January First: A Child's Descent Into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her (9 page)

My daughter is five and already being sent to the principal’s office. She knows him by name, something I am certain no other child in her class does.

“I also really need her to write her name,” she adds.

“Yeah, I know. She doesn’t like her name,” I reply.

“But one of the requirements of kindergarten is that students be able to write their first names by the time the school year is done. She needs to do it. It is a California requirement.”

This isn’t unreasonable, but it still pisses me off. She has a 146 IQ, but they don’t give a damn about that. All that matters to them is the stupid rules.

“What about teaching her science?” I ask.

“I do. In fact, when it’s just Janni and me, she’s wonderful. It’s only when I have to move on to help another student that things get rough. It’s like if I could be with her all the time, she would be perfect.”

I look over at the whiteboard. Every student’s name is up there in one of three columns: green, yellow, and red. The teacher calls it the “Streetlight System.” Names written in green are the students who are following directions, green meant to indicate that they can “go,” or continue as they are doing. Names in yellow are students who have been asked to “slow down” and think about what they are doing. Names in red are students who have been told to stop. Janni’s name is always either in yellow or red. I have never seen her name in green.

“Red again,” I comment.

The teacher is sympathetic. “The system works well for other students but not for Janni. She doesn’t care. That is why I had to send her to the principal’s office. That’s the next step if a ‘red light’ is ignored.”

I hate putting Janni through this. I know this isn’t where she needs to be. The other kids are learning their ABCs and Janni knows the periodic table of elements. I look down at the floor, wishing we could just solve the violence. If we could fix that, then we could home-school her.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Saturday, March 8, 2008

E
ven though today is Saturday, I am working. I signed up to grade the writing exam every CSUN student must pass in order to graduate. I get $250 for six hours of work, money we desperately need. College lecturers don’t make much.

I thought about not doing it because it means Susan has to take both Janni and Bodhi, but she already hired a babysitter for the day, a young college girl named Shawna who manages the toy store in the mall, the same store Janni destroyed two years ago. She saw Janni tear through the store for about a year but seemed to genuinely like her, even engaging her in conversation when she ran behind her cash register. Susan said she has experience as a nanny and works with her autistic nephew, so she understands meltdowns. She is going to help Susan with Janni and Bodhi while I am gone.

I read through the exams, although my mind keeps drifting to what might be happening with Susan and the kids.

By late morning we’re given a break and I go out into the corridor and call Susan. “How’s it going?”

“Not well,” Susan answers, her voice like I’ve never heard it before. She sounds … broken.

“Where are you?”

“Right now I am parked outside the ER at Henry Mayo.”

Panic squeezes my blood vessels. “Why are you there? What happened?”

On top of my fears of Janni hurting Bodhi, I now live in constant fear that Susan is going to put Janni in a psychiatric hospital. Dr. Howe keeps pushing for it because Janni is not responding to medication. Susan agrees, but I can’t accept Janni going into a hospital. If we put her in one, I feel like we will have crossed a point of no return. As long as Janni is out of the hospital, there is still hope that, just maybe, this is a phase that she will outgrow.

“She tried to hit Bodhi.” Susan starts to cry. “I was driving. She would have done it if Shawna hadn’t been here to stop her.”

I look down at the floor, angry, not sure what to do. “She always tries to hit him. That doesn’t mean you go to the ER.”

“It scared Shawna enough that she told me to call 911.”

“That’s just because she’s never seen it before,” I reply. “She’s not used to it.”

“I called 911.”

My razor-thin sense of control is beginning to crack.

“Why?!” I whine.

“Because even Shawna couldn’t control her! I didn’t know what else to do. They just told me to take her to the emergency room. By the time I got here, she was asleep.”

I exhale, relieved.
An ambulance didn’t come. They didn’t take Janni away
.

“Hold on,” I say. “I’m on my way.”

“She’s asleep right now. When she wakes up, she is still going to want to do something. Just meet me at the party.”

AFTER I’M DONE grading the exams, I race to the birthday party at Color Me Mine in Porter Ranch. It’s midway between where I work in Northridge and where we live in Valencia.

When I get inside, I see Susan, standing, holding Bodhi, talking to the mother of the girl whose birthday it is.

