And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (18 page)

He made no mention of having Nancy neurologically tested. I guess he didn't feel there was any need for it.

I spent every day and night with Nancy over the next five months. Much of the time I was on the telephone trying to locate her school records, trying to find a school to place her in.

I wasn't having an easy time. I called private schools all over the country. They were prohibitively expensive—some as high as $20,000 per year, which was Frank's entire income. The state of Pennsylvania did operate schools for disturbed children, with sliding-scale fees based on income, but it seemed that Nancy's circumstances were unique. She didn't fit the model of the emotionally disturbed child: usually, children who exhibited behavior like hers were also learning-disabled. The state schools weren't equipped to offer any education beyond the level she'd already reached. There just didn't seem to be any school that fit Nancy's problem. So I kept looking.

She found some of the brochures one day and got so upset that Frank and I were “sending her away” that I had to begin hiding the brochures and applications under the underwear in my dresser, and making whatever phone calls I needed to make before nine thirty in the morning, when she got up.

She rarely went outside. Mostly, she read and listened to raw, hard rock albums in her room. Once, when I was cleaning up her room, I found a piece of paper on the floor that she'd scrawled a note on. Evidently, it held significance for her:

She was still fighting, just like the day I saw her in her isolette in the hospital nursery, screaming and kicking at some unseen enemy. I wished I could help her, but I didn't know how.

The shark nightmares were becoming a regular occurrence now. I sat with her practically every night when she woke up screaming. Then they began to spill over into the daylight. She began to see sharks all over the house, even when she was wide-awake.

Once I found her in the den, trying to crawl under the couch.

“They wanna eat me!” she screamed. “They wanna eat me!”

I sat her down on the couch and tried to calm her. She began to bang her head against the wall and pull her hair out. She was wild-eyed. I pinned her arms down and spoke to her. After a few minutes she came out of her hallucination. She looked at me gravely.

“Mommy,” she said, “I want to die. Let me die. Please.”

“I love you, Nancy,” I said. “I don't want you to die.”

“If you loved me you'd let me.”

I hugged her helplessly. She pushed me away.

“I wish I'd never been born,” she said.

A few minutes later I found her going through my medicine chest, collecting what was left of some old prescriptions for muscle relaxants, cold pills, painkillers.

“Nancy, what are you doing?” I cried. “Give me those.”

She gave them up without a struggle. She'd collected about eight or nine pills.

“You don't love me,” she said woodenly. She walked away. I threw out all of the pills in the house.

She spoke to her psychiatrist that week about the sharks. “They want to kill me,” she explained to him, simply.

He asked her why. She had no explanation.

But verbalizing the hallucination to her psychiatrist did seem to have an effect. The shark attacks seemed to diminish over the next few days—only to be replaced by something far worse.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Suzy and David were playing in the living room. Nancy and I were watching TV in the den. Frank had gone out on an errand.

“This is a dumb movie,” Nancy said abruptly. “Let's go to the Franklin Institute.”

“It's too late,” I pointed out. “The science museum closes in half an hour.”

“I
want
to go,” she repeated.

“No,” I repeated.

At that moment I looked down at the coffee table. David had been trying to fix something and had left a hammer there. Nancy saw me looking at it, grabbed it before I could stop her. She hefted it in her hand and smirked. “Take me or I'll kill you.”

“Give me the hammer, Nancy,” I said sternly, trying hard not to let her know that I was afraid, for the first time, that she might actually hurt me.

“Take me or I'll kill you,” she said.

“You won't.”

“I
will
!”

“You
won't
.”

She struck me hard on the shoulder with the hammer. It gave me a jolt down to my fingertips. Then she did it again.

“Stop that! Give me that hammer!”

