And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (32 page)

“So now we know,” he said softly.

My Nancy. An addict. Sticking needles in herself. I shuddered as we continued to stare—neither of us could take our eyes off it.

“What … what should we do?” I asked hoarsely.

“I don't know. We've got the meeting at Suburban Psychiatric on Friday. We'll bring it with us and talk to them about it.”

“Okay. But what should we do with … it until then?”

“Wrap it in a towel. Stick it somewhere. Somewhere we don't have to look at it.”

I wrapped it up, searched for a place to put it. No such place existed. I tried every nook and cranny in every room. I ended up putting it in the garage.

We went to our meeting at Suburban Psychiatric that Friday. I had the syringes in my purse. We met with the young psychiatrist in his office, along with another doctor. The psychiatrist immediately told us that he was discharging Nancy the next day.

“Why?” Frank asked, shocked.

“There's no point in keeping her here.” The psychiatrist stopped, made an effort to be as tactful as possible. “You see, you only have thirty days on your insurance. There's no way we can make any impact on Nancy's condition in one month. She's too sick. This is a longstanding problem. I'm afraid you waited too long to get her help.”

Waited too long! I was aghast, outraged. My face got very hot. I couldn't speak.

Frank finally spoke up. “If … she's, as I understand it, too sick to be treated, then how can she come home?”

“Good question, Mr. Spungen. But I think we've got a solution for that. Nancy's agreed to sign what we call a behavioral contract. We'll go over all of the things you want her to do as part of your household. We'll draw it up together. Nancy will sign it and abide by it.”

“Are you kidding?” I demanded, incredulous.

“Far from it. We've had great success with this technique. It helps the patient understand her responsibilities and obligations.”

“A piece of paper won't matter to this girl!” Frank snapped angrily.

“But she's agreed to sign it,” the psychiatrist countered. “That's an important step. We'll just have to try to work with her as an outpatient. It would be futile to attempt treatment here in thirty days—unless, of course, her present condition were drug-predicated.”

“Wait!” I cried out. “It is!”

I opened my purse, pulled out the syringes, and dumped them
on his desk. He looked at them, turned to the other doctor. “This makes a difference.”

The other doctor nodded.

The psychiatrist turned to us. “Let's call Nancy in and confront her.”

Nancy was brought in. She looked at us blankly when she saw us. Her facial expression didn't change when the psychiatrist pointed to the drug paraphernalia and asked her about it.

“Where'd you find that?” she asked, her voice flat.

“Your mother found it,” the psychiatrist replied.

She sneered to me. “So you went through my stuff, huh?”

“No,” I said. “I was unpacking for you.”

“Well, it's not mine,” she told the doctor. “I was just keeping it for a friend.”

The doctor questioned her further but Nancy had all the right answers. Frank and I knew she was lying, but the psychiatrist bought her story, didn't pursue it further. He wanted to believe it. Whether she was using drugs or not, he knew there was no way he could help her. He wanted to free her bed for someone he
could
help. There was no point in fighting him any further. His mind was made up.

“In that case,” he said when he was satisfied, “let's gather around this table and draw up our contract.”

We all sat around the table. He pulled out a pen and legal-size pad.

“Now, Mr. and Mrs. Spungen. The idea is for you to bring up what you would like Nancy to do. Nancy, if you agree to do it, we'll put it in the contract. Then both parties will sign it, just like a regular contract. If you violate it, Nancy, you'll get demerits, which means you'll be punished. Understand?”

Nancy nodded. She thought this whole thing was a joke. It was. I knew Nancy would agree to do anything at this point, and then do whatever she wanted once she got home. But we went ahead and drew up the ridiculous contract anyway. It was an option we couldn't afford not to try, since we had so few. Besides, I thought it wouldn't hurt to at least verbalize how we wanted her to behave.

We signed the contract. The psychiatrist dated and witnessed it, then folded it, put it into an envelope, and gave it to us, with the name of a recommended therapist for Nancy. He smiled and wished us the best of luck. He felt he'd discharged his responsibilities.

It was too late in the day for Nancy to be checked out. She had to spend one more night at the hospital. We agreed to pick her up in the morning.

On the way home we passed a darkened, deserted commuter railroad station.

“Pull in there for a second,' ” I ordered Frank.

“What for?”

I pulled the towel with the syringes in it out of my purse. “I don't want this stuff in my house anymore.”

Frank nodded, pulled into the station. We looked around carefully. There were no people in sight. I felt like we were about to commit a crime.

“Turn off the lights,” I said.

Frank switched off the headlights. I jumped out of the car, dashed to a trash bin on the outdoor platform, threw the towel into it, and ran back to the car.

“Go,” I commanded as I hopped in.

We sped off, lights still out. We didn't turn them on until we were half a mile away.

Nancy came home the next morning. By noon she had twenty-seven demerits.

“Fuck your demerits,” she snarled.

“That's twenty-eight, Nancy,” I pointed out. “This calls for disciplinary action. You agreed to abide by the rules of the contract.”

“Fuck your contract. I just signed it to get out of that fucking hospital.”

Frank and I decided then and there that the contract wasn't
going to fly. We stopped keeping track of demerits.

It was a Saturday. Nancy called Linda but her parents wouldn't allow Linda to see her—they were suing us.

Our insurance company eventually settled out of court for ten thousand dollars, then dropped us. It wasn't easy for us to get insured again, and it was very expensive.

So Nancy stayed in her room alone that first day playing records. When she came downstairs to join us for dinner, she was surly and unpleasant. She still would not speak to Frank—did not, in fact, say one word to him for over a year. She spoke around him. At dinner, for example, she said to David, “Tell him to pass me the potatoes.” This became a standard means of address. The word
Daddy
was no longer part of her vocabulary.

