Her relationship with Jeff continued into the fall of Nancy’s second year at Lakeside. It ended abruptly when Jeff left the school a few weeks into the semester. I don’t know why he left or where he went. I don’t know if Nancy ever saw him again, though I think not.
At Thanksgiving she brought home a new boy from Darlington. She described him as “just a friend.” His name was Roger. Roger was very clean-cut, with short hair, a tie, and a sportcoat. He had very nice manners. He was from Virginia. Nancy had picked up his southern accent.
“Mama and Daddy,” she drawled, “I’d like y’all to meet Roger. Roger, that there’s Suzy, my kid sister. And that’s David, my sweet li’l baby brother.”
She acted like the model daughter. It was quite a performance. She proudly took Roger on a tour of the house, helped him get settled in the guest room, made sure he had everything he needed. She offered to help me make dinner (I nearly fainted). During dinner her table manners were flawless. She took a keen, sisterly interest in Suzy and David’s school activities. She asked how Frank’s new paper business was going (he nearly fell out of his chair). She complimented me on the turkey, pointed out to Roger what a wonder her mama was, running a store and a household, too. When we were done eating, she helped me clear the table.
Then she decided to take Roger for a walk around the neighborhood. She invited Suzy to join them.
“Can I?” exclaimed Suzy, delighted to be included.
“Why shore,” Nancy drawled.
Off they went on their walk. Frank and David and I chuckled over the “new” Nancy. They went into the den and turned on the TV. I started in on the dishes, humming to myself. Maybe Nancy’s behavior was fake. At least she was being pleasant. And this Roger seemed a nice boy, a good influence.
After a few minutes I heard giggling in the street and looked out the kitchen window. Nancy, Roger, and Suzy were standing together under a streetlight. Roger was holding a match to a small pipe and Nancy was smoking from it. She took a deep drag, held it in, and offered the pipe to Suzy. Suzy took it eagerly, puffed on it, coughed. The other two laughed at her.
I couldn’t believe it. Suzy was smoking marijuana. She was barely twelve. Nancy was turning her on!
My heart began to pound; my face flushed. I felt like I’d been kicked in the belly. Here was my worse fear realized—that Nancy would use her influence over Suzy to make a drug user of her. She had the power to pit Suzy against us, to undermine our authority. And she was using it.
Why? Looking back, I believe it was Nancy’s own way of trying to make Frank and me love her more. By turning Suzy on, she was hoping she’d tarnish Suzy so we’d love Suzy less and give that love to her. There was never enough love to satisfy her.
I didn’t see it that way then, though. All I saw was a child who was making it so impossibly painful for me to love her.
I said nothing to Frank about what I’d seen until Nancy and Roger returned to school. When I did, he wasn’t surprised. There was no outburst. He accepted the news with weary resignation.
We now had a new, urgent reason for keeping the girls apart, we agreed. Suzy had to grow up free of Nancy’s poisonous influence. Meanwhile, we had to keep our relationship with Suzy as open as possible. We had to reassert our authority. Our influence over Suzy had to be greater than Nancy’s was. Had to be.
We decided a come-clean session about drugs would be a good starting point. Suzy, however, denied she had ever gotten stoned.
“Suzy, sweetheart,” I said. “I know you did it. There’s no point in lying. The important thing is for us to be honest.”
“I’m not lying! I’ve never done it!”
“Suzy, I saw you.”
“God, who do you think you are, my jailer? I don’t believe you!”
It was a Nancy response. Frank and I glanced at each other nervously. How much was rubbing off?
“Suzy,” Frank said. “Mom and I are very disappointed in you for this. We expect more of you.”
“Meaning what?” she demanded, jaw stuck firmly out.
“We expect you to be you,” I said. “You’re not Nancy.”
She broke down and began to sob. She ran off to her room. I followed her up there. She wept in my arms. Still, she would not admit she’d gotten stoned.
We kept an eye on Suzy when Nancy came home for Christmas. We now regarded Nancy as a threat. We didn’t like feeling that way, but we did. We discussed searching her things, but I wouldn’t do it. I believed in my privacy. If you want privacy for yourself, you have to respect the privacy of others. Frank and I agreed—we wouldn’t go through Nancy’s things. Instead, we kept the two of them apart as much as possible, or together in our presence. It was not a pleasant stay. Fortunately Nancy went back to Lakeside early because there was a New Year’s Eve party she wanted to go to.
Frank and I had a New Year’s Eve party to go to also. David planned to sleep over at a friend’s house. Only Suzy had nothing to do. Her crowd was having a party, but she had no date. She was going through her awkward phase—she felt a bit heavy—and was dismayed that none of the boys had asked her. She sulked around the house all day.
“Everybody has a date except me,” she pouted. “I’m so fat and ugly.”
I tried to cheer her up. I told her not to worry, that she’d get a date next year. But she was inconsolable.
Before Frank and I left, I went up to her room to try cheering her up one more time. Frank went out to warm up the car.
Her door was closed. I knocked. She didn’t answer.
“Suzy?” I called. No answer. I checked the crack under the door to see if her light was on. It was.
“Suzy?” I called louder.
Still no answer. I tried turning the knob. The door was locked from the inside.
“Suzy!” I screamed. I panicked. I believed she was trying to kill herself in there because she’d not gotten a date. Nancy would have. Why not Suzy?
“Suzy!” I screamed again. I rammed my shoulder against the door, threw my weight behind it. It wouldn’t give.
Then I heard a rustling in the room. Suzy unlocked the door and opened it a crack. I shoved it open, stormed into the room. It was freezing. The window was wide open. The room reeked of marijuana. She had been smoking a joint.
I glared at her. Her eyes