His Bright Light

by Danielle Steel

  So Nick was at home, and I was scrambling around frantically to find him tutors, so he could finish the school year. He did fine work, and all of his tutors were impressed with him. He received his diploma, as promised, and could not attend graduation, which broke my heart, if not his, after nine years in the school. But there were even greater consequences to contend with. One by one, the schools that had accepted him for high school withdrew their offers. Nick had no high school to go to. More groveling, more begging, more pleading. I called everyone I knew, on the board of every school I could think of, and finally found one boarding school that was willing to take him. It was a miracle, and I was grateful to everyone who had helped me.

  Nick seemed mollified by the lesson he’d learned, but still depressed, understandably. But he liked the idea of the boarding school he was going to more than I did. I am not fond of the concept of boarding schools, and think that those midteen years are the most important to be at home in the bosom of one’s family. I want to see what my children are doing between fourteen and eighteen, and have some influence on their decisions. Once they reach college age, I figure they’re ready to step into the world without me. But before that, no matter how big a pain in the neck they think I am, I want to be there.

  But in Nick’s case, we had no choice. There wasn’t a single school in the city that was willing to take him. Expulsion from eighth grade was hardly an advantage. And his only option was the boarding school I’d found him. I was very grateful that they would take him.

  I sent him to visit friends in Germany for two weeks to get him away from his routine and where he seemed to be in better spirits.

  And in August, everything got underway to prepare him for his big adventure. Like most fancy boarding schools, they allowed him to bring everything but his own bungalow with him.

  We bought linens, towels, a boom box, a stereo, a computer, a bicycle, a refrigerator, framed posters, a bulletin board, packed all his favorite trinkets to remind him of home, and of course, he took half a dozen framed photographs of Sarah. I was beginning to think it would do him good to get away. He needed a new life, a fresh start, and a new location. His bedrooms both at home in the city, and at our country house, had become shrines to Sarah. And he was still facing the aura of disgrace that had fallen on him with his expulsion from school. I was happy he was getting a fresh start, and he was genuinely excited.

  We flew down to the school on schedule, and rented a van to carry all his new belongings and treasured old possessions, spent a day settling him in, plugging things in, making the bed, setting up his computer, and left him there, with a great deal of hope, and only a small tremor of trepidation. He was going to be fine, I told myself. He was like any other kid going away to school, I said reassuringly to my own inner voices. Stop worrying. But how could I not? I had worried about him all his life, been there for him, laughed with him, cried for him, made excuses for him, apologized for him. As I drove away, all I could think of was how much I was going to miss him. It was like setting a small bird free in the sky whom you have loved and nurtured and cared for. All I could hope for was that he would fly safely and well, and that the hawks that always hovered over him wouldn’t get him.

  8

  He crashes

  Nick’s stay at boarding school was alarmingly brief, and what came swiftly on its heels was deeply disturbing. I had no warning of trouble there, and ten days after he had arrived, with his gypsy caravan filled with his belongings, they called me. They were blunt, and they were right. They said that something was seriously wrong with him, and that leaving him there was an invitation to disaster. They didn’t want him to have another expulsion on his record, but they were absolutely sure that if he stayed, he would get into trouble. “He’s not capable of being here,” they said. “He needs treatment.” I knew it, but they were the first ones to say it. They didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but they knew something was. He couldn’t follow the rules, not so much “didn’t,” as “couldn’t,” which was something I knew about him too. There was no malice about the things he did or didn’t do, he just couldn’t follow the music and keep in step, and sometimes to cover that fact, he pretended he didn’t want to. But they saw through it.

  They felt that something was off about him, they had noticed his lack of impulse control, and the crazy things he did, and I knew as well as they did that we had to do something about it. The problem was that I didn’t know what, or who would help me do it. Despite their best efforts, I felt that the two psychiatrists he had seen hadn’t really helped him, whatever their good intentions. He seemed to slip right through the cracks, particularly with the last one. I was at a loss as to where to go next, or what to do. But it was obvious that Nick was no longer able to function in an ordinary environment. He couldn’t play by the rules anymore. He was slowly losing the ability to control himself, slowly but surely and steadily, and I knew I had to stop the momentum before it destroyed him.

