As I boiled the water for pasta, Jenny climbed up on the couch and began to step daintily along the back. She proceeded to make the rounds of all the furniture in the house, circumambulating the edges like a cat. I tried to keep an eye on her as I cooked, but she disappeared into Kali’s room.
I rinsed the tortellini, spooned it into a bowl, mixed in a dollop of pesto, stuck a fork in it, and knocked on the bedroom door. Silence. When I entered, the room was dark, and it took a moment for the edges of Jenny’s form to take shape in the shadows. She was crouching at the far corner of Kali’s bed, eyes glittering. I handed her the dish of pasta, and she reached for it, then whacked it out of my hand. The hot food spilled across my arm, my shirt, the rug at my feet. Jenny shimmied past me and rushed out of the room.
I heard the front door open and then slam. It was very cold outside. Jenny was barefoot, and wore only a short, tight tank top with her favorite royal blue parachute pants. I left the food on the floor and went after her.
“Sweetie?” I sang into the darkness. My voice was shrill, fake. “Want to go see Kali and her mom? They invited you over,” I lied.
When I had picked Jenny up the day before, Kali’s mother had warned me against a psychiatric intervention, on the grounds that “they would turn her into a mental patient for the rest of her life.”
Meanwhile, Elaine and Trudy were telling me that if I didn’t get Jenny help immediately something terrible was likely to happen.
Torn between these two categorical opinions, I tried to quiet my mind and seek inner guidance. Nothing.
I ducked inside, grabbed my purse, and tried to act casual as I dashed back outside and headed toward the car.
“Let’s go, Honey.” I had no idea where we would go once I got behind the wheel, but I was trying to buy time before Jenny ran away again. To my amazement, she followed me and opened the passenger door. Thank you, God, I uttered. I climbed in and began to babble, flinging words around in hopes of hitting on the right combination to regain her trust, pretending this was an ordinary jaunt to visit friends, rather than a desperate late-night flight into the void.
Jenny froze and stepped back.
“What? Oh, come on, Jenny. Just get in the car.”
“Be quiet and listen,” she whispered, holding a finger to her lips. “I’ve always tried to tell you. Be quiet. Listen.”
“Okay, okay! I’ll stop talking if you just come with me.”
She put her hand on the door, hesitated, withdrew it, leaned over and stared me down through the glass across the span of the front seat.
I got out and walked around the car to open Jenny’s door for her. She stepped aside and ambled into the sagebrush. Slowly, as if pursuing a wild partridge, I followed her. She could not cover much ground without shoes. I easily caught up with her, and I clasped her shoulder, turning her around and guiding her back to the car. I helped her in, closed the door, closed my eyes, and prayed. Then I walked around to my side of the car and got in.
Jenny got out.
I got out.
I crossed the driveway and reached for her hand. She let me lead her back to the car. I started the engine and drove to the top of the driveway, irrelevantly put on my blinkers, and turned left onto Maestas Road. As I accelerated, Jenny opened her door and tumbled out, then sprang to her feet and took off.
I screeched to a stop in the middle of the street, flung open my door, and, leaving the engine running, plunged into the darkness. She was gone. Defeated, I headed back to the car.
Suddenly Jenny materialized out of the shadows and slipped into the driver’s seat. She slammed the door, gunned the engine and sped away.
I dropped to my knees in the empty street. “Oh no,” I whispered. “Oh no.”
I walked back to the house and called Anthony, a former lover who had become a big brother. Anthony had fulfilled the bad-boy-on-a-bike archetype I’d needed as part of my recovery from Randy Sanders. He was brooding and sexy, with a fuck-you attitude toward the world that I hoped would rub off on me. It didn’t. But once we had dispensed with the illusion of a romance, Anthony and I had been able to get on with the business of being friends. If I had a flat tire or my pipes froze or I locked myself out of my house, it was Anthony I would call.
