January First

by Michael Schofield

  But Janni is not going to stop. “For the last time” means nothing to her, because she has nothing to lose. I need to distract her, get her mind on something else other than kicking my dad’s seat, but I can’t think of anything.

  Janni continues to kick.

  “Janni!” my father roars. He takes his right hand off the steering wheel and reaches around. I feel like I am watching a plane crash in slow motion. He lightly spanks her on her knee.

  My dad settles back into his seat, thinking he has solved the problem. What he doesn’t know, what he can’t see in the dark of the backseat, is that I have unbuckled my seat belt and am leaning across the seat, putting my full weight on Janni’s legs because she is still trying to kick the back of his seat.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  December 22, 2007

  We cannot let Bodhi make a sound. In the three days since we brought him home, we have come to fear the slightest peep out of him. As soon as he begins to stir, even before he opens his eyes, we put a pacifier or bottle into his mouth.

  Every few minutes, I come over to Bodhi’s crib. He is still asleep. I check for any signs he might be close to waking up.

  I look over at Janni, a few feet away, standing in front of the TV set, so close there’s no way she could see the entire picture, yet she’s totally absorbed by the show.

  I return to the kitchen, where I am forever washing Bodhi’s baby bottles. There are already five full bottles waiting in the fridge, but I want to make sure more are ready.

  The volume on the TV is rising. I run over to see the volume bar moving across the screen, the numbers climbing to 59, maximum volume. Steve from Blue’s Clues booms around the apartment.

  “Janni, turn it down!” I hiss, turning the volume back down, looking nervously over at Bodhi, afraid the deafening noise will wake him up. He’s been asleep for four hours and he’ll be waking up soon. I don’t want to speed up the process.

  Janni turns the volume all the way back up again.

  “Janni, that is too loud.” I rush to turn it down again.

  “But I can’t hear it!” Janni suddenly erupts, turning it back up.

  “How can you not hear it? You’re right in front of it.”

  “I can’t hear it,” she complains again.

  A weak cry comes from the couch. Bodhi has been rudely returned to the world.

  “Susan!” I yell, breaking for the kitchen. The countdown to detonation has begun.

  “I’m coming!” Susan leaps out of bed, where she was resting, and runs into the living room like I’d yelled “Fire!”

  She gathers Bodhi up in her arms, while I fling open the refrigerator and grab a ready-made bottle of formula.

  “I can’t hear over Bodhi’s crying!” Janni screams out, never taking her eyes off the TV, even though she’s seen this episode a million times before.

  We are running out of time to defuse the proverbial bomb. I run back to Susan with the bottle. She wearily puts it into Bodhi’s mouth. He grimaces and wails louder, formula running from his mouth. Shit! I was so panicked I forgot to warm the bottle up to room temperature. Janni never cared, but Bodhi is extremely sensitive to temperature.

  “Bodhi!” Janni’s shriek pierces the room, never turning from the TV. “Stop crying!”

  Her scream only makes him cry louder. I can hear the fear in his cry. He doesn’t know what is happening. It is not supposed to be like this. This should be a safe environment. I rush back to the kitchen and put the bottle in the microwave.

  “Stop crying!” Janni puts her hands over her ears, even though the TV is the loudest thing in the apartment.

  “Janni, if it is bothering you, go into the bedroom,” Susan says soothingly.

  “I’m watching this!”

  “We have a TV in the bedroom,” Susan reminds her.

  “I’m watching this!” she repeats, as if the request is unreasonable.

  I pull the bottle out of the microwave and rush it over to Bodhi. “Nobody likes the sound of a crying baby, Janni. We’re wired to hate it,” I say, trying to teach her as a means of distracting her from Bodhi’s crying. “It’s evolution’s way of making sure we take care of our young.”

  Bodhi opens his mouth up, eager for the nipple, but then breaks off screaming again. It is too hot now. I overshot. I didn’t have time to warm it for a few seconds, check it, and warm it again.

  “Stop crying!” Janni shouts over the top of him and then unleashes one of her earsplitting screams. Bodhi’s crying goes up in volume.

