“What was she doing?”
“Singing.”
I took this in.
“We covered her and brought her back to bed. Three times. But she was up at dawn, and she went right into the temple room. She’s been there ever since. Now she’s dancing in front of Baba’s tucket.” Stephen attempted a chuckle. “At least she’s dressed,” he added.
“I’ll be right there. Don’t let her leave.”
“We’ll try. But it’s Sunday. We’re getting ready for a hundred guests.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” I had always dreaded being perceived as a pain in the ass. “Thank you, Stephen.”
As I drove over to the ashram, I tried to figure out what might be making my cool daughter act like a nut. A combination of sleep deprivation from our all-night flight and participation in a potent religious rite must have dislodged Jenny’s inhibitions. I just needed to get her home. A quiet evening with a bowl of green chile chicken soup and an episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on video should calm her down. Me too. I suddenly craved normalcy with a ferocity that took me by surprise, as if the footings of my world were melting and only something quintessentially ordinary would prevent its complete and irrevocable disintegration.
When I walked into the sunroom that led to the temple, Jenny was sitting at a table with her head in her arms. Kali was perched on a bench, sketching her. I placed my hand on my daughter’s back, and she raised her head in slow motion. She looked at me with unfocused eyes, and very gradually, she smiled.
The radiance of Jenny’s smile almost blinded me. Gone was the grumpy adolescent. In her place was a beatific goddess-girl who beamed at me with unconditional love.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, Sweetie.” I hugged her. She laid her head on my shoulder and clung to me. “What’s going on, Buddy?” She did not answer. She did not loosen her grip around my neck. I turned toward Kali and lifted my eyebrows.
Kali shrugged. “She’s been this way since I got here. She hasn’t said a word. Except just now, when she said hi to you.” Kali returned her attention to placing the finishing touches on the drawing of her apparently God-intoxicated stepsister.
We were sitting on my bed, sipping Earl Grey. After a long nap, Jenny had begun to come back to herself, though there was still a thrumming silence around her that made me feel like I had entered an empty church in a rainstorm.
“Mom?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Can I go to the peyote meeting at Lama tonight?”
I almost choked on my tea. “Are you kidding me, Jenny? Look at you. You want to alter your altered state?”
“I wouldn’t take any peyote. I won’t even go into the tepee. Jack invited me to be his assistant.” Jack was the fireman, whose sacred task it was to tend the campfire through the night while the participants in the ceremony prayed and sang inside the dark womb of the tepee, occasionally stumbling outside to throw up in the sagebrush as they metabolized the magic in their mushrooms.
“I’m sorry, Jenny. You’re too . . . you’re not . . . Let’s try this again in the spring, okay?”
Jenny did not say anything, so (as usual) I felt compelled to say more. To say too much. I launched into a lecture about the power of these ancient medicines and how they needed to be approached with utmost respect and not as recreational substances, and Jenny stared at me while I pontificated. I watched her watching my mouth move, then shifting her gaze to my eyes and perceiving something there, but not actually listening to my discourse.
Suddenly Jenny wriggled her fingers in the air between us—a cross between “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and the Jesus blessing—and said, “It’s all just a game of pretend.”
“What?”
She looked up, down, and all around, to indicate the full spectrum of phenomenal reality.
I commenced a fresh sermon. This time I preached about how I, too, understood that the world was ultimately an illusion, but that I was a big fan of this place nonetheless, and that I, for one, had learned to embrace the mind as a vehicle for transcending the mind. This, I explained, was the path of Jnana Yoga.
Jenny continued to gaze at me with a kind of affectionate pity, and I stopped talking. We sipped our tea.
Then I said, “I’m sorry I have to say no sometimes, Honey. I’m just trying to be a good mom.”
Jenny reached for my hands and pressed them between hers.
“I know,” she said. “You are a good mom. You always have been.”
These are pretty much the last coherent words she ever said to me.
It is not always easy to spot when someone you love is losing her mind. Several conditions obscured Jenny’s mental illness at first. One was that Jenny prided herself on her unconventional attitudes anyway, so it seemed at first as if she might simply be producing and starring in her own existential drama. In many ways, Jenny was a typical teenager, and I had rationalized her behavior over the past year (and everyone assured me this was so) as being nothing more than an extreme version of adolescent angst—a pain in the ass, but developmentally appropriate.
Also, when Jenny’s psychosis switched on, it manifested (as it does with many mad geniuses) as a spiritual experience, and the holiness she radiated was undeniable. She was beatific. Anyone who came near her was bathed in light. It was a couple of days before I was able to reconcile the fact that my daughter was experiencing a psychotic break and a mystical state. They were not mutually exclusive. I should know. After years of trying to figure out what the hell was going on with my own altered states, which had begun at the same age as Jenny was experiencing hers, I had pretty much concluded that I had been suffering from a severe case of dissociation. Evidently I had developed this slipping away action as a coping mechanism for my untenable circumstances. But I was also (as Randy Sanders—I hated to admit this—suspected) experiencing a profound and authentic glimpse of the numinous.
