“Are you okay?” I asked him. His voice had sounded happier when I answered the phone. He had obviously calmed down, which was a comfort to me.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” And then suddenly, I wondered. He sounded too ebullient. Maybe even a little manic. But without his medications, that didn’t surprise me.
“Where are you, Nick?” I said calmly.
“In a phone booth on the highway.” He had done it. Walked right out of camp in the middle of the night, two weeks off meds, and in the middle of nowhere, on a highway. My worst fear was that he would hitch a ride with a truck driver, and disappear forever. Although I tried not to sound it, I was frantic.
I asked him if he’d go back to camp, just to please me, but he was adamant and I knew that would get me nowhere. He was beyond that kind of reason at this point and his lack of impulse control had already taken him too far to turn back. I had to think of other options. “What’s nearby, Nick? Can you see anything? A town?” I was groping, as John walked past with a worried expression. There was no denying that with Nick there was always a drama. There was no such thing as an easy day, or a carefree vacation. And now, as usual, my whole being was focused on Nicky.
“There’s a motel,” he said blithely.
“Where?”
“Across the street.” He had already walked a long way down the highway, which made my heart race.
“What’s it called?” He told me and I jotted down the name. “Okay, now I want you to listen to me, Nick, and I mean it. Go to the motel, get a room. Call me if you have to, and I’ll give them a credit card number to guarantee it. Get in the room, and stay there. I’ll have someone there with you as soon as I can, but I want you to promise me you won’t go anywhere, or you’re in BIG trouble.” I tried to sound as though I meant it, and somewhat ominous rather than as frightened as I was. I couldn’t imagine who I was going to send there to get him.
“Can I order pizza?” He sounded happy with the plan. Happier than I was, but at least there was a motel for him to go to.
“Sure. Order as much as you want. I’ll call you when I know who’s coming. And remember, Stay there!”
“Okay, Mom. I love you.” He sounded happier again. Crazy kid, but how I loved him.
“I love you, too, Nick.”
All my afternoon plans with the kids went out the window, as I reached for the phone again. But we were used to it. John took them on a sight-seeing tour without me. “Mommy has to take care of Nicky.” How often had they heard that? Too many times, I knew. But that was the reality of my life, and his, and theirs, and John’s. There were no easy options. I was always disappointing someone to take care of him. But they had grown up with it and understood it, or at least I hoped so.
I called Julie and relayed the situation to her. She was as panicked as I, but it was Father’s Day and she couldn’t leave her husband and children.
Next I called Camilla, our beloved longtime nanny, who had stayed home, mercifully, and not come on the trip. Now I knew why. There was a God after all. I called her, found her at home, and told her what had happened. She called me back five minutes after I’d explained it. If she drove to the airport like a maniac, and didn’t bother to pack, she could catch two connecting planes and be with him in five hours. If we could just keep him in the motel room for that long, he’d be in her competent, loving hands. And I’d know he was safe five hours later. She could assess the situation from there, and bring him calmly home to Julie.
“Go!” I said, and she dashed off, without even taking a change of clothes with her, or a toothbrush, as she pointed out later.
I called Nick back then, and told him Camilla was on her way, and threatened his life again if he moved from the motel room, and he swore he wouldn’t. But he sounded perfectly content, said he was watching TV, and had ordered pizza for breakfast. Terrific. Me, I had been too nervous to eat lunch, and now I had to survive five hours of anxiety until Camilla got there. I called Julie and told her what was happening, and she was relieved, too. And then, hoping that everything was as much in control as it was going to be, I called the camp Nick had just walked out on. I wanted to see what they were going to say to me. I had already called home to check, and they had left no message for me. They also had my itinerary, but had not called me in London, either.
When they answered, I asked to speak to Nick, and they told me he was busy.
“Really? What’s he doing?” I asked sweetly.
“Horseback riding,” they lied.
“How wonderful.” Nick hated horses. “When will he be back?”