Now that I was with Jeff, I had stopped depending on Anthony to rescue me, and we had begun to drift apart. But Jeff was still working in the South Pacific when my daughter went crazy and took off in my car, and so it was Anthony I summoned to do something—anything—to get her back.
While Anthony was at the state police office filing a report, I called my real boyfriend in Hawaii and told him what happened. I had been keeping Jeff apprised of Jenny’s condition ever since Sunday morning when I found her channeling the Divine Mother over at the Hanuman temple. He insisted I phone him the minute I had any more information, even if it was the middle of the night, and I promised I would. After hanging up with Jeff, I paced the living room floor and waited for Anthony to come over and stand vigil with me till Jenny came home. When he arrived, he sat beside me on the couch. We exchanged our customary tortured psychoanalytical self-revelations, but tonight I had no stomach for it. I snapped at him, berated myself, apologized, and started to cry. Then I told Anthony I wanted to be alone.
“Are you sure?” he said. “I don’t think I should leave you like this.”
I nodded. I needed all my attention available to weave a psychic shield around my child, and Anthony was a distraction.
He kissed the top of my head and left.
For a while I sat on the couch in the dark and strained for the sound of tires on the gravel, signaling Jenny’s return. I finally had to conclude that she wasn’t coming home and that tomorrow could be a very long day. I would need all my strength to manage whatever came next. My body felt like Velcro as I ripped it from the couch. I dragged myself upstairs and climbed into bed with my clothes on, just in case I would need to get up in a hurry. I tried to stay awake and vigilant, but at last I succumbed to exhaustion and fell asleep.
Suddenly, I came fully awake in the dark, floating on a tide of well-being. It was as if I had stepped into a warm, well-lit cabin after being lost in a snowstorm in a dark forest. Like a deep drink of water after hiking up a ridge in the high desert, or finding out the tumor is benign and not malignant. Every fiber of my being relaxed and sighed with ease.
I heard a voice inside me say very calmly, “If Jenny dies tonight, it will be all right.”
Permeated with that strange peace, I fell back to sleep and rested through the night.
By the next day, all equanimity had vanished, and it would be months before I remembered it even happened.
As soon as dawn began to lighten the horizon, I got up and called my mom. She tried to sound perky when she answered, but I could tell I had woken her.
“Mom . . . Jenny . . .” I could not utter another word. I was sobbing.
My mother had been tracking Jenny’s unraveling since our return from Hawaii four days earlier. She had been propping me up with hopeful predictions about Jenny’s return to her senses and the standard reassurances that, while admittedly dramatic, Jenny’s behavior fell into the spectrum of normal adolescent extremes.
Mom waited quietly for me to get a hold of myself, but I could feel the thrum of her anxiety across the phone line. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I swallowed hard. “Jenny took off in my car last night. I don’t know where she went. I don’t know where she is. Mom, I’m so scared!”
“You went through this alone all night? Oh, my poor Mirabai! Why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t want to bother you. I thought she’d come back.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Mom lived a half an hour away, but it felt like a decade before she pulled up to the house. Rightly suspecting that I would not eat of my own accord, she had brought me a breakfast burrito, which sat on the counter for the rest of the morning like an accusation. Food w
as for people who did not lose track of their children.
Mom sprang into action. She called Daniela and Amy, who cancelled all plans for the day and raced from their respective houses to see what they could do to help. Sean came over with his wife Tania, who often stayed with me when Sean went away on weekend Zen retreats, and they too dropped everything to sit with us while we tried to figure out how to find Jenny and get her back. We called Chamisa Mesa to let them know that Jenny was missing, and they suspended classes for the day and organized search parties, spreading out across the county in a collective effort to locate my wayward girl. Every muscle in my body was coiled for action, but my team convinced me to stay home and wait in case Jenny came back.
