January First: A Child's Descent Into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her (2 page)

“Yep.” Janni nods. “I call them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.”

Then comes the part I hate the most. The clerk looks up at me, a questioning expression on her face. She is looking to me, the dad, for confirmation of this incredible fact. One rat she could understand, even two or three, but seven? Except that we don’t have any rats. Every single one of them is an imaginary friend.

Janni’s first imaginary friend, a dog named Low, appeared right
before her third birthday. Then came a cat named 400. By now, I’ve lost count of how many she has. They all come from a place called Calilini, which Janni describes as a desert island off the coast of California.

Normally, this would be no big deal. Everybody knows that little kids have imaginations. But Janni gets so angry when I dismiss her friends like that. She looks at me like I’ve betrayed her.

I open my mouth, about to say,
Well, we don’t really. They’re actually imaginary rats
, but I see Janni turn to me, awaiting my response. Right now, she seems content. If I tell the clerk the truth, I know what will happen. Janni will emit one of her earsplitting screams. Then she’ll grab things off the shelf and throw them on the floor. I will tell her to pick them up, because I really do try to reinforce good behavior. But then Janni will say,
No
, like a petulant teenager and run out of the store. I’ll call,
Janni, you need to come back here and pick this stuff up!
but she’ll be gone. Then I’ll have to abandon the mess she made and chase her for fear of losing her. I will come out of the store and see her about a hundred feet down the mall, looking back at me, waiting.

It suddenly occurs to me … 
Why do I have to tell the truth? This woman is never going to come over to our apartment. She will never know that we really don’t have seven rats. Why make Janni feel more different than she already is?

I nod and spread my hands in a
Yes … I know it’s crazy
expression. “That’s right. Seven rats.”

She shakes her head.

“Wow.” Her eyes widen, giving me a look like I’m nuts, but I don’t care about that. I just want to keep the peace.

I come over to Janni.

“Okay, Janni, let’s go.” I rush her along to avoid digging a deeper hole for myself.

“Do you want to meet Friday?” Janni suddenly asks her.

Oh, shit
, I think nervously.

“Come on, Janni. We have to go. We need to get home and feed our rats.”

The clerk looks at Janni, confused.

“Do I want to meet Friday?” she repeats.

“She’s one of my rats,” Janni says earnestly, her face completely straight. “I have her right here in my pocket.”

The clerk looks up at me in horror.

“You have a rat with you?! You can’t bring animals into the store!” She moves toward the phone on the counter, ready to call security.
Dammit!

“It’s okay,” Janni says, chasing after her. “She won’t bite.” She comes up behind the clerk and holds out her empty palm. “See? She’s a nice rat.”

The clerk stares at Janni’s empty palm, the phone halfway to her ear, before she realizes what is happening.

Finally, she chuckles nervously. “Oh, my God,” she says, looking over at me. “She had me going there for a minute. I thought you really had a rat with you.”

“We do,” Janni says, her face totally serious. “We brought Friday. Here she is.” She extends her palm into the clerk’s face, as if she’s nearsighted.

“Janni, come on,” I call, desperately wanting to leave.

The clerk smiles and pretends to pat the rat.

“He’s a very nice rat,” she tells Janni.

I wince. I can hear the condescension in her voice. She is treating Janni like every other child, believing Janni isn’t smart enough to know she’s being blown off.

“She,” Janni corrects.

“She.” The clerk nods, looking up at me with an expression I get all the time:
Your daughter has a wonderful imagination
. Then she smiles at Janni.

“Do you like to pretend?”

Janni doesn’t answer. I see a look of frustatration come over her face. Suddenly, she grabs several classic wooden games off the shelf and throws them down on the floor.

“Janni, stop that!” I run over and grab her hands to stop her. She pulls free and runs deeper into the store, pulling items off the shelf and throwing them down.

I chase after her. “Janni!” But I know it doesn’t matter what I say to Janni now. She won’t stop. I will have to drag her out of the store. I’m angry at Janni, but even angrier at the stupid clerk.
Why couldn’t she just play along?
I know it’s unfair of me to expect the world to play along with Janni’s imagination. But that doesn’t stop me from wishing they would.

