Loved and Wanted by Christa Parravani

Author:Christa Parravani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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MID-OCTOBER 2001. CARA ran her dog in the woods, down by the Connecticut River. Tents pitched the river’s bank, a small city of people down on their luck.

A man approached Cara on the path. He carried a stick, held it over his head, and brought the stick down, cracking Cara’s skull. He dragged Cara onto a secluded path. He smashed her teeth. He tore her clothes. He held a broken bottle to her throat. He used her body until she felt it no longer belonged to her. In the wake of the rape and all it cost her, Cara suffered crippling anxiety and depression. She was rage filled. She turned that rage inward.

I wrote an entire book about grieving Cara. What is one girl without the other; half of who she might be. My loss was packaged and published into something past tense—a thing with a beginning, middle, and end; sisterhood, life-exploding trauma, a new chance. I gave the world a book. I lost some privacy.

Now I know a story never ends. It changes shape.

In the last days of Cara’s life, five years after she was raped, we weren’t speaking. I caught her shooting heroin in my bathroom. I asked her to leave. On the morning she died, seven days later, I woke with a feeling of terrible remorse. I’d abandoned my sister. I’d left her thinking I didn’t want her in my life. All I ever wanted was for the sober her to come back to me.

I dialed Cara’s number right after breakfast. She didn’t answer. I kept calling. I called more than thirty times. She never answered. She was already gone.

Readers often ask me what I think would’ve happened to Cara had the rape never happened. Do they want to hear that regardless of the attack, Cara would have died? Nobody wants to believe they might also stand on the blade between sanity and madness, or that one event can tip fate. I tell them what I believe: I imagine if Cara hadn’t been raped, she’d be a married mother living in suburbia now. That’s what she most wanted, to be able to choose those things.

What happened to her was a matter of place and time. Sometimes I thought she bore some responsibility for the attack by having been in those unsafe woods in the first place.

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