“So what do we do?”
“I’ll keep working on them. In the meantime our only alternative is to put her on heavy medication to keep her calm.”
I drove to the drugstore, the bruises on my arms beginning to throb. I picked up a prescription for Thorazine, a very powerful tranquilizer. Then I came home and collapsed.
The Thorazine did the job, if you call turning Nancy into a vegetable doing the job. The drug put her in a perpetual zombie state, neither awake nor asleep.
During the day she just sat on the den couch and stared at the TV, absorbing none of it. Occasionally her head would droop over to the side and she would be asleep.
At night she wandered around the house in a stupor. I slept with one eye open. I could see her doorway from my side of the bed. When she was up, I was up. One night she went in the kitchen. I heard the kitchen drawers being opened and shut. I followed her in there. She was calmly gathering up all of the knives.
“Where are you going with those, Nancy?”
“To stab them,” she replied dreamily.
“Stab who?”
“Them. The brother and the sister.”
I took the knives away from her—she was so stoned that she was really quite docile. I suggested she go back to bed. She obeyed.
From that night on I ordered Suzy and David to sleep with their bedroom doors locked from the inside.
Another night I found her in the den, slowly collecting things and piling them onto one another in the middle of the den floor—a few encyclopedia volumes, a lampshade, some paintings off the wall. She hummed while she worked, eerily humming in a singsong manner those exact same melodies she’d sung the night of her Atarax attack, songs like “Happy Birthday” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
“What are you doing, Nancy?”
“They don’t like me,” she explained softly.
“Let’s put them back. Then maybe they’ll like you.”
“Gee, you think so, Mommy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay.” She began to put everything back.
“And then we’ll go back to bed.”
“Okay,” she said meekly.
This was a stranger. This wasn’t Nancy.
Whenever she came out of her stupor and became herself again, she immediately began to pull her hair out, bang her head, and scream, “Help me! Help me! Put me somewhere! Help me!” After fifteen minutes of this she would fall asleep.
It broke my heart to see her either way, but these were the only two choices.
Finally her psychiatrist came through. He persuaded the Psychiatric Center (which was, ironically, affiliated with the clinic we had taken her to) to admit Nancy to their adolescent unit, even though she was too young. He told us to meet him there at seven thirty that night. We agreed.
Frank and I sat Nancy down. We told her she’d asked us for help and that we were going to take her to a hospital so she could get it.
She didn’t fight it. She seemed relieved, actually.
I packed some things for her. When it was time to leave, she followed us meekly to the car and got in. It was a damp, cold night, the night before Thanksgiving, when we drove to the hospital. Christmas decorations were up on the houses in the neighborhood. The lights were on inside the houses. It looked warm in each one.
We were committing our child to a mental hospital. It was incomprehensible that it had come to this, but it had. There was no alternative. Thorazine was certainly no answer. She had to be put somewhere. For her safety, and for the safety of the rest of the family. She could not live in the house anymore in this condition.
The psychiatrist who admitted Nancy to the adolescent ward was wearing cufflinks that didn’t match. I don’t remember much else. I didn’t hear a word he said. He led my daughter away.
Then Frank and I drove home. We didn’t speak. To talk meant to admit aloud what we knew to be true: our dream had died that night. By giving our first baby to the mental hospital, we’d given that up, too. The life we’d wanted for Nancy and for ourselves when she was born, the future we’d planned, was never going to happen. We knew it. There was no need to talk about it, no desire to talk about it.
The next day I made a turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and apple pie. The four of us sat down to Thanksgiving dinner and tried not to look at Nancy’s empty place at the dinner table. None of us ate much.
Our family had died that night, too.
The next day there were visiting hours at the mental hospital. Frank and I went to see Nancy. We were issued passes at the front desk and took them to the adolescent ward. The nurse there checked our passes, led us down the hall to a different door—the one that led to the locked women’s ward. She began to unlock the outer door with a key attached to her belt.
“Wait,” I said. “There must be a mistake. Our daughter is in the adolescent ward.”
“Your daughter is in here,” she replied calmly.
“No she’s not,” I insisted.
“Please follow me,” she said.
She took us through one locked door, then another and another until we arrived in a large, central room with several doorways that led off to the lockup rooms. The room was dark and dingy and there were benches running along the walls. One woman was sitting on a bench, staring straight ahead. Several sat there shouting to themselves. One woman was standing and urinating on the floor. Another lay face down on the tile floor, mumbling. It was like something out of the Middle Ages.
In the midst of all this stood our eleven-year-old child.
She ran to me and hugged me hard. She was shaking. “Mommy, get me out of here,” she begged. “I’m not like them … I swear I’m not. Take me away. I’ll go to the psychiatrist. I’ll go to school. I’ll be good. I’ll do whatever you want. Just get me out of here, Mommy. Oh, please.”
I held her tightly to me, as if to protect her from the madness around her. I believed her. I wanted to believe her.
“We’re getting her out of here,” I said to Frank.
He agreed, his face registering the horror of the ward.