She struck me on the arm. I fought the pain and went for her. I tried to wrench the hammer away from her, but I couldn't get it out of her grasp. She may have been five inches shorter than I was, but she outweighed me by ten pounds and was filled with animal fury. We began to wrestle. She struck me repeatedly on the shoulders and arms. I couldn't overpower her. It took both my hands to grab hold of the arm that was striking me with the hammer, and when I did grab it she began to punch me in the chest with the other fist. I wouldn't let go. I didn't know if she was capable of killing me or not, but I didn't want to find out. She was in a blind rage. She didn't see me.

Far away, I could hear the sound of Suzy and David playing and giggling innocently. I thought about calling them for help, but they were smaller than I was—they could be seriously hurt. I didn't call.

I held her off for an hour or longer. She just wouldn't quit. I was reaching the point of exhaustion. My battered arms were losing their strength. But I had to hold out just a little longer, until Frank got home. I just had to hold on, hold on.

At last I heard Frank's car pull up. His car door closed. The front door opened.

“I'm home!” he yelled cheerfully.

“Frank!”
I screamed.

He rushed in, wrestled the hammer away from her, and threw it into the hall. She began to punch and claw and kick at him, totally out of control. He overpowered her, put her down on the floor in a wrestling hold, face down. He put his knee in her back to contain
her. She continued to whip around and curse and snarl.

Suzy and David watched from the doorway, cowering in fear. I just lay there on the floor, panting.

“Are you okay?” Frank asked me, straining to hold her down.

“Uh-huh,” I gasped. “Just in … just in time.”

“Can you phone?”

I nodded, crawled over to the telephone, and dialed the psychiatrist at home. I hoarsely related what happened. He could barely hear me over Nancy's screams.

“Lock her in a room,” he advised. “Lock her somewhere where she can't hurt herself and let her get all of that anger out.”

“None of the bedrooms lock from the outside,” I said.

“Oh … how about a punching bag? You got a punching bag?”

“A what?”

“Something she can punch.”

“Just me.”

“How about the basement? Can she hurt herself down there?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Put her down there. Call me when she quiets down.”

Frank pulled Nancy kicking and screaming to her feet and into the kitchen. He took her halfway down the basement steps, released her, ran up the steps, and locked the door. We stood in the kitchen, watching the door and waiting. She ran up the steps and began to pound on it with her fists.

“Let me out, you motherfuckers!” she screamed through the locked door. “Don't do this to me! Don't do this to me, you bastards! You motherfucking bastards!”

She kept pounding and kicking at the door. She began to slam at it with her shoulder. The frame strained against her weight and I was afraid it might give way.

She gave up on the door. She ran screaming down the steps and began to throw open the storage cupboards down there. She pulled out cartons and suitcases and the lawn furniture and hurled all of it to the floor. She destroyed the furniture, broke lamps, broke the luggage, ripped our winter coats into shreds, ripped the boxes up. She destroyed the entire basement. The rampage went on for two hours, interrupted only by an occasional run up the steps to throw herself against the door.

Then it was quiet.

We unlocked the door and tiptoed warily down the steps. Nancy was sprawled across the rubble of our belongings, spent. She was
gasping for breath, her body quivering. Frank carried her to her room and put her to bed.

I called the psychiatrist. “We have to do something.” I cried. “We can't live like this.”

“Calm down,” he said. “I know that. I've been on the phone trying to find a hospital for her. But she's too young—none of the psychiatric hospitals take children, not even the one I'm on staff at.”

“So what do we do?”

“I'll keep working on them. In the meantime our only alternative is to put her on heavy medication to keep her calm.”

I drove to the drugstore, the bruises on my arms beginning to throb. I picked up a prescription for Thorazine, a very powerful tranquilizer. Then I came home and collapsed.

The Thorazine did the job, if you call turning Nancy into a vegetable doing the job. The drug put her in a perpetual zombie state, neither awake nor asleep.

During the day she just sat on the den couch and stared at the TV, absorbing none of it. Occasionally her head would droop over to the side and she would be asleep.

