The Quiet Room (8 page)

Again, by the time I arrived Lori had had her stomach pumped. Again she was contrite.

“I wasn't trying to kill myself, Daddy, really I wasn't,” she cried. “I was just feeling hyper and I took that stuff to calm down.” She seemed in a partial stupor. I left Mark with Lori while I went out to discuss the situation with the doctors. They already knew her history at Bellevue. I was trying to convince them that what Lori was saying was true: She wasn't trying to kill herself, but just trying to calm down.

But when I returned to Lori's bedside, I found Mark white and stunned.

“Dad, she's cursing me out,” the stricken twenty-year-old told me. “She's telling me to get the hell out of here, that she hates me, that she's always hated me.” Mark idolized Lori, from the time they were kids. He looked shocked. “She's been trying to take off her clothes and leave, Dad. I've been having to hold her down.”

And just at that moment she tried to do it again. She was lying in a hospital bed, dressed only in a cotton gown open at the back. When she saw me enter the room, she began to shout. “There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not sick. I'm not staying here.” And then, just as if her brother and I were not in the room, she began to take off her gown.

That was when I finally realized her problems were serious. Lori was the most modest of girls, shy and private. When she was well, she would never ever have considered disrobing before me or her brother. But now, shrieking and yelling, she was preparing to walk—naked and without shoes—into the pouring rain outside the hospital.

I have always tried to stay in control. It is simply part of my nature. But that night at New York Hospital, I lost it. I pleaded with her. I begged her. I did everything I could to try to get her to sign herself into the hospital. Over the next hour Mark and I struggled to get her back into her clothes, and tried to calm her down. I tried to reason with her. Then I tried to threaten her. She was hostile. She was unmoving.

“I'm not sick, Daddy. I want to go home. I want to get out of here.”

I tried to get her to see the reality of the situation. Matters had spiraled out of our hands. If she didn't sign herself in, chances were good they would commit her involuntarily.

“If you sign yourself in,” I told her, “you will stay in control of the situation. You will be able to sign yourself back out when you want. If you don't, they can force you to stay.”

Still, I kept giving her a hopeful picture, one that I myself was aching to believe. The Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital, where she was to be sent, was a well-known acute-care facility. That was where people were sent with short-term psychiatric problems. It never occurred to me that people left such short-term care facilities and went on to long-term hospitals. I simply thought she would go in, get some rest, and leave.

“It will only be for a few days, Lori,” I told her.

Lori trusted me. Lori had always trusted me. So after about an hour, tired and tearful, she capitulated. The paperwork had already been prepared. She signed it. She looked very small and very helpless as they wheeled her away to be transferred to the psychiatric unit.

In the car on the way home, I knew that Mark was hurting. He hadn't been able to understand what was happening to his sister and was frightened and shocked by the night's events. But I couldn't find anything in myself to comfort him. I was too caught up in the battle raging within my own mind. Lori's problems were only temporary, I kept saying to myself. It was just an acute problem that was going to be over quickly. She would snap out of it in the hospital and be home soon.

But then the dark thoughts I had been trying to hide began pummeling at my hopeful barricade: It's all your fault, I thought. Lori is very sick, and you caused it. You weren't affectionate enough. You didn't pay enough attention to her. You pushed her too hard. You were too demanding. It's you who have caused her problems. You. You. You. My mind reeled over Lori's entire childhood, looking for answers.

What had I done? What had I done?

New York Hospital is a white, cold-looking building overlooking Manhattan's East River. Because it is perched right atop the FDR Drive where cars zoom down the east side of the city, I must have driven by it hundreds of times in my life, and never given it a second look. This time, when Nancy and I drove together to the Payne Whitney Clinic at New York Hospital, I looked closely. I knew that behind one of those dark, anonymous windows was Lori.