“Soon,” they said vaguely, sounding nervous. They were lying to me, and they still hadn’t called me to tell me he was missing.
I called again that afternoon for me, morning for them, and they continued to report on his activities. And on the third call, I forced a showdown. They claimed they’d been trying to reach me all day at home, and at my hotel, which was a bold-faced lie, and I said so. I asked them if they knew where he was, and they finally admitted that they didn’t. And when I asked if they’d called the sheriff to tell them that an emotionally disturbed teenager was missing, they said they hadn’t, but were “going to.” I was livid. From what I knew, I felt they had endangered my son, first of all, and foremost, by not giving him the medication he relied on to remain balanced, and which we felt he needed them to give him. There was no excuse they could possibly offer to placate me. What would they have done if they had truly lost my son, particularly in the state he was in, and some harm had come to him? I told them I would call them when we found him, but I wanted to wait until Camilla was there, because I didn’t want them taking him back to the camp now. I didn’t trust them with him.
And a short time later, Camilla called. She had him safely in hand, and was at the motel with him. He seemed happy enough, and had ordered four hundred and eighty dollars’ worth of pizza, which confirmed what I thought, when I thought he’d sounded manic. He had also bought a cigar, and was smoking it when Camilla entered the room.
And the rest of what Camilla told me was typical of Julie. Camilla had run for the plane, as she’d promised to do, and then switched planes for the second flight to get Nicky. It was a small plane and she hadn’t bothered to look around when she took her seat. She had been distracted and thinking about Nick. And when she got off the second plane, she saw a familiar face getting off the plane behind her. It was Julie. Father’s Day or no, Julie had been worried sick about Nick, and in the end had left her family, to be with him. She had taken a different flight to make the same connection as Camilla, but neither of them had seen each other as they were boarding.
They went to the motel together, and as they entered the room and saw Nick smoking his cigar, he grinned when he saw them.
But the rest of what they both told me on the phone was considerably less amusing. Nick had told them both almost immediately that he felt completely unbalanced, and for the first time, told Julie he wanted and needed to go to a hospital until he got “normal.” He had been too long off his medications, and he knew it. It was the first time he had ever asked to be hospitalized, and it both concerned and impressed me. He told Julie he felt completely out of kilter, and was frightened by it. But at least he was safe and she and Camilla were with him.
I let the camp know that he was safe, and then Nick’s doctor, who agreed that hospitalizing him was a good idea under the circumstances. And when I spoke to Julie, she suggested the hospital that had evaluated him four months before, as she’d been impressed by them. And Dr. Seifried promised to fly out to see him. My next call was to the director of the hospital, who promised to find a bed for him as soon as we got him there.
By then I had spent the entire day on the phone. The children and John were back from their tour, and I was still too distracted to talk to them. I had to get Nick on another plane with Julie and Camilla, who had agreed to fly him to the hospital together. And I was immensely relieved that they were with him, although I felt guilty not to be t
here.
Meanwhile, neither Camilla nor Julie had clothes with them, nor Nick, who had left everything at the camp, and they had promised to send his things to us.
They were back on a plane two hours later. As usual, we had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, but I was a nervous wreck after I hung up the phone. I had already decided that the rest of us would go to pick Nick up on our way home from Europe. And at least he’d be safe now. And Julie was going to stay at a hotel near the hospital in the meantime. But we knew that within a week or two, we’d have him on track again with the Prozac.
I hung up the phone finally, and went to catch up with my other children. Sometimes it was hard to be lighthearted for them. The burden I was carrying was by no means a small one, and they knew it. Even when I didn’t tell them what was happening, they almost always sensed it. Particularly Sammie, who was twelve then. The war between Nick and Sammie had long since ended. She adored him. She was completely devoted to him, and very protective of him.
Seeing my face, she interrogated me immediately. “It’s Nick, isn’t it?” I admitted that it was, but reassured her that he was on his way to a hospital for a few days, and would be home soon. But I could see in her eyes how worried she was about him, as we all were.