“Where’s Janni?” I demand.

Susan looks around. “I’m not sure.”

I leave her, ignoring Bodhi, who was the victim, searching for Janni. I find her sitting at one of the tables, painting a ceramic dog. Half the dog’s head is purple and the other half is yellow, the purple bleeding over into the lighter color.

There is plenty of room to sit down next to her, because there are no kids anywhere close.

“How’re you doing?” I ask her, like nothing bad has happened.

“Fine,” she answers.

I look around at the other girls. They are painting, too, but it is different. They paint and chatter among themselves. I look back at Janni, who gives no indication that she is aware of anybody else.

One of the staff comes over and picks up the dog. “What’s your name, sweetie?” she asks. “I need to write on the bottom so we know who this belongs to.”

“Eloise,” Janni answers.

The woman looks at me. “Eloise? Like in the books?”

“Yes,” I answer. “We’re big fans.” I am not going to give Janni’s real name. I am not going to trigger her. Besides, I’m pretty confident that there are no other “Eloises” at this party.

“I want to go,” Janni says without looking at me. But she isn’t
whining. She is begging, as if being here, surrounded by all these other children, is causing her physical pain.

“Okay,” I answer, getting up immediately. I want to get her out of here. I want to get her away from any place and any person that reminds her she is different. Or reminds me.

Susan is still talking to the other mothers. I say nothing as we leave, angry that she keeps putting Janni in situations like this.

WE ARE DRIVING. I don’t know where, exactly. I just want to get Janni away.

“Mommy thinks I need to go to the hospital,” Janni says quietly.

My first instinct is to say,
Your mother is full of shit
, but I don’t. Susan is still her mother. “Do you feel you need to go?” I ask her instead.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital, but I think I need to.”

This hits me like a sledgehammer.

“Why?” I ask, almost choking on the words.

“I want to hit Bodhi all the time. I can’t help it.”

My five-year-old daughter is telling me she thinks she needs to be hospitalized. It is more than I can bear, so in that moment I get angry with Susan again. If Susan had a full-time job, I could stay with Janni all the time. She just can’t fit into our world, our system, our rules. If I could take her, I could protect her from society. I want to keep driving, just her and me, into the desert, as far away as I can get.

“It’ll be okay, Janni,” I tell her. “We’ll get through this.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sunday, March 9, 2008

O
ur dog Honey, an Australian shepherd–golden retriever mix, hasn’t been able to run in weeks, and since Susan wanted to spend some time with Janni alone, here I am with Bodhi, his body propped against me, his head on my shoulder.

He’s not even three months. He snuggles into me, seemingly just happy to be held. Janni was never like this. Even at this age, she was always struggling, trying to get down, wanting to move, to explore. Bodhi is nice to hold. I give him a kiss on the side of his head.

My cell phone rings and I retrieve it from my pocket. I don’t bother to check caller ID anymore. It’s always Susan.

“Are you at the Pizza Kitchen yet?”

I expect Susan to tell me Janni is doing fine on their “girls’ day out.”

“We’re at Alhambra,” Susan answers flatly.

“What?” BHC Alhambra is a psychiatric hospital. I look around
for Honey, wanting to get her back on the leash and get out of here. Maybe they are still en route. Maybe I can still stop this.

“Just come back and I will take Janni,” I say, trying to control my anger.

“It’s too late. They’ve already taken her back.” Susan sounds spent but relieved.

I turn in circles, trying to spot Honey, feeling powerless. “Why?” It’s a rhetorical question. I know why, but I still can’t accept it.

“She was hitting me and throwing things at me nonstop. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

“Why didn’t you call me?!”

“Because she needed to go. You even told me last night that she said she needed to go.”

I spot Honey and scream at her to come.

“Don’t yell at Honey,” Susan tells me. “Let her have her time.”

Susan just checked our five-year-old daughter into a psych ward and she’s upset that I am yelling at Honey?

“I tried!” I hear Susan say. “I really did! I thought we could work through it.”

I am furious. I never should have let Susan take her. I should have known she couldn’t handle Janni, even without Bodhi.

“You should have called me before you took her,” I hiss.

“She wants to go. She needs help, help we can’t provide.”

