And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (34 page)

We would not have our home serving as an illegal drug marketplace. Frank and I considered calling the police anonymously and having the boys busted. Nancy, too. We went so far as to ask our attorney what would happen to her. He said that since she came from a comfortable suburban family and still—despite her numerous brushes with the law—had a spotless record, she would probably be put on probation and sent home to her parents. We just plain couldn't win.

The only way the legal process could help us, our attorney advised, would be to declare Nancy a ward of the court. But to make Nancy a ward of the court, we would have to relinquish our rights as parents. Frank and I wouldn't do it. It would be like leaving your baby on somebody's doorstep in a blanket, a five-dollar bill pinned to her diaper.

She was our child, so she stayed in our home—where she remained a disruptive, divisive influence. Worse than ever before, actually. How could we raise Suzy and David responsibly when there were two sets of rules, one for them and one for Nancy? They had to be up at a certain time and off for school. Not Nancy. They had to be home by a certain time. Not Nancy. Sometimes she never came home at all. If we got angry at her for staying out, she'd tell us to “get fucked.” Or worse, she'd bring some boy home with her at two a.m. on a weeknight, lock her door, and “entertain” him right there in her room while the rest of us tried to sleep. The talking and loud music would wake the four of us up. Frank and I were outraged by this. It was
our
house. She was violating our family unit. Frank would have to get up and throw the boy out.

After one such nocturnal visit, I went downstairs in the morning to find a young man with long hair sprawled on the living room sofa, asleep. I didn't know who he was. I tried to wake him up, was unable to. I called Frank down. Frank was unable to rouse him. He really appeared to be quite comatose. Before we called an ambulance we woke up Nancy. She told us not to worry.

“He's just tired.” She yawned. “He was too tired to drive home, I guess. He's cool—just let him sleep.”

So we went about our morning routine with this strange person passed out on our couch. David said he was still there when he got home from school. When Nancy came down at about four o'clock, she woke him up and he left. Later I found out from David that he had been on Quaaludes.

Even now, I wonder how we could possibly have put up with this. But thinking back, what could we have done? We had tried
everything
. There was no solution, no hope. All we could do was cope. Most of the time, we felt so defeated that we had no capacity for anger. Anger accomplished nothing but to make us feel worse, anyway. Certainly it had no effect on Nancy. Nothing did. More than once I asked myself
Why me? What did I do to deserve this?
More than once I fantasized that someone would kill her, put her and us out of our misery. I really did. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

We went through the motions of living. We were prisoners in our own home. We literally could not leave. Then one night both Frank and I had to be out of town on business, Nancy responded by inviting half a dozen couples to sleep over. They took over the house—used our bed, David's bed, Suzy's bed. David told me there was humping and moaning and naked people running up and down the stairs all night long, not to mention two very large dogs.
He and Suzy were forced to spend the night on the sofa while this went on around them.

This was going on while Suzy, at fifteen, was starting to date boys and formulate her opinions about sex. I knew that Nancy and Suzy's generation was more promiscuous than mine, that having sex on the first date—not kissing—was now considered by some to be the way a girl showed she liked a boy. So I tried to emphasize to Suzy the difference between sex and love—a distinction Nancy was never able to comprehend. Nancy was right there to contradict whatever I tried to impress on Suzy. She egged Suzy into losing her virginity.

“You should go out with more guys,” she told Suzy one afternoon. “Don't any of 'em dig you or what?”

“Joe likes me,” Suzy said defensively.

“So you oughta fuck him. You're too old to be a virgin.”

“Nancy,” I said sharply. “That's
Suzy's
business, not yours.”

“I don't like him,” Suzy said, ignoring me, as Nancy was.

“What difference does it make?” Nancy demanded. “Everybody balls everybody.”

“That's not true!” I cried. “Everybody does
not
do that. There is such a thing as romance, Suzy. I don't want you—”

“Mom,” Nancy interrupted.

“Yes?”

“Fuck off. I'm trying to set my baby sister straight.”

I was furious—especially when Suzy didn't come home Friday night.

She told me she was sleeping over at her friend Laura's house. When Frank, David, and I were in the middle of dinner, I remembered that Laura's parents had forbidden her to have sleepovers. I called Laura. She was home. Suzy was not there. She said she didn't know where Suzy was, but Laura must have contacted her, because Suzy was afraid to come home the next morning. She hid at another friend's house. David interceded and found her. She came home that afternoon, sobbing.

“I don't like what you did,” I told her. “More than anything, I don't like to see you lie.”

She apologized. I grounded her for two weeks.

Frank and I fretted over Nancy's influence on Suzy and David. It ate away at us that they still looked up to her, respected her, wanted to be like her. After all, she was getting more erratic and irrational with each passing day.

One time she didn't come home for two days. She finally called from a train station in Philadelphia. She said she'd been beaten and robbed. When I picked her up, she was bruised and pale. Her wallet and watch were missing. She was totally vague about what had happened.

“He beat me,” she said softly, as if she were under a spell.

“Who did, Nancy?”

“
He
did.”

“Where?”

“I don't know … I don't know.”

“I'll call the police,” I said.

“No! No! You can't!” she suddenly screamed. “You can't call! No,
please!”

I didn't call. I took her home and put her to bed. She stayed there for a day and a half.

Another time I dropped her off at a mall to buy some records. It was early on a weeknight. The mall closed at nine. We didn't hear from her until midnight. She told us she'd been abducted by a man at gunpoint and driven around. Again, she sounded very vague, as if under a spell.

