My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  My friend Randi drove in from Washington to visit once, and she got to witness an even rarer treat—this time, not only did Laurie give me the finger, but she threw in a bonus: she stuck her tongue out at me. I hadn’t realized adults even did that.

  I began seeing a new therapist, as I didn’t feel I was making much progress. Dr. Fulton had been the same doctor we had seen with Nick when he was angry with us because we weren’t letting him see Ben. There were still those memories lingering in his office; I could still see Nick’s reactions in that room. Dr. Fulton primarily treated children and teens; he didn’t specialize in grief therapy.

  Parents of Murdered Children recommended Dr. Larry Schulte, who was trained in treating grieving parents. The first few sessions were on my own terms. Depending on how I was doing that day, I showed up late, or stayed past the point when he told me our time was up, or left early. I felt very at home with him very quickly, and although I wasn’t consciously trying to step over his boundaries, I was just trying to get my own needs met. Some days it was too much to handle, and others, I needed to just talk until all the talking was done.

  At the end of one of my first sessions, I casually mentioned that my last therapist would have said that my drinking was a problem. Then I left, wanting him to figure out how to deal with that before our next session. He asked me about it. I smiled and said, “No one, not even you, Dr. Schulte, will get me to quit drinking.”

  It was a challenge. Of course I knew my drinking was out of control, but I also felt very justified. No one was going to say that I didn’t have the right—the undeniable right—to get as drunk as I wanted to every day of the rest of my life if that’s how I managed to get through the days. And yet, it was a problem. I knew it. Although I was saying the exact opposite, I just wanted someone to shake me and make me change. And if Dr. Schulte had pushed me in the beginning, I would have just walked out. He had the right touch, though, letting me get away with just enough but still acknowledging that he saw things we would need to work on.

  Some days, I would arrive early and just fling myself on his floor; he didn’t have much of a waiting room, which he kept apologizing for. But there I’d be, half drunk and half coherent, trying to find a place of stability to check in when he opened the door. I managed to fly just under the radar; if he had realized I was drunk, he never would have let me drive home.

  Some days, I was able to summon up anger, a feeling that was usually overshadowed by depression and confusion. Anger was a better feeling because it was active; the depression just made me want to hide in my house all day, whereas at least the anger propelled me to get back out there and hunt for Jesse James Hollywood.

  Anxiety attacks rendered me housebound on and off, but my anger gave me the will to keep fighting. I attended a retirement party for someone I didn’t even know, just because someone told me that important people would be there. So I went with a stack of “Wanted” cards and key chains in memory of Nick. I handed them out to police officers and the president of the city council. Everything I passed out was a new possibility, I reminded myself. Maybe this would be the person who would finally find Hollywood and bring him to justice.

  For the third anniversary of Nick’s death, we paid four hundred dollars for a memorial in the Santa Barbara News-Press. It included a poem I wrote, plus an essay that Nick had written for his Hebrew school:Acts of Loving Kindness By Nick Markowitz, age fourteen

  Everyone has an obligation in this world to make it nicer for everyone else. I wouldn’t consider myself a good example, but at least I know what I should be doing. . . .

  Giving money, gifts, or even your time to another individual can brighten up their day and give them a great impression of you. Giving respect and love can often be the best gift of all, as it not only enlightens the person with physical things, but emotional as well.

  Even though it is expected of us all, I would still consider going out of your way to be extra-special nice to your parents is always good.

  You can make donations to the local Ronald McDonald foundation, and I’m sure they could always use a buck. Also, if you plan to have a pet, you may wish to get one at the pound or an animal shelter since they’re in danger of being put to death.

  Almost equally important is to be kind to yourself. Spend time with yourself. Love yourself (not too much, it will make you blind).

  Random acts of kindness are always welcome. “Thank you sir,” for example. “How are you, ma’am?” Or, “Would you please pass the taquitos, senorita?”

  I hope my examples will brighten the lives of others. This essay is an act of loving kindness all by itself.

  A woman named Maggie who read the essay online wrote to me, “I have been trying to decide on the purchase of a new dog, until I read Nick’s suggestion of adopting one from the animal shelter. That now will be the route I take. In honor of your son.”

  It was a beautiful gift, which I cherished. Letters poured in from dozens of readers who wanted me to know that they had been touched, or that they had followed the case and were thinking about us. I craved their words; it was another form of therapy for me to hear that people had not forgotten Nick. The anniversary dates and holidays were always particularly hard days—the day he was kidnapped, the day he was killed, his birthday, Christmas. Those were the days I needed the letters and the invisible support even more.

  I put a poster and roses on the tree where Nick had been kidnapped. When I drove by later, the poster had been ripped down. At least the roses remained.

  My dreams twisted into nightmares, often starring Jesse James Hollywood or Ryan Hoyt. In one, my cousins were cuddling up to Hoyt while I asked him questions—“What time did you kill him?” He answered, “9 a.m.,” and I sobbed because the time on Nick’s death certificate and headstone were wrong. (Of course, there was no time of death on Nick’s headstone, but in the dream, it was devastating to me that it was wrong.) In another, I was drowning, and I woke myself up gasping for air, sitting straight up in bed. I saw Hollywood in my nightmares in all sorts of places, and it made me so angry that he haunted my sleep; I wanted to dream of my son, not his murderer!

