And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (38 page)

Recently I met a girl named June who had a brief encounter with Nancy that winter. June had come up to New York on the train from Philadelphia to meet her boyfriend, a musician, at a party. She told me she got there before her boyfriend and, intimidated by the scene, stood against a wall feeling bewildered and ignored. Then a young woman, Nancy, appeared at her side.

“Hey, I'm Nancy and you need a drink and an ashtray.”

And with that, Nancy stuck by June's side until her boyfriend arrived an hour later. She got her the drink and the ashtray, and when she found out June had come from Philadelphia, Nancy introduced her to everyone else at the party as “my friend from Philly.” June told me everyone there seemed to know Nancy and made a point of speaking to her on their way in and out. She told me she thought Nancy was so sophisticated and self-assured, and couldn't believe she was not yet eighteen. June added that she thought Nancy was a very considerate, very special person.

Frank and I decided to take a vacation alone that winter—our first. It so happened that the only time both of us could get away from work was during Nancy's eighteenth birthday. We thought it over. After all, Nancy had a way of regarding her birthday as a national holiday. We decided to go. Our relationship needed this.

We arranged for one of the secretaries in my office to stay with Suzy and David. I think they were a bit offended—they felt they
were old enough and responsible enough to stay alone for a week. They
were
. We just thought an adult should be there in case Nancy got upset about us being away for her birthday and decided to come home.

I told Nancy we would be going to Aspen on a one-week charter and would be gone for her birthday. She said that would be fine. She wished us a pleasant trip. We sent her a birthday card and a toaster oven as a gift, and I arranged for a Mailgram to be delivered to her on her birthday, which was a Saturday.

We had an idyllic two days and nights in Aspen, skiing and cuddling in front of the fire. On the third day I came down with the flu and spent the rest of the trip in bed with a high fever. I felt like God was punishing me for trying to get away and have a good time.

Our charter flight came back very early the morning after Nancy's birthday. Suzy and David were still asleep. They left a note: Nancy had called continually all day Saturday and was furious to find us absent on her birthday. I crawled into bed, still weak from the flu, and was just about asleep when the phone rang. It was Nancy.

“How dare you go away on my birthday!” she screamed.

“Now, Nancy, I
told
you we were going to be—”

“You forgot my fucking birthday! I don't
believe
you!”

“Nancy, we sent you a card and a Mailgram and a toaster oven. We didn't forget. And we told you we would be away.”

Silence from her end.

“You don't love me,” she said quietly.

“Of course we do.”

“Do you
really?
” she demanded.

“Yes.”

“Good. Then I'll get on a train and be there right away. We'll celebrate today. Okay?”

I honestly didn't want her to come home that day. I was still sick and not sure I could handle her first return visit since moving to New York. But how can you tell your own child not to come home to celebrate her birthday with her family?

“Okay, Mom?”

“Okay, sweetheart.”

Suzy baked her a birthday cake. I found a roast in the freezer and stuck it in the oven. I went to get her at the train station. She got off the train with her old nasty scowl—That Look—and another look that was entirely new. Nancy was now a blonde.

“Whaddya think?” she demanded.

“It looks very nice, sweetheart,” I replied. What else could I say? I thought it looked cheap and awful. I thought it made her look like someone other than my Nancy.

“Yeah. Debbie and I did it at her apartment. She's a blonde, too.”

She wore a purple sweater and new, skin-tight black jeans, which she stripped off the second she got in the house and dumped in the washing machine.

“Need to be shrunk,” she said. “Let's eat.”

So she sat through her birthday dinner in her sweater, her underwear, and her ridiculous blonde hair, and any time any of us glanced at her, she erupted.

“What the fuck are you staring at, you!” she demanded of David at one point.

“Nothing,” he said quickly, shooting a look at Suzy. They exchanged a smirk—both of them thought Nancy looked really silly as a blonde.

“Now you're passing fucking signals,” Nancy charged. “Back and forth. I saw you, you two little shits!”

“Aren't!” Suzy protested.

“Are!”
Nancy returned.

We ate the rest of the meal in silence, our faces in our plates. When we were finished, Nancy blew out the candles on her cake and ate a large piece. We had no more gifts for her. This annoyed her.

As soon as her jeans were dry, she put them on and said she wanted to leave. Frank drove her to the station. In all, she was home about three hours.

“Boy, was she mean and nasty,” said Frank when he got back.

“Boy, is she the same,” said Suzy.

“Boy, am I glad she doesn't live here anymore,” said David.

“I got a job, Mom!” Nancy told me excitedly over the phone one afternoon.

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah, I don't have to worry about money anymore. And you don't have to take care of me. I'll be good for two or three hundred a
night!
Do you
believe
it?”

I didn't. “That's a lot of money, sweetheart. What kind of job is this?”

“Dancin',” she replied. “Kinda sleazy places, but that's cool. An agency sets me up with gigs.”

She was a go-go dancer. She danced topless in Times Square hustle joints.

“I have to drink with some of the customers afterwards. You know the old routine, right?”

“Uh, no.”

“They think they're buyin' me champagne. Champagne! It's ginger ale.” She laughed. “Fuckin' ginger ale.”

I guess her new profession fit all of the criteria Nancy had for a job. It was lucrative and, while not illegal, it was socially unacceptable. It took her into a hard, unsavory, and dangerous world. And it allowed her to sleep all day and be up all night.