The hospital had made some attempt at cheer: There was a small rotunda containing a pleasant garden with scarlet maples and a scraggly tulip or two in front of the main entrance. But from the moment we entered the hospital, it was clear that this was no ordinary place where ordinary people came to get well. This was a locked-door psychiatric facility. The people inside couldn't just walk on out. And we couldn't just walk on in. After taking the elevator up to Lori's floor, we buzzed and waited to be scrutinized through a window in the door and admitted.

I didn't know what to expect. After her first suicide attempt, at least she had seemed fairly normal. Apologetic, yes, and afraid that we would be angry. But we had talked things over coherently, and she had explained herself. What would she be like this time?

As it turned out, it was worse than anything I could have imagined. We were admitted to a corridor filled with blank-faced people, muttering strange things to themselves, or knitting jittery patterns in the air with restless fingers, or pacing or rocking incessantly in their chairs. And there, in a visiting room, where thousands of devastated parents must have looked with horror on thousands of distraught children, I saw my daughter. But it was not my daughter. The Lori I knew was gone. And in her place was a stranger, a person who seemed to be living only partly in this world, and partly in some faraway world of her own making. There were no more apologies, no more pleas to let her out. The illness had captured her, and was part of her.

We hugged her, and talked briefly of home, of her brothers, of how much we loved her and how much we hoped she would be better soon. But the things we said weren't registering. She was preoccupied with thoughts that seemed to perplex and amaze her both at the same time.

She leaned over, and in a hushed, confidential tone, whispered to me.

“I know you aren't going to believe this, Daddy, but I can fly.”

“What?” The hairs in my arm stood out. I wasn't sure I had heard her correctly, but I was afraid that I had.

“I can fly. Really, Daddy. I can.”

It was not a boast, or a challenge. She herself, I could see, found this state of affairs incredible. She was very soft-spoken and focused, deliberate and serious.

“Why don't you show me, Lori.”

She scanned the hallway until she spotted a nearby sofa. She climbed up on the pillows. I saw the soft cushions of the sofa sink under her weight. She stood up straight, with a deliberate, almost practiced motion, and then spread her arms as if ready to take flight. She looked down, first at her feet and then at the floor. And then she paused.

“It's not high enough. I can't fly from here.” She looked around her. “If you could take me to that window there, I could show you. I can fly.”

And she believed it. There was no doubt about it. If we had taken her to an open window, she would have plunged, arms outstretched in flight, to the ground.

We didn't know what to say, so we changed the subject, and left the hospital soon afterward. As we left, her words rang in my ears. “I can fly, Daddy. I can fly.”

6

Payne Whitney Clinic, New York City, June 1982

MEDICAL RECORDS

6/17/82 Primary Therapist Note

Patient describes her day of admission as one where she heard voices. “I was afraid I would take my hammer and smash my apartment.”

6/17/82 Nursing Note

At 8 p m patient had episode of severe auditory hallucinations coupled with intense psychomotor agitation: She was writhing, forcefully grimacing, holding her hands to her ears, shaking her feet repeatedly, and seemed nearly oblivious to external stimuli. This episode lasted about ten minutes. After it subsided she was initially guarded about what had happened, but later did admit to auditory hallucinations, to feeling ashamed and hopeless about the hallucinations, and to feeling that she must “fight” the voices when they occur, and that discussing them makes them more difficult to “fight.”

6/21/82 Nursing Note

Patient appeared quite preoccupied and angry earlier this morning. Patient refused to discuss what was the matter and stated she was fine! She stated she knows what to tell the doctors in order to let them discharge her. She wants very much to leave Payne Whitney Clinic and was able to say her parents brought her here and that was the only reason she remains here.

6/23/82 Primary Therapist Note

Patient remains agitated and intermittently actively hallucinating. It became clearly evident in discussion how tormented she is by these voices and how hard she is fighting to resist their commands. Much of her treatment resistance appears to stem from fear of the repercussions of revealing these hallucinations to staff. “They'll kill me if I tell.”

7

Steven Schiller Scarsdale, New York, July 1982

I was sixteen years old when Lori was committed for the first time. When my parents told me what they had done, I lost it. I stood there in the kitchen, my hands shaking with rage.