“Did he rape you?” Frank demanded, barely able to contain his agitation.

It was maddening. We didn't know if the crime was real or a product of Nancy's imagination.

She didn't answer.

“Did … he … rape … you?”
Frank repeated.

“No. He just wanted to kill me … to kill me. He drove and he drove and he … then he just drove back to where I am now.”

“Where are you now?”

“Uh … the mall.”

I said we'd be there as soon as we called the police. Again, she got hysterical. I brought her home and put her to bed. We never did figure out what happened either time.

Then, one weeknight, Nancy brought home a boy named Stephen at around three in the morning. He was about twenty, a guitar player with long hair. Her stereo woke us up. Frank banged on the door and told him to get out.

There was no response.

“You hear me in there?” Frank screamed, pounding on the door with his fist.

Still no response. He tried the knob. The door was locked. He
stormed back into our room, picked up the phone.

“I'm calling the goddamned police!” he fumed. “And get that lousy sonofabitch out of my house.”

“Wait!” I cautioned. “Maybe they'll get up, now that they've heard you. Wait a minute.”

He slammed the phone down. “I know what I'll do! I'll take the door off! That's what I'll do!”

By now, Suzy and David were standing in their doorways in their pajamas, yawning, annoyed.

“What's going on?” asked David.

He got no answer from Frank, who took Nancy's door off to reveal Nancy and Stephen lying on the bed, fully clothed, so zonked on drugs and Southern Comfort that they were barely stirring.

“Out!” Frank screamed. “Get out!”

“Okay, man. Okay,” Stephen mumbled. “Don't get crazy. No need to get crazy.”

“I'll get crazy if I want to! This is my house and you're in it! O-u-t!”

Frank came back in our room, cursing. We could hear the two of them talking. Suzy and David closed their doors and went back to bed. Then Nancy showed Stephen to the front door. We heard it open. We didn't hear it close. A moment later she came back upstairs. Stephen started up his car, drove away. He had a loud sports car. We could hear it circle around the block, pull back up in front of our house, and stop. He turned off the engine, got out, and came back in the house through the open front door.

Frank leaped out of bed, intercepted him before he'd gotten halfway up the stairs. Stephen was surprised to see him.

“Oh,” he said. “How ya doin', man?”

“What do you think I am, some kind of stupid schmuck? Some asshole?”

“Look, don't get, like
hostile
, man. No hassle. It was just like your daughter said I should come back. No hassle.”

“Get out! Now! Or so help me I'll beat the living crap out of you!”

“Hey, like I said, you don't have to get
hostile
. I'm splitting.”

He did. Frank slammed and bolted the door behind him. Nancy's light was out when he came back upstairs, her unhinged door resting against the hallway wall.

“Your friend had to leave!” he shouted into the darkness. “I hope you don't mind!”

She didn't answer.

We went to bed.

This was not the end of the incident, though. In the morning we
discovered that our cat, Sake, had disappeared. She'd gone out the door that Nancy had left wide open for Stephen.

And because of this incident, Suzy and David saw how irresponsible her behavior was, how intolerably inconsiderate she was. They understood why Frank had been so upset. They were upset, too.

They cooled toward Nancy.

For instance, when we were having dinner that night—breakfast for Nancy—she told Suzy to get her a cola. She often ordered Suzy around. Ordinarily Suzy obeyed. Not this time.

“Get it yourself,” she snapped.

Nancy was so surprised she had no retort. She got it herself.

Suzy did more than stop waiting on Nancy. She stopped emulating her. She stopped wearing jeans to school, began to wear a dress with stockings and heels. She got her hair done.

“Going to somebody's sweet sixteen party, Jappy?” Nancy sneered at her when Suzy came home from school one day. “Jappy” was something of a family insult, deriving from “Jewish American Princess.”

Suzy just walked away.

Nancy laughed, turned to David. “Doesn't she look ridiculous?”

“I think she looks very nice,” David replied.

Undaunted, Nancy turned to me. “Why is she dressing like such a JAP?”

“She dresses the way she wants,” I said.

Nancy shook her head, went up to her room, and closed the door.

When Nancy invited Suzy to a concert later that week, Suzy said she was busy.

David, meanwhile, avoided Nancy. He stopped hanging around the house. He never brought friends over anymore. If they did drop by, he didn't introduce them to Nancy.

After a couple of days, miraculously, Sake came home. The cat's return didn't alter the way Suzy and David now felt about Nancy. They loved her as a sister, but they didn't look up to her anymore, didn't respect her opinions, didn't want to be like her. If anything, Nancy now pushed them in the opposite direction. They became more considerate, more responsible. They stopped smoking marijuana.

Frank and I were very proud of them.

Like her involvement with drugs, Nancy's becoming a rock groupie was a natural outgrowth of her troubled life. She was into the anger, the rebelliousness, the oversimplified, hard-edged morality, the sound of the music. Always had been. The only boyfriend she'd ever had had been Jeff, the musician. Otherwise, at age seventeen, she had proven herself unwilling and unable to handle the complex demands of a mature relationship—the intimacy, the sharing, the caring, the love.

In Nancy's mind the best thing in the world that could happen to her would be to meet and get involved with a guy in a famous band. Someone who was a big deal. By becoming his lady, she herself would then be a big deal. I suppose most teenage girls have this fantasy for a little while, just as most teenage boys probably have the fantasy of being that famous musician. Most boys and girls outgrow it.

Not Nancy. Music was
everything
to her. There was nothing else in her universe that mattered. All she wanted was to belong to the music. All she wanted was a musician.