Mom and Amy cleaned Jenny’s messy room while I fought with the state police over the telephone. Local law enforcement had not done a thing to help. Nor were they willing to even begin until twenty-four hours had passed, at which time I was required to file an official missing person report. Meanwhile, they had no record of Anthony’s visit the night before, nor my follow-up call around midnight, nor my subsequent call early that morning, during which the dispatcher had finally asked me to stop calling.
“It’s not our place to mediate family disputes, Ma’am,” I was now being told.
“But it wasn’t a dispute. My daughter is mentally ill. She is a danger to herself.”
“It says here that she attacked you.”
“No! Well, sort of. That was only part of what happened. She’s having a psychotic break.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that, Ma’am.”
“Hey, wait a minute, I thought you said you had no record of our report last night.”
“It says here that you had a fight with your daughter and she fled in your blue Ford Escort.”
“It wasn’t a fight! And it was a purple Ford Explorer. Shit! You guys need to get your facts straight. Can’t you send out an APB or something?”
“Please don’t swear at me, Ma’am. You can file a report this evening. As I said.”
“Right. Well.”
The dispatcher hung up.
I gripped the phone, clenched my teeth, and roared into the empty air.
Tires on the gravel. I leapt from my chair. But it wasn’t Jenny. It was the UPS truck, rumbling to a stop in front of the house. The horn honked, and Mom went outside to retrieve the delivery. It was a small box from my publisher. I set it unopened on the kitchen table. Mom picked it up.
“May I?”
I shrugged. “Go ahead.”
A month earlier, before we went to Hawaii, the publisher had overnighted a glossy photocopy of the book cover. I wasn’t home when the Fed-Ex package arrived. Jenny had opened it on her own and carefully resealed the envelope. Then, with the skill of a CIA operative, she spread Wite-Out over the return address and wrote in the name and address of Victoria’s Secret, where I had been known to purchase the occasional item of lingerie. Only in addition to using the penmanship of a would-be physician, Jenny had spelled it “Victory’s Secret.” I pretended to be surprised and duly impressed by the ruse when she handed me the envelope after dinner that night.
Now my mother was opening the latest delivery from my publisher. Inside was an advance copy of my new translation of Dark Night of the Soul. In this moment my life’s work felt like a cruel joke.
“Congratulations, Mirabai,” my mother said.
“Congratulations,” said my older daughter and my sister and the friends who had come over to keep me company as we waited for news of Jenny.
I glanced at the cover, flipped it over and took a look at the back, riffled through a few pages and set it on the table. Then I turned around and went back to staring out the window.
Half an hour later, the police pulled into the driveway.
19
HER CHARIOT
I watched my reaction unfold like a traditional movie scene in which a mother receives the news that her child has been killed in an accident. As I saw myself prostrate on the porch floor, I reminded myself of Catholic nuns in the movies who prostrate themselves before the altar and cry out to Jesus. I reminded myself of myself as a small child, throwing myself on the kitchen floor and howling because my mother would not let me eat plain butter; once I had started crying, I was committed, and it had seemed wrong to stop. I reminded myself of Jenny laying herself flat before Maharaj-ji’s tucket in full dunda pranam.
“No,” I whispered. And then I was wailing. “No!”
Couldn’t I come up with something more original? Something more dignified?
“Mom! I need my mother!” I screamed.
“I’m right here, my love. I’m holding you.” And she was. But I could not feel her arms wrapped around my torso, her face pressed against my face as she sobbed with me, our tears colliding in the storm.
And then I sat up. I mopped my tears with angry hands and lumbered to my feet. “Let’s go,” I said.
“We will accompany you to the funeral home,” Officer Rael said, and for the first time his partner looked into my eyes and made a stab at a compassionate smile.
Funeral home. That sounded like a house, where people lived. Not a holding facility for dead bodies.
“Thank you,” I said, and then I reached across the chasm of my own pain for Officer Rael’s hand. “This must be very difficult for you to do,” I said. “Is it . . . your first time?” He did not let me touch him.
