And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (22 page)

“Nancy,” I reasoned, “you
have
to go to school.”

“I'll run away,” she repeated.

I didn't respond. She hung up on me.

The following day Nancy ran away from Barton.

“I'd not be too concerned,” Mr. Grant said over the phone. “One of our people is out in the car looking for her. She hasn't been gone long and she only has two dollars. She's probably walking into town. But I wanted you to know in case she calls you. If she does, try to find out where she is, so we can pick her up.”

I agreed to. “Is there any specific reason why Nancy ran away?”

“I'm not certain about that. I took away one of her privileges this morning for some disruptive classroom behavior. She spoke back to a teacher.”

“What privilege did you take away?”

“Her use of the music room for two weeks. Where the girls listen to records.”

They found Nancy in town. She was by the side of the road, trying to hitchhike home.

“She was very angry,” Mr. Grant reported to me over the phone. “Yelled and cursed. But they got her in the car and now she's back safe and sound. Pretty calm, too.”

“Will you discipline her?”

“Yes. I'm afraid this means a grounding—no trips to town. And I'll be taking away her phone privileges for two weeks. She won't be calling you.”

A few days later I got a letter from Nancy. It consisted of a terse one-line message:

“They can't keep me here.”

She didn't run away from Barton again, at least not that I was informed. But as spring arrived she got more and more disruptive. Mr. Grant's evaluations grew increasingly negative. She was fighting with the other girls and with authority figures. For the first time her schoolwork was beginning to suffer. She refused to do it—as a form of rebellion.

By the end of the semester, when we arrived at Barton for our Parents' Day evaluation session with Mr. Grant and Nancy, the idea of her moving on to a small boarding school had been abandoned.

“We feel that Nancy belongs in our Avon unit this fall,” Mr. Grant said. “The students are older, and she needs the scholastic level they can offer her there.”

Nancy sat up stiffly in her chair. She was very angry. “You
promised
me I could leave after this year!”

“Nancy,” he said. “You still need a structured environment.”

“Don't listen to him,” she commanded Frank and me. “He's a liar.”

Mr. Grant shook his head. “We told you you'd be able to leave
if
you continued improving like you had been. I'm afraid you didn't keep up your end of the bargain, Nancy.”

“I'm okay!” she insisted. “Mom, don't listen to him! I'm okay!”

“We don't think she's capable of handling a boarding school. If
you wish to keep Nancy in the Darlington system, then she's to go to Avon after she gets back from camp.”

Darlington was still the only school system we'd found that was equipped to deal with Nancy. The Avon school was more expensive than Barton—$1,000 a month. But it was also closer, about forty miles from Huntingdon Valley in the Main Line suburbs. We agreed to enroll her there.

It was at Avon that Nancy became involved with drugs. This time it was no figment of her imagination.

The Avon unit was called Lakeside Campus. Its ten-acre grounds were situated in countryside that was giving way to suburban development. The students lived in two old mansions, one for the boys, one for girls. Joint classrooms and a gym had been added on. There were forty boys and forty girls at Lakeside Campus, ages fourteen to eighteen. Nancy was the youngest. She was thirteen.

Most of the girls were already there, slouched on sofas in the mansion's downstairs living area or on the floor, smoking cigarettes and catching up on summer news. A stereo blasted the Jefferson Airplane from somewhere upstairs. They were unkempt girls, barefoot and braless, wearing patched jeans, torn T-shirts or workshirts, and hostile expressions on their faces.

Some of them paused to check out Nancy, the newcomer. She stood next to us in the front doorway, clad in a clean, puffy peasant blouse, jeans, and sandals. She looked uncomfortable. So did Suzy and David, who had come along to say good-bye.

I looked around for the supervisor. There were no adults anywhere, so I tried to find one of the college students who were supposed to be around part-time as child-care workers. I approached the only clean-cut girl in the room, who sat alone on a sofa.

“Do you work here?” I asked.

She stared straight ahead, eyes glassy. She was in some kind of fog.

“Hello? Excuse me?” I said.

She blinked. “Huh?”

“Do you work here?” I repeated.

No answer.

“Hello?”

“I live here,” she replied.

I tried one of the other girls, who wore a paisley headband and was deep in conversation.

“Excuse me?” I said. “Could you direct me to the supervisor, Mallory Brooke?”

The girl pointed over her shoulder with her thumb. “In her office. Brooke's in her
office
.”

I signaled to Frank and the kids and we went to the back of the house, where we found Mallory Brooke, girls' unit supervisor, in her office. She was in her mid-thirties, tall and thin, with close-cropped hair and no makeup. She looked like a gym teacher. She gave Nancy a firm handshake.

“Hello, Nancy,” she declared. “Mallory Brooke. Call me Brooke. Everyone does. I'll take you up to your room.” She pushed past us and marched through the living area. We followed.

The girls sitting on the great curving staircase parted grudgingly to let us pass. Three or four stereos blared upstairs. Several girls were taping psychedelic posters to the corridor walls.

There were three beds in Nancy's room, two of them already made up. The furniture was chipped, the curtains were shabby.

Nancy looked around at all of this, then glared at me. “I got no fucking room here,” she said.

“We'll make room,” Brooke said. “Plenty of it.”

Frank went back downstairs to get the rest of Nancy's things from the car. We left quickly. Having us hanging around was making her feel like even more of an outsider.

“Mommy?” Suzy said as we got in the car. “Mommy?”

“Yes?”

