To Die For (29 page)

Beverly tried to discipline Dana, and at the same time pay more attention to her, by laying out clothes for her to wear and fixing food for her to eat. But Dana interpreted that as a form of control. Whenever Beverly disciplined her, Dana would rebel by stealing money from Beverly's purse to buy candy, sometimes as much as $10 and $15. She liked Jolly Rancher and Pixy Sticks, and stashed it in her room. If Dana didn't have any money, she would steal candy or other food and hide it in her room to eat later.

When Beverly thought she was tucked away in bed, Dana would read Grimm's Fairy Tales, her favorite book, from cover to cover. Later, she fell in love with horror movies. She'd get up in the middle of the night to catch the 2-to-4 a.m. movies, preferring older movies that relied on suspense to slasher flicks. She liked good, scary stuff: monsters and sci-fi with genetically altered mutants. Her favorite was the werewolf, a powerful person you didn't want to piss off, because it could change into a fearsome beast and rip your lungs out. She saw every werewolf movie she could.

Dana's destructive behavior continued and, although she was bright, she didn't do well in school. She always thought the teachers were looking down their noses at her or trying to put her down. When she was in sixth grade, Dana and a friend defaced the homeroom of a teacher she didn't like. She got caught and spent weeks cleaning classrooms. Seventh grade brought more teachers that Dana didn't like. She thought they didn't like her either, so she ditched class. She became a banner carrier, one of the uniformed girls who walks in front of the marching band carrying the school's name on a banner, but was dismissed because she couldn't work with the rest of the team. She was suspended from school several times for forging notes to get out of class. With Rick, a young sky diver, Dana created a contraption to catapult neighborhood cats—outfitted with tiny parachutes—off the roof, so they would splash-land in their pool. They built their own makeshift high-dive platform from stacked orange crate boxes. One of the more dangerous stunts was to climb to the top of the rickety platform and kick off the top crate on the dive into the pool. Sometimes Dana got hurt, but she liked playing rough. Dana became an expert swimmer and excelled at softball. She got into a fight with another girl in sixth grade, claiming it was retaliation for a beating by the same girl. Dana admitted she'd cold-cocked her classmate, and said afterward, “It sure felt good. She beat the shit out of me and I got her, but I knew I would get in trouble.” Dana was suspended again. She said her mother took her to Baskin-Robbins, an ice cream parlor, to celebrate standing up to a bully.

Beverly was into Scientology and had a big poster in the kitchen listing the stages of development, with “apathy” at the bottom of the chart and “clear” at the top. She occasionally took Dana to meetings. Beverly was spending so much money for Scientology classes, which were required to progress in the organization, that she had to take in boarders to make some money. A man going through a divorce moved into a bedroom vacated by Craig, on tour with his band, and a couple of guys lived in a camper in their driveway.

Beverly didn't set the best example for an adolescent Dana. Threatened by her daughter's emerging beauty, she dressed in attention-getting outfits, dated aggressively and didn't shield her daughter from her private life. Beverly often skinny-dipped in their pool and stayed out all night dancing with girlfriends. One night, Dana and her best friend found Dana's mother and a local cop in the pool, with his boots, hoster, uniform and badge strewn around the house. Upset, Dana flipped on the harsh, bright pool and outside spotlights full blast and left them on. At 12 years old, Dana lost her virginity to one of the men living in the camper.

Craig's success in the band was paying off. He became the primary breadwinner for the family. In between gigs, he came home to mow the lawn, do repairs and help around the house. He tried to tie up the funds to ensure that the money was spent on household expenses, not Scientology courses.

Despite meager finances, they always had food in the house and Beverly's comedic, upbeat attitude lifted the household spirits. The divorced boarder, Michael Carpenter, was delighted by Dana's spirit. She dyed his undershorts purple and put a “For Sale—This Week's Special” sign on his car as a prank. He grew very attached to Dana and she regarded him as a surrogate father. Carpenter was delighted with Dana's antics and thought she was “full of the devil.” Beverly lifted Carpenter's spirits with her natural gift of comedy and inadvertently helped him get through a difficult divorce by showing him another side of life. She laughed away their unusual living arrangements and celebrated holidays like a patched-together family. Beverly tried to make Christmas and Halloween special by decorating the house and doing special things. On Christmas Eve, she would run a long thread of brightly colored yarn from their Christmas stockings to some gift in another part of the house or outside. One year, Dana got a redwood playhouse with windowboxes.

