January First

by Michael Schofield

  “Because,” I continue, my voice meaner, “when you graduate from this college, it will be alongside millions of other students with the same degree. This isn’t Harvard. There’s nothing special about you that’ll make you stand out from the millions of other stupid punks with the same degree. Any idiot can get a college degree.”

  My eyes scan across the room. “That goes for all of you. What high school guidance counselors tell you about college is bullshit. A college degree doesn’t fundamentally change who you are. If you were a loser before college, you’ll be a loser after it … just a loser with a worthless piece of paper that gives you a false sense of hope that your life is going to amount to something, but you know where you will end up working after college, assuming you can even find a job? Selling insurance, or telemarketing.”

  In the back of my mind I’m vaguely aware that I am losing it, but I don’t care anymore. I lean forward over the podium, staring into their stunned faces.

  “The truth is you are going to end up working in a cubicle for the rest of your life, until you die. If any of you had brains in your head, I might actually believe you could fight your way up, but look at you! Half of you can’t even make it to an afternoon class on time. You’re nothing but a number. Enjoy your cubicle.” I start packing up my briefcase.

  “Are you leaving?” a female student asks nervously.

  I swing my bag over my shoulder. “I’m done wasting my time with all of you. I have better things to do.” And I walk out.

  I’M SITTING IN my car parked in the faculty lot, trying to light a cigarette, but my hands are shaking so badly that the flame on the lighter keeps going out. As I was leaving, I caught a glimpse of the stunned looks on my students’ faces. In four years of teaching, I’ve never lost my cool in front of a class. I was teaching when Jani went into Alhambra and when I got accused of sexual molestation, but I didn’t lose my cool. I was teaching when Jani’s diagnosis officially became schizophrenia, and I didn’t lose my cool. For a year and a half I’ve gone through this nightmare and never lost my cool … until today.

  I finally manage to light my cigarette and take a long drag. I’ve been living two separate lives, one as Jani’s father and the other as Professor Schofield, but I can’t do it anymore. I’m the father of a child who is losing her mind to a disease nobody can stop. I can’t fake being the other guy anymore.

  I call Susan and tell her what happened.

  “Just come home,” she gently suggests. “Come home and we’ll be together.”

  I shake my head vehemently. “It’s my night to visit Jani. I have to take her the food she requested.”

  “I’ve already called the unit,” Susan replies. “She’s asleep.”

  I’m not surprised. She’s already asleep most nights by the time I arrive for visiting hours. The medications knock her out early.

  “It was a rough day, but she is fine now. She is sleeping peacefully. Just come home. Please.” She’s begging me to come home, but it doesn’t sound like the old days, when she’d been out with Jani all day and she would call me constantly, asking me when I was coming home from work. It’s different now. Jani is not there. I don’t need to race back to take care of her.

  I realize Susan is begging me to come home because of me. I’m going over the edge and she is trying to pull me back.

  “No,” I tell her. “I need to go see Jani, even if she is asleep. I need to do it for me and make sure she’s okay.” My voice breaks and I clear my throat. “I will call you when I’m on my way home.” I hang up.

  A NURSE IS sitting outside Jani’s room, and I already know something is wrong. The only reason a nurse would be there is if Jani got assigned a “one-to-one,” meaning she was a danger to herself or others. I have never seen this nurse before. She doesn’t have a UCLA ID. Must be a temp.

  “She’s asleep,” she tells me in a heavy West African accent.

  “She’ll wake up for the food,” I reply and go into the dark room, where I see the outline of Jani in her bed.

  I step forward and hear the sound of paper scuffling under my feet. I reach down and pull the paper from my shoe. I turn on the light and see that it’s a page torn from a Dora the Explorer book, a Ready-to-Read book. Jani has known how to read since she was two. We bought these books for her back then and kept them for Bodhi since she’d outgrown them, but these are the books she asks us to bring now. I don’t know why. I try to bring her educational books, but she doesn’t want those. She wants these simple books where one sentence takes up the entire page. Maybe they comfort her, reminding her of a simpler time, her way of trying to go back.

