And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (28 page)

Frank went to get the car. Nancy and I walked together to a bench in front of the airline terminal and sat down to wait for him. She was wearing jeans and an orange T-shirt with little silver clouds on it. Her beautiful chestnut-brown hair curled around her face, framing it.

She smiled. “You know what, Mom? I'm happy for the first time in my life. Really happy. I'm not a sickie anymore. For sure.”

My heart soared. We hugged each other.

I had never been so happy. Nancy was healed! The veil had been lifted! I immediately forgot all about her chronic troubled behavior. Past history was erased. The evidence was there—the look on Nancy's face was enough to convince me she was going to be okay now. I so desperately wanted to believe it that I did. The human mind is pretty amazing that way. In those few moments while we waited for Frank to bring the car, my whole life seemed to turn around. I had waited for sixteen years to see my Nancy find joy in life. That had been my goal. And now, at last, it had been realized. I thought to myself,
No matter the cost, the pain, the sacrifice—it has been worth it
.

Fortunately I could not see into the near future. I was able to enjoy that special moment. It remains one of my most precious memories.

I didn't know at that moment that Nancy was about to get much worse, that her behavior was about to grow more horrifying and insidious with each passing day, that she was about to eat away at the four of us like a malignant growth. Soon we would openly despise Nancy. Can you hate your own child? Sure you can. Yet you
still love that child, still hope that someone will step in to set her right. But over the coming year we would finally realize our inability to even come close. Over the coming year, as each door was slammed in our face, our anger and outrage would give way to numbness and despair. Nancy was about to back us deeper and deeper into a nightmarish corner until, beaten down, all feeling and hope gone, we would have but one choice left. We would have to cut that malignancy out.

Things fell apart the instant Nancy got home. Suzy and David had just returned from camp the day before, and David was still very proud of his new wall-unit desk. We'd had a carpenter build it in while he was away. We'd offered Suzy one, too, but she didn't want one. She was happy with her bedroom-set desk. David dragged Nancy upstairs to show it to her. We went with them. She immediately seized on the fact that David had something Suzy didn't have.

“How come
David
got one?” Nancy demanded.

“He has his homework to do,” Frank replied. “He needs a proper place to do it.”

“But what about Suzy? Doesn't she have homework?”

“Yes,” I said. “But she turned us down. She didn't want one.”

“I don't believe that shit for a minute. Suzy, get in here!” she called out.

Suzy came in from her room.

“How come you didn't get a desk like David's? Because you're dumb?”

“I didn't want one,” Suzy answered. “And I'm not dumb.”

“Are,” insisted Nancy.

“Am not,” countered Suzy.

“Nancy, leave her alone,” Frank said. “You're off base.”

She ignored him, plowed on. “David got one because he's smart. He got all A's on his report card. You didn't get a single A. That's why you didn't get a desk.”

“That's not true!” Suzy cried, upset.

“David's so good and sweet and perfect. You're not!”

“Nancy, stop it!” I ordered.

Suzy began to cry. “He is
not
sweet and perfect.” She sniffled.

“
They
think he is,” Nancy said.

Suzy turned to me. “You think he's sweet and perfect? He's not. He's
not
. He gets stoned. She turned him on.
She
did it!”

“Shut up!” David cried out, too late.

Suzy clamped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide with horror. Nancy smirked. Frank and I froze. There was an ominous silence.

“Uh-oh,” David said.

Suzy turned to David, tears streaming down her face. “I'm sorry.” Then she ran out. Her bedroom door slammed.

I finally swallowed, turned to David, and said, “Is that true?”

He put his head down, nodded.

It was a total shocker. Twelve-year-old David, who got good grades and was popular and outgoing, smoked pot. It was so unexpected.

“Nancy,” Frank said. “Please leave us alone.”

She shrugged, still smirking, and went downstairs. Frank closed the door. He and I sat down on David's bed. Nobody said anything for a minute. Frank and I were too devastated to speak. Here, surely, was the last blow to our family's innocence. I looked at David.