CHAPTER ONE
August 8, 2006

T
oday is Janni’s fourth birthday, and I’m setting up her pool party at the clubhouse in our apartment complex.

I place pool toys in the water. Janni is already splashing around.

“Come in, Daddy!”

“I’m coming, Janni. I just have to finish setting up.”

“Look, Janni!” Susan calls out. “Lynn and the twins are here. Come say hi.”

I look over to the gate where Susan is letting them in. Janni is the same age as the twins. We’ve known them since they were babies.

“Janni?” Susan calls again to her. “Come say hi to Lynn and the twins.”

“No,” Janni calls back, not even bothering to turn around and see.

“Janni, you have to welcome your guests,” Susan says, a bit more sternly.

“No!” Janni yells behind her, more forcefully this time.

“Hi, January!” Lynn calls. “Happy birthday!”

“I’m not January!” Janni screams, still not turning around. Then calmly, “I’m Blue-Eyed Tree Frog.”

Lynn is visibly taken aback a little, but recovers quickly; she’s known our struggle with Janni’s constant name changing for a while now.

A year ago, Janni stopped going by her name. And this phase has gone on way longer than we thought it would. Whenever someone calls her by her real name, she screams like somebody put her hand to a hot frying pan.

We don’t even try to force her to use her given name. At this point we’re happy if she just picks one name and sticks with it. The problem is that she changes it all the time, sometimes multiple times in the same day. She’s been “Hot Dog,” “Rainbow,” “Firefly,” and now “Blue-Eyed Tree Frog,” which was originally “Red-Eyed Tree Frog,” from
Go Diego! Go!
, until a lady working at Sav-On drugstore pointed out, “But you have blue eyes, dear.”

“Lynn and the girls have come to your birthday party,” Susan reminds her. “You need to come and greet them.”

Janni gets out of the pool and comes over to the twins. She is not pouting. She is smiling and rubbing her hands rapidly, as if she is actually suddenly happy to see them. It’s like the previous outburst never happened.

Susan gets the twins two juice boxes from the cooler.

“Hi, Janni. How are you?” Lynn asks pleasantly.

The hand rubbing stops and the smile vanishes. “I’m not Janni! I’m Blue-Eyed Tree Frog.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot.” Lynn quickly corrects herself like she just received a mild electric shock.

“Girls, wish Blue-Eyed Tree Frog a happy birthday,” Lynn instructs her daughters.

“Happy birthday, Janni,” they dutifully intone. The twins have known my daughter as Janni since before they could talk. It is all they know.

“I’m not Janni!” she screams at the twins. “I’m Blue-Eyed Tree Frog.”

The twins look up at their mom, confused.

“Janni!” Susan warns. “Be polite.”

I say nothing. Sure, I would like Janni to be polite, but I realize odd behavior is a by-product of her genius. She hit all of her developmental markers early and was already talking at eight months. By thirteen months she knew all her letters, both big and small, even if they were turned on their side or upside down. Then, at eighteen months, she was speaking in grammatically correct sentences, introducing herself to people saying, “I’m Janni Paige and I am eighteen months old.”

But I didn’t fully comprehend what she was capable of until I came back from grad school one evening when Janni was two and Susan was telling me about their day.

“I’ve been teaching her addition,” Susan told me, which I already knew, “so today we started on subtraction. I asked her what ‘seven minus four’ was.”

“Did she get it right?” I asked.

“Yes, she did, so we did ‘seven minus three is four.’ Then she asks me, ‘Mommy, what’s four minus seven?’ so I started trying to explain negative numbers to her.”

I stare at Susan. “She asked you what was four minus seven?”

Susan, washing dishes, turns to me. “Yeah.” She sees the look of shock on my face. “What’s wrong?”

“She asked you that right out of the blue?”

“Yes. What is it?”

Negative numbers
, I remember thinking. Negative numbers are a totally abstract concept because they don’t exist in the real world. You can’t see negative four apples. At two years old, Janni’s mind made
the jump from what Piaget called “concrete reasoning” to “abstract reasoning,” something that typically happens at a much older age. Janni could conceive of concepts that did not actually physically exist.

I have fantasies of Janni going to Harvard or Yale or MIT before she is even a teenager. My ultimate dream, when I close my eyes at night, is Janni winning the Nobel Prize. For what, I don’t know and don’t really care. But to be able to do what she can do at two years old, she must be a gift to humanity. I think that trumps being impolite on occasion.