  I don’t know why I still had a hard time telling even my therapist about the depth of my sadness; it was like I was still trying to make light of things and not scare anyone, so instead, I would go to the sessions wearing silly socks and flounce down on his couch and talk about sadness but not about suicidal thoughts or the desire to sleep all the time, to go home and drink some more and try to get back to sleep.

  But finally, in September 2003, I told Dr. Schulte the truth—that I felt like I needed to be in a safe environment right now. He told me he would arrange everything and that I should just get myself to Huntington Memorial in Pasadena. Drunk and on pills, I did. Before I went inside, I stuck an extra pill in my sleeve in case they wouldn’t give me enough later. They gave my agony a name: PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and put me on Effexor XR.

  With a schoolgirl blush, I pulled out the pill I had hidden in my sleeve and handed it to the psychiatrist on duty. My sense of guilt was too strong.

  I stayed in the hospital through what would have been Nick’s nineteenth birthday. There was no alcohol in the hospital, so I got sober by accident. It was disorienting. I kept journal entries that said things like:September 20, 2003

  Feeling very down. It is now 4:30 a.m. and I think I can sleep now. I will tell you more later.

  September 21, 2003

  I have no idea what I was going to tell you.

  My house seemed bigger and hollower when I returned to it. My kitty gave me a warm welcome, but all I wanted to do was pull her into Nick’s bed with me and settle back in. I slept through Rosh Hashanah. For two weeks, I left the house only twice. Jeff was out working late into the nights, so he didn’t know how bad things were. I didn’t even go out to check the mail. I left the bed only for necessary functions like eating, and I hid from the phone and the doorbell.

  But I didn’t drink.
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  It had finally set in for me that I was going to have to be sober if I was ever to have a chance at pulling out of this depression. Understanding it didn’t make the process easier, but at least I had made a decision. I was not going to drink anymore. But from the looks of it, I wasn’t going to do much of anything else anymore, either.

  At the end of the two weeks, I told the doctor that I needed to be back in the hospital, where they would keep me safe from myself.

  Not quite safe enough, though. I’m not sure which day it was that I cut my wrist. While I did it, I was thinking, “This is harder than I thought it would be.” I had never thought about killing myself in that fashion before, and I’m not sure why I did then. My previous thoughts were the less messy ways: pills and alcohol. But this time, I’d yanked out a small cosmetic mirror that came with my eye shadow, then broke it and ran it across my vein again and again, but it was dark and I couldn’t see if I was accomplishing anything.

  The nagging voice in my head made me pick up my hospital phone and call Dr. Schulte, the only person I felt comfortable telling the truth to.

  “Please go tell one of the nurses while I wait on the telephone,” he said.

  “It’s hardly bleeding at all,” I argued. “I’m really just weak, or chicken.”

  “You need to tell them anyway.”

  Fine.

  I went to the nurse’s station and ratted myself out. They were not pleased that I had called Dr. Schulte, someone outside the hospital, instead of confiding in them. They immediately sent for a watchdog who was to sit with me for the rest of the night and watch me sleep. But the problem was that he fell asleep instead, and I wanted a drink of water. Instead of waking him, I stepped over him to get to the water fountain, which was just a few steps outside of my room.

  The nurse looked at me and asked where the guard was.

  “Shhh! He’s sleeping,” I said.

  That didn’t go over so well. They put me in lockdown the next day because it would be easier to keep track of me there. In that ward, there was no hall—just a bunch of rooms with a nurse’s station in the middle. My room had a window, through which I could nostalgically see the hallway I used to be allowed to walk down. The musty smell in this ward seemed to indicate that the carpets needed to be cleaned. I looked too normal to be there. Most of the others were there for drug rehab and appeared just as strung out as you’d expect. Compared to them, I looked like Carol Brady.

  For the next two weeks, I struggled and struggled to get myself together. The therapists were willing to try anything with me, and one day I asked to see the last pictures of Nick. The doctor and I went into a room, and he prepared me for what I would see: pictures of Nick in his grave. After each photo, we looked at Nick’s last high school photo. We talked about how funny he used to be. We laughed. I couldn’t cry.

  I guess I was looking for something tangible, something I could relate to, like his ring. But because his hands were duct taped behind his back, I couldn’t see his hands in the photos they had sent. I wanted to see his face, but I just couldn’t make it out—the pictures were too blurry and distant.

  After I was out of the hospital, I wanted to pressure the district attorney to let me see more descriptive pictures, but sweet, sure-footed victim’s advocate Joan delicately held my hand and reminded me that Nick had not been identified by his face, but by a thumbprint. I absorbed her explanation and accepted it. I had seen enough; I had to leave the rest alone.

  I went home feeling a little better. It seemed that each hospital stay was a little more productive than the last. And I was still sober. I didn’t think of it much, and didn’t count the days of sobriety the way I’d counted the days since Nick’s death. All I knew was that I had to remain sober if I was going to make it. And for the first time, I accepted the possibility that I might make it. Not the probability, but the possibility.

