And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (16 page)

“You happy?” I demanded. “You happy you got her to run away?”

“Thrilled to death,” he replied bitterly as he closed the door behind her.

“Aren't you going to go get her?”

“She'll come back.”

“Go get her, Frank. It's your fault she ran away.”

“Why is it
my
fault?”

Suzy and David watched us like it was a Ping-Pong match. They were used to us fighting over Nancy.

“Because you gave her no choice. You backed her against a wall.”

“What else was I supposed to do? I try to do what's right. I don't know what else to do.”

“You can start by going out there and getting her. It's cold tonight. She hasn't got a coat.”

He sadly put on his coat, got Nancy's coat, and went out after her.

There was a big field behind the house that hadn't been developed yet. She was crossing it. He caught up to her, demanded she come back. She called him every name in the book, refused to come with him. He grabbed her arm to pull her back. She struggled to get free, and in so doing pulled her arm out of its socket.

She came back to the house, screaming in pain and anger.

“Look what your fucking cocksucker husband did to me!” she yelled. “He broke my fucking arm!”

We drove her to the hospital emergency room. She was quiet during the drive. As soon as we got to the ward she began to yell.

“Look what my father did to me! He beats me, see? I want him arrested right now! I want you to call the police this instant!”

The doctors and nurses on duty exchanged a look. They remembered Nancy from when she had locked everyone out of the emergency room. They ignored her ranting, took her inside, and popped her arm back into its socket. She calmed down immediately. They did not leave her alone in there this time.

“How's that feel?” the doctor asked.

She rotated the arm easily. “It still hurts.”

“It does?” he asked, surprised.

“A lot. Can't you give me a sling or something?”

“Okay, a sling might be a good precaution for tonight.”

He put the arm in a sling. Nancy insisted on wearing it for ten days, even though the arm was fine. She went up and down the
block with it, shouting, “Look what my father did to me!” to the other girls in the neighborhood.

She seemed to enjoy dramatizing her own suffering, particularly at Frank's expense.

Frank was heartbroken by the incident. I was too, for yelling at him when Nancy ran away. We both felt sad and guilty. She was constantly prying us apart, pitting us against each other. We fought out of frustration. I told him I knew he hadn't meant to hurt Nancy's arm, that he was only trying to be firm. We talked all night.

Once again, Dr. Blake blamed us for the incident.

“There's conflict in the house,” she said to me, through my social worker.

“Of course there's conflict!” I complained. “As long as we try to handle her there's going to be conflict. You told us to be firm!”

The social worker had nothing to say.

I informed Dr. Blake a few weeks later that Frank had a sales meeting to attend in New York. The other wives were going, and I was expected to go, too. I asked her if she thought it would be all right to leave Nancy, Suzy, and David with a sitter for the weekend. Dr. Blake said she thought it would be okay. In fact, she said, it would be a good idea because it would show Nancy that we trusted her.

I hired an experienced neighborhood baby sitter for the weekend, a college girl who came highly recommended. Just before we were to leave, I got cold feet and asked my mother to stay at the house, too. She agreed.

We left on Friday afternoon. I called home several times while we were gone, and each time my mom and the sitter reported that everything was fine. Still, I didn't enjoy being away. I couldn't relax, couldn't wait to get home. I wasn't comfortable leaving Nancy. I was afraid she might get belligerent and curse.

I was in no way prepared for what did happen.

Frank and I drove back on Sunday morning. It was afternoon when we turned onto Red Barn Lane. Our neighbors were out washing their cars and mowing their lawns. It was a hot, sunny summer day. Frank and I waved to them as we passed. Instead of waving back they looked away.

We pulled in front of our house. Nancy was sitting on her bike in the driveway, wearing her bathrobe. Her eyes were glazed. She had That Look on her face.

Mother was inside, badly shaken. She burst into tears when she saw me.

“We had just an awful experience this morning. Just awful.”

“What? What happened?”

“She … she …”

Frank came in with the bags. “What happened?”