  “Janni!” I yell, racing back to the kitchen, pulling one of the half-clean bottles out of the sink and rinsing it out. I am going to have to make new formula that will be room temperature. It’s faster than trying to warm one of the remaining bottles in the fridge. “Screaming at him will only make him cry harder.”

  “But he’s crying!” Janni screams, her hands over her ears.

  I try to keep my hand from shaking while measuring scoops of formula. Time is almost up. We only have a few seconds left. I am so scared that it is a struggle to get the nipple on the bottle correctly.

  “Janni, no!” Susan cries out, panicked. I look up to see her arm go out in protection. She jerks Bodhi in her arms, as the remote control goes flying past. The abrupt movement scares Bodhi even more.

  Janni just threw the remote control at Bodhi.

  “Janni, no throwing!” I shout. Time is up. The firing mechanism has been triggered. It is too late now to stop Janni from going off. “Go into the other room now!” I command.

  Janni calmly walks around the coffee table that separates her from Susan and Bodhi. Susan starts to get up, recoiling, twisting to shield Bodhi. Janni reaches up and drives her fist into Susan’s stomach, just below Bodhi’s dangling legs.

  I have seen this every day since we brought Bodhi home, but it still paralyzes me for a moment, the sight of my daughter attacking my wife and son.

  Susan turns her back to Janni, trying to shield Bodhi. Janni’s fist comes down on her back so hard I can hear the “thud” from across the room. Susan stumbles forward. I watch her twist in mid-fall, turning Bodhi away from the oncoming couch. Susan lands hard on the couch, crying out. Janni pushes past her legs, coming on, silent, totally devoid of emotion, totally focused on her hitting. Susan rotates away.

  “Help me!” she calls to me in desperation.

  I finally snap out of my temporary paralysis and cross over to Janni, grabbing her arm in midair.

  “Janni, stop that! No hitting!”

  Janni doesn’t respond. I feel her arm pulling against my hand. She keeps pulling for several seconds before she seems to realize something is holding on to her arm. She turns to me. Her other fist rises and comes down in my stomach.

  The strength of the impact catches me off guard, pushing all the air out of my lungs as her fist buries itself in my solar plexus.

  “Janni, you need to stop …,” I say, as calmly as I can manage. I need to stay calm and maybe it might rub off on her. I grab her other arm, holding them both firmly, but careful to make sure I don’t hurt her. My goal is just to immobilize her and wait it out.

  She kicks me in the shin. Hard. She is wearing no shoes. How can that not have hurt her foot? I wonder.

  I have to get her out of here, away from Bodhi, who is still screaming in terror. I pick her up off the ground, embracing her in a bear hug, and turn for the bedroom. I feel her fist slam into the side of my head, sending a shock wave of pain through my temple. She continues hitting me in the head, punching me as hard as she can.

  I reposition her in my arms to get a firmer grip so I don’t drop her when she hits me again. She is still my daughter, and I am more concerned about her getting hurt than me. I grit my teeth so I can take the pain. I can’t grab her hands without putting her down, and if I do, I know she will tear loose and go after Bodhi again.

  I don’t tell her to stop. There is no point. This has happened several times a day since we brought Bodhi home. I get Janni into the bedroo
m and onto the bed, where I can hold her until this passes. And it always does. This explosion of violence subsides as quickly as it came. I don’t have time to worry about what caused it. All I am focused on is just surviving these next few minutes without any of us getting hurt.

  “Let me go!” she screams, thrashing against me. I lie next to her, holding her arms down.

  “Are you going to hurt Bodhi?” I ask.

  She stops thrashing and looks up at me. I feel a rush of hope. “If you tell me you won’t try to hurt Bodhi, I can let you go,” I tell her.

  “I have to hurt Bodhi,” she answers in a voice like she is being forced to hurt him.

  “No, you don’t. You may feel like you have to, but you don’t.”

  She nods. “I do have to.… I want to.”

  I’m confused. Does she want to hurt him because she has to or because she wants to? I would rather it be the former. I don’t want to believe that she wants to hurt her baby brother.