At night she wandered around the house in a stupor. I slept with one eye open. I could see her doorway from my side of the bed. When she was up, I was up. One night she went in the kitchen. I heard the kitchen drawers being opened and shut. I followed her in there. She was calmly gathering up all of the knives.

“Where are you going with those, Nancy?”

“To stab them,” she replied dreamily.

“Stab who?”

“Them. The brother and the sister.”

I took the knives away from her—she was so stoned that she was really quite docile. I suggested she go back to bed. She obeyed.

From that night on I ordered Suzy and David to sleep with their bedroom doors locked from the inside.

Another night I found her in the den, slowly collecting things and piling them onto one another in the middle of the den floor—a few encyclopedia volumes, a lampshade, some paintings off the wall. She hummed while she worked, eerily humming in a singsong manner those exact same melodies she'd sung the night of her Atarax attack, songs like “Happy Birthday” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

“What are you doing, Nancy?”

“They don't like me,” she explained softly.

“Let's put them back. Then maybe they'll like you.”

“Gee, you think so, Mommy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay.” She began to put everything back.

“And then we'll go back to bed.”

“Okay,” she said meekly.

This was a stranger. This wasn't Nancy.

Whenever she came out of her stupor and became herself again, she immediately began to pull her hair out, bang her head, and scream, “Help me! Help me! Put me somewhere! Help me!” After fifteen minutes of this she would fall asleep.

It broke my heart to see her either way, but these were the only two choices.

Finally her psychiatrist came through. He persuaded the Psychiatric Center (which was, ironically, affiliated with the clinic we had taken her to) to admit Nancy to their adolescent unit, even though she was too young. He told us to meet him there at seven thirty that night. We agreed.

Frank and I sat Nancy down. We told her she'd asked us for help and that we were going to take her to a hospital so she could get it.

She didn't fight it. She seemed relieved, actually.

I packed some things for her. When it was time to leave, she followed us meekly to the car and got in. It was a damp, cold night, the night before Thanksgiving, when we drove to the hospital. Christmas decorations were up on the houses in the neighborhood. The lights were on inside the houses. It looked warm in each one.

We were committing our child to a mental hospital. It was incomprehensible that it had come to this, but it had. There was no alternative. Thorazine was certainly no answer. She had to be put somewhere. For her safety, and for the safety of the rest of the family. She could not live in the house anymore in this condition.

The psychiatrist who admitted Nancy to the adolescent ward was wearing cufflinks that didn't match. I don't remember much else. I didn't hear a word he said. He led my daughter away.

Then Frank and I drove home. We didn't speak. To talk meant to admit aloud what we knew to be true: our dream had died that night. By giving our first baby to the mental hospital, we'd given that up, too. The life we'd wanted for Nancy and for ourselves when she was born, the future we'd planned, was never going to happen. We knew it. There was no need to talk about it, no desire to talk about it.

The next day I made a turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed
potatoes, and apple pie. The four of us sat down to Thanksgiving dinner and tried not to look at Nancy's empty place at the dinner table. None of us ate much.

Our family had died that night, too.

The next day there were visiting hours at the mental hospital. Frank and I went to see Nancy. We were issued passes at the front desk and took them to the adolescent ward. The nurse there checked our passes, led us down the hall to a different door—the one that led to the locked women's ward. She began to unlock the outer door with a key attached to her belt.

“Wait,” I said. “There must be a mistake. Our daughter is in the adolescent ward.”

“Your daughter is in here,” she replied calmly.

“No she's
not,”
I insisted.

“Please
follow me,” she said.

She took us through one locked door, then another and another until we arrived in a large, central room with several doorways that led off to the lockup rooms. The room was dark and dingy and there were benches running along the walls. One woman was sitting on a bench, staring straight ahead. Several sat there shouting to themselves. One woman was standing and urinating on the floor. Another lay face down on the tile floor, mumbling. It was like something out of the Middle Ages.