We left, promising Nancy we’d get her out of that awful place at once. We didn’t tell her we had no idea what she was doing in there in the first place.
I found a pay phone in the hospital lobby and called her psychiatrist. I demanded to know what she was doing in the locked women’s ward.
“The hospital people called me,” he said. “They said they didn’t think the adolescent ward would be safe for her. They’ve got sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds in there with criminal behavior—drugs, rape. They weren’t sure she’d be safe. They were worried about homosexuality. I told them to go ahead.”
“Don’t you know what it’s like in there?” I protested.
“I do. But you have to keep in mind, Mrs. Spungen, Nancy’s in a mental hospital, not the Holiday Inn.”
“But don’t you think you should have discussed this with us before going ahead?”
“It was for her own safety,” he repeated.
“We want her discharged immediately.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“It takes at least two days to process the papers. Besides, what are you going to do with her when she’s discharged?”
“I don’t know. That’s not important. The important thing is to get her out of this place.”
He sighed. “You’ll have to keep her on the Thorazine.”
“Fine.”
“Very well, Mrs. Spungen. I’ll arrange to have her discharged.”
He was right—it did take time to process the discharge papers. Nancy was stuck there for the entire weekend. We picked her up on Monday morning. She hugged me again and held my arm tightly until we were out of there. She breathed the fresh air deeply and gratefully. We got in the car and Frank started the engine. Nancy started to giggle.
“What’s so funny, Nancy?” I smiled, happy to see her laughing.
“I’m not go
nna do any of those things I promised.” She giggled. “I only said them so you’d get me out of there. Tricked ya. Ha ha ha.”
She laughed all the way home.
I was back on twenty-four-hour duty. I pressed forward with my search to find Nancy a residential school.
Through my state senator I put pressure on the Pennsylvania state school to at least grant Nancy an interview. Frank and I no longer cared if the school was unable to provide education at her level—which was presently college level in all areas except math. The schooling was unimportant now. What good would a gifted intellect do her if she was unable to function in the outside world?
Nancy’s interview at the state school was memorable for its absurdness. The social worker who conducted it chewed on her hair the entire time. When Nancy asked her for a tour of the facilities, she snapped, “Be quiet.”
In the car on the way home Nancy said she would not go to that school. It didn’t matter—they didn’t accept her anyway.
I began working the phone again. One of the private schools I contacted was the Darlington Institute. Darlington was headquartered in one of Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs but had over twenty units throughout the country, as well as a summer camp system. Darlington took retarded and disturbed children of various ages and degrees and placed them in what they considered to be the appropriate setting. It was exclusive and expensive. The application blank was over twenty pages long.
It took the Darlington people a long time to decide whether or not they wanted to interview Nancy and, if so, for which unit. An admissions officer I spoke to on the phone told me that if Nancy was as disturbed as we thought, she might belong in their locked unit, which was in Texas.
Frank and I discussed this. We were upset at the idea of sending Nancy so far away, but we agreed that she had to be placed somewhere.
So I pressed Darlington for an interview at the Texas unit. They agreed. I made plane reservations, then had to cancel them because Darlington cancelled the interview. They gave no reason.
I pressed them to see us at the Main Line headquarters. I was desperate. Now that the state school had fallen through, Darlington seemed like our only hope—no matter how much it cost. They finally granted us the interview.
The three of us drove out there. After a series of morning interviews Frank and I were asked to leave Nancy for the afternoon. We did.
We returned to hear the first good news we’d heard in a long, long time. After evaluating her, the Darlington people had decided Nancy wasn’t suited for the Texas unit, but would be right for a small facility they had just opened in Connecticut. It was called Barton. Nancy could go there if we wanted.
I couldn’t believe my ears. “When?” I asked, incredulous. “When can she start?”
“Immediately,” the admissions officer replied.
At last we’d found a place for her. A place where maybe she could get better.
The fee was $850 per month. It was more than we could afford, but we’d manage somehow. The important thing was that we’d found her a school, a good school. And relatively nearby—about a three-hour drive from Philadelphia.
We said we’d be there tomorrow afternoon and took Nancy home to pack.
“I don’t wanna go, Mommy,” she said that night while I was folding her clothes and putting them in a suitcase.
“I don’t want you to go, either, Nancy,” I replied softly.
I really didn’t want my Nancy to go away. But this Nancy who sat there on the bed wasn’t my Nancy. It was a different one, a stranger. I would only get my Nancy back if I sent this one away.
“Then why do I have to go?”
“Because you don’t go to school. You have to. It’s a law.”
“But I don’t want to leave.”
“We don’t want you to, sweetheart. Believe me, we don’t want you to. We’ll miss you. A lot. But you have to. And when you feel better, you can come home and go to regular school again. Okay?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Okay, but I’m gonna be back real soon.”
“Sure you will,” I agreed.
She insisted I pack all of her books and board games. She refused to say good-bye to Suzy and David because she was certain she’d be back in a few days.
