the infusion center, Larry and I had met an emaciated woman with lung cancer who’d been given only a short time to live. She’d already exceeded expectations. “My doctor calls me the Engergizer Bunny, because I just keep ticking,” she said.
We were in one of the three private rooms when we had that conversation, choosing privacy over the community infusion room with six or seven big reclining chairs, a television, a nurses’ station, and a constant flurry of activity.
The private rooms had two flat beds each and two chairs, for helpers. After we settled in on one, the woman with lung cancer arrived in a wheelchair and needed help getting up onto her bed. Her toes, I noticed, were twisted. Her toenails were painted pink.
After introductions — when we shared information about our diagnoses, prognoses, and medications — she spent most of the four hours it took to infuse me nodding off. But after waking suddenly one time she turned her head on the pillow. “I can’t sleep at night,” she told me softly. “I leave the television on to keep me company. There doesn’t even have to be a show on. Just the sound of static is comforting.”
Her husband, seated at the foot of her bed in the helper chair, nodded his head. It was covered with bright brown hair. The woman’s head was covered with a gray turban.
“You lie awake and wonder.”
When we reached Half Moon Bay on the coast, we stopped at Caffino, a little drive-through coffee stand. I had a chai latte. Rose had hot chocolate with whipped cream. Eddy said he wasn’t thirsty. He was subdued, lacking animation. I felt worried about him, but also determined to enjoy the day. On the counter in the window was a tip jar with the label “Instant Karma.”
“I’ll take some instant karma, too,” I told Rose, handing her a dollar more.
With our coffees in hand, we turned left on Highway 1 and headed down the Coast. We were in farm country, and the two-lane road was surrounded by fields of baled hay, bright pumpkins, and tall shivering corn backlit by the mighty Pacific Ocean on the right. The enormous sky was gray and overcast, the vast ocean roiling.
The coastline between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz is the most beautiful stretch of road that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve driven down it every summer for more than 20 years. But the experience of being a passenger was unfamiliar. Normally, I had to divide my attention between the scenery and the traffic. That day, I could sit back and enjoy the freedom to devote all my attention to the view.
“The ocean is my mother,” I murmured to Rose. She nodded. She’d heard me say that before.
It wasn’t until we were about five miles out of Half Moon Bay that Rose revealed her ulterior motive for taking me on this day trip. She hadn’t suggested it just to spend time with me. “I’m taking a class on female sexuality, and I have a project due on body image,” she began.
“Umhumm.”
“So I brought my movie camera.”
“Yeah?” That got my attention. I sat up in my seat.
“And I want you to film me walking naked down the side of the highway.”
“What?!?!”
She laughed mischievously. “You heard me.”
“Rose, you can’t do that! We’ll get arrested.”
“Oh, come on, Mom. It’ll be fun! There aren’t any policemen out here.”
“No, Rose,” I tried to use a stern voice. “I really don’t like this idea — at all. Something bad could happen. Someone might pull over and attack you. Or get into an accident. They could be so distracted by the sight of you walking naked down the highway that they drive off the road.”
“Mom, be serious. That’s not going to happen. There‘s nobody out here.”
“NO, ROSE. It’s crazy!”
“Mom…” Her tone was disdainful.
“Hold on a minute. Let’s think about this together. There’s got to be another way to complete the assignment. What was your whole idea?”
“Well, first I thought I’d take some videos of me walking naked along Highway 1…” she paused to give me a big, teasing smile.
“Then I’d do a voice over about how I feel about my body. Then I want to interview you about what you said to me about sex when I was becoming a teenager, how my body was my own and you wouldn’t try to control it. Because that was so cool, Mom, and had such a big influence on me — on how I feel about myself and on how I turned out as a woman.”
Was she buttering me up? I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate, but it sure was working. I felt a pleasant waft of pride. “I’m so glad to hear that, Rose. Really, I am. And I’d love to help you with this project. I’d be honored to be interviewed for your film. But I don’t want to do anything crazy or illegal. I’m feeling too vulnerable right now. If something bad happened, I don’t think I could handle it.”
Just then a sign advertising a corn maze appeared on the side of the road. It was the third sign I’d seen for the attraction, but the first time that I’d paid any attention. “Corn maze…” I muttered, trying to rein in a frisky idea. “Corn maze…That’s it! We can do it in the corn maze! That would look great on film, and it will be private. No one will see us.”
“You think so?” The entrance was approaching.
“Turn left at this driveway. Turn left! Turn left!”
The corn maze turned out to be enormous — two square miles, according to a sign— and cost five dollars a person to get in. I didn’t mind paying. I felt like I’d averted a disaster by pulling the project off the road.
Rose was excited at the prospect of filming. Eddy followed us mutely, in a dreamy, passive state. Was he taking too much medication? He was so quiet, so unlike himself. Then again, he was easier to deal with as a passive zombie than when he was running amok.
First, we gathered our stuff out of the car: two cameras, a water bottle, my headscarf, wallet, and keys. The proprietor was a small, grizzled man wearing a greasy cowboy hat and smoking an unfiltered cigarette. Who knew Eddy’s strange cowboy hat would be perfectly appropriate on this trip? I nervously located the entrance sign and, a ways off to the right, the exit.
“Can we just go in a little ways and then come back out the entrance?” I asked, already feeling claustrophobic. “We just want to take some pictures. We don’t want to go all the way through.”
“What are the pictures for?”