In seventh grade, Dana tried stealing earrings and perfume at the May Company department store, but she was caught immediately, and the store called her mother. Dana's activity skyrocketed when she got the moped. She and Carrie Ann would ride for fun after school, zipping up and down alleys and backstreets, being careful not to get caught again. They loved high-energy and edgy rock music—David Bowie, Frank Zappa, the Rolling Stones and Spirit. Sometimes Dana, Carrie Ann and Beverly would spend hours in the kitchen cooking sauteed mushrooms and French toast, talking and eating. When no one else was around, Beverly would give them each a glass of Champale, an inexpensive brand of wine. Dana and Carrie Ann became fast friends. They would run up to the mountains and hike around with Dana's dog. Carrie Ann's parents were more restrictive and she envied Dana because she had so much freedom. Dana craved independence and wanted to live life on the wild side. She resented being told what to do. When her mother tried to keep her in line and give her chores to do after school, Dana would explode in anger and there would be a high-pitched screaming match. Punishment didn't seem to work. If Dana was grounded, she would simply slip out of her bedroom window at night and return when she pleased.

Raising a teenaged girl with high spirits gave Beverly plenty of stress, but she had another problem—she'd found a lump in her breast. For some reason, Beverly interpreted the teachings of her new-found religion as reason to ignore the lump, but her health began to deteriorate and she quickly began to fade. Out of vanity, Beverly rejected getting a biopsy and, when her condition worsened, a mastectomy, but she eventually agreed to undergo chemotherapy. Her health was on a roller coaster. She would periodically improve and then deteriorate to the point of being bedridden. Then she would be up and around again. Craig hired a maid to take care of the household finances, buy groceries and clean the house.

The reality of having a terminally ill mother was beyond young Dana's ability to cope. Michael Carpenter had to drive them to the emergency room one evening. As her pale, weak mother awaited treatment, Dana raced up and down the hallway of the hospital with the wheelchair. When her mother entered a treatment room, Carpenter gathered Dana in his arms and told her to prepare herself for her mother's eventual death. Dana sobbed and they both cried together. To relieve the stress, he took Dana to dinner at a nice restaurant and Dana proceeded to order a cocktail. The waiter never flinched or asked her age, but Dana could pass for 18 at the time. Dana thought it was a big joke, but Michael was mortified. He knew that Dana liked putting him on the spot.

When Beverly was very ill, Dana would try to take care of her mother, getting her food and drinks and pills. Beverly suffered mood swings from the chemotheraphy and the abject horror of cancer. As a reasonably attractive and robust woman in her middle years, she shrank and shriveled into a shell of her former self as the cancer spread to her lungs and liver.

Beverly clung to life until Dana was 14. It was the summer between her freshman and sophomore high school years. Dana spent the evening in the hospital with her mother and asked Carrie Ann to go with her.

Carrie Ann thought Beverly was already dead. She was struggling to breathe. Dana sat by her bedside for a while to comfort her.

“Let go, Mom. It's OK. I will be all right. Let go. Just let go.”

*   *   *

Dana didn't last two years at her father's house. Russell had married again, to a woman named Yvonne, but Dana didn't like her new step-mother, nor did she like Yvonne's daughter, Cathy, with whom she had to share a room. Russell and Yvonne had plenty of money and a beautiful, spacious home in Dana Point, an upper-class beach city. Dana spent a year in a depression. Losing her mother was a combination of extreme pain and relief, and she struggled with her feelings, alternately loving and hating Beverly. Dana thought her mother was an asshole for being promiscuous and not paying enough attention to her.