  I look up and see the room is strewn with shreds of paper. I put the food on her desk and start picking them up.

  Gillian, the charge nurse whom we’ve come to know, enters the room and sees me picking up the mess.

  “She ripped up all her books,” she tells me, sadness in her voice. “She tried to destroy all of her stuff. We had to lock everything away.”

  I pick up a crumpled piece of paper and my legs give way. I sit down hard on the floor, staring at the piece of paper. It’s a page from one of her Winnie-the-Pooh books, the original Winnie-the-Pooh chapter books, the page faded into a light yellow. They were nearly sixty years old, given to my father in 1953 for his fifth birthday. When I was a kid, he gave them to me. When Jani was old enough, I passed them on to her. I’m numb. She destroyed books that have been in my family for three generations.

  “I’ll have someone come in to clean up the mess,” Gillian says.

  “No,” I answer. “It’s okay. I got it.”

  “You sure?” Gillian asks. I look at her and realize she, too, is worried about me.

  “Yep,” I say, picking up some of the pieces.

  “You okay?” Gillian asks me.

  “Fine,” I answer automatically.

  She hesitates. “Okay. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Wait.”

  Gillian turns back.

  “Did she get her last dose of meds?”

  Gillian hesitates. “No,” she finally answers. “She fell asleep before she could take them. If she wakes up, let me know so I can give her her meds.”

  She leaves and I begin to pick up more torn pages. I look down at the Winnie-the-Pooh pages for a moment, then push the whole lot down in the trash. I don’t want her to wake up and be confronted with what she did. When she wakes up, I want to spend happy times with her.

  I turn to Jani, passed out on the bed, still in her clothes. “Jani!” I call loudly. “Daddy’s here!”

  Jani’s eyes open.

  I feel a sense of relief that I am able to wake her without too much effort. “Hey, sweetie!” I say, sitting on the edge of her bed.

  She sits up, stringy hair falling about her face. She looks around like she just woke up from a dream and is trying to remember where she is.

  “I brought you Burger King like you asked.” I brush the hair out of her face.

  She turns to me, staring for a second.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  My blood freezes in my veins. No, I think to myself, she must be joking. We’ve always been silly with each other.

  “Who am I?” I repeat, smiling, waiting for her to grin and rub her hands, acknowledging the joke.

  But the grin and the excited hand rubbing don’t come. She just keeps staring at me as if she’s never seen me before in her life.

  The smile on my face fades as the truth sinks in. My worst nightmare has come to pass: She doesn’t recognize me anymore.

  “I’m your daddy,” I tell her, in an amazingly level voice.

  “Oh,” she answers and looks around the room.

  “I brought food for you.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  She puts her head back down on the pillow.

  I reach forward and pull her into my arms. I don’t want her to go back to sleep. I don’t want to let her go.

  “Do you want to watch TV?”
/>   “I’m tired,” she answers, hanging in my arms.

  “Come on. Watch TV with me. Survivorman might be on.” I try to get her to reconnect with her past. We used to watch Survivorman together.

  “I just want to sleep.” She pulls free of me and sags back onto the bed.

  In the six years of her life, I have never known Jani to “just want to sleep.”

  “Jani,” I ask. “What’s the temperature in Calilini?”

  “Two hundred,” she mumbles.

  Twelve degrees to go.

  I CALL SUSAN on my way home.

  “How was she?” Susan asks when she picks up the phone. “She must have been awake, because you were there a long time. I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

  “She didn’t know who I was.”

  Silence for a moment, just windblast outside my window, and taillights from cars I barely see driving ahead in the distance.

  “What do you mean she didn’t know who you were?” Susan finally asks.

  “She was asleep when I got there. When I woke her up … she … she asked me who I was.”

  Silence.

  “At first I thought she was joking, playing a game with me, but she wasn’t. She just stared at me. She really had no idea who I was.”