“Don't look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like … like I was the last best hope for the Spungen family and now I'm doomed to a life of crime. It doesn't mean anything. Everybody does it. Everybody at school gets stoned. Somebody else would have turned me on if it hadn't been Nancy. Don't blame her.”

“You mean most of your friends get stoned?” Frank asked.

“Some of them.”

“Suzy and her friends, too?” I asked.

“Suzy and her friends, too,” he replied.

“How often do you do it?” Frank asked.

“Just about every day after school. It's fun.”

“It's dangerous,” Frank said.

“Not if you don't get into anything else. And you don't have to. I won't. I won't be like Nancy.”

“What else has Nancy done?” I asked.

“I don't know for sure. Acid, Ludes, THC.”

“Suzy?”

“Just pot. Same as me. Nancy won't let us try anything else. She's really kind of protective of us. I asked her if the pills she had were Ludes and she wouldn't let me touch them. Said she'd break my arm if she caught me trying anything other than pot.”

“It's against the law,” Frank pointed out.

“The law's wrong,” David said.

Both Frank and I were too dizzy and confused to say anything more to him. We talked in bed that night. The world, we realized, had certainly changed since we'd been kids. Maybe a total of two kids in my high school had taken drugs, and they were definitely the type that would land in prison someday. This was different. David and his crowd were good students, good kids. Achievers. We didn't get it. We didn't condone it. But we didn't think there was anything we could do about it, so we faced up to it: Suzy and David were recreational marijuana users. All we could do was impress upon them to be responsible—not to ride in a car with someone who was stoned, for instance; not to go on to stronger drugs. Not to be Nancy.

Suzy and David smoked marijuana regularly for several more months. In a way, it was Nancy who stopped them. She got worse, and they reached a point where they no longer wanted to be like her in any way, shape, or form.

Nancy finally passed her driver's license test during her three-week stay at home. She also got friendly with a girl named Linda, who had been Suzy's friend. She sort of stole Linda from Suzy. She and Linda began going in Nancy's room together and closing the door on Suzy. Suzy resented it deeply. “I'm sorry I introduced them,” she said, sulking. “Linda was
my
friend.”

Now Linda introduced Nancy to a new crowd of friends, and Nancy fit like a glove. They were just like the Lakeside bunch. She would have them up to her room, the whole pale-faced, sour, disreputable bunch of them. They'd close the door and stay in there for an hour, the stereo blaring. Then the door would open—releasing a blast of cigarette smoke—and down the stairs they'd slink. I disliked them intensely, hated having them in the house.

We were delighted when Nancy went back to Colorado for the fall semester.

She was placed in a different dormitory when she returned, and didn't like her new roommate. Her old roommate and the other students she'd been friendly with over the summer were scattered around the campus. There were many more students on campus now, and she seemed less comfortable.

Toward the beginning of October, Frank had to be in Oregon on business. On his way back he stopped in Boulder for the weekend to see Nancy. He got in at about six p.m. on Friday. She seemed to
be happy and was doing okay in her classes. Her new dormitory was a high-rise. She warned Frank that her new roommate was an “asshole.” Actually, her roommate turned out to be a very nice Jewish girl who was studying pre-med. Frank asked her to join them for dinner, and she did. He called me from his motel that night to say they'd had a very pleasant time.

On Saturday he took Nancy shopping and then joined her at a party she'd been invited to at a student's apartment in Boulder. It was a small party; about eight people were there. Some of them were students. Some of them were “street people”—nonstudents who hang around college towns, using and usually selling drugs. A hash pipe went around at the party. Nancy smoked it. Frank felt very uncomfortable but said nothing. This was what college kids did, he decided, and he shouldn't try to judge them.

Frank was bothered that Nancy seemed to be associating with the street people element, but otherwise he thought she was doing fine. He left on Sunday morning. It had been a pleasant weekend.

