by John Brooks
I will never part with that watch.
“Hey, Dad.” Casey unplugged one of her earbuds and shook out her hair. “How long till we get there?”
“Umm, probably an hour or two, depending on traffic.”
She groaned and looked out the window. “Man, this place is pretty cutty, Dad,” she said, referring to the procession of malls and subdivisions that lined the freeway north of Sacramento.
“Yep.” I smiled at her Marin County teen vernacular.
We continued north into the Sierra foothills, past Auburn, Colfax, Yuba Gap. By Kingvale we saw snow on either side of the freeway. I took a risk.
“Sooo . . . are there any boys at school you’re interested in?” She shot me a look of disgust, her mouth ajar, as if she were about to vomit. “Dad, I can’t believe you asked me that! I have more important things in my life right now!”
It was hard for me to believe that boys weren’t tripping over themselves for her, but I was biased. I had a pretty good idea which boys she thought were cute, like Nathaniel, Dylan, her friend Emily’s brother David, even our minister’s son Steven. She spent a lot of time with her friends Julian and Max, but they seemed platonic. In fact, all of her relationships with boys seemed platonic.
Perhaps sensing my thoughts, Casey said, “You know, I’m not gay, Dad, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I glanced at her, a bit surprised by her statement. “And by the way, don’t think I’m going to get married and have kids, because I’m not. I hate kids.”
I stifled a laugh. “I just want you to be happy, sweetie. You know that.”
We were silent again, drifting back into our thoughts. I was pretty sure she hadn’t been sexual with anyone. But that wasn’t unusual. Most of her girlfriends hung out in a pack. We suspected that some of them were sexually active, some not. Casey seemed to put intimacy of any sort at arm’s length. I didn’t care whether she was straight or gay. I just didn’t want her to live her life alone and I feared that her tendency to push people away could leave her stranded.
At Donner Summit the snow was well over the roof of the car. It felt like we were driving through a freezing white corridor of fifteen-foot-high snow walls. We stopped at Truckee for a snack and a quick bathroom break, then made the last leg of the trip to Tahoe City.
I had whiffed on the boyfriend thing, but while I had her captive I took another risk. “Honey, have you ever thought about your birth mother?”
I was hit with another look of revulsion. “Dad, why would you even ask me that?” she muttered while shaking her head.
“I don’t know. I was just wondering if you’d ever want to talk about it.”
“With you?” She cranked up her iPod until I could hear the rap beats exploding from her earbuds. It was one of my few, timid exploratory missions into her biological past—a reality check. And of course my inquiry was met with her usual slap-down.
It was nearly four o’clock when we checked into our room at the Travelodge, a budget chain in Tahoe City—two queen beds, desk, table and chairs, cheap prints on the wall, cable TV, coffeemaker with bad coffee, bathroom. Nothing fancy, but clean, comfortable, and functional. It looked perfect to me. Casey practically choked as she gave me her verdict. “Ahg! This place is janky.” She threw her bag on the bed closest to the bathroom. “Dad, why do we have to share a room?”
“We’re here to ski, not to hang out in our room all day. Besides, a room in Squaw Village costs over twice as much as this place.”
“Caroline and Ian’s dad has a condo at Squaw.”
“Well, first, they’re up here all season long, and second, they obviously have a rich and generous dad,” I said with a drip of sarcasm.
“Da-ad. Stop it.” She hated it when I made the slightest negative remark about her friends, even in jest.
It had actually been a good day. I loved being with Casey when she was happy, and looked forward to a day of skiing as I drifted off to sleep while she watched Project Runway.
The next morning, we joined the procession of mud-splattered traffic inching its way from Tahoe City to Squaw Valley; it took a half hour to drive the five miles and park, but I still had plenty of time to get Casey to her snowboarding lesson. We took the gondola to High Camp and found the meeting spot for the snowboarders. Casey noticed some other boys her age and shooed me away. I was to pretend not to know her until instructed otherwise. We were to meet an hour later when the lesson was over.