The drive to Barton was a silent one, each of us lost in our thoughts. I knew we were doing the right thing, but I wondered. I wondered who would get up in the middle of the night to sit with her when she had her nightmares. I wondered who would hold her. I wondered who would love her. She was only eleven years old. My heart ached at having to separate from her. It is so impossibly hard to finally admit to yourself that your child must leave you. You’re admitting that no matter how much love you’ve given her, it hasn’t been enough. It won’t be enough. It means you’re not enough to make your child happy and well.
But this was the only alternative. And part of me was still optimistic. Maybe Nancy would get well and come home. Maybe she could still become like other girls.
When we got to western Connecticut, we stopped at a diner for lunch. Nancy was very calm.
“I’m coming right back,” she assured us. “This isn’t for long.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Frank agreed, doing his best to be cheerful.
I said nothing. I knew if I opened my mouth I would cry.
Then we got back in the car and drove our daughter to her new home.
Chapter 8
The town in Connecticut where Barton was located was a postcard New England village. There was a church with a tall white spire. The lawns of the neat houses were covered with snow. Kids were sledding. Barton was a few miles outside of town, in the woods.
We pulled into the Barton driveway and were totally overwhelmed. The school was headquartered in the most beautiful mansion I’d ever seen. It was a huge old stone place with formal gardens, stables, a pond, a swimming pool. We came to a halt before the front door and just gazed in awe.
The massive oak front door opened. Mr. and Mrs. Bebee, a handsome older couple who were Barton’s headmaster and headmistress, came out and greeted us. A big, friendly dog bounded out the door behind them and began to lick Nancy’s hand, his tail wagging like crazy.
“Mommy, I forgot,” she said, frowning. “Who’s gonna take care of Cupcake?”
We’d gotten a new cat, a friend for Aquarius.
“I will, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Mr. Bebee helped Frank unload Nancy’s bags. We went inside. There was an immense pipe organ in the living room. A fire crackled in the fireplace.
Nancy’s room upstairs had a fireplace, too. She had the room to herself.
“Boy, I wouldn’t mind moving in here myself!” exclaimed Frank.
A few of the girls watched us shyly from the hallway as we parked Nancy’s things. Altogether there were twenty boys and girls—ages eleven to fourteen—living in this wonderful mansion.
Nancy checked out the view from her window. “Look, Mommy. There’s a skating pond!”
Mrs. Bebee smiled kindly. “Do you like to ice skate, Nancy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So does Annabelle, your next-door neighbor. Oh, Annabelle!” she called.
A tall girl in a slouchy felt hat, torn jeans with peace sign patches, and a baggy sweater appeared in the doorway. Mrs. Bebee introduced them. They acknowledged each other with a nod, their eyes firmly fastened on the floor.
“Annabelle, how would you like to introduce Nancy to the pond?”
“Okay,” she replied softly. “Do you need skates?” she asked Nancy.
“Got ’em right here,” Nancy said, grabbing her skates. Off they went.
Mr. Bebee smiled at us warmly. “Coffee?”
We went back down to the living room and sat before the fire while Mrs. Bebee served us coffee.
“Before I forget,” I said, digging into my purse, “here’s Nancy’s Thorazine and the pr
escription.”
Mr. Bebee took the pills and the slip of paper. “We’ll keep this stuff for you, but we don’t think much of pills. They’re no solution. We expect to have her off them very soon.”
“Well, you have our complete support there,” I said.
“If you can manage her without the medication, that would be great,” agreed Frank.
“We will,” Mr. Bebee said firmly.
“We hope you’ll write Nancy often,” Mrs. Bebee said. “We generally ask parents not to phone at all for the first three weeks. We’ll contact you.”
Frank and I nodded, finished our coffee.
“I hope you won’t think we’re bad hosts,” said Mr. Bebee, “but we’d also appreciate it if you left now, before Nancy comes back. It’ll be easier on her.”
From the car window I could see Nancy and her new friend skating merrily back and forth on the pond. The Bebees stood in the doorway and waved to us as we drove away.
It was a dream come true. At last Nancy was in a place where she could get better, a place staffed by caring people who would make her a happy, healthy, functioning child. No price was too high to achieve that. Not the financial burden, not being separated from her.
“It’s so lovely here,” I said to Frank.
“Very nice. Very nice people. I was glad he said that about the pills. I’d like to see her off those.”
“I think we did the right thing.”
“It’ll be good for her. No question.”
Frank took my hand and held it most of the way home.
When we got there, Suzy asked me if she could sleep in Nancy’s bed.
“Why?” I asked, surprised.
“I just want to, Mommy. I miss her. Can I? Please? I won’t touch anything. Promise. Please?”
“Well, okay. But don’t let her know about it.”
“I won’t.”
Suzy was frightened of Nancy. Sometimes she even hated her. After all, Nancy was seldom nice to her. But Nancy was still her big sister. Though it may seem hard to believe, Suzy looked up to her and loved her. Most of all, she wanted Nancy to love her.
From that night on, Suzy did her homework in her own room, then went to bed in Nancy’s room, with its psychedelic posters and antiwar stickers.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 14