She was angry at me for putting him in the hospital, and viewed it as some kind of punishment I was meting out to him. She knew from him how much he hated being in programs and hospitals. And whenever he was, she viewed it as the ultimate betrayal on my part, rather than a safeguard. I explained to her that he wanted to be there this time, which she found incredible. But as she happened by, Victoria, who was only eleven, was far more pragmatic about it. As Sam berated me for “locking him up,” Victoria looked at her and shrugged her shoulders.
“Come on, Sam, he’s sick, you know that. He needs it.” Out of the mouths of babes. They all knew it. They had grown up with it. They accepted him for who he was, and even though he made their lives difficult sometimes, particularly when he ate up so much of my time, they loved him. And fortunately, he knew that.
12
A long, hard summer
The rest of the trip to Europe went well. The kids had a good time, and so did John and I. But the reports I was getting from the hospital where Nick was were not terrific. What we had anticipated as a short stay was now being stretched out longer. They felt that he needed residential treatment and would benefit from staying for an indeterminate amount of time, perhaps the entire summer, or longer. And Nick was miserable about it.
I wasn’t sure which way to turn. He sounded upset, but they kept assuring me they could help him. The director of the hospital was someone I had spoken to and liked, and at first the counselors and therapists he had there seemed interested in him. But within days, the director left for a month’s vacation, and the counselors were beginning to sound frustrated and hostile. The longer he was there, the less Nick was cooperating with them. He was sounding angry and aggressive, and they were playing our old, familiar theme song, to which I knew the lyrics only too well. Neglected celebrity child, and spoiled, indifferent mother. Great. But there was no denying that Nick wasn’t well. Even with medication, he seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was upset about being in the hospital, or if he was actually getting worse, from a psychiatric standpoint. Dr. Seifried flew out to see him, as promised, and agreed that Nick wasn’t ready to come home yet. And once again, once hospitalized, Nick was becoming less functional, and cooperating less than ever.
John and I went to see him on the way home, and I didn’t like what I saw. He looked pale and tired and sounded irrational and desperate. He wanted to come home with me, but he seemed too wound up for us to handle. He needed to calm down again before I could bring him home, no matter how badly I wanted to free him. And I tried futilely to explain that to him. He thought I was abandoning him there, and he was afraid I would leave him there forever.
The problem the hospital had with Nick was that he didn’t fit in anywhere. He was too bright and too sophisticated to fit in with the kids his own age, who were there for a variety of reasons. But when they put him in with the adults, although he interacted well socially with them, and in therapy groups, he actually had nothing in common with them. Their life experiences were just too different. He wasn’t dealing with children and wives and jobs he couldn’t cope with. But he ran rings around the adolescents, and some of the counselors. And as usual, he was creating mayhem all around him. He was once again unable to follow their rules, ignored their smoking taboos, and had set fire to the carpet in his room, and scorched an entire wall by putting a paper clip into an outlet and doing something exotic and extremely dangerous with it to light a cigarette. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt. But they were already pretty tired of him by the time I saw him. And Dr. Seifried wanted some new medications tried, but they had not yet done that, and Nick said he didn’t want to.
All I could do was urge him to cooperate with them, calm him down as best I could, and promise him that I’d bring him home as soon as he could travel. And I meant it. I had no intention of sticking him away in a hospital somewhere indefinitely, unless they could prove to me that they could help him. They promised they could, of course, but there was no evidence of it yet. In fact, he seemed a lot worse, and more irrational and agitated than he had when I’d last seen him. But he had also been off his medications for two weeks, and I knew that that had wrought havoc with him. All we could do was wait now and see what happened.
I left Nick with a heavy heart, and flew home with John and the children. But I was still worried. I wasn’t sure if Nick was just having a “bad spell” for a while, an irritation of sorts caused by being off Prozac for two weeks, or if his illness had taken a turn for the worse. And no one seemed to know which it was. We’d just have to see how things progressed, but I was depressed about it.