  I hear Susan sniffle on the other end. She’s crying.

  “Do you have Bodhi?”

  “He’s sleeping in my arms.”

  “Good.” That’s where I want him. Hold him, Susan, and never let him go.

  “He’s such a sweet boy,” Susan says, her voice filled with agony.

  “Yes, he is. I’m glad you have him.”

  “You know, I’ve been thinking …,” Susan begins.

  “Yeah?”

  “What if the reason Jani wanted a sibling wasn’t for her, but for us?”

  I can’t speak.

  “Maybe she knew. She knew she was going and we couldn’t live without her. She wanted us to have Bodhi because she wanted to give us something to keep going.”

  This is excruciating. Everything outside the windshield begins to blur as tears come. But it is not hard to believe Susan is right. We have said for years that we could not go on if something happened to Jani.

  “I remember,” Susan says, “she once told me, ‘I feel like I’m living on the border between your world and my world.’ ”

  I am thinking of a dream Susan had that she told me about recently. In it, she was taking Bodhi to his first day of kindergarten at the same elementary school in San Mateo, south of San Francisco, that she went to as a kid. Neither Jani nor I was in the dream. I asked Susan where we were. She looked confused for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “You weren’t there.”

  “What do you want to do?” Susan asks me now.

  “I want to bring her home.”

  “I understand. Bring her home. We’ll find a way to deal with it. We’ll make it.”

  But Susan doesn’t understand.

  “I can’t bring her home while Bodhi is still there. She’s still a danger to him.” I suck my breath in. I know Susan isn’t going to like this. “I want you to take him and go to your parents in San Mateo.”

  “No!” Susan cries, the tears breaking free again.

  “He’s suffered enough. He deserves a life.”

  “But I want to be here for her! She’s my daughter, too!”

  “I understand that, and you’ve done a great job. There’s no one else I’d rather have gone through this with. We kept her alive for six years. All the people who told us that we shouldn’t let her dominate our lives were wrong.”

  “She always had it,” Susan says. “I remember when she was a baby, her looking around, watching something we couldn’t see, but together, we kept it at bay by taking her out all the time.”

  “Yes, we did, but we can’t anymore. It is too strong. Bodhi needs his mommy. He needs you more than he needs me.” My mind drifts back to when I took off my wedding ring for the MRI, how soldiers remove all personal effects before going into a battle they don’t know they’ll come back from.

  “That’s not true! He needs his daddy!” Susan cries.

  “He’s still young enough that he won’t remember me. Or Jani. He’ll grow up and he’ll be fine. It’s better for him to lose me now than later, when he’s old enough to remember.”

  “I don’t want him to lose you at all!”

  “I know that. I don’t want to lose him. I want to see my son grow up. I’ve never really gotten the chance to know him. I thought Jani would be with me, and together she and I would teach him all the things I taught her.”

  “I don’t want to lose my daughter.”

  “If Bodhi is not here, I can bring her home. I will take care of her. And whatever happens, happens.”

  “And what then?”

  “Remember that dream you had? The one where you were taking Bodhi to his first day of school in San Mateo? Jani and I weren’t there.”

  “It was a dream!” Susan argues. “I had it years before Bodhi was even born. Besides, you and Jani could have been somewhere else.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t,” I answer. “Maybe it was a vision of the future.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening!” Susan cries. She’s been saying this ever since Alhambra. It doesn’t change anything.

  “Jani and I will come up to visit if we can, and you can come down to visit.” I’m lying. I am not sure we will ever make it to that point. If Jani leaves our world completely, I don’t see how I can go on. I know there is still Bodhi and I know Bodhi would still need me, but without Jani nothing else matters to me. Maybe it’s weakness. Maybe it’s selfishness.

  “No,” Susan replies, her voice suddenly strong.

  “It’s the only way,” I repeat.

  “It’s not the only way,” she fires back. “It can’t be the only way. There has to be another.”

