Hope and Other Luxuries (15 page)

I glanced at Joe across the appetizers:
You bring it up
.

No, you bring it up
, his eyes told me.

“Valerie, do you think you might want to try college back home now?” I asked. “You could start in January.”

“I thought we were stuck here for another year and a half,” she pointed out. “Dad's contract and all that.”

“I'm talking about you going home first. Dorm life.”

We discussed it as a family over our entrées while we ate my celebration meal. Perhaps it was the fact that we were out in public where no one could shout, but we actually had a reasonable conversation. Somewhat to my surprise, Valerie liked the idea. She liked it very much.

“I think it's time for me to grow up,” she told us.

Over the next few weeks, Valerie began to make more of an effort in the college courses she was taking on base. This seemed to be a promising sign. She talked often about the move to Texas, and I found a great psychiatrist for her only a few miles from the dorms. Dr. Harris came highly recommended, and when I spoke to him on the phone, I felt better at once. He specialized in treating college students, and his mild, interested manner reminded me of Dr. Eichbaum. I thought he would be a good match to Valerie's laid-back temperament.

But as the weeks went by, Elena opposed the idea more and more strongly.

“She's tricking you, Mom,” she said. “She doesn't want to grow up or get better or anything. She just wants to get away from us where she can fall apart without us bugging her about it. This is going to be a disaster!”

I sighed. Why was Elena always so ready to see the worst in her sister?

“I don't think it'll be a disaster,” I said. “Remember, Valerie will have a very good support network there. And you know things aren't working out for her here. She needs the kind of professional help she can't get.”

“She won't get it there either, Mom. She won't go.”

“Don't you think you're being a little extreme? Valerie did excellent work with her doctors last summer. She's never missed an appointment.”

“Yeah, and she did excellent partying with her psycho friends, too.”

“Well, sending her to England alone was probably more temptation than most young adults could handle. Look, your sister is finally doing what we've been asking her to do now for a year: she's finally working toward a life goal. I have to show her that I trust her and respect her desire to improve.”

“She hasn't improved, Mom,” Elena said. “She's excited for all the wrong reasons. She just wants to get away from you, so she can go crazy without you calling her on it all the time.”

“So, what you're saying is that she needs a psychiatrist,” I said. “Again: This is the only way to get her one.”

“It won't help. She won't go. This is going to be a disaster.”

Typical Elena!
I thought with a sigh.

Christmas came, and we flew back for our once-every-two-years trip to the States to visit our relatives. Then Valerie and I stayed behind in Texas for a week, getting her settled into her classes and dorm room. We shopped for practical organizers and nice dorm furnishings, and she and I had a great time.

It was fun to be with Valerie without her father and sister around. She relaxed and became sunny and happy again. And she really seemed to be committed to this. She even stopped smoking.

“Dr. Harris is nice,” she told me after their first appointment. “He reminds me of my therapist in England.”

This seemed like a particularly good sign.

At the end of the week, I flew back to Germany, almost buoyant with hope. A new year was starting. The old, dark year was gone. This was going to be a better year—better for all of us.

But it wasn't.

Almost from the moment my plane landed in Germany, I began to get bad news.

“I didn't go to class today, Momma. It's the crowds.”

“You're—what? You're afraid of crowds?”

“They all stare at me!”

“But, Valerie, you used to say you couldn't care less! Did you tell Dr. Harris? What does he say?”

“He gave me new pills.”

“But what did he
say
?”

“He said take them.”

I hung on to hope wherever I could. Unlike Elena's gloomy predictions, Valerie was going to all her psychiatric appointments. And Dr. Harris was wonderful. He was seeing Valerie every week, and he had arranged for her to see a therapist twice a week: a psychologist who specialized in adolescent disorders.

“Valerie is a little chaotic right now,” he told me when I called, but his tone seemed reassuring. “We just need to help her find her balance.”

Comforted, I hung up the phone.

But the next night, another frantic phone call would come through: “I can't face the cafeteria. I'm living on microwave popcorn.”

And the night after that, another one: “I hate the history professor. She glares at me when I come to class. I don't like to go to class anymore.”

And another one: “I slept through my exam.”

It was all very hard for me to comprehend. I, too, had had my ups and downs in college, but I had graduated in three years. Joe had had his ups and downs and lost weekends, too, but he had survived the pressure-cooker classes to get his engineering degree. Melting down was something one did at home—not when working on one's chosen future.

Still, it was time to face facts. Regular psychiatrist or not, this experiment just wasn't working—

This very expensive experiment.

“Valerie,” I said late one night, “I think you'd better withdraw from class and come home.” I always seemed to talk to her late at night because that was afternoon back in the States.

“No way!” she answered. “I'm not doing that.”

“Well then, you'll have to find a way to make this work. Talk to Dr. Harris. You can't just not go to class.”

“No, you're right, Momma. I can do this. I'll get it together. It's not like I'm not handling it, either—I have As in my other two classes.”

“Good for you! You need to build on that success then.”

And I hung up the phone and went to bed to stare at the ceiling, overwrought and jittery with stress.

I got no writing done anymore. I barely managed to push myself through my days, too tired to stay awake but too upset to go to sleep. I felt like a puppet, never knowing when I would be jerked up or down.

Then, a week or two later, a call came through from a number I didn't recognize. The voice on the phone was crisp and businesslike.

“This is Valerie's therapist.”

And I could hear Valerie in the background, sobbing.

“Valerie has to go back into residential care for six months at least,” the therapist told me. “She needs structure; she can't handle life on her own at this point. I've spoken to your insurance company, but they won't cover it.”

“Okay . . . ,” I said, faint from breathlessness. “Okay . . .”

