January First: A Child's Descent Into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her (19 page)

“I don’t want to,” Janni mumbles. “I’m too tired.”

“Let’s just do a little,” I reply. “I’ll help you.”

Janni walks into her room and plunks down at the special desk we got for her.

“I’m tired,” she complains again.

“I know. Let’s just do three. Which one do you want to do first?”

“This one.” She points to a homework sheet with a cat.

“Okay.” I read the directions. “Write a paragraph and then circle the nouns. That should be easy.” I hand her a pencil.

“What should I say?” she asks.

“Write something about a cat,” I reply.

I have a cat named 400. She is an orange tabby
. She starts on the “y” in “tabby,” but drags the tail of the “y” far down the page, like she can’t stop. She reaches the bottom of the page.

“That’s not right,” she says, more to herself than to me.

“It’s okay,” I say, handing her an eraser. But Janni takes the eraser, throws it, and tears up the sheet of paper.

“Janni, you’d already finished it! Now we have to do it all over again!” I close my eyes, struggling to stay calm.

“I don’t want to.” Janni is staring straight ahead at the wall.

I exhale, pushing my hair back. “Janni, you need to do your work.” Janni turns to me and hits me on the arm.

“Okay, Janni. Ten-minute time-out for hitting.” I start to walk out. Janni dives to the floor, for my ankles, to stop me from getting to the door, but I easily step out of the room and lock the door behind me.

I hear the sound of something heavy hitting the other side of her door. It must be her chair. That is the only large object left in her room that she can pick up and throw. Every time she gets a time-out, she picks up anything she can lift and throws it at the door.

“Now it’s fifteen minutes,” I call.

She throws the chair again. She’s going to break it.

“Twenty minutes,” I call out, feeling like a judge increasing the sentence on a prisoner who refuses to cooperate.

I wait, expecting the sound of more items being thrown against the door, but they don’t come. I put my ear to the door, trying to hear the scratching sound of pencil on drywall. Typically, once Janni runs
out of things to throw, she starts writing on her walls. Things like the word “Lion,” the names of her imaginary friends, and phrases that make no sense at all, like “Von Dog.”

“Janni,” I call through the door. “If you’re writing on the walls, you know you’ll have to clean it off before coming out of your room.” I say this even though it is impossible to get the words off the wall, especially red marker, no matter how hard I scrub.

No answer.

“Janni?”

I unlock the door and open it to find that the room is a mess, with papers strewn everywhere. Her lamp is on the floor.

But no Janni.

“Janni?”

The walk-in closet light is on. I walk over to it and see Janni sitting on the floor, gritting her teeth as she pulls the sleeves of a shirt around her neck.

“What are you doing?” I demand, yanking the shirt away from her. “Don’t do that! You’ll stretch out your shirts and they won’t fit you anymore.”

“I want to break my neck,” she answers in a voice that is equally dreamy and forceful. She pulls another one of her shirts off a hanger and wraps it around her neck, pulling so hard I can see her hands shaking,

“Janni, stop that!” I grab the second shirt, trying to pull it away, but she clings to it like it’s a life preserver.

“Don’t do that,” I say. My words sound insane even to me. I am commanding her not to try to kill herself?

“I want to know how to break my neck!” Janni screams.

I should ask why in the world she would want to, but I don’t. Over the past nine months, our lives have gone to a place I never could have fathomed. I’ve become numb. Nothing shocks me anymore. It can’t. Even this.

“You can’t,” I simply tell her.

Janni wraps her hands around her neck and squeezes.

“Janni, stop that,” I yell, reaching for her hands, trying to get my fingers underneath so I can pull them free.

“What is she doing?” Susan calls, running into the room.

“She says she wants to break her neck,” I answer, turning away. I know I should be terrified, but I feel nothing except slight annoyance.

“Oh, my God! Janni!” Susan runs to Janni. “Why do you want to hurt yourself?”

“I want to break my neck.”

“You can’t, Janni,” I say over my shoulder. “It doesn’t matter how hard you squeeze. Eventually, you will just pass out and let go.” I can’t believe how cavalier I sound. Something is seriously wrong with me. Or maybe I’m just tired of always fighting her. But this is my daughter!