“She …” Mother trailed off, sobbing.

From what she told us when she calmed down, and from what the sitter told us later, we pieced together the story.

Nancy called David a “fucking little brat” at the breakfast table.

“You know, Nancy,” the sitter scolded, “it isn't nice to talk to your brother that way.”

In response, Nancy ran upstairs to her room, pulled the window screen off, and jumped out on the roof of the garage in her bathrobe and slippers.

She began to scream at the top of her lungs, “
I wanna die! I wanna die! I'm gonna kill myself! I wanna die!”

Everyone in the neighborhood could hear her.

Mother and the sitter tried to coax her back into her room from the window. Nancy finally agreed to come back in when the sitter apologized for what she'd said to her at the table. That seemed to satisfy her.

No sooner had Nancy climbed back in the window, though, than she grabbed a pair of scissors from her desk drawer, brandished them over her head, and hissed to the sitter, “I'm gonna stab you to death, you fucking bitch.”

The sitter screamed and ran from the room.

Nancy ran after her. She chased her down the hall, down the stairs, around the living room, hissing at her, “Fucking bitch, fucking bitch.” She chased her back up the stairs, then back down again.

Finally Mother got Nancy to the floor by tripping her. She pried the scissors from Nancy before she could recover. The sitter ran home, terrified.

Then Nancy's eyes glazed over. When Mother released her, she wandered out the front door and sat on her bike until we got home.

“I didn't know she was this bad,” Mother said to me. “I didn't know she was this bad.”

Frank calmed her down while I went out to see Nancy. I said her name several times. She didn't see me. I held my hand out to her. She took it, came willingly with me into the house. Then she went up to her room and sat on her bed and stared at the wall. I looked in on her a few minutes later and she was asleep. I pulled a blanket over her.

I went to see the baby sitter. I apologized to her and to her
parents. I told them that Nancy was indeed undergoing therapy, but that she'd never exhibited this sort of violent behavior before. I swore to them that we wouldn't have left Nancy with a sitter if she had. They were surprisingly understanding and compassionate.

I phoned Dr. Blake when I got home.

“She's acting out,” Nancy's therapist said. “She wouldn't have really stabbed the girl.”

“It certainly looked that way to my mother,” I said.

“No, no, no. She wouldn't have.”

“How do you know that?”

“She isn't violent.”

“Aren't you listening to me? I just told you, she tried to stab her baby sitter with a pair of scissors!”

“She's acting out,” Dr. Blake repeated calmly.

“Acting out what?” I demanded.

“I'll talk to her this week and we'll find out.”

I hung up the phone, furious. The clinic refused to acknowledge that Nancy was in serious trouble. But Frank and I knew she was deeply disturbed. It wasn't only her behavior that had deteriorated over the past few months. It was her appearance, too. She was ballooning in weight, so much so that I had to buy her new clothes every two weeks. And her facial expression had changed. When Nancy had started her treatment at the clinic, she still smiled, still had an alert, warm gleam in her eyes. Now the light was gone.

I have snapshots of her at age ten and age eleven. The contrast is alarming. The ten-year-old Nancy is our Nancy. The eleven-year-old Nancy, the Nancy who stood on the garage roof and screamed that she wanted to die, is not. She is glaring vacantly through you, her thick dark brows knitted into a frown.

Whatever was pulling her had taken her away from us. But the experts didn't believe us. They still thought we were the trouble.

They needed to see it for themselves, and finally they did.

Ever since Nancy had started with Dr. Blake, she'd been very curious about the source of the therapist's accent. Dr. Blake was from one of the Eastern European countries, I believe. But for some reason she preferred not to tell Nancy where she was from. It became a major point of contention.

When Nancy arrived for her first session after the near-stabbing, she was armed with a list of at least ten European countries that Dr. Blake might have come from. She intended to confront her therapist.

I waited outside Dr. Blake's office on a couch, as usual. A few minutes after their session started I heard Nancy scream, “I know you're from somewhere, you fucking bitch! Where are you from? Where?”