It was, to us, repellent. Knowing about it made us feel dirty, ashamed. When people asked us what Nancy was doing for work in New York, we didn't tell them. Only my friends Janet and Susan knew. Suzy and David kept it from their friends. They, too, were ashamed.

Of course, we were perfectly aware that these clubs were also operating bases for prostitutes. The one thing, dancing, led to the other thing, hooking. We shut our eyes to this possibility. It was too horrible to conceive. We wanted to believe that Nancy was
only
dancing, and so we believed it. That was bad enough.

Recently Karen told me that she called Nancy one morning that March to tell her that her father had died. Nancy coldly told her, “I have to hang up—I have a customer here.” And hang up she did.

So I suppose I must face the fact that my daughter probably did work as a prostitute. She was certainly capable of it. Sex meant nothing to her. It hurts me to think about it. But I can deal with it now. Nancy is at peace now. I couldn't deal with it then.

Karen told me she was very hurt after talking to Nancy on the phone. Nancy had rejected her. She wasn't there for Karen when Karen needed her. My daughter had stopped caring about people. Frankly, I think this upsets me more than the thought of Nancy selling her body.

Nancy was able to pay her rent and bills herself now that she was working. She was very proud of this. She was also able to afford the fast track to self-obliteration. With the two to three hundred dollars she was making a night, she became a hard-core heroin addict.

I found out in the early spring when Frank and I took the kids to New York to see Nancy's apartment and take her to dinner. They hadn't been up there since the move.

She looked tired and down. She wore old jeans and a baggy, oversize turtleneck sweater that came to the very tips of her fingers.

She hadn't cleaned her apartment. It wasn't a pigsty, but the ashtrays and litter box were overflowing. She showed Suzy and David around rather mechanically. They played with her cat for a minute. It went for David's throat as if it wanted to kill him. We didn't stay long.

We went to a restaurant in the neighborhood. I sat next to Nancy, who immediately began to doze off right there at the table. Her eyes closed, her head lowered, and off she went into slumberland. I nudged her. She sat up, confused, then fell asleep again. So we
talked around her. We talked about the food. We talked about the weather.

At one point she slumped onto the table. Her elbow went into the untouched spaghetti I'd ordered for her. The sauce got all over her sweater. I roused her, suggested she take the sweater off so I could dab at the sauce before it stained. She did. She had a T-shirt on underneath.

That's when I saw the track marks. They ate away like a cancer at the insides of her elbows and the backs of her hands. The sight made me so sick to my stomach that I almost vomited. Those were her baby arms and hands to me, pudgy, soft, innocent. Now they were covered with the needle scars of an addict. She was so out of it, she didn't notice or care that I saw them.

Frank saw them, too.

“There's nothing we can do to help her,” he said to me later that night, choosing his words slowly and painfully.

“Nothing?” I begged.

“Not until she wants to be helped.”

He took me in his arms. I held back my tears.

I had a nightmare that night, the nightmare I was to have so many times over the next three years. I dreamed we were back on Welsh Road. Nancy was five. She was running up to me in the living room, excitedly waving her hands in front of her face.

“Look what I have, Mommy!” she exclaimed. “Look what I have!”

What she had were track marks all over her little girl's hands and arms, the track marks I'd seen in the restaurant.

Then she began to cry.

“Help me, Mommy!” she sobbed. “Help me!”

I tried to reach out to her, but my arms wouldn't move no matter how hard I strained.

I awoke from the nightmare with a start.

Seeing Nancy's track marks haunted me in daylight, too. A few days later Frank and I went to his friend's house, where a
briss
was being held for the baby that he and his wife had just had.

The proud mother held the lovely pink baby in her arms. When I saw it, I nearly screamed. I saw needle marks on that baby's pudgy little hands. I saw my Nancy's baby hands covered with track marks. I saw my sweet-smelling, innocent infant with a pink ribbon in her hair, the infant who had grown up to be a receptacle of unendurable pain. Maybe this baby would too. Some would. Too many. I couldn't blot out that realization, that fear.

I had to leave the room. I thought I'd get hysterical if I stayed in
there with that baby for another second. I tried to compose myself in the dining room. Frank found me in there a few minutes later.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“I'm having a … a problem in there.”

“What kind of a problem?” he asked, turning me around to face him.

“If I look at that … at that baby for one more second I'm going to break down.”

Our foreheads touched. He understood what I meant. Somehow he always did.

“We'll go, Deb. We'll just go.”

Frank told them I wasn't feeling well and we left. When his friend asked us over for dinner the following week, Frank told them we were busy. I could not see that baby again. Or any baby. From that day on, if I saw one in the grocery store or being wheeled down the street in a carriage, I was immediately seized by the same hysteria. I began to avoid places where I thought I'd see babies. It was no use. There are a lot of babies in the world.

I gritted my teeth and kept going.

Nancy reached out for help toward the end of April. She phoned me several times, highly agitated, to say the city was getting to her and she had to get out, just had to.

“I'm going to Jamaica, Mom,” she said. “I have money. Saved up. I'm going to Jamaica. Have a round-trip ticket.”

“Why Jamaica?” I asked.

“It's warm there.”

“It's warm in New York. It's spring.”

“I'm going to Jamaica, Mom.”

“Okay.”

I had to be in Chicago then on business. When I got in touch with Frank my first night there, he told me he was about to drive to New York to get Nancy. He said she'd phoned several times, very upset, sobbing, barely coherent. She didn't want to go to Jamaica anymore, she said. She wanted to come home. She'd begged him to come and get her. He refused, surprised that she was even speaking to him.