Six months! Six
months
of care?

Valerie took the phone. She was weeping with shame and fury. “She's lying! Momma, I'm fine! I've got this!”

I knew which one of the two I believed.

“Honey,” I said. “Honey, it'll be okay . . .”

“I won't do it!” she said. “I won't go back into treatment.”

“But . . . But you loved treatment. You know you did.”

Six
months
? Tens of thousands of dollars!

“This is bullshit, Momma! You don't need to pay for me to sit around and have tea on the lawn. I trusted this woman! I shouldn't have talked to her. She promised not to tell!”

Valerie's therapist took the phone again.

“Confidentiality is important,” she said. “But I believe Valerie is a danger to herself.”

A
danger
to herself? Sleeping through class was one thing, but—
danger
?

Stress crawled up and down my body like prickly-footed centipedes, tightening my shoulders and raising the hair on my arms, and I felt like that puppet again—punched, jerked around, completely helpless . . .

A
danger
to herself! A
danger
!

But Valerie refused to go into treatment. And because she was over eighteen, there was nothing I could do.

When I told Joe, he was pale from stress and grim with disappointment. “If she won't do what the doctor recommends, then she can come back here,” he said. “She needs structure? Great!
We
can provide structure.” And he drew up a daunting list of rules.

That was the end of the argument.

“Good-bye, Momma,” Valerie said on the phone. “I'm not letting anybody run my life. I'm leaving Texas. I don't need this shit. I've got friends.”

“Friends? What friends do you have outside of Texas?”

“Buddies from the forum.”

“Valerie! You can't mean—from the Internet? You don't know anything about them!”

“I do, too. They're great guys. They came out to visit me. We went to the movies together.”

I couldn't believe I was hearing this. It had to be a nightmare—one of the many nightmares I'd had this last year, where I was trying to reach her, trying to call out to her . . .

“Valerie, that's not knowing somebody!” I cried.

“I knew you wouldn't understand.”

I took a breath and tried another tack.

“Do you even know where these great guys live?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Where?”

Please give me a name. Please, please! Something to go on
 . . .

“That's my business. Bye, Momma.”

No, this wasn't happening, not in real life. This was like the script from some hideous crime forensics show or some bad horror movie. It wasn't real, it couldn't be real that my daughter was actually saying, “I need to go now. They're busy loading up the car.”

This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening!

“Valerie!” I heard myself scream. “For God's sake,
no
! At least give me a zip code! What will we tell the police?”

Then the phone clicked. And she was gone.

I don't know how Joe or Elena took the news. I don't know if they could eat that week or couldn't. I don't know what demons Joe wrestled. I don't know if Elena lay awake and thought,
I
told
them! I
warned
them!
She certainly could have.

All I know is what happened to me.

After everything I had done for Valerie—after everything I had tried to do—I couldn't believe that it had actually ended like this. I could believe that Valerie would do this to her father and sister. Both Joe and Elena had built up their distance and stayed behind their walls of disapproval. But me? I had no walls. I had no protection.

I had only hope and love.

It was to me that Valerie had come over the course of her long, strange illness, and it was to me that she had confided her confused hopes and dreams. “Listen to this song,” she had told me countless times. “Listen, Momma. It describes exactly how I feel.”

And I had listened. I had listened, and I hadn't judged. I had tried to be with her wherever she was. I had followed my lost sheep so far away—so far away! As far as she would let me. And I hadn't asked for perfection. I hadn't asked for health. All I had ever asked—the most I had ever asked—was that she take one step toward health, toward goodness. One step back to me.

One step back toward the light.

My daughter is an amazing person
. It was my mantra. It was my faith.
My daughter will be a better person than I am
.

And now my daughter was gone.

I crumpled. I did. After a solid year of worry, of anguish, of panicky insomniac plans for how to drag my family whole and entire through the next day—the next week—the next year—I curled up under a mound of blankets and shut down.

I had no more thoughts. No more hopes. No dreams.

I lay motionless and watched gray blobs float across the salmon-colored dusk inside my eyelids. Or I opened my eyes and watched the flimsy shadows of tree branches slide across the cool blue wallpaper of
the bedroom. Occasionally, stripy cat Tor might jump up and make a warm nest at my feet. Occasionally, a bird might sing outside. In the evening, Joe or Elena would come in and stand by the bed. But when I heard the door open, I would pretend to be asleep.

I hid my injured soul away inside my safest, most comforting daydreams. I lay in bed, and my imagination brought me other worlds where characters lay in bed. They lay between crisp sheets in a tuberculosis hospital, surrounded by snow and fir trees and the clean, clear, ice-cold mountain air. Or they lay paralyzed in rose-scented hot baths while encouraging attendants massaged their shattered limbs.

The best doctors and nurses tiptoed in and out of my daydreams and brought my characters relief and care. But they couldn't get better because I couldn't get better. We would never get well again.

A part of me was missing now, torn out of my soul. Call it trust. Call it hope for the future. Whatever it was, that piece of my soul had kept me going through all those anxious months.

But it wasn't there anymore. My daughter had taken it with her.

And my daughter . . .

My daughter was gone.

J
oe and Elena teamed up and applied themselves to sleuthing on the Internet. Elena cracked Valerie's passwords and found out where she was. She was living with a fundamentalist family in Georgia. They had taken her in because they thought we had kicked her out. They thought she had nowhere else to go.

“I've had it with her!” Elena told me, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I never want to speak to her again.”

She's safe
, I thought.
My wayward child is safe
. And all those pictures my imagination had been showing me—dirty bones poking out through a pile of mildewed leaves, white fingers rising like mushrooms from muddy ground—grayed out in a tear-soaked haze of relief.