“You're wrong!” I shouted at my parents. “You're wrong! This is no way to treat one of your kids.”

My father sat at the butcher block table. My mother was nervously fluttering through the kitchen, compulsively arranging and rearranging her kitchen that was already spotless.

“Steven,” my father began, “Lori is sick.” There was a pause. “We are doing what is best for her …”

“Sure you're doing what's best for her,” I said sarcastically. “You just don't know how to handle her. You're doing what's best for you.”

“We're trying to get help for her,” my mother began.

“You're trying to sweep her under the carpet,” I shouted. There was another long silence. There wasn't anything left to say. I started crying.

I really believed they were trying to sweep her away. At my age, everything looked black and white. There was right and there was wrong, and putting Lori in the hospital was wrong. This seemed like typical stupid Scarsdale stuff. I knew how people around here hushed up divorces, and kids on drugs, and jobs lost and other unpleasant things. To me, putting Lori in a psychiatric hospital was just like that. It was something that had to be whispered about.

“Let's put her where we can't see her, so we don't have to confront this every single day,” I mocked. “Let's put her where no one else can see her, where no one else will know she has problems.”

To be honest, I didn't really have any idea what was wrong with Lori. Because I am six and a half years younger than her, I was still just a kid when she began having difficulties in college. My parents didn't seem to understand much of Lori's problems. What they did understand, they weren't passing on to me. I was only vaguely aware of talk of Lori having troubles in school.

And when Lori graduated and moved back to New York, all I heard was more talk, again vague, about her seeing a doctor. Even her suicide attempt a few months before didn't really register. I was lying in bed at night when I heard the phone ring. There was the scuffle of someone dressing, and then my father poked his head in my bedroom door.

“We have to go get your sister in the hospital,” he said. “She's tried to kill herself.”

It was out of the blue. I didn't understand it, and no one took me aside to explain what had happened. Now Lori was suddenly a major problem—bigger than anyone knew how to deal with. Since there were no answers, nobody talked about the questions. I felt isolated in the silence and confusion.

When my parents put Lori in the hospital, it reopened an old wound for me. It was loneliness. I was still resentful that my mom had gone back to work many years earlier. I was still feeling abandoned.

So when Lori went in the hospital at the end of my junior year in high school, I just felt it was more of the same. Mom started coming home later and later. Both Mom and Dad were more and more preoccupied. They both had even less time for me than they had before.

That summer, they left me more on my own to do things than they ever had with the other kids. My summer job that year was working at Cherry Lawn Farm, helping bag produce and wait on customers. In the evenings I sometimes started dinner. My mom had always done all the cooking, and somehow the fact that she wasn't doing it all the time anymore seemed to signal the end of a happy era to me. We used to start dinner together. Now I was doing it alone. I would start the burgers, or chicken or steak, and cut up vegetables for a salad.

Then once they got home in the evening there we were, just the three of us around the dinner table. Mark was away at college. Lori was put away someplace. My parents were silent and tense. We were hardly even a family anymore.

So when Mom started coming home crying, I wasn't exactly sympathetic. She never talked about Lori. I thought she was upset about work. She always talked about work. She was upset, she said, because someone had said something mean to her. Or because someone had taken credit for something she had done. Or because of some bit of office politics. It never really registered that she was coming home late and always crying because she had gone to visit Lori.

Had I been older, I might have thought that all the stress in my mother's life was making it hard for her to deal with things that otherwise she might have taken in stride. But I didn't think that at all. I thought she wasn't cut out for business. I thought she was finally finding out that she had no business leaving home—and me. Lori had nothing to do with it.

And when my mother started smoking again after seven years without a cigarette, I wouldn't buy her explanation. Is smoking the solution? You and Dad are just using Lori as an excuse for everything bad that is going on in our family. I was harsh. I knew I was being harsh, but I didn't care. I didn't know what was going on, and I was very confused.