“Nothing special. Just family. Just mementos.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you can do whatever you want to in there, as long as you pay me. Just mind you don’t get lost.” He gave me a malicious look as I surveyed the field.
Outside the maze some bales of hay were arranged to make a play area for children. An oversized scarecrow stood guard over the scene. There was a family on the bales — a mother and father with a toddler and a baby in a stroller — and a few random children darting in and out of the exit from the maze. A few other families were picking through the pumpkin patch, looking for the perfect ones for Halloween. The maze itself didn’t seem to have any customers at the moment. That suited us fine. We hurried inside.
After turning the first corner, I took up the camera. Rose ran ahead to the end of the path, slipped off her jacket and dropped it mischievously on the ground before disappearing around the next corner. Eddy and I stumbled after.
“Perfect! That was perfect, Rose, but could you do it again? I’m not sure I got the shot.”
As we moved through the maze, we fell into a rhythm. Rose was the actress. I was the creative director. And Eddy was the prop boy, carrying the growing pile of her dropped clothing and acting as a lookout in case any strangers came up from the rear.
At the end of the second row, Rose kicked off each one of her shoes. Next off came her socks, then her shirt, then her pants, as we followed her deeper and deeper into the maze.
I started to feel we were under a spell, being lured by a corn sprite in a fairy tale, getting farther and farther away from the real world as she discarded another item at every turn. After throwing off her lacy black bra, she took off her last stitch of clothing, white panties, and gave a little leap of joy before disappearing around a corner again.
I had to stop then, to smile at Rose’s leap. She looked so much like me! It felt like a blessing and a foretelling of the future — a good, healthy future — to see her whole, sound body frolicking in the corn.
Eddy and I stood stupid together for a moment. But then we heard a group of teenagers approach. The two of us ran forward and Rose scurried back to snatch up her clothing, barely getting her pants on and shirt over her shoulders before they rounded the corner and tumbled into us.
After the filming, we continued south on Highway 1, excited and satisfied with our excellent efforts on Rose’s film project. And the day was just started! We arrived in Santa Cruz after noon and headed straight to Natural Bridges State Park, which hugs the cliffs along the beachfront north of the Boardwalk.
The park attendant who took our money said not many butterflies had arrived yet, and even suggested it might not be worth the price of admission, but I wanted to go in. Because, who knew? I might not get another opportunity.
After paying the fee, we proceeded along a wood-plank path marked with butterfly symbols. And when I noticed one or two flutter past, I thought we had seen what the park had to give. But then a breeze kicked up, and the long brown vines hanging down from the trees suddenly bloomed bright orange. That’s when we realized that hundreds of butterflies were hanging in vertical strands all around us. We had mistaken them for leaves, since the undersides of their brilliant wings are brown.
Rose cried out in excitement at the first revelation, and ran off down one of the paths, looking up. Eddy and I walked slowly after. Seeing his broad back hulking before me on the path, and feeling my own liquid legs below, I thought of Frankenstein’s monster, or Beowulf’s gruesome Grendel, the dread night monarch astir in his cave. But both of them suffered from isolation. At least we have company in our deformity. At least there are two of us.
After the butterflies, we drove down West Cliff Drive to see the statue of a surfer with his crazy long board, pulling over to spend some time watching his more modern counterparts riding the waves. Rose and I stood near a rail set back from a fat cliff covered with iceplant that dropped off to sharp rocks 30 feet below. Behind us was a grassy meadow where white folding chairs were being set up for a wedding.
Eddy was lying on the grass with his arms behind his head when a strong gust grabbed his black cowboy hat, lifting it off his head and depositing it on the iceplant on the other side of the rail. He quickly jumped up and tried to leap over the rail, holding the top rail with both hands as he swung his legs over the side. It was the kind of jump I had seen him make a hundred times — the kind of jump he could have easily completed just one year before. But today, his foot caught and he sprawled on the slippery iceplant, landing hard close to the edge of the cliff.
“Eddy, stop!” I shrieked.
“Come back Eddy,” Rose coaxed. “Just forget it.”
Rose and I waited anxiously on our side of the fence, not daring to say anything more, afraid of provoking an unexpected reaction. The hat sat still on the edge of the cliff, as if taunting Eddy, and he was slowly turning his sluggish body toward it when it lifted up abruptly and dashed down into the sea. Thank god.
Rose and I exhaled a huge breath of relief.
I grabbed Eddy’s hand when he climbed back over the railing and squeezed it — hard. He squeezed mine back. Then we were all safely buckled into the car. This time I took the wheel.
The sun was setting as we retraced our route, driving north on Highway 1, with the gorgeous blue ocean and orange sky spread over the left. The car was warm and cozy. Rose and I talked, just a little, about how glad Michael would be to have both his brother and sister home, and what Dad might be cooking us for dinner.
When we got to Half Moon Bay, we found Highway 92 so clogged with traffic that the cars snaking in an interminable line up the hill were standing stock still. “Let’s not go that way,” Rose suggested. “Let’s go up through Pacifica and around.”
So I drove much farther north than I had planned to, past Mavericks, past Miramar, past Devil’s Slide, traveling far afield in the darkening night, feeling flustered and lost, taking strange and arduous pathways till we found our way home.
That was the last chapter of my novel, Count All This. To read the whole book, follow the free chapter links below or buy a digital copy of it on Amazon, where leaving a rating or review will help others find my story.
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