I was afraid of her. The pure hate for me that had spewed out of her when we'd committed her could surface at any time, I felt. I was nervous, particularly at night. I couldn't sleep that first night. I just lay there in bed, from where I could see the crack of light under her door. Once she opened the door and went downstairs. My heart began to pound out of fear—I remembered the time I'd found her collecting knives in the middle of the night. I lay there tensely, heart pounding, afraid to breathe, afraid to move. It was as if I'd awakened to hear a prowler in the house. I heard the refrigerator door open and close, then cupboards. I heard her coming back up the steps. Then she appeared in her doorway, clutching a bag of pretzels and a glass of cola. She went into her room and closed the door. I relaxed, but not enough to be able to sleep very well.

I had made an appointment for Nancy to see the new therapist on Monday morning. Frank and I took off half-days so we could go with her. An hour before we were to go, she went out the front door and didn't come back. We went without her.

The therapist was a young, idealistic behaviorist. This constituted a new wrinkle. We had been through Freudian therapy and family therapy, but not behavioral. He mapped out a new strategy for handling Nancy, one emphasizing behavior modification through positive reinforcement.

“Now, give me an idea of something you want her to do,” he said.

“Get a job,” I replied.

“Okay. What you do is suggest she go through the classifieds and circle three jobs she's interested in. Tell her that when she does it, you'll give her a dollar. That's the positive reinforcement. When
she gets a job, buy her something she'd like. A record or a blouse. What you're doing is reinforcing compliance.”

“Isn't that sort of like housebreaking a dog?” Frank asked.

The therapist laughed. “It works. But you're going to have to modify some of your behavior, too. For one thing, you must never argue with her.”

“How do we do that?” I asked.

“It takes two to argue. If you want Nancy to do something, say to her ‘Nancy, this is what you're going to do …' State it to her as fact. If she argues, walk away.”

“What if she follows?” I asked.

“If the situation gets undesirable, say ‘Time out' and explain to her why it is undesirable. If you're angry, tell her you're not mad at her but at what she's doing. Don't lecture. Don't yell. Simply say ‘You must not do this …' Don't quarrel between yourselves. Be calm, be consistent. If you two disagree, don't let her know that. Present a united front, then discuss your differences later.”

It sounded positive. It sounded like something to do. He gave us a book called
Families
by Gerald R. Patterson and scheduled us for a once-weekly session. He suggested we come without her. He said he would help us learn new and better responses.

Nancy still wasn't back when we got home from work that evening. She finally got in at about seven. Frank and I were in the den and Suzy and David were doing their homework.

“Nancy, you missed an appointment with your therapist this morning,” I said calmly. “That was wrong. I'm angry. I'm not angry at you, but I am angry at your behavior.”

“Who cares?” she said and went upstairs.

“I've got to admit,” said Frank, “there
is
less arguing this way.”

We tried the behavioral approach to controlling Nancy. She circled three jobs in the classifieds the next morning. I gave her a dollar. She was happy to take the dollar. When she cursed at me for suggesting she call about the three jobs, I ignored it. I told her I was angry. I told her I didn't like it. When she responded by hurling a napkin holder against the kitchen wall, breaking it into numerous pieces, I didn't get angry. I simply said “You must clean that up.” When she refused, I told her I didn't like her behavior, and, because of that, she could not go over to Linda's house that night. (Linda's parents had relented and she was now allowed to see Nancy.) When she responded by climbing out her bedroom window after dinner and not coming home from Linda's until four
a.m., I took several deep breaths, told her in a calm voice that I was angry at what she had done, and said she was grounded for two weeks.

“Keep it up,” the therapist encouraged us at our second session. “Just remember—you don't have to explain yourself. When she starts in on ‘Why,' don't mix it up with her. Just repeat yourself and start walking. It's your house. You are the law. She has to understand that.”

She responded to her two-week grounding by lifting my car keys from my purse and stealing my car while Frank and I were at a hockey game. It was impossible to be calm. We took Frank's car and drove around the neighborhood. The car wasn't at Linda's or Stephen's or the houses of any of the other members of the crowd. Frank wanted to call the police. We called our lawyer first. He told us not to.

“You'll have to press charges against her, and you don't want to do that,” he said. “Wait it out. She'll be back tomorrow.”

She wasn't back in the morning. We went to work. I phoned the house in the afternoon. David was there but Nancy was not, he said. She finally got home at dinnertime. I went in my room for a minute so I wouldn't blow up at her—actually, what I really wanted to do was punch her in the face—and then I took the behavioral approach. Frank stood by, chewing on his lower lip.

“Nancy, you had no right to take my keys from me and take the car,” I said, calmly but firmly.

“I went for a drive,” she snapped. “So what?”

The doctor had said not to explain myself.

“You're not to do it,” I said.

“And what if I do?”

“Ever again,” Frank commanded.

“I'll do what I please. It's my fucking house, too.” She went up to her room, slammed the door, and turned her stereo on full blast. She began to throw stuff around the room and bang on the floor, just to let us know it was her house, too.

“I'm going to take the distributor cap off your car,” Frank said. “She might have copied your keys.”

So we kept the distributor cap off the car whenever we went out.

When we met with the therapist that week, we told him what had happened. He was pleased with the way we'd handled the situation.

“But it didn't do any good,” Frank protested.

“You can't ask for overnight results, Mr. Spungen. It takes time.
Be firm. Be consistent. Don't give in to her demands. Ignore her threats. You'll see, she'll come around.”

Frank was skeptical. So was I. But we kept at it. That Saturday, when Nancy wanted the car, we said no.