The Girl Behind the Door (19 page)

Hidden by the people in front of me, I watched as she broke off her conversation, turned around, and craned her neck in my direction. She spotted me in the crowd, lit up, and didn't hide her face. Instead she waved excitedly in my direction.

I must have been starved for her affection like a lovesick boy, because all I could think about was that she'd acknowledged me. I contemplated for a moment the years of fighting, the ugliness, the crying, the worrying, and the hurtful words. But all she had to do was acknowledge my existence as her dad in a crowd and I'd forget everything.

She'd be fine.

I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.

I
n the days following that horrific morning in January 2008—just weeks after the concert at Old St. Hilary's—I'd become obsessed with a single question:

Why?

I drifted through each day and went to bed each night thinking about her, torturing myself with guilt, drowning in soul-crushing grief. Sometimes, as if a protective mechanism in my brain had kicked in, I imagined that this was all a dream. I'd wake up to find her asleep in her room. Then I'd suffer a jolt to the chest.

The Coast Guard called off the search for her body after just two days; something about the currents being too strong—the ocean would be Casey's grave.

I felt a reflexive gag as I wrote her obituary.

I endlessly relived and dissected the events of the weekend before her death. Erika and I had both been fighting with Casey, starting with something seemingly trivial—a rude remark or refusal to clean up after herself; I hardly even remember. Things spun out of control. As tension mounted between us, Casey had spat out,
“Asshole! Motherfucker!”
She threatened to run away and live on the streets.

And my response? I got in her face and yelled at her like a drill sergeant,
“Good! Go ahead!”
I slammed her door, leaving her alone in her room, sobbing convulsively.

Later that night, I passed through the living room on my way to bed. She sat curled up on the sofa, staring hard at the TV, her eyes red and swollen from crying. We exchanged frosty glances.

And that was the last time I saw her.

That last ugly exchange screamed through my head. If I hadn't yelled at her, she might not have been so upset. If I hadn't ignored her on my way to bed, I might have thought twice, taken back my harsh words, and told her I didn't mean those nasty things. If I hadn't slept that extra half hour the next morning, I might have gotten to her room sooner, seen the note, and alerted the police in time.

But I did none of those things.

We'd had knock-down, drag-out fights since Casey was in grade school and they never ended in a catastrophe like this. She'd usually stomp off to her room. There were no clues that weekend that could have shed light on how she'd shifted so suddenly from “infuriated at Dad” to suicidal.

Some people suspected that drugs had played a role in Casey's suicide, but Erika and I had doubts. Despite our numerous busts, we'd never seen her out-of-control stoned or drunk, and she'd never been to rehab. She wasn't on any prescription medication at the time and wasn't out partying Monday night. Early Tuesday morning, she managed to drive the Saab to the bridge. The last video images captured her smoking a cigarette and jogging out onto the pedestrian walkway—not exactly the kind of behavior I'd associate with someone high on drugs. She easily climbed over that four-foot railing and, according to the police report, stood for ten to fifteen seconds before stepping off to her death. What could have gone through her mind in those crucial seconds before she made that fatal choice?

Casey's friends were as shell-shocked as we were. After her memorial service at St. Stephen's Church in Belvedere, an event that drew an overflow crowd, there was a reception in the parish hall. It was an awkward affair, with other parents struggling for words. It seemed we'd become separated by a glass wall. Was it pity, empathy, judgment, or terror that was in their faces? We couldn't tell. Perhaps the suicide of a child was just too toxic for people to handle. It raised the horrifying specter of contagion.

As the adults drifted away, Casey's friends circled around us. The collateral damage from her death was etched into their faces. They seemed to be looking for something from us. Perhaps they wanted to talk.

“Do you guys know anything about why she did it?” I asked.

They shook their heads and mumbled a collective “No.”

Why would she have kept her closest friends in the dark? “I don't get it. She was so close to freedom. I thought that's what she wanted.”

Everyone stared at the floor until her friend Julian spoke. “I don't think that Casey had any intention of going to Bennington.”

Erika and I exchanged startled glances. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

“It's hard to explain,” he said. “I think she just wanted to prove to herself and everyone else that she could get in.”

Julian made an interesting point. But why would someone get what they wanted and then throw it all away?

After the memorial, we learned that Casey had chatted online late that Monday night with two childhood friends, Carly and Maryse.

Casey and Carly, both procrastinators, commiserated about deadlines for school projects they hadn't yet started. Later, Casey and Maryse griped about how much they hated school and about getting together over February break.

It began as a typical late-night talk that took an unusual turn. Casey talked about how lucky they were to live in Marin and then asked Maryse if she believed in reincarnation, claiming that she would probably be reincarnated into something
really shitty.
Within six hours of that conversation, Casey was dead.

I searched for more clues on her laptop, a hand-me-down gift from Erika and me for her sixteenth birthday. Most of the documents were homework assignments—an essay about a boy named Andrew titled “Andrew Is a Boring Fuck,” some research articles she had pulled off the Web for A.P. History, a report on a book about the Depression that she had borrowed from me, the paper on the Eiffel Tower I edited for her that she claimed to have deleted, then ripped up and pieced back together. Almost no personal things, such as diaries, letters, or photographs. It was as if she'd made sure to eliminate anything that could have helped us understand what she was thinking, removing every trace of her emotional life.

I used one of her friends' passwords to get onto her Facebook page. Feeling like a voyeur reading what I wasn't supposed to see, I looked at her profile:

About Me: Acts paradoxically; hugs trees; could out-sarcastic you.
Casey had a jagged wit. She was the master of the bitter jibe or cutting remark in a very
Seinfeld-
esque kind of way.

Interested in: Men.
Since she was in middle school, we'd suspected that she'd never had a boyfriend nor, to our knowledge, any sexual encounter beyond maybe a kiss. It seemed so unusual for such a beautiful girl.

Religious Views: Atheist without the negative connotations.
In Casey's mind, there was no God watching over her.

I was stunned to find dozens of pictures of Casey in the Photos section that I'd never seen. There was Casey hamming it up, dancing, smoking, and drinking beer at a party we weren't supposed to know about. In another photo, she sat in a lush meadow wearing a sleeveless black slip dress and flip-flops, the deep green of the tall grass around her standing in stark contrast to her blond hair and pale skin.

One series of pictures showed her walking through graffiti-covered cement batteries from World War II in the Marin Headlands. They reminded me of the abandoned buildings and cemeteries my friends and I sought for quirky photo shoots when we were her age.

There were photographs of Casey dressed in a short-sleeved dark purple dress and worn, untied Keds walking pensively around an abandoned construction site for some gaudy mansion in Belvedere. In the distance, the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge were visible.

On her Facebook wall, she and her friends talked about homework, weekend plans, people they hated, their despicable parents, along with some reefer and random trash talk.

Duuude, fuck me and my busy shittyness, where do you want to go to lunch on Thursday?

Your comments to Julian are way sketch.

Yo, Niggah, wanna chill tonight?

I hit the Wall-to-Wall feature so I could read Casey's responses to her friends' posts:

I don't get along with my mother at ALL. We are the same or opposites. I can't decide.
I'd often thought the source of their friction was the fact that both were so much alike—stubborn and argumentative.

On the 26th my parents will be gone. Dude you should come over here and smoke cigarettes.
That was her reference to the overnight trip Erika and I took out of town after Christmas when she asked permission for “a few” friends to come over.

I might get kicked out of the house when I turn 18 'cause my crying bothers my parents a lot.
Did her friends even know about her tantrums?