And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (29 page)

It was hard—
very
hard—to remember she was ill. She couldn't help herself. She wasn't responsible for her actions. No, that kind of perspective didn't come easy. Self-pity did.

How could she do such a thing to us? Where would it end? How much worse would it get?

Frank got to Boulder on Saturday afternoon. Pending a Monday morning juvenile hearing, Nancy was released from the detention home to Frank's custody. She was the only juvenile involved in the case.

“You
believe
those bastards?” she demanded. “Blaming
me?
I didn't do a thing. They had no right.”

“Didn't you suspect anything when those guys wanted to put all those skis in your room?” Frank asked.

“No, why should I?”

Frank checked them into a Sheraton for the weekend. At this point there was nothing they could do but wait. Same with me. I called Janet, Susan, and my mother and told them Nancy had been arrested. They were very supportive, said if we needed anything—including money—to just ask. I took Suzy and David for a drive. And I paced a lot. Now that it looked like Frank wouldn't be back on Monday morning, I made arrangements to get a ride to the hospital.

Nancy's lawyer told them to report to his office on Monday morning. When they got there, a juvenile officer and the lawyer were conferring. Frank was asked to join them and Nancy was told to wait outside for a few minutes.

Then the juvenile officer informed Frank that Nancy had managed to get herself involved in something very serious—much more serious than the other charge. She had bought drugs from somebody and that somebody was in actuality an undercover federal agent. It was only a small part of a large Boulder drug operation. The investigators had infiltrated it and were almost ready to shut it down—almost, but not quite. They needed about two more months before they'd know who the main dealers were. They were not that interested in Nancy. They felt she was a harmless kid who'd been influenced by her peers. Their undercover operation was the important thing. They didn't want it blown. Frank was informed that if Nancy left school and Boulder immediately the ski theft charge would be held in abeyance for a year and then expunged from her record. In addition there would be no federal warrant issued.

Frank really had no choice. If he didn't accept the deal and take her home, she'd be left subject to prosecution. But Frank couldn't tell her that the real reason for leaving Boulder was the federal drug bust.

They brought Nancy in. The attorney and the juvenile officer informed her that she was being expelled and that she had to leave Boulder immediately to avoid prosecution on the ski theft charges. She blew. She went into a blinding, red-faced rage.

“You can't do this to me, you fucking goddamned cocksuckers!”
she screamed. “
I didn't do anything wrong! I didn't do anything wrong!”

As usual, she refused to accept any blame for her actions.

“You piece of shit! How could you fuck over your own daughter! You bastard! I hate you! God, I hate your fucking guts!”

A horrible burden had been placed on Frank. He had to be the
bad guy. Nancy couldn't know why she was being taken out of school. She hated him for it and never forgave him. He finally told her the truth after the drug operation had been shut down, but it was too late. Her dream world had been destroyed. As far as she was concerned, Frank had done it.

He got seats on a Tuesday morning flight to Philadelphia and helped her pack her belongings. She was totally uncooperative. She punished Frank by flatly refusing to speak to him. I felt Frank's pain deeply when he phoned to tell me what happened and I wished I could be with him to absorb some of it. We were stronger when we were together. But he had to suffer it alone.

I was driven to the hospital that afternoon. For selfish reasons, I wished Nancy hadn't done such a foolish thing so that Frank could be with me. Suzy and David were left on their own, too. They made their own dinner that night, did their homework, and waited for Frank and Nancy's return.

Frank called me at the hospital when they got in on Tuesday afternoon.

“Well, I packed her up and got her here,” he said, sounding upset and harassed. “She hasn't said a single goddamned word to me since the hearing. She's up in her room. I'll be by as soon as I can.”

I decided not to have the surgery. Frank needed me too much. So did Nancy. With her home under these circumstances, there was no way I could be laid up in the hospital for several weeks after surgery. I called Frank right back and told him to come and get me at once. I could hear the relief in his voice. Then I had my surgeon paged. While I waited for him, I got out of bed, threw off my hospital gown, and put on my clothes. When the surgeon came, I told him I was clearing out. He was furious but I didn't care. Frank and I had to see this thing through with Nancy together. When Frank got there, we clung to each other for a long time. Then he picked up my suitcase and we took off.

I never went back for the surgery. It turned out later that the diagnosis had been wrong and it wasn't necessary.

She was up in her room sitting on her bed when I got home, very depressed, surrounded by unpacked cartons and suitcases. I gave her a hug. She didn't return it.

“Tell him to get the fuck out of my room,” she said quietly.

Frank was standing in the doorway. I motioned for him to leave us. He did, clearly hurting inside.

“Why won't you talk to Daddy?” I asked her.

“He's an evil scumbag.”

“No, he's not. He loves you.”

She said nothing.

“Can't you at least talk to him?”

“Never.”

“You can go to school somewhere else, you know. There are other schools besides Colorado.”

“There's no point,” she said quietly.

“Why not?”

“Because I'm gonna die before I'm twenty-one. I'm gonna go out in a blaze of glory. Like … like,
headlines
.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I just am. It's something I know. For sure.”

It was no surprise to me that she wanted to die, but her reference to headlines baffled me. I couldn't imagine what she could possibly do to make someone want to put her death in the newspaper.