“Mommy, I don't like it here.”

“It'll be fine,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Suzy. I had an uneasy feeling about the place, too. But I knew of nowhere else for her to go.

She phoned that night.

“The food is crap here,” she said. “Nothing but fat. Total crap. And the kids are sickies and weirdos. I don't like it here. I wanna come home.”

“Do you have permission to phone, Nancy?”

“What's wrong, don't you wanna talk to me? Your own daughter?”

“That's not the point, sweetheart. You're supposed to be getting settled and—”

“I wanna come home,” she demanded.

“You can't.”

“How about this weekend?”

“You just got there. I don't think you'll be allowed home yet.”

“Brooke gave me permission.”

“She did?”

“Yes. She said it was okay.”

“Well …”

“Don't you wanna see me?”

“I'll talk to Brooke, see what she says about it.”

“She said it was
okay
. Don't you believe me?”

“Of course I do. I just—”

Nancy slammed the phone down angrily. I dialed Brooke.

“No,” she said emphatically. “I absolutely did not give Nancy permission to come home. Certainly not this weekend. She's not even set up in her classes yet. Absolutely not.”

I spoke to Nancy, told her Brooke denied having given her permission. She called Brooke a liar and hung up on me again.

Later, after Suzy and David had gone to sleep, Frank and I were watching the news on TV in the den. I felt a cool breeze behind me, and turned. Nancy stood in the foyer, That Look in her eyes.

“Nancy!” I cried. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” she replied quietly.

Frank got up, closed the front door behind her. “But honey,” he said, “you're not supposed to be here.”

“I wanted to come home.”

“How did you get here?” he asked.

“Hitched.”

“This time of night?”

“Nothing's gonna happen to me,” she said.

“It's dangerous,” I protested.

“What would you care? You don't love me. Either one of you.”

“Of course we love you,” Frank insisted.

She glowered at us, went into the den, and sat down on the couch
with her coat still on. She stared defiantly at the TV set.

We were not pleased. Nancy didn't live with us for a very good reason—we couldn't handle her. That was why we had relinquished our supervisory role. That was why we had gone to the great expense of placing her in the Darlington system, reputed to be one of the finest in the country. They were supposed to be able to handle her. Clearly, they weren't living up to their end of the bargain.

Frankly, Nancy's arrival was also an intrusion. I was not proud to admit this, but the truth was that our life was better when our first child was not there.

I went to the kitchen and phoned Brooke to tell her Nancy was safe and that we'd return her the next morning. She had no idea what I was talking about.

“Nancy's gone,” I said, confused. “She must have been gone for hours. She ran away. Didn't you know that?”

“No, I thought she was in her room. I can't watch her all the time. I'm sorry.”

“But don't you have help?”

“Not right now.”

“You mean you're keeping track of forty girls all by yourself?”

“I do the best I can, Mrs. Spungen. But you have to remember this isn't a locked campus. If a girl wants to leave, there isn't much I can do—even if I had a dozen assistants.”

Barton hadn't been a locked campus, either. But Barton
had
been isolated. Lakeside Campus wasn't. It was within easy walking distance from Winfield, a commuter town with a train station and access to the major turnpikes.

Nancy still sat in her coat, staring at the TV. I made her a sandwich and a glass of milk. She ate, but said nothing else. She seemed very depressed. Frank and I sat quietly with her until she abruptly got up, went up to her room, and went to sleep in her clothes. I dropped her off at Lakeside Campus the next day.

She phoned constantly. She accused the other girls of hating her, conspiring against her, threatening to hit her, stealing her clothes, her records, her spending money. I checked with Brooke. Most but not
all
of Nancy's accusations were products of her imagination.

“We have had rip-offs,” she admitted. “We can't watch them all the time.”

Nancy was not in therapy. This bothered us and I called Brooke after a few weeks to find out why Nancy wasn't seeing anyone.

“It's taking time,” she said. “You see, most of the girls already
have a therapist from last year. But don't worry. She'll get one soon.”

She didn't. Weeks passed and Nancy still hadn't been assigned a therapist. So I phoned Mr. Sylvester, Brooke's boss at the Lakeside Campus unit, and demanded one.

“We're working on it, Mrs. Spungen,” he said.

“That's simply not good enough,” I said. “Your brochure promises therapy. We're paying you a thousand dollars a month. Nancy's supposed to be in therapy and I want her in it—
now
!”

She got her therapist assignment, though the sessions didn't actually begin for another two months.

She came home for Thanksgiving. She arrived after school on the Wednesday before, looking like many of the girls we'd seen that first day. Her jeans were frayed and filthy, her hair and complexion untended.

She went straight for the kitchen, which I had, of course, stocked with her favorite brands of pretzels, cheese, and pickles. She gathered the goodies in her arms, sat down at the kitchen table with them, and dove in. I joined her in the kitchen and began to make dinner.

Almost immediately I smelled smoke.

I turned to find Nancy smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table. A pack of Marlboros and a book of matches sat there. She glared at me, daring me to say something about it. I went back to my cooking.

After a moment I quietly said, “I see you're smoking cigarettes now.”

“So what?” Nancy demanded.

“So, they're bad for you. So, when Daddy smoked you made him stop because you said they would kill him.”

She laughed derisively. “Like, I mean, who wants to live. Ya know?”

“No, I don't know.”

Frank pulled his car into the garage and came inside through the side door. He exploded the instant he saw Nancy smoking.

“Put out that goddamned cigarette!”