  I called everyone I could think of once again, got the name of a counselor who dealt with difficult kids and recommended schools for them, and unorthodox solutions. Perfect. Just what we needed. I called him, and made an appointment for the next morning. I had someone else pick Nick up at the airport, with his mountains of stuff, while I made the calls, and he was sitting in the living room, when I walked into the room, as calmly as I could manage, to see him.

  I was determined not to lose my temper. It served no purpose, and I knew he must be feeling rejected by being sent away from the boarding school. All I wanted to do was help him.

  But I got a shock when I walked into the room. He was sitting in front of a bank of ferns I had there, and I could see instantly that he had shaved his head. All I could see was his face, and the kind of broad, sheepish smile he wore when he knew he had done something he shouldn’t.

  “I fucked up again, Mom,” he said somewhat forlornly, as I walked towards him to kiss him.

  “No, you didn’t. You didn’t get kicked out. They said it was the wrong place for you. You wouldn’t have been happy there, Nick,” I said, and then got another shock as he stood up to hug me. He hadn’t shaved his head, he had been in true camouflage with the ferns. When he stood up, I saw that he had dyed his hair exactly the same shade of green the ferns were. He grinned broadly at me when I saw it.

  “You like it?” he asked hopefully.

  “Yeah, sure. I love it.” And that was the beginning of Nick and exotic hair colors. We moved from green to blue and back again, from sapphire to turquoise to blond, a sort of flame concoction at one point that was half red, half blond, and finally to jet black, which actually suited him, and I came to like it. I would have to say that second only to his passion for music was his obsession with his hair color. I never saw it a natural color again, but to tell you the truth, after a while I got used to it, and wouldn’t have recognized his original color if I saw it. But the green was certainly different. (I am innately conservative to my core, and not the sort of person to find green hair “amusing.” But I had long since accepted about Nick that the standards I apply to myself and the rest of the world, just didn’t apply to him.)

  He was sad about having left the boarding school. He had met people there he liked, made some friends, and said he was going to miss it. I promised him a better solution, and promised myself I was going to find a school in the city. He had proven that he couldn’t handle boarding school, and they couldn’t handle him. And somehow, we had to help him deal with his problems, his depressions, his lack of impulse control. I didn’t realize then that he had been thinking about suicide for the past nine months, or I would have truly panicked. As it was, I was pretty damn worried.

  He was welcomed back into the bosom of the family, and everyone was happy to see him. He cheered up that night, and the next morning bright and early (much to Nick’s chagrin), we met with the counselor who had promised to find a school for him. Nick was never happy about morning meetings. All his life, he had been up late at night, and he had tr
ouble sleeping. And he was never at his best in the morning.

  The counselor made two suggestions, both of them unacceptable, and Nick and I both looked devastated by what he was saying. He had read what material I had from Nick’s grammar school, and knew of him by reputation. (He had called some friends who taught there, apparently.) He had also spoken to the boarding school Nick had just left, and he said without preamble or artifice that no school would take Nick. According to him, we had two choices. One was a school in Utah or Nevada or Colorado or somewhere that was, in effect, or sounded like, a prison for children. It was locked down, cut off, I couldn’t visit him for a year. There was no escape and no vacations, no phone calls, no contact with the outside world. Nick looked as though he was going to burst into tears as the counselor told me they would shape him up in no time and that it was what he needed. There was another one similar to it, in Southern California, which was equally out of the question, but he didn’t recommend it. His second suggestion was well-known in Europe, where Nick would stay for two to four years, and again be incarcerated, though in a far prettier location. It was full of kids from rich families who didn’t know what to do with their problem children. So they shipped them off and let someone else handle their problems. Neither of which was my style. I was not looking to shut Nicky away, to get rid of him. I wanted to help him, at home, hands on, and do whatever it took to do it.