  Our house was still a shrine to Nick, and that wasn’t good for my mental state anymore. Not only had I not taken down the things in his bedroom, but I’d put up more pictures, took more baby things of his down from the attic, so that the entire house was like a Nick Markowitz museum. It allowed me to avoid reality; I tried to set things up to make it feel like he was still there, still coming home any minute now. But that also kept the devastation fresh when he didn’t come home. After years, I was still waiting by that window for him to show up.

  At the cemetery one day in January 2004, there were already two bouquets of flowers on Nick’s grave when I arrived with my red roses. I talked to Nick like I always did, just as I did at home. “Are you really in there?” I asked, like I always wondered at the cemetery.

  I always tried to welcome the newcomers—the people in the newly filled graves—and ask that they keep an eye on Nick. Then, after an hour or so of feeling not much of anything, even as I looked at the photo on Nick’s headstone of us kissing when he was a toddler, I left. I was tired of this dissociation. I didn’t know how else to live, but I also knew that these years of feeling disconnected from reality and still waiting for Nick to show up were not healthy.

  At least the medication was helping by delaying my suicidal thoughts. No longer was it the first thing I thought of every morning, which gave me time to get out of bed, at least. But the thoughts still came, and I still told myself that if I ever did decide to kill myself, it was my right and my decision, and no one should feel that they could have done something different to alter the outcome.

  In April, I was back in the hospital for an overdose again. This time, I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I wasn’t thinking about dying or being with Nick; I’m not even sure what I was thinking. I didn’t know why I took extra pills so much of the time. At first, I thought I was just chasing my high—especially now that I was no longer drinking—but then it would just turn into an impulsive action. Not thinking, not feeling, just doing. I didn’t want to do this anymore, but I didn’t know how to stop myself. I told my therapist I thought we should increase my treatment time.

  “I don’t think an hour is enough for me to say everything I need to say. Can we meet for two hours at a time?” I asked Dr. Schulte, and he agreed.

  Not knowing where the right help was going to come from, I tried every avenue I could think of. I began reading The Purpose Driven Life, which my aunt Susie had recommended to me. I wrote to the Dr. Phil show, asking for Dr. Phil to help guide me. A producer of his was very interested in having me on the show, but when she found out I was still feeling suicidal, they decided to wait until I was past that. I continued to watch his show, along with the other daytime talk shows, hoping to pick up a piece of wisdom here or there that might stick with me.

  I asked for the help I needed. I tried to think about having a purpose in my life again. I allowed time to pass, and little by little . . . I actually got better.

  Something was changing within me, and it felt very new and tentative, but it felt . . . kind of . . . good.

  In May 2004, Leah and I went out to lunch. It was a time of reconnecting. So much time had gone by with each of us living separate lives because of my negative thoughts about her brother. I told her that I was going to tell her dad that evening that if he felt he needed a relationship with Ben, he could have one. Life was too short to have the stress of his wife disapproving of his love and devotion for his son. My love for Jeff, and these new feelings of hope about my own life, had changed my view on what was important. Just because I couldn’t share in his celebrations didn’t mean he shouldn’t have them.

  “Thank you,” Jeff responded when I talked to him about it.

  In June of 2004, I realized that I no longer wanted to die. It was a calming, comforting feeling that I was determined to hang on to—and one that would be tested over and over. First came the knock on our door from one of Nick’s friends. He had shown up, with much heartache in his eyes, to tell us that Nick’s memorial tree at El Camino Real had been chopped down in a senior prank. Nick’s tree hadn’t been singled out; it was one of five that h
ad been chopped down.

  Do not let this set you back, I told myself.

  At other times, I didn’t feel depressed exactly, and I didn’t feel suicidal, but I kept wanting to cut myself anyway. I kept feeling that if I were to make myself bleed, maybe I could get some relief. Maybe I could feel something. Pain on the outside was easier than pain on the inside.

  My therapist suggested that I wear something of Nick’s around my wrist, like a watch or bracelet, so that if I got the urge to cut myself, I would see it and remember that I had to go on living in order to honor his memory. But I wound up spending four days in Della Martin Hospital nonetheless, because I couldn’t stop the thoughts.

  Right after I got out, my dear friend Randi and I drove from Washington to Canada, where we spent five days putting up America’s Most Wanted posters and handing out flyers, business cards, and key chains. I loved spending time with Randi, and it felt productive to get out and do something like that. But by this point, Jesse James Hollywood had already moved on from there.

  Canada hadn’t been all that Hollywood hoped it would be—it was cold, for one thing, and it turned out that the media there picked up on the story, too. His face was all over the television, and everywhere he went, he felt like he “stuck out like a sore thumb.” There have also been reports that he had arguments with his “handlers”—people who had presumably been hired by his father to keep him safe.

  For six months, Hollywood had traveled from place to place in Canada by bus: Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, and Quebec. In Quebec, he paid one thousand dollars for a fake passport that included a five-year visa to Brazil. First he flew to Mexico, then to Brazil, in 2001.