I made my way over to the Siberian Express quad lift and joined a group of three, listening as they talked to one another about the weather and trail conditions. Looking down at the skiers and snowboarders gliding silently forty feet below us, I fantasized about Casey and me racing down the slopes, Casey swaying back and forth on her snowboard with me in hot pursuit. It would be so gratifying to see her enjoy something she felt she’d mastered, and it would do wonders for her self-esteem.
At the appointed time, we met in front of the High Camp outdoor restaurant. She sat outside in the snow with one boot buckled into the snowboard, looking disheartened. I slid up next to her.
“Hey. How was it?” She poked at the snow and shrugged. Maybe she was just tired.
“Do you want to ski a bit? I’d love to see what you learned.” She remained silent.
“You wanna go inside and get something?”
“Yeah, whatever.” She pulled herself up and unbuckled her boot.
We got hot chocolate inside and sat by the window. I tried to get her to talk but she was unresponsive. It seemed the snowboarding lesson didn’t go as she’d hoped, and I knew better than to press her into a conversation. She wanted to be left alone. But now we had a problem. How would we make the two-thousand-foot descent from the mountain?
I tried again, gently. “Honey, if you’re tired, we don’t have to stay.”
She stared at her hot chocolate. “What about you? You want to ski.”
She was right. It was a gorgeous day and I hated to waste the opportunity, not to mention the money I’d spent. If I had some fun while she waited for me, perhaps she’d learn a valuable lesson that the world didn’t revolve around her. But I couldn’t enjoy myself knowing that she was miserable. I gave in.
“I don’t care. I can go. Maybe we should take the gondola down.”
She looked at me, rolling her eyes. “That’s lame, Dad.” Taking the gondola would’ve meant losing face. She was too proud for that. She was determined to get down on her own steam. Maybe she’d get a second wind that’d boost her spirits. It was impossible to coax a smile out of her.
We finished our hot chocolate, went back outside, and buckled ourselves into our gear. Normally, the three-mile trip to the base of the mountain would’ve taken about twenty minutes, most of it a gentle descent, but there were a couple of steep, tricky areas.
We pushed off from the restaurant, and I let Casey go ahead of me. She wobbled slowly for about ten feet before falling backward and sitting down in the snow. As I pulled up beside her she shot me an accusatory look of resentment, as if this was entirely my fault.
I extended my hand. “Want some help?” She ignored me, pulled herself up, found her balance, and coasted slowly for another twenty-five feet before stopping at a flat straightaway. I stopped next to her. “Wow, honey, that was great!”
We made it to the base after an agonizingly slow hour and a half, punctuated by crying and cursing fits. Several times Casey threatened to abandon the board and spend the night on the mountain before I coaxed her back on.
By the time we made it to the bottom, her nose was runny from crying and her hair was caked with clumps of wet snow. She was exhausted and angry with herself. If only she’d had more patience. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, kiss her wet hair, and cheer her up, but I knew she’d just berate me.
“C’mon, honey. Let’s pack up and go home.” It was pointless to stay.
She looked down at the snow, mumbling, “I’m sorry I ruined everything,” slurping back tears and snot on her sleeve.
I’d gotten used to rejection and tried not to take it personally anymore. I just hoped she knew that I’d never reject her no matter how difficult she was.
We drove home in silence. Casey never went skiing or snowboarding again. It was another reminder of her inability to tolerate failure, like the time she crashed and burned on the Yerba Buena skating rink when she was eight. If she couldn’t do something perfectly, it wasn’t worth doing, and that robbed her of so many opportunities.
THIRTEEN
Casey finished her sophomore year with a GPA equivalent to a low B, respectable for most kids but not up to her personal standards, and she probably gave herself a good thrashing. It was less about us and more about her disappointment in herself.
We found ourselves, once again, in a cycle of defeat. Casey refused our offers of help or tutoring, and we felt powerless to console her when she was down. With summer break coming up, we hoped she’d forget about school for a while and go back in the fall refreshed.