“How can I break my neck?” Janni repeats, struggling to keep her hands on her neck.

Susan looks at me. “Help me!”

“She’s fine,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like my own.

“She’s choking herself!” Susan yells at me.

“If she can talk, she can still breathe.”

Susan finally manages to pull Janni’s hands free. Janni hits at her.

“Why?” Susan asks, tears in her eyes. “Why do you want to break your neck?”

“I don’t want to live,” Janni replies and goes back to trying to choke herself.

Susan again struggles to get Janni’s hands free, then turns to me, her eyes blazing with anger and fear. “She needs to go to the hospital!”

“What’s the point?” I reply. “They’ll just release her and she’ll still be the same.”

“Something is wrong!” Susan screams at me. “Can’t you see that?”

Yes, but six months ago, I had to stop feeling anything in order to function. Now it appears I can’t turn it back on.

“We need to call Dr. Howe! She needs more medication!”

I turn back to Janni and Susan. I have no idea what to do.

“It’s late. The office will be closed,” I say stupidly.

“She needs to go the the hospital.”

“Which one? Alhambra?” I shoot back. “She’s not going to the hospital. Kids do weird things. I picked my gums as a kid until they bled.”

“It’s not the same thing!” Susan cries. “She’s trying to kill herself.”

“Will you stop saying that?” I yell back.

“What do you want me to say?” Susan demands, holding Janni in her arms. From the other bedroom, I hear Bodhi start to cry.

“Just give her a bath and get her to bed. I’ll leave a message for Howe.”

I leave Janni’s room and retrieve the phone, dialing Howe’s number. The after-hours message comes on, telling me, “If this is a life-threatening emergency, hang up and dial 911. Otherwise, please leave a message and your call will be returned on the next business day.”

The message beeps at me. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. What do I say?
Ah, yes, hi. This is Michael Schofield. My daughter is January Schofield. She wants to break her own neck. Can Doctor Howe please call me back at her earliest convenience?

I hang up the phone.

“Dial 911,” the message said.

We already tried that once and that didn’t help, either.

I don’t know what to do anymore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
October 2008

I
decide that Janni’s attempt to strangle herself isn’t serious, but just a way to avoid being put in time-out. All she needs to do is act like she is going to hurt herself and Susan will let her out, defeating the whole purpose of time-outs, which is to get Janni to think about why she got them in the first place. I am trying to connect consequence to action.

So I up the ante. When I come home from work, I usually have to make two dinners: one for me and Susan and another for Janni, because Janni won’t eat what we eat. She will eat only mac ’n’ cheese or cheese pizza.

That has to change.

Tonight, I make only one dinner for all of us, a rice dish, which I serve to Janni.

She looks down at it like it is a plate of worms. “I won’t eat this.”

“Well, that’s dinner, Janni.”

“I want mac ’n’ cheese.”

“You eat too much mac ’n’ cheese.”

“That’s all I’ll eat.”

“You’ll eat what I put in front of you,” I answer, the words sounding unnatural coming out of my mouth.

Janni turns to Susan. “Mommy, make me mac ’n’ cheese.”

Susan starts to get up.

“No,” I tell her forcefully. “No mac ’n’ cheese. She has to eat what we’re having.”

Susan ignores me, pulling a box of microwave mac ’n’ cheese from the freezer. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Yes, it is! She’s got to learn to knuckle under.”

“I was a picky eater when I was a kid. So were you. I remember your dad telling me that you wanted your food mashed up in a blender before you would eat it.”

“That was just another part of my mother’s craziness.”

Susan puts the box in the microwave. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just you.”

This makes me see red. “That’s not the point. The point is you are letting her divide us. We need to be a united front. She needs to eat what we put in front of her. We’re the adults, not her. If she doesn’t eat, she doesn’t eat. Eventually, when she gets hungry enough, she’ll eat.”

“I won’t eat,” Janni chimes in.

“Then you get nothing,” I say to her.

“You’re acting like your mother. I’m not going to starve her,” Susan replies.

I turn away to avoid saying an expletive in anger. “Janni, sit at the table,” I command.

“I’m not eating the rice.”

“If you want the mac ’n’ cheese, you need to eat some of the rice.”

Janni picks up her spoon and shovels in a mouthful, then immediately leans over and spits it onto the floor.