“You mean you can’t provide,” I answer bitterly. I feel like Susan has taken my child from me.

I HAVE TO take Honey home before I go to Alhambra, more than forty miles from where we live.

I put Bodhi’s car seat down on the floor of Janni’s bedroom.

Susan wants me to pack a bag of clothes for Janni, so I get her
Disney Princess suitcase out of the closet and lay it down on the carpet next to Bodhi. I slip down to the carpet next to the suitcase and stare at it. On the bed in front of me is Hero, Janni’s favorite bear. I stand and pick up Hero. I don’t want to pack clothes for Janni. If I pack clothes, then that means she is staying. I wonder if I have the guts to go there and pull her out. Would Susan fight me on that? I don’t know. I don’t know if I can trust her anymore. She is clearly cracking under the stress.

I sigh and put Hero into the bag. I will pack clothes. But if when I get there Janni is scared and wants to leave, I am going to take her, whether Susan likes it or not.

WHEN I FINALLY find BHC Alhambra and pull into the parking lot, it is nothing like what I expected. It doesn’t look like a hospital at all. I get out of the car and stare at the twelve-foot-high steel bars that surround what appears to be an outside patio area. The final twelve inches at the top of the bars curve inward. I know what this is for. Down the highway from us is our local water reservoir. It is also surrounded by a security perimeter with a fence where the final foot curves. Such a curve makes it impossible to climb over the fence. The direction of the curve tells you whether the fence is designed to keep people in or out. At the reservoir, the fence curves out toward the freeway. Here at Alhambra, the top of the fence curves in, toward the hospital, to stop people from getting out.

Okay
, I say to myself,
I get that
. This is a psychiatric facility. Most people who are brought to a place like this are brought here against their will. When I was sixteen, I spent two weeks as a patient in a psychiatric ward for troubled kids. My father didn’t give me a choice. My parents had divorced and I went to live with my father, but after what I’d been through with my mother, I couldn’t adapt to a “normal” life again. I started doing drugs. I ran away from home. I set fires. Eventually, my father told me that if I wanted to live with him I had to go to a place where
I would get the help I needed. I remember there were bars on the windows of that place as well. But the place I was in was on the fifth floor of a full hospital. There were appendectomies below and babies being born above me. This place is just one floor. There is no ER, no signs to surgery or maternity. This is not a full hospital. It’s more like a prison. Janni is only a five-year-old child. She shouldn’t be in a place like this.

Susan is sitting in the waiting room, bent over a clipboard, when I enter, pushing Bodhi’s stroller and pulling Janni’s bag.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” she says, as if I just got home. She puts the clipboard down. “You can finish the rest of this. I’ve been filling out paperwork for two hours.”

I can’t believe how Susan is acting. She looks relaxed.

I appear calm, but it is taking all my effort not to run back into the facility and save Janni. It’s been years, but I still remember looking down from the window of my room in the psych ward, watching my father’s car drive away. I cried myself to sleep that night.

“Where is she?”

“She’s back on the kids’ unit,” Susan replies, gesturing deeper into the building. “We’ll be able to go back and see her in a few minutes. It’s almost visiting hours. Which are six to seven, by the way.”

There are visiting hours?
I think to myself.
This is my child and I can only see her for one hour a day?
Forget this. I am not going to let someone tell me when I can or cannot see my child.

“Is she here under a voluntary or does she have a hold?” I ask, remembering the terminology from my own experience. A “hold” means that you can’t leave, that a doctor has determined you are a danger to yourself or others. “Voluntary” means you or your parents, if you are a minor, checked you in. I was a voluntary, in the loosest sense of the word, as I was a minor and my father had checked me in.

“It’s voluntary, I think,” Susan replies, then thinks for a moment. “I had to sign a document giving them permission to treat her. They weren’t going to take her at first. The receptionist kept saying there were no beds
available, but I told them I wasn’t leaving. Eventually, some guy from admissions came out and he started telling me the same thing, that they have no beds. So I just said ‘January’ to her and of course she blew up and started screaming and hitting me. The admissions guy looked shocked. I kept calling her ‘January’ and she kept hitting me until the admissions guy took her back. So much for not having any beds, huh?”