“Would you like some juice?” Susan hands the twins the juice boxes and they take them.

Janni starts to laugh and flings her arm at the twins. “400 is splashing mango juice on you,” she chortles, without touching them.

The girls flinch instinctively, then look up at their mother for guidance, not sure what happened.

“400 is splashing mango juice on you.” Janni makes the move again like she is throwing juice on the twins, but she has nothing in her hand.

The twins retreat to either side of their mother.

“Janni, that isn’t nice,” Susan corrects.

“But it’s not me. It’s 400. 400 is splashing mango juice on them. She likes to splash mango juice on people.” Her arm shoots out with the imaginary juice again. We don’t even have mango juice.

The twins look up at Lynn. “You both need sunscreen.” She looks down at them, taking each daughter in one hand and over to the lounge chairs and tables.

“Well then, tell 400 to stop,” Susan tells Janni. “400 is another one of her imaginary friends,” she explains to Lynn.

Janni turns away and says to the air, “400, stop that.” She waits, apparently for a response, before turning back to the twins.

“She won’t stop.” Janni breaks into laughter again. “It is so funny. 400 is throwing mango juice on you.”

The twins are clearly scared, as Lynn puts on their sunscreen. “It’s okay, we know Janni is ‘unique.’ ”

This is frustrating. She’s being imaginative, but the twins haven’t seen imagination like this. Geniuses are often eccentric, I think to myself.

“Janni!” Susan’s voice goes up an octave. “Stop it!”

“It’s not me! It’s 400!”

“You control 400. Tell her to stop.”

Janni puts out her hands in exasperation. “I can’t!”

“Janni …,” Susan begins, but I cut her off.

“Let it go.”

Janni comes over to me and and we get ready to go into the pool. This is what I do. I am her protector from the rest of the world.

I see the look of frustration on Susan’s face, but she doesn’t completely understand Janni like I do.

“She needs to greet her friends,” she tells me imploringly. “You’re not helping her learn to be polite.”

“It’s her birthday. Let it go,” I reply.

Susan opens her mouth to protest.

“Let it go,” I say again, more firmly. Susan closes her mouth and gives me an annoyed look.

I jump in the water and come up to the edge, holding out my arms. “Come on, Janni. Jump to me.”

“400 wants to jump in, too,” Janni says earnestly.

“Cats don’t generally like water.”

“Okay, you stay here, 400.”

Janni jumps to me, and I carry her out into the middle of the pool. Janni suddenly looks back at the edge.

“Oh, no! 400 fell in the pool!” she cries out. “400, don’t drown!”

“I got 400,” I answer. I put Janni down in the shallow end and wade over to where I imagine 400 to be. This is what I do that makes me different from everybody else in Janni’s life. I play along with her
imaginary friends like they are real. I’ll be damned if I’m going to get lumped in with the “thirteens” in her mind. Janni says “thirteens” are kids and adults who don’t have her imagination. She considers herself a “twenty,” like me, and Susan a “seventeen,” while most of her friends are “fifteens.” But the “thirteens” have no imagination at all.

“Got her!” I fish nothing out of the water. “Ah! Now she is on my head! 400!” I pretend to sink under the weight of the imaginary cat. I will not shut any aspect of Janni down. I will not restrict anything, because I worry once she shuts down in order to conform, her full potential might be lost.

Janni smiles and laughs.

“400! Get off Daddy’s head.”

I smile back, happy.

“You know, Janni, if you could find an ocean big enough to put Saturn in it, it would float.” This is how I teach her. I engage her imaginary friends and then she pays attention.

“Do you remember what the atmospheric pressure on Venus is?”

“Ninety,” Janni answers.

“That’s right. You would weigh ninety times what you weigh on Earth. Of course, if we were on Venus right now, we’d be swimming in sulfuric acid. And then there is the heat. Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the sun, about eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit.”

“It gets up to two hundred degrees in Calilini,” Janni says.

Here is my chance to insert a little reality into her world.

“Janni, that’s hotter than any place on Earth. That’s nearly the boiling point of water. Nothing could survive that temperature.”