“That’s it,” I say. “Time-out. Go to your room.”

“I’m hungry!”

“Go!”

Janni picks up the plate of rice and dumps it on the floor. I grab her arm. “Let’s go,” I say. Janni lets her body go limp. Damn, she is too smart for her own good. She knows that going limp makes it harder for me to get her into her room because I have to pull her entire body weight. I won’t pull on her arm for fear of dislocating it, so I pick up her legs and drag her across the carpet.

“You’re not Ghandi,” I tell her. I’ve taught her about Ghandi and nonviolent resistance. “This is not nonviolent resistance against oppression.” I’m talking to her like an adult again, but it’s only because of the “disconnect” between her mind and her body. If I don’t punish her for a tantrum, all people will see is her behavior.

I pull Janni into her room and let go. “Ten minutes. You need to think about why you are in a time-out.”

As I am walking past, she reaches up and hits me hard in the shin. “Twenty minutes now.” I walk out and lock her bedroom door.

Nothing crashes against the door. Not that there is much left in her room. The beautiful room I made for her before she came home from Alhambra has been largely destroyed.

I put my ear up against the door, straining to hear any sounds that might tell me she is trying to choke herself.

Nothing. Once she tells me what she did, acknowledges it and owns her behavior, I will let her out.

“Janni, why are you in a time-out?”

A long silence. I don’t think she’s going to answer. This is the problem. She has to make the connection between cause and effect. For someone so brilliant, she seems to be unable to do this.

“I hit Bodhi.”

This catches me by surprise, because that’s not what she did.

“Well, that is usually why you get time-outs, because you
try
to hit Bodhi, but that’s not what you did this time.”

“I hit Mommy.”

I’m getting annoyed. “No, you didn’t hit Mommy,” I say. “Stop playing games, Janni. The sooner you face what you did, the sooner you can come out.”

“I screamed,” Janni answers through the door.

“Well, yes, but that’s not the main reason. Janni, what did you just do a second ago that got you a time-out? Just tell me and I’ll let you out.”

“I hit,” Janni says again.

“Who? Who did you hit?”

“Bodhi.”

“No.”

“Mommy.”

“No, Janni!” I reply, frustrated. “Janni, you could end all this right now. Just take responsibility for your actions.”

“Tell me.”

“No, I’m not going to tell you. If I tell you, that defeats the whole point of the time-out.”

“Tell me. I don’t remember.”

“How could you not remember? You just did it a minute ago. It was the last thing you did.”

“Let her out,” Susan commands.

“No,” I tell her, feeling like I am losing a battle. “She has to face the consequences.”

“I don’t remember,” Janni says again through the door. “Just tell me what I did.”

I open the door. Janni is sitting on her bed. I stare at her. “You deliberately spilled the rice and then hit me.”

“Oh,” Janni answers. “Can I come out now?”

I shake my head and walk away.

•  •  •

IT’S A SATURDAY in the middle of October and we’re in sweltering heat running Honey around at Janni’s school. Janni didn’t want to come, but I told her she had no choice in the matter. There is no way I am leaving her alone with Susan and Bodhi.

A group of kids on bikes suddenly ride into the schoolyard, and I see Honey approaching them, picking up speed. This is not good. Honey doesn’t bite, but she is a herding dog by instinct. If these kids aren’t used to dogs and see one running toward them, they will get scared.

“It’s okay,” I call across the playground to them as Honey comes running. “She doesn’t bite.”

“Watch out for Wednesday,” Janni suddenly calls. “She bites.”

The kids turn to Honey, apprehension on their faces, and I realize they think Honey is Wednesday, Janni’s imaginary rat.

“Janni, I wish you hadn’t done that. Now they think Honey is Wednesday and they will be afraid.”

“But I had to warn them about Wednesday,” Janni protests.

“Janni, Wednesday can’t hurt them,” I answer, annoyed. “Honey! Get over here!”

“Yes, she can. She bites. She bites me.”

“Dammit, Janni. I can assure you Wednesday cannot hurt them.”

“Yes, she can. She can hurt them in their head.”

This catches me so much by surprise that I forget about Honey scaring the other kids. I turn to Janni. She is looking at me like she finally has my attention.