She played soccer and lacrosse during the summer break, but it was more social than athletics. For exercise, she’d drag out her Dance Dance Revolution video game and mimic the TV moves on her dance pad in the living room as if it were a Jane Fonda workout tape.
We were shocked when Casey expressed an interest in a work camp program in Alaska sponsored by our church youth group, a pleasant surprise coming from someone who insisted that she was an avowed atheist. Since she had few extracurricular activities, the trip could have been a wonderful growth experience for her and would spruce up her résumé for college. The program attracted a broad cross-section of kids, from self-proclaimed atheists like Casey to the very devout. When she came home, she complained about proselytizing “Jesus freaks” who wouldn’t leave her alone. When pressed, though, she admitted that she enjoyed the housepainting and a boat trip to see a glacier up close, so it wasn’t a complete waste.
Erika continued to keep an eye out for evidence of Casey purging. Since we’d first raised this concern with her, there were fewer strange noises from her bathroom that would have suggested she was throwing up her food. Either it had been a phase or she’d simply gone underground, out of earshot. But she still had some questionable eating habits, and it had become increasingly difficult to get her to eat with us. When she did, she’d pick at a salad and ignore the protein before racing back to her room to tackle her homework, or so she said.
She complained regularly of stomach problems, but a trip to the doctor revealed nothing—no poisoning, appendicitis, or ulcers. Her diet seemed to consist mostly of cereal, ramen noodles, sliced bread, salad, and, of course, Diet Dr Pepper by the case. She claimed to be a vegetarian.
Erika was more attuned to Casey’s eating habits than I was because home-cooked meals had been an essential part of her family life growing up. But nagging Casey did nothing but provoke a fight and a door slammed in the face.
She didn’t seem much different from her friends or the other kids in the neighborhood. They were vegans, vegetarians, and raw foodies who stayed up too late glued to the Internet, watched too much TV, and slept too late. Some couldn’t eat wheat, others gluten or dairy.
Casey stopped wearing the fabric bracelets around her wrists, and there was no evidence of any more cut marks. She’d confided to Erika that some of the girls were just curious about cutting. It was an experiment and it was over. Nothing to freak out about.
Casey started her junior year at Redwood in the fall of 2006. Erika and I hoped for a turnaround from the year before, but she continued to struggle with the precarious attendance and performance record that we first saw in sophomore year. There was no consistency to her grades. They were at one extreme or the other.
A.P. European History—A
Enjoy having student in class
Pre-Calculus—F
IN DANGER OF FAILING
This was especially worrisome because she had less than two years to raise her GPA for college admissions. She couldn’t afford many more attendance problems or incompletes, particularly because she had her sights set on some pretty competitive schools—NYU, Bard, Reed, Bennington. I was petrified that failure to gain admittance would send her off the deep end.
But there was something else brewing that was even more troubling.
Erika raised the subject one Saturday on a walk with our friend Sharon and her dog, Joy. It was Indian summer, shorts and T-shirt weather. Sharon had on a pair of big black sunglasses. We walked along McKegney Green in Tiburon, making our way to a small white gazebo by the water. A local family who’d lost their seven-year-old daughter to a mysterious disease forty years earlier had donated it to the town. It was a very tranquil spot. We sat down.
“This is such a cool little place,” Sharon said, admiring the latticework.
Erika sighed. “Yeah. It’s just so sad because it was built for a little girl who died.”
We were silent. Igor and Joy walked up to us from the bay water, panting, their tails wagging, sticking their noses up to say hello. Then they wandered back to the water. Erika broke the silence. “I need to share something that’s bothering me.”
Uh-oh.
“I was putting some clothes away in Casey’s room and I found an empty bottle of Skyy vodka in the back of her drawer.”
My mood sank. Sharon, normally the consummate cheerleader—Ms. Positive—had a look of concern on her face as Erika continued. “I was also looking through her pocketbook and I found a pack of cigarettes and a glass pipe.”