Jenny’s adoption file had revealed that her birth mother suffered from severe bipolar disorder and had been hospitalized on and off for most of her life. Like Jenny, Gloria had a very high IQ. When she was not locked up, she made her living as an exotic dancer in Albuquerque’s red light district, which is (a) how Jenny was conceived and (b) why Jenny was taken away at age two, when she was found alone in a motel room where she had been left for several days without food. But my understanding was that while there is a genetic predisposition for mental illness in the offspring of people with such chemical imbalances, the child might not inherit the disease, and if even if they do, the onset does not usually occur until the late teens. When I thought about it all, which was rare while I was immersed in the daily task of mothering Jenny, I figured we had a few more years before we needed to look for signs. So far, she hadn’t shown any. She was moody, yes, and judgmental as hell, but also a high achiever with a sophisticated sense of humor and a capacity for deep empathy.
Days after Jenny’s last day on earth, as I was trying to piece things together in the futile attempt to make sense of the senseless, Jenny’s friends told me what happened after I’d left her at the river the night of the Durga Puja.
They had hiked upriver to the hot springs, and as they soaked together under the rising moon, they passed around a joint. Jenny, a fledgling pothead, took a hit and handed it to the guy next to her. A few minutes later, she began to cry. This in itself was unusual. Jenny was not someone to cry easily, especially in front of people. But that night, once she started she could not stop. She wept, she sobbed, she howled. Her friends took turns holding her in their arms. A young woman named Rachel, who helped out around the Hanuman temple, told me later that it seemed like Jenny was feeling and releasing a lifetime of pain—maybe lifetimes. At last, Jenny rose silently from the spring, wrapped herself in a blanket, and went to sit by herself on the riverbank. Her friends concluded that she needed space, and they left her alone.
Like Jesus in the wilderness between his initiation by John the Baptist and his emergence as the Messiah
, Jenny had grappled in private with forces I can only imagine. She never returned to her ordinary consciousness after that.
The next few days following Durga Puja unfolded in a dreamscape of beauty and anguish. Jenny was too unstable to go back to school. I brought her home; she ran away. I made her a sandwich, and she created a peanut butter and jelly mandala in the middle of her bed. I reached for her, and she growled like a wounded dog and tried to bite my hand.
Daniela had an early Monday morning appointment with the dentist for Jacob’s first check-up, and she needed help with Bree, so I volunteered Jenny. Maybe being responsible for a two-year-old would ground my unhinged younger daughter. As a teenage mother (twice), Daniela had always needed a lot of help, and her kids spent as much time at our house as they did with Daniela and her various boyfriends. Jenny loved babies, and from the time she was eight years old, she had fed, diapered, and comforted her sister’s children with competence and calm. Daniela and I decided Jenny would sleep over so they could just get up and go the next morning. But she was still acting odd. That night, Jacob woke to the sound of Jenny crying. He went to get his mom. Daniela came into the kids’ room, where Jenny was lying on the top bunk.
“What’s up, Babe?”
Silence.
“Jacob said you were crying.” Daniela reached for her sister’s hand in the dark. “Why are you crying, Hon?”
“Because it hurts.”
“What hurts, Jenny?”
“Giving back.”
“Giving what back?”
“Giving back to God.”
On day three of Jenny’s episode, I had an idea: I would buy her a trailer. We had been talking about it since summer. Our friend Adair, a social worker, endorsed the plan. “It’s called a Teen Cabin,” she said. Teenagers need their own space, Adair explained, but they also need to stay safely held within their parents’ sphere of influence. The solution, if you could pull it off, is to arrange for close but separate living quarters. That way, kids who are bursting with the juices of individuation can see what it feels like to be independent without being prematurely emancipated. I couldn’t help but wonder, wistfully, why both my daughters had been so eager to get away from me, but I comforted myself with the thought that I too had left home young, and I adored my mom.
Our friend Trudy, who used to live in Taos, was visiting from California, and I heard that she had an Airstream for sale. I had just received the second advance check from my publisher, so I had money in my pocket. I would buy Jenny the RV, set it up in the yard, and Jenny could create her own world out there, coming in to eat and bathe and watch movies when she felt like it. I would even throw in a cat. I loved cats, but I was allergic, and Jenny had always wanted a kitty of her own.
I tracked Jenny down for the umpteenth time at the ashram. This was the only place she seemed to want to be. She would sit before Maharaj-ji’s tucket, laying her face against the plaid blanket draped over a platform to represent his presence, her eyes closed, lips moving. Periodically she would rise up on her knees and begin fluttering her fingers in front of his picture, weaving the air with complex hand mudras. She would stand and whirl, sit and stare, bow and remain prostrate for a long, long time.
I clanged the bell over the temple door as I entered, but Jenny did not look up.
“Jen?” I touched her hair. She whipped her head toward me, eyes wild. I drew my hand back. “Let’s go get your trailer. Trudy’s meeting us at Elaine’s.”
In silence, Jenny rose to follow me.
“Sweetie? Shoes?”
She shook her head.
“It’s October, Jenny. Almost November. You have to wear shoes. It’s cold out.”