Then I heard a loud smash, followed by another, then another. Another therapist hearing the commotion came running down the hall and into Dr. Blake's office. I followed him.

Nancy was destroying the woman's office. Everything on the desk was smashed. The books had been swept off the shelves. A clock had been hurled through the closed window and out into the parking lot. A bottle of blue ink was all over Dr. Blake, dripping down from her hair onto her face. She was definitely frightened.

The man pinned Nancy's arms behind her and sat her down hard on the couch. Dr. Blake motioned for me to come out in the hall with her.

“Nancy got
very
angry,” she said, with total surprise. Clearly, she had not believed any of my reports over the past year. “Angry over absolutely
nothing
. I think you had better take her home.” Dr. Blake looked warily over her shoulder into the office. “When she's calm.”

“Do you still think she's acting out, or is something else wrong with her?” I asked.

Dr. Blake hesitated. “She really did try to stab the baby sitter, didn't she?”

Finally Nancy calmed down a little, and as we left she turned, pointed a finger at Dr. Blake, and said, “I warned you, you bitch.” Then she marched down the hallway, me struggling to keep up with her.

Nancy's fall term at school started soon after that. She was excited about going back to school, though she did get upset when we had to buy her new jeans because the old ones didn't fit anymore. I couldn't understand why she was blowing up so fast. She wasn't eating much.

She was very quiet when she came home from her first day of classes. She went to her room and read and listened to records. She came down for dinner but ate little and said nothing. She went to bed early.

Her screaming woke me in the night. I ran to her room, turned the light on. She was cowering on the floor in the corner, her arms over her head, gasping in fear. Her face was white.

“They're after me!” she screamed. “Help me.”

“Who?”

“They're after me!”

“
Who
, Nancy?”

“Sharks. Sharks are after me. They're gonna attack me. Eat me up!”

She began to crawl furiously around on the floor on her hands and knees, trying to escape the terror only she could see.

She was awake. This was no nightmare. This was a hallucination.

“Where, Nancy? Where are they?”

“They're gonna get me!”

I sat with her, just like I used to when she was little and thought a rabbit had bit her. I tried to soothe her. We talked about going to the seashore. I quieted her. After a while she fell asleep in my arms, her legs still kicking.

In the morning she refused to come out of her room to go to school. She locked us out and no amount of threatening would get her out of there.

“I'm not going and there's no way you can make me!” she yelled through the locked door.

I got Suzy and David off to school, then called Dr. Blake.

“Nancy must go to school,” she said. “She absolutely must. Get her out of there. Take the door off at the hinges if you have to, but get her out of there. She
must
go to school.”

Frank took Nancy's bedroom door off. She was huddled in the corner on the floor like the night before, her eyes wide with terror. “Don't make me go,” she begged. “Please don't make me. They hate me. My friends, the teachers, they all hate me. They're all against me. Don't make me go. You can't.”

Frank and I looked at each other. She didn't seem to be in any condition to go to school, but Dr. Blake was quite emphatic about this.

“Come on, Nancy,” Frank said, “I'll drive you.”

“Drive me where?”

“To school.”

She screamed. He pulled her to her feet and dragged her to the top of the stairs.

“No, no! Don't make me go! Don't make me go.”

She wrapped her fingers around the wrought-iron bannister and held on for dear life. Frank tried to pull her down the stairs but she held firm. The bannister began to creak.

“They're against me! Don't make me go!”

I peeled her fingers off the railing, one at a time. When one hand was loose, Frank was able to drag her down a step. She grabbed hold again. Again I peeled her fingers off, one by one, and Frank pulled her, screaming, down one step. After twenty minutes of this we had her downstairs. Frank dragged her, kicking, punching, screaming, into the car. He started the motor, backed out the driveway, and hadn't gone halfway down Red Barn Lane before her door flew open. She tried to jump out of the car. He pulled her back in, slammed the door shut. He yelled. She screamed. They drove away.