I was taken aback. “What do you mean? Like a crack pipe or hash pipe?”
“A hash pipe,” Erika answered.
“Oh.” I was curiously relieved. At least she wasn’t smoking crack. “Why were you going through her stuff?”
Erika was annoyed. “What do you mean, why was I going through her stuff? Aren’t you concerned that your daughter might be doing drugs?”
I resented Erika’s accusatory tone but I knew she was right. Of course I was concerned. It was just so overwhelming. First the grades, then the purging and cutting, now this. Upon Erika’s insistence, we had formed a parents’ group to connect with Casey’s friends’ parents so that we could all keep tabs on their outings, parties, and overnights. We thought we had the substance issue covered.
I drank and smoked pot when I was her age, but I hid it and my parents never caught me. Now that I was a parent, I was faced with the ultimate irony. I still had a weakness for a chardonnay and a toke, and I thought I had to hide it from my daughter, who, apparently, was also toking.
Why did Erika have to be so goddamn observant? Couldn’t we just look the other way like my parents did when I was a kid?
I grasped for a way to respond. “Do you have any idea how often she’s been getting high?”
“Nope.”
Sharon weighed in. “A lot of kids are into drugs and alcohol at Redwood, but I’d be especially concerned about Casey. You don’t know much about her physiology and what she might have inherited. Some kids get through this and others become addicts.” We watched a seagull glide in to land on the rocks by the water. Igor was on full alert; he sprang but the gull flew away.
I thought to myself that maybe this wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Perhaps Casey was a casual drinker or toker—like at parties—but didn’t buy it for herself. I’d never seen her wasted, and I had doubts that she did bong hits first thing in the morning before school like some kids I’d suspected or even knew about in my own youth. And her grades? They weren’t stellar but she wasn’t flunking either. Still, we had a serious problem with our daughter and couldn’t sit back and do nothing.
She’d had more than enough chances, and we’d bent our own rules too many times. I let out a long breath. “I guess we have no choice. We’ve let her slide hoping she’ll turn around, but now we have to make good on our promise
to send her back to therapy.”
Erika, sensing my anxiety over another confrontation, turned to Sharon. “After the last two therapists, Casey’s been dead set against going back. Have you ever heard of a child who refuses therapy?”
“No. I can’t say that I have.”
I remembered something that Erika and I had discussed after we ended Casey’s sessions with Tori. “Why don’t we let her pick the therapist—within reason, of course.”
Sharon perked up. “That’s a great idea.”
The thought of another therapist disaster left me numb. Dr. Darnell was essentially useless. Tori was an improvement but still failed to connect with Casey. The church work camp trip to Alaska only reinforced her vow of atheism. What if we shipped her off to a grandparent? My mother would have loved to pamper her, but perhaps my mother-in-law’s Polish discipline would have been the better remedy. We were running out of options.
We stood up and took in the inscription on the bronze plaque in the middle of the gazebo.
CHILD OF SUNLIGHT, CHILD OF STARLIGHT,
CHILD OF MOONLIGHT, GRACE,
SHINE YOUR JOYOUS LIGHT OF LOVE ON ALL
WHO FIND THIS PLACE.
I shook my head. “I can’t imagine losing a child.”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” Erika said. We called Igor and Joy back from bird patrol and walked back home.
The only way for us to have this conversation without Casey running out the door was to wait until she was in her room and stand in the doorway to block her only exit. That moment came soon enough on Sunday, the day after our walk. The door to her room was open, so Erika and I poked our heads in.
It looked like Hurricane Katrina had swept through—clothes, books, shoes, pillows, CDs, empty cans of Red Bull and Diet Dr Pepper were strewn everywhere. Her papasan chair in the corner was barely visible under a pile of dirty laundry. Her new IKEA platform bed was fairly neat, the white comforter tucked in, stuffed animals arranged around the edges. The pink squeaky doll that we’d given her in Poland poked its head out from a pile of pillows. And of course there was her ever-present comfort pillow, now threadbare from years of wear and restuffings.