  “There isn’t,” I say angrily, hanging up.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I’m still driving, taking the long way home, when my cell phone rings. I can see it is Susan. I don’t want to keep rehashing this. I’ve made my decision.

  “Yes?” I answer.

  “I just got an idea.” She’s not crying. She sounds excited. “I was praying to God for an answer and it came to me. It came from God. I know it.”

  I sigh. “What?”

  “The only reason she can’t come home is because of Bodhi, right?”

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “So what if we get two apartments?”

  “I can’t afford two apartments.”

  “No, I mean, what if we trade in this apartment for two smaller apartments, two one-bedrooms. One would be Bodhi’s apartment and one would be Jani’s. You and I could trade off, alternating nights. One night you stay with Jani and I stay with Bodhi, and the next night we switch. What do you think? Brilliant, huh?”

  I am stunned into silence.

  “We could keep the kids separated,” she goes on, “but still stay together as a family. It’s from God, I’m telling you. Tomorrow I’m going to go talk to the leasing office and see if there are any one-bedrooms available.”

  For the first time in a long time, something stirs within me. It takes me a few seconds to realize it is hope. I have to be crazy to have hope now.

  “What do you think?” Susan asks me.

  “Honestly, I think it’s crazy.”

  “So do I. Which is why I think it might work.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  May 15, 2009

  It’s moving day. I stand in the middle of our two-bedroom apartment with the moving men, pointing at each piece of furniture.

  “The kitchen table goes to Bodhi’s apartment,” I tell them. “The couch goes to Jani’s apartment.”

  We are dividing up our possessions, splitting our home.

  Susan’s family thinks what we’re doing is insane, but Jani has forced Susan and me to live apart since she was a baby. This is just a more extreme version of that separation.
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br />   All of the cooking supplies are going to Bodhi’s apartment, for safety reasons. There will be no glass or ceramics in Jani’s apartment, nothing she can use to hurt herself. Nothing she can pick up and throw.

  The goal with Jani’s apartment is to create a minature version of the UCLA child psych unit. We’re no longer trying to re-integrate Jani into our lives, but are instead altering our existence to fit what works for her. At UCLA, there is a dry-erase board in each room that tells the child “Good Morning” along with his or her assigned staff, so I hang up a dry-erase board that lists which parent is Jani’s “staff” for the day. In the day room at UCLA, another dry-erase board lists planned activities from the time the kids get up until they go to bed. I hang up a similar board in Jani’s living room, listing her daily schedule, which includes “recreational therapy” and “occupational therapy” just like in the hospital. Recreational therapy will be going outside and playing. For occupational/art therapy I go to Michaels Crafts and load up on arts and crafts projects, which fill the cupboards of Jani’s kitchen so her apartment is entirely set up for therapeutic purposes.

  On her schedule board I write Dinner (Go to Bodhi’s) in the 5 P.M. slot. We’ll eat meals at exactly the same time Jani eats at UCLA. I worry about taking her over to Bodhi’s, even for just an hour, but Susan and I feel it is important to be together, to remind ourselves that we’re still a family. Splitting up is, ironically, the only way to keep our family together. This way Bodhi can have his space, free to explore his world without fear of what Jani might do, and Jani doesn’t have to worry about hurting Bodhi. And most importantly, Susan and I no longer have to live in fear every second.

  I rub my hands over the walls of Jani’s old bedroom, over the words she wrote during her time-outs. I tried washing them off, scrubbing for hours, but could never completely erase them. My hand pauses over the outline of 400, scrawled in giant numbers above where her bed used to be. I’m sorry, Jani, I think to myself. I didn’t know.

  I walk out of her bedroom and leave the keys on the mantel, glad to be leaving this apartment. I never want to see those walls again.

  June 1, 2009

  Today is discharge day. Jani has been in UCLA for more than four months, making her the longest continuous resident on the child and adolescent psychiatric unit in decades. Dr. Kim and UCLA knew we needed time to get into the two separate apartments, so they fought off Blue Shield until we completed the move.