Nancy's return from Colorado was the turning point of her life. Never again did I see the slightest ray of light. She had genuinely believed she was well enough to function in the real world with regular people—without us, without Darlington. Now she knew she couldn't. Her failure in Colorado meant she had to admit to herself that she wasn't like other people, that she really
was
a sickie. For her, this was the last straw. No more dreams. No more will to live. The episode left her purposeless. It left her with nothing to do or be or believe in. Her only commitment now was to death. She took the fast lane so she could get it over with as soon as possible. It took her four years to fulfill her prophecy.

For us, Nancy's failure in Colorado meant she was back home again, ours. The burden was back on us. I was petrified. How were we going to be able to handle her? She was as bad or worse than before. But what could we do? We couldn't close our home to her, could we? We didn't know what we were going to do, how we were going to cope. All we knew for certain was that she would take control of the house again—at a time when Suzy and David were coming of age, in need of room to grow, to be free of her influence, to have friends, to have a life. Was there any hope? Any alternative? The only thought that occurred to us was to try hospitalizing her with Dr. Cott, now that she was free of Darlington. But she would never stand for it. The mere mention of his name sent her into a rage. We would have to physically drag her there, incarcerate her.

We didn't know what we were going to do.

She sat on her bed all afternoon that first day she came home. She wouldn't unpack. It was as if unpacking were an admission that she was really home. She didn't come down for dinner. That evening she unpacked her stereo and put a record on. Then she dressed up in one of her ski outfits and came down the stairs to model it. She wore red, iridescent skin-tight ski pants with a matching sweater, yellow ski boots, and yellow mirrored sunglasses. She seemed very proud of the outfit. She posed and smiled so David could take her picture. Then she went back in her room, piled all of her ski clothes and boots together and dropped them over the bannister to the floor of the entry hall. They landed with a thud.

“Nancy!” I called up the stairs. “What do you want me to do with all of this?”

“Get rid of it!” She slammed her bedroom door.

She never mentioned skiing again. It was as if she had never skied. She never mentioned Colorado, either. As far as she was concerned, it didn't exist.

She didn't do any more unpacking the next morning, just sat there on her bed, head down. I stayed home from work to be with her.

“Do you want me to help you unpack, sweetheart?” I asked her.

“I wanna die.”

I noticed that her right hand was closed, as if she were clutching something.

“I'm gonna do it now,” she said.

She opened her hand. She had some Valium my doctor had given me, about eight of them.

“You're wasting your time,” I said. “Those won't kill you. You can't OD on Valium.”

“I can't?”

“No.” I held my hand out. “Give them to me.”

She did. I flushed them down the toilet. She stretched out and stared at the ceiling, morose. I sat on the edge of the bed.

“Nancy, have you thought about what you want to do now that you're home?”

“Yeah, I wanna—”

“Besides die.”

“No.”

“You don't want to go back to school?”

“No.”

“How about working? What would you think about getting a job?”

“Okay.” She shrugged.

“Okay?”
I asked, surprised.

“May as well make some money.” She sighed. “I don't care.”

That afternoon I loaned her my car, a four-year-old Volvo, and she made the rounds of the nearby malls. She found a part-time job at a clothing store, starting the next day, which we thought was a step in the right direction. That night Linda and a couple of the boys from the neighborhood came over and sat in her room with her with the door closed. We thought that
wasn't
a step in the right direction, but we had to allow her some freedom.

She had to use my car to get to her job. I wasn't too crazy about that idea, but I wasn't using it during the day—I took the train to work. So we let her have it. She worked on Friday and Saturday afternoons. On Saturday night she asked us if she could use the car to go out for a pizza with Linda and two boys. One of the boys was named Stephen. He was a musician. I don't remember the other's name.

We had some qualms, but we said okay. After all, we couldn't lock her in her room. We reminded her that she had to be home by midnight as a condition of her Pennsylvania junior driver's license. In the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds are not allowed to drive past midnight. She promised to be home by twelve.

The phone woke me at two a.m. It was a Philadelphia policeman. Nancy had wrecked the car on her way home from a downtown rock club. She had never gone to the local pizza parlor. She'd driven off the side of an expressway ramp, rolled three times down a twenty-foot embankment, and landed upright on the road below. Miraculously, no one had been seriously hurt.

Nancy was being held at a police station in Philadelphia. She was apparently under arrest, though the policeman was vague as to what the charges were—beyond driving after midnight. She had been tested for drunk driving; she was not drunk. The test revealed a .03 alcohol level in her blood, equal to about half a glass of beer and well below the level that constitutes drunk driving, which is .10. No drugs were found in her system.

She got on the phone.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Of course I'm okay,” she replied angrily. “The cop's a liar. I just bent the fender is all. A fucking bent fender. Get me out of this hellhole, will ya?”

The policeman got back on. He said that because Nancy was a minor, she would have to be processed by the Philadelphia Juvenile Aid Division. Since we were not residents of Philadelphia County, she could not be released into our custody without the presence of a juvenile aid officer. It was a Saturday night. The officers were swamped with arrests. None were available.

As a result, Nancy was held in a cell until six a.m., when she was transferred by paddy wagon to the Youth Study Center, Philadelphia's juvenile detention center.

We waited there in the parking lot with our lawyer for the paddy wagon, not having slept a wink since getting the phone call. It had been some week: Nancy had been arrested twice and had destroyed our car. I wondered if I had a breaking point, or if I would just keep bending. At that moment I didn't think I could take too much more. There was no more emotion left in either of us. We were burned out, defeated