  I reassured Nick that this wasn’t going to happen to him, he wasn’t going anywhere, and I would keep him at home and have him tutored if I had to. And I said as much to the counselor, who continued to try and talk me into his two options. I told him he was wasting his time, and asked him to put his thinking cap on again. We needed a day school for Nick, close to home, and he assured me it would not be an easy project. It would take time, he said, as I nodded.

  And within a couple of days, he came up with an interesting suggestion. He said he needed time to find a school that would be willing to take Nick, but he had another option to keep Nick busy in the meantime. It was a wilderness program, modeled on Outward Bound, but specially designed for children that were disturbed or troubled in one way or another. And I have to admit, it sounded intriguing. I was a little suspicious of it, and wanted to be sure it was safe, but he assured me he had known other kids who had gone through it, and he thought it was a perfect place to put Nick for three weeks, to keep him busy, and build up his self-esteem again, while we found a school for him at home, and got everything ready for him to step right into it the minute he completed the outdoor program.

  It made sense certainly, and had some real advantages, the only thing I didn’t like was that he told me privately that the element of “surprise” was an essential part of it. According to him, Nick shouldn’t be warned, or allowed to prepare, particularly since a lot of kids ran away when faced with something that different and scary. I didn’t think it was a real fear, as Nick had never run anywhere, except the day three years before, sitting on a park bench and eating a Hostess Twinkie. I didn’t like the idea of surprising Nick, or frightening him. It felt like a betrayal. But eventually, the counselor convinced me, and I should have known better. I knew my own child, and I rarely, if ever, let other people interfere with the integrity we shared, but Nick was undeniably in a poor frame of mind, he was feeling down, and I let the counselor convince me that he might run away if we told him.

  The man from the outdoor program appeared, looking to me like an executioner, early one morning a few days later. He looked about six feet ten to me as I let him in my front door at six in the morning, in my barefeet and nightgown. And he must have looked twice as big to Nicky. Nicky was fourteen then, and if things had turned out right for him at the boarding school, he would have been a high school freshman. Instead he was a sleeping boy with tousled hair at six A.M. (I had made him dye the green back to something resembling his natural light brown color, and believe me, it wasn’t easy. The hairdresser who did it still talks about it.) But when I saw Nick’s face, my heart sank. He looked terrified. Who was this stranger in his bedroom? I suddenly wanted to step in and rescue him, but I knew I shouldn’t. Or at least I had been told not to.

  John and I had talked about it at length, and I had aired all my misgivings to him, but we had decided it might be the best thing for him. And it was only three weeks, not a lifetime. I was aware of the fact that I had protected Nick too much, and this seemed a good time to let go a little. But I felt like a monster as the man explained to Nick that they were flying to the wilderness program. Nick looked as though he wanted to kill me, and I don’t blame him. If someone showed up in my bedroom at six in the morning, threatening to drag me away to the bushes somewhere, I’d want to take out a gun and shoot him. Nick looked as though that concept would have appealed to him immensely. And the wilderness program the man rhapsodized about clearly didn’t. But rhapsody or not, the guy looked as though, if Nicky didn’t like the idea, he was going to drag him out of bed, throw him over his shoulder, and take him. Nick didn’t argue with him.

  They left the house half an hour later. I tried to kiss Nick goodbye and he wouldn’t kiss me, which was the first time he’d ever done that, and I walked back into the house, sobbing. I felt as though I had totally betrayed him, and perhaps even put him in danger. I had never in my life felt as rotten, or as lonely, or as worried about him. I had confidently put him in the hands of strangers. What if they weren’t trustworthy? What if something happened to him? The idea didn’t bear thinking about, but it was all I could think of.

  His escort allowed him to call me from the airport, and Nick told me how much he hated me and what a monster I was for what I had done to him. I didn’t entirely disagree with him, but told him I was trying to do something for his own good. But he was still furious, and hung up on me.