Once I got home, Nick called me several times a day, always with a tirade about how I had abandoned him, how much he hated me for it, and how I had betrayed him. He was certain that we were lying to him and leaving him there. Even Julie couldn’t calm him. The only thing that seemed to help were visits from my mother, who would travel considerable distances to see him, and despite the length and rigors of the journey, would arrive wearing a silk dress and pearls. Immaculate as usual, as Nick would sit with uncombed hair, playing Scrabble with her. But the longer he stayed, the looser his grip on sanity became, and the less feasible it was to bring him home. It was a vicious circle from which there was no escape for the moment.
And as I read his journal entries written during his hospital stay, I am once again aware of how troubled he was, and how desperate he must have felt. It breaks my heart to read them. They were written in July 1994, when he was sixteen years old. He was pretty sick then, immensely tormented, but still lucid enough to write in his journal.
“The Quiet Room”
Caged in, locked down, a spitting screeching animal, no saner than a rabies infested rodent, foam dripping from its lock-jawed mouth. I bang my head into the walls, round and round in circles, white ceiling, mattress in the middle of the room, bare and singular. Makes it seem even more empty. On my knees I squeal at the dense, thick walls to rescue me. I pray to the empty sky I cannot see and the empty God who doesn’t inhabit it to relieve my pain, fix me, heal me, save me. No answer. I sit in the corner, hands covering my eyes from this tasteless plain reality, this awful reality I can find no escape from. I’m alone, head down, trapped in my wooden and plastic cage. The only light streams in through the glass square in the middle of the door filled with chicken wire to keep me from any hope of escape. They think I might hurt myself. I look in the plastic mirror and see a haggard boy in it. It is so they can watch me, make sure I’m broken down to nothing, crying out for rescue, begging for the salvation they offer, but I won’t break. This will never end, no matter what.
Mental stability has reached its bitter end, all my senses are infected. I will never get
out of this hell. Everything questions my mental health. It makes me lose control. I just can’t trust myself. If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me, but they turn around and I end up talking to myself. Anxiety has got me strung out and frustrated so I lose my head or bang it up against a wall. Isolated and angry, it hampers my recovery, and keeps me from being healed.
Confusion has me strung out and desperate. My whole world is made of disillusion and pity, nothing more than a mirage, transparent, nonexistent. I reached my hand out to try and touch my soul, but it was gone. I lost it somewhere. I am a scared little boy, and I don’t know where to run. My little boy legs won’t carry me much farther. I am weak when I always thought I had strength. My feet are in the air, my head is on the ground. Reality has set me spinning. I thought I could get up but there was more to it than that and I asked myself … where is my mind? … I thought I’d know what it was to be a man, but now I know I didn’t understand. Secrets collecting dust, rotted to ashes long ago in the back of my head, and now the skeletons are coming to life in my closet.
In this same journal he talks about his friends, and a girl he is in love with. He also talks about being sick and insane, and for the first time many of his entries are completely incoherent and irrational, very different from the others. Yet some are brilliant.
“On a Scooter”
Confusion, pulling me every which way. Anger throws tulips in my face and the sky refuses to part for my ego to be comfortable. How will I stand this? How will my body hold up through the drive? Chewing on my lips, clawing the bedspread. Run, run, run, spitting product of our father’s loins, poison the mother’s milk, and make the children cry with infection. Bleeding out of my eyes, striking out at thin air, scratching at my chest, trying to find out whether the heart inside me is still beating, or if there is even a heart still inside me. Do you think I’m crazy? I’m pushed and pinched, shoved into a narrow box and labelled. I’m fucking NUTS and this place made me that way. I was normal before I got here, and then they took my reality, tossed it in the blender and liquefied all my mental assets. They make others like me every day, pumping us out like they were a factory. And I guess, in a way, they are.
His Bright Light Page 17