Because of the move to Dana Point, Dana had changed high schools and now attended Newport Harbor High School—when she felt like it. Her brother Rick saw his little sister having trouble and introduced her to his hobby of sky-diving. He took her up in an airplane for a spectator ride. Thousands of feet in the air, Dana looked down from the plane, her eyes wide, and he asked her what she thought. She said she wanted to jump. And when she did, she outjumped him. Dana was hooked. At 16, Dana had disarmingly light blue eyes, sun-kissed good looks and a figure that turned heads, but she preferred sky-diving to dating. Dana had some hair-raising experiences with sky-diving, but she considered the possibility of losing her life part of the adventure. Months after she took up the sport, she collided with another sky-diver and their gear became tangled in a free fall, thousands of feet in the air. As the seconds ticked away, they frantically tried to get their equipment to open up. Finally, about 400 feet from the ground, her reserve chute suddenly opened and she drifted slowly down to earth. Dana didn't regret the collision. At that young age, she was so absorbed with the sport that she didn't mind dying her way, on her own terms. She had skipped school that day and that experience intoxicated her with being in charge of her destiny.

At the same time, she and her new-found sky-diving friends were experimenting with drugs. When Yvonne discovered marijuana in the room that Dana and Cathy shared, Russell confronted both of them and told them that they were forbidden to bring drugs into the house. But by this time, Dana had her own life. She moved out of her father's house and moved in with Rob Beaudry, her 23-year-old jumpmaster. She managed to graduate from Newport Harbor High School in 1976. In the yearbook, she answered a question about her favorite pastime with “Getting into trouble.” Her favorite place to be? “In free fall.”

The relationship with Rob centered around sports, primarily sky-diving. With the stamina, coordination and fiercely competitive drive of an athlete, Dana quickly mastered windsurfing, wave sailing, hang-gliding, water skiing and scuba diving. A year after moving out of the house, she invited her father to dinner for his birthday. Before dinner, she and Rob drove him to the airport, outfitted him with an emergency parachute and stuck him in the jumpmaster seat of the plane, and up they went. Dana and Rob clambered out under the wing of the plane and leaped off, did a few stunts and landed smack on the target in the drop zone. Dana felt happy to see the look of pride and admiration on her father's face—she was able to share her adventurous lifestyle with him and get his approval. She was particularly happy that her “evil stepmother,” Yvonne, was left at home.

Rob helped Dana through nursing school at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. She had hated the way the nurses at the hospital treated her when her mother was dying and wanted to become a nurse so that she could demonstrate kindness to patients and their relatives. It took her five years to get her associate of arts degree in nursing.

She and Rob stayed together for several years and became engaged, but Dana decided she didn't want to rush into marriage when she was still so young. She had become pregnant twice and he convinced her to end the pregnancies, even though Dana wanted children. She loved him, but she knew that she would always resent him for that.

In 1981, just after she'd received her nursing degree, a group of sky-divers decided to take the ultimate challenge: sky-dive into the Grand Canyon, a spectacular—and illegal—thrill. They plotted and planned and took practice jumps for months before flying to Colorado for the secret jump. Because conditions were dangerous and volatile, many of the divers missed the drop zone, including Dana and two others, who were arrested and hauled off to court. Their gear was confiscated and they had to pay a fine, but Dana looked back on that as one of the greatest moments in her life.

For the next five years, she was in a volatile, on-again, off-again relationship with Chris Dodson, an excellent windsurfer. Sports kept them together. They would go to Hawaii three times a year just to go sailing and play golf and traveled to Oregon for sailing competitions. Though they were great at sports, they were crummy at having a relationship. Both hot-headed and competitive, neither one would back down during a fight. Inevitably, Dana moved out and, while she was dating a paramedic, met Evan Campbell, a Scotsman, who also was involved with someone else. Smitten with Dana, he took her to Hawaii for three weeks of hang-gliding, sky-diving and golfing. He returned to his girlfriend, but he and Dana remained friends and stayed in touch.

In 1986, Russell married Jeri. Shortly after, Dana moved into their house with them in Canyon Lake for several months to figure out her next move. She had been working as a nurse at the nearby Corona Community Hospital since 1981, a few weeks after getting her state nursing license. Over the years, she had held down positions in obstetrics and the emergency room, and had assisted in the operating room, which she preferred.