  “Janni, just tell me you won’t try to hurt him and I can let you go,” I say out of desperation.

  “I am going to hurt him,” she replies, very matter-of-factly.

  She is being irrational. The rational thing to do, the “smart” thing to do, would be to lie to me and tell me she won’t hurt Bodhi, even if it isn’t true, just so I would let her go. I can’t understand why she insists on telling me the truth. It is not a truth I want to hear.

  She kicks her legs into my side. I have her arms still pinned, so she’s gone to her next weapon. I place one leg over both her legs, trying to hold them down while still keeping my weight off her. I weigh one hundred and fifty pounds more than she does and I don’t want to hurt her. This is not about punishment. This is about hanging on until she calms down.

  She is twisting her head back and forth, her eyes closed. “You’re hurting me!”

  “No, I am not, Janni,” I reply calmly, even though I check my grip to make sure I’m not holding her any tighter than I have to, just enough to keep her limbs immobile. “I am just holding you. Now, are you going to stop trying to hit Bodhi?”

  “No!”

  Her answer flusters me.

  “Janni, just tell me you won’t hurt Bodhi and I will let you go.”

  “I want to hurt him!”

  “He hasn’t done anything to you!”

  “Yes, he is!” she says, as though he’s hurting her at this exact moment.

  “But he isn’t, and never has.” I am desperate for a reason, anything that will explain this sudden violence. “Just tell me what you are angry about, Janni.”

  “He’s crying,” she answers.

  “Babies cry,” I reply. “Nobody likes the sound of a baby crying, but he won’t cry forever.”

  “Yes, he will.”

  Her answer makes no sense. You understand so much, Janni. Why can’t you understand this, too?

  “No, he won’t.”

  “I can’t take his crying!”

  “Then walk away! Go into the other room.”

  “I can still hear him!” she cries. I pause, listening. I can’t hear him. Susan has obviously calmed him down again, or he must be eating.

  I feel teeth closing down on my chin.

  “Ahhhhh!” I cry out. I didn’t expect her to bite, but I realize now that with her arms and legs pinned, she is using the last weapon at her disposal. I glance down. She looks like a wild animal attached to my chin. I can feel her teeth going through my flesh. “Janni, Janni, Janni.… Let go, sweetie.”

  She is biting down harder. This is the most physical pain I have ever felt in my life. Automatically, my arms let go of hers and move to my face. Despite her being free now, she’s still biting down on my chin. I pull back, but this only makes my pain worse. Tears form at the edge of my eyes. I fight the intense desire to pull free.

  This is not my daughter. This can’t be my daughter. My real daughter makes me fish drowning bees out of the pool. The person hurting me is just in her body. I just have to ride this out until it lets go of her. I steel myself to take whatever pain I have to take.

  Finally, she lets go. I lift my head out of the range of her mouth. Her mouth hangs open, her head up, like I’ve seen crocodiles do on TV. She is not making eye contact with me. She glares at my chin like she is considering eating it.

  “Janni, that hurt,” I say, as if she had just bumped me. I am trying to gently remind her that she is inflicting pain. Maybe if she realizes this it will make her stop.

  “You’re hurting me!” she cries, thrashing her head back and forth. I don’t get this at all. I’m not even touching her anymore. Abruptly, I feel the sting of fingernails digging into my forehead.

  “Janni …”

  I close my eyes as she drags her nails down the length of my face. I can feel my skin slicing open and the sting of blood meeting air.

  Her hands detach from my face.

  I breathe heavily, my face stinging sharply.

  I roll off her, gingerly touching the scratches on my face. Hopefully, she has gotten all her violence out of her system. I sit on the edge of the bed watching her, ready to grab her again if she goes after Bodhi, adrenaline making me only dully aware of my own pain.

  She looks over at me. “I’m hungry.”

  “Okay,” I say. It is over, I realize. That is how it is. The violence leaves as quickly as it comes. “What do you want?”

  Janni looks around and finally meets my eyes. I see no recognition of what she has done. It is like this never happened.