The phone calls started soon after he returned.

We were in the midst of planning David's bar mitzvah, which was scheduled for the end of October. Nancy had elected not to come home for it. Since we couldn't afford the plane fare for her to come home both after the summer session break and for David's bar mitzvah, we had given her a choice. She chose to come home after summer school.

Now she phoned and said, “I need to come home.”

“You mean for the bar mitzvah?” I asked.

There was a very long pause.

“Huh?”

“Nancy, are you all right?”

There was another long pause.

“Something's … wrong.”

“What is it?”

“Huh?”

“What's wrong?”

“Uh … something.”

“Are you on something, sweetheart?”

No answer.

“Nancy?”

Clearly, she
was
on something—something heavy like angel dust or LSD or THC—and wasn't doing well with it.

“Something's
wrong,”
she repeated. She sounded scared, like she'd gone off the deep end again. “I need to come home,” she said.

“But we made a deal about the bar mitzvah, Nancy.”

“Oh.”

“Let me talk to Daddy. I'll call you tomorrow. Okay?”

“Huh?”

“I said I'll call you tomorrow, okay? To let you know about coming home.”

“I have to go now, Mom.”

She hung up. I was very concerned. That night Frank and I discussed her coming home for the bar mitzvah. We thought maybe we would send her a ticket. When I called her the next morning to tell her, she sounded very confused.

“Why would I wanna come home?” she asked.

“You said yesterday you wanted to.”

“What for?”

“David's bar mitzvah, I think.”

“Nah, I'll send him a present. I saw a really nice turquoise ring. He'll like it.”

So Nancy did not come home for the bar mitzvah. These rather strange phone calls continued, each one seemingly isolated from the previous one. She called me several times at work. Once she mentioned a guy she liked—a street person—who didn't like her. Most of the time, though, I was never quite sure why she was calling.

She did not come home for Thanksgiving. Instead she went skiing with friends. It was just as well, since I had to spend the holiday in the hospital for some tests. I hadn't been feeling well. My doctor had initially diagnosed my problem as hypoglycemia and had put me on a special diet, but I hadn't improved.

My condition was then diagnosed as a possible nonmalignant tumor of the pancreas. Exploratory surgery was scheduled for when the surgeon returned from vacation in two weeks. I was discharged from the hospital until that time. I went back to work but felt weak and down. I took the train home from the office instead of driving each day. Frank picked me up at the station on his way home.

On the Friday before the Monday I was scheduled to go in to the hospital, I got off the train to find Frank staring straight ahead in the car, very upset. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white.

“What's wrong?” I asked. “What happened?”

“I just got a phone call from the Boulder police,” he said. “Nancy's been arrested.”

“For what?” I gasped.

“Receiving stolen property. Skis. Apparently she got mixed up with a bunch of these street people who were stealing students' skis. They were stashing the skis in her room.”

Frank started up the car and we drove home.

“Is she in jail?” I asked.

“The guys are in jail,” he went on. “They put her in a county juvenile detention center, since she's only sixteen. We have to get a lawyer for her. I guess I'll have to go out tomorrow and try to clear it up.”

“I'm going with you.”

“No. You're not up to it. And you have the hospital Monday. Who knows how long I'll be out there.”

Suzy and David took the news pretty calmly. They made dinner while Frank and I called our lawyer. He contacted a law firm in Boulder, and a lawyer there went to work on Nancy's case that night. Our lawyer said the man in Boulder would be ready to meet with Frank and fill him in as soon as Frank got in on Saturday morning. Then we called the airlines and got Frank a seat on the earliest flight out.

We didn't sleep that night. We were too tense, too angry at Nancy.
She had been busted
. We were respectable, responsible citizens. We were
not
the kind of people who had their child thrown into a juvenile detention center. Or so we'd thought. But we had been wrong. We
were
that kind of people. Nancy had made it so. She had brought crime into our family.