  And for the next three weeks, the days were endless. He had a counselor there who sounded like a mountain man, but was kind and wise and gentle. He seemed to have a genuine affection for Nick when he called me. But it was the first time in Nick’s entire life that we were out of communication, and it was agony for me. I dreamed of him at night, terrified that something terrible would happen to him. But every few days, his counselor would call, and assure me that he was fine and doing well, and that he would be a new person when he emerged from the wilderness and came home to us. I liked the old person just fine, but I also knew that he had to turn things around, start feeling better about himself, and get control of his life, whatever it took to do that.

  But I was extremely discouraged when, close to the end of it, the wilderness counselor told me that I had to start thinking of a school for Nick, and although he had done well, the counselor felt that he couldn’t manage to live at home yet. He needed to be put in a “special school” for a year or two, until he had adequately dealt with his “problems,” whatever they were. We knew one thing for sure, he had terrible impulse-control, and as time went on, he had ever greater problems of concentration. I still felt certain that we could fix him at home, and everything inside me shrieked that sending him away was wrong. He was still my baby. And all of the schools the counselor recommended were far, far from home. It would be hard for us to visit him, I had five tiny children to take care of at home, and the schools he was suggesting were not anxious for him to have visits anyway. He even suggested one of the places the first counselor had recommended, the one that sounded like a prison for children. Nick was not a bad kid, I reminded him, he was a sick kid. But the counselor insisted it made no difference, he could no longer handle living at home with his family, he needed more “structure” to control him. He made it sound like a barbed-wire fence they were going to wrap around Nicky.

  So as Nick struggled with the elements and the dirt and bugs and nature he had always so desperately hated, I set out to find a school again. So far, despite considerable effort, the counselor in town had turned up nothing. And a doctor I knew finally came up with what sounded like a viable suggestion. It was a tiny boarding school for disturbed
kids, in a town I’d never heard of. We could visit him on weekends, and he could even come home from time to time, if he behaved himself. And the doctor sang its praises, one of his closest friends knew the school and loved it. I spoke to his friend who knew the school, and didn’t like what I heard. It sounded like another jail for children, a place where people sent their kids because they couldn’t handle them and didn’t want to be bothered, or just couldn’t, for one reason or another. The doctor’s friend apparently had a son who was violent, and had physically attacked him on numerous occasions. This was a far, far cry from Nicky. Nick was a troubled soul, who turned his anger on himself or his belongings, never physically on another person. But it was also obvious that whatever efforts I’d made so far had not been fruitful. So I decided to try it. They had counselors who lived at the school, and a psychiatrist to work with the kids daily. Despite my reservations, it sounded perfect.

  Meanwhile, Nick was finishing up his wilderness program, and they let me talk to him on the phone a couple of days before he came home. He had even done a “solo,” which was one or two days alone in the wilderness, during which he was observed for his safety’s sake, although he didn’t know it. He had learned first aid and CPR, and rescued another boy who had gotten lost. He sounded absolutely terrific, and all the grief it had caused me, and him, seemed worth it. He was full of hope and promise and was certain he had his life back on track. All he wanted was to come home and prove it. And then I had to break the news to him that he was going to a boarding school for special children. I felt like an axe murderer telling him, and it nearly killed him. He cried, he begged, he pleaded, he swore he’d do well at any school I sent him to, but not to send him away again. I cried as much as he, but begged him to try it. After checking out the school by phone, I had a bad case of the flu and wanted to go up and see the school myself but John offered to go instead. Most of the time, I was the “front man” for all the creative solutions I came up with for Nicky, but this time John offered to look at the school and make sure it was okay. He flew up, and returned to report that it looked fine to him. John hoped, as I did, that Nick would like it. Nick was due home in two days, and we were going to meet him at the airport, spend a couple of hours with him there, and then send him on to the school we had chosen. We had decided, at the recommendation of the wilderness counselor, that if we let him come home even for a few hours, or a day or two, it would be too hard for him to leave again, so he would leave for the school straight from the airport, after we had lunch with him.