  “Do we have any mac ’n’ cheese?” she asks, rubbing her hands together excitedly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Christmas Week, 2007

  I pull into a parking space outside my therapist’s office. My appointment starts now, but I need a cigarette.

  I started seeing my therapist, Tom, the previous spring for the unresolved anger issues over my mother. I could forgive her for padlocking the refrigerator so we wouldn’t “overeat,” even though it made me so hungry I stole handfuls of dry dog food out of our dog’s food bag. Ironically, my mother confessed that she’d been doing the same thing. So why was she padlocking the refrigerator?

  I could even forgive her for chasing me out of the house with a butcher knife, because she told me later that she thought I was her father trying to rape her.

  But what I couldn’t forgive was that after my parents divorced and I chose to live with my father at fifteen, she never tried to see me again. So I’d come to Tom to try and find a way to deal with my mother’s abandonment.

  But I haven’t come to talk about my mother today, because nothing in my past seems to matter anymore. Now I fear the future. I am terrified that if Janni ever manages to reach Bodhi during one of her episodes, she will kill him. I wouldn’t have believed that a five-year-old could be this violent if I hadn’t been on the receiving end of it. I have scratches and bruises all over me. My entire body aches. But I am thirty-one years old. Bodhi is a newborn. One punch to his body could be life-and-death for him.

  My hands shake as I light another cigarette. My nerves are raw. This is the worst fear I have ever known in my life. I look at Bodhi through the tinted rear window. He is still asleep. I brought him because Susan and I have already instituted a new rule, a week into Bodhi’s life: Neither one of us ever leaves the other alone with both Janni and Bodhi. At all times when our children are together, one of us must take care of Bodhi, protecting him, and the other must be ready to block Janni.

  By the time I reach Tom’s office, I’m nearly fifteen minutes late and lugging the still-sleeping Bodhi in his car seat. Tom is sitting in his chair, his door open, but I knock to let him know I’m here.

  “Hi, Tom. Sorry I’m so late.”

  He looks up. “I saw you through the window down in the parking lot. I was wondering when you were coming up.” There is no annoyance in his voice, only concern. “Is everything okay?”

  I hold up Bodhi’s car seat.

  “Is it okay if I bring my son in?” I
ask. If he says no, then I have no choice but to leave.

  He looks down at Bodhi, a look of surprise on his face. I’m not sure whether he is surprised to see me bringing my newborn out so soon or if he is just shocked that I brought one of my children to my therapy session.

  “He should just sleep,” I say. “He’s not like Janni. He sleeps.”

  He sticks his finger in his ear, which he always does when I say something that throws him.

  “Ah, yeah, sure, I guess, as long as it’s not going to be a regular thing. I don’t mind, but I wouldn’t want to disturb Kate.” Kate is the therapist in the next office.

  I sit down, placing Bodhi’s car seat on the floor below me.

  “Then I don’t know that I will be able to come anymore.”

  Tom’s brow furrows. “What’s going on?”

  I pour out to Tom everything that has been happening since Bodhi was born. As I listen to myself, I think it sounds insane.

  “I don’t know what is happening to Janni,” I finally conclude. “You’re a psychologist. What do you think?”

  Tom exhales. “I don’t work with children, so I am not the best person to say, but from what you describe it sounds like she is pretty disturbed.”

  Pretty disturbed. That’s not what I was expecting to hear. I have to believe there must be a rational explanation for this. I was expecting him to tell me that he has heard of this before and it is a phase that can be treated through therapy. But that’s not what he said. He just said pretty disturbed, in the way people say the word “cancer.”

  TOM GETS US in to see Kate, his office mate and a child psychologist, in less than three days.

  When Kate, a curly-black-haired woman in her sixties, comes out of her office, she’s clearly surprised to see all of us there. She was expecting just Susan and me for the first visit. But who could take care of Janni and Bodhi and keep Bodhi safe from Janni? We had no choice but to bring both kids.

  Janni tries to run into her office.

  “No, January,” Kate tells her. “I need to speak to your mommy and daddy first.”

  I instinctively flinch, knowing what is coming.