“Not at all,” he said. “I do this often.” He pronounced the silent “t” in often, which bothered me. “It’s my job.”
“I see.” So much for noble gestures. “Let me get my purse.” But my purse had been in the car with Jenny. I had no purse. I turned in a helpless circle.
That’s when I noticed Sean and Tania standing in the doorway, their faces collapsed in various versions of shock and mercy. I stepped inside, and they took turns embracing me, crooning, their eyes wild with sorrow.
“I need to call Jeff before we go.” I had promised. And I wanted to feel the warmth of his voice enfolding me. But when he answered the phone on the first ring, I was detached. “Jenny’s dead,” I said bluntly.
And it was my steely Vietnam vet boyfriend who broke down.
“Mirabai, no!”
“I have to go. Identify her body.” Still I did not cry.
“Oh, my love.” It was late afternoon in New Mexico and early morning in Hawaii. Jeff was about to begin his workday, installing locks in a resort on Kauai. He had just been unloading his tools when I called. “I’m on my way.” He threw everything back in the case and called a cab to the airport. Mom grabbed her keys, and I followed her to her car. Amy, who had just gone home to take a shower, magically reappeared in the backseat. She reached up and squeezed my shoulder in silence, and she did not let go. We followed the police car through town to the Rivera Family Mortuaries. We drove slowly, and the world held its breath as we passed. No mother should ever have to do this, I thought, and desperately wished that no other mother ever would. I will take this one, I said to the universe. Just don’t make anyone else have to identify the body of her child.
The medical investigator met us at the door. I knew her. We lifted weights together at the gym. Tenderly, she held my gaze for a moment.
“You ready?” Tamara asked. I bit my lip and nodded. “Please come with me,” she said. And I followed the kindly coroner into a room in which, upon a cold metal table at its center, the body of my little girl lay.
I stood away for a moment, gazing from a distance, and then, as if wading into a pool of piranhas, I made my way to her.
She lay on her side, her body curled gently in on itself, like someone trying to find the perfect position to take a nap. Her eyes were slightly open, her lips barely parted. Her expression was settled, serene. Apart from a pale bruise on her cheek, she looked entirely unhurt, as if she had swallowed hemlock and not swerved and overcompensated, smashed a guardrail, tumbled across the sky, and flown through the shattered windshield before slamming to the groun
d beneath a ponderosa pine in a puddle of full moonlight.
You’ve gone too far this time, Jen.
But this was not the place to reprimand her, to criticize Jenny for dying and get her to promise never to die again.
I leaned over her and awkwardly wrapped my arms around her shoulders and bent to nuzzle her neck. I could not find my way around the foreign landscape of my daughter’s dead body. It felt like I was walking in on an ancient esoteric rite in the inner sanctum of a goddess temple, and so I withdrew from this one-sided embrace.
I stood up and opened the palms of my hands. “Fly with angels, my love.” And I turned and walked away from the empty vessel that used to hold Jenny’s life force.
Fucking angels. I did not want to give them my daughter. But it was evident that I had no choice. And something in me seemed to get that my highest task at this moment was to love her enough to release her into their waiting wings, where they would lift her and exalt her, and carry her away from me forever, and keep her safe.
“She heard the call and she went running,” Jeff said when he returned from Hawaii and drove over to the funeral home to view her body. “And her chariot came back empty.”
20
KADDISH, ETC.
Again they took her away. Now that I had found her, even if only her empty shell, I couldn’t bear to let her out of my sight. But because Jenny died alone (they told me), she had to have an autopsy. State law (they told me). Later I found out that, as Jenny’s mother, I had the right to decide whether or not a team of strangers could slice open the cavity of my daughter’s body-temple and weigh, measure, and otherwise intrude upon her ruined organs. But I did not know this at the time, and I let them separate us. I comforted myself with the thought that Jenny, a budding scientist, would have been fascinated by the notion of peeling away the outer covering to reveal the inner architecture of the human form.
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