Without a word, she whirled around and took off running. She leapt over the irrigation ditch and onto the adjoining property, where she darted between the back porch and the tool shed. When I finally caught up with my daughter, I blew up. “Jenny, this is bullshit!” She stopped in her tracks and stared at me. “I have to get this article in by the end of the week, and I’m spending all my time chasing you around.” Jenny surprised me with a look of compassion. “I’m a writer who’s not writing,” I said plaintively, more to myself than to her.
“I know, Mom.” She spoke at last. She hugged me, and we walked back to the car.
“You drive,” she said. “I’ll walk.”
“Jenny, Elaine’s house is five miles away.”
She ignored me and began walking.
I started the car and inched up beside her. I leaned over and opened the passenger door. “We can stop at the animal shelter on the way back, and you can pick out a kitten.”
She climbed in.
But we did not make it to Elaine’s to meet up with Trudy. As we were driving past the turn-off to Chamisa Mesa high school, Jenny opened the door to the car and tried to get out. I swerved to the side of the road, running over shards of broken glass and cursing.
“Jenny, are you crazy? You can’t get out of a moving car!”
“I need to pay off some debts.” As part of my effort to bribe her into going home with me the day before, I had given Jenny her allowance a week early. Now it was around 3:30, and school was just letting out for the day. Absently, I wondered who Jenny owed money to and why.
“What about the RV?”
She slammed the door. I rolled down the window.
“What about the cat?”
She shrugged.
“I want you home by 9:00!”
She nodded and trudged up the hill to the school.
I drove over to Elaine’s in a fugue state.
When I walked in the door, Elaine and Trudy were sitting on Elaine’s couch having tea.
“Jenny’s losing it,” I said from the doorway. “I don’t know what to do.” I stood for a moment, arms folded, clenched, and then I started to cry.
My friends set down their cups in unison and I went to them, melting into their collective embrace.
When I finished explaining how Jenny had been acting for the past couple of days, Trudy said, “This is a psychotic break, Mirabai. You need to take it seriously. People in this condition think they’re invincible, and they walk in front of trains. You need to get help for Jenny. Right away.”
“I’ll make some calls and see if I can get her a bed in the adolescent unit,” Elaine said. “I still have connections at St. Vincent’s from when I was a psych nurse.”
Psychotic break? Psych ward? We were hereby shifting into serious territory.
I nodded my head. There were those at the ashram who were lauding Jenny as an incarnation of the Divine Mother, but I had to face the fact that my illuminated daughter might be seriously ill. If a psychotherapist Zen teacher and a Sufi psych nurse were telling me Jenny was in danger, I had to do what I could to protect her, right? I had to. The seams of my daughter’s mind were bursting, and something vital was spilling out. I was her mother. I would intercept the disaster. I would save my crazy, holy, beautiful girl.
18
DARK LIGHT
After I left Elaine’s, I drove out to the Hondo Mesa, not knowing what had become of my wild child, or when I would ever find her again, or what I would do with her when I did. It had only been three days since Jenny had begun to act like a lunatic, but it felt like this drama had been going on forever and would never end. All I wanted to do was go home, but I was like a person who gets into an accident on her way to the bank, and as the paramedics are trying to staunch the bleeding, she keeps repeating, “I have to get this deposit in by 2:00.”
I had promised Jenny Bird that I would come to the CD release party she was throwing for all the people involved in her latest project, and, under the influence of shock-logic, I was determined not to let my friend down.
The recording engineer was at the party with his fiancée.
“When’s the wedding?” I asked.
“Valentine’s Day.”
“Que romántico.” I sipped my cup of wine. “Planning to have children?”
The w
oman reached for her lover’s hand and squeezed it. They looked meaningfully into each other’s eyes, and then they both smiled at me. “Yes.”
“Don’t,” I said. “It’s not worth it.”
I thought they’d laugh. But they didn’t. They looked at each other again, this time nervously.
“Just kidding,” I said and left the party.
My daughter had sort of promised to be home by 9:00. It’s not that I expected her to uphold the agreement, but I needed to be there just in case.
Jenny was not home when I got there.
I called everyone I could think of who might know someone who might have some clue as to where she could be. I finally tracked her down at a one-room adobe shack up the road from our house. A boy Jenny went to school with, whom I had never met, was living there with a single mom in her thirties. After an hour of coaxing, he managed to get Jenny to climb into the open bed of his pickup, and then he transported her the one mile to our place. When he dropped her off, he was awkward and brief. He seemed embarrassed by the whole situation.
“I found her in my roommate’s car,” he said. “She was dismantling the rear-view mirror and stabbing the seat covers with a fork. I’m going to have to pay for that.”
Jenny smiled hugely, hooked one arm onto a post that held up the porch, and began to twirl, the other arm flung behind her. The full moon washed the sagebrush with pewter light and illumined the planes of Jenny’s face.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “Just let me know what it comes to. And thanks for bringing her back.”
“Okay,” he said and bolted.
Jenny crouched, as if she were about to spring and run away again.
“How about something to eat?” I said. “Cheese tortellini and pesto. Your favorite.”
Her expression shifted from beatific to menacing in a flash. She growled, snarled, shot out her hand as if it were a claw. Involuntarily, I gasped and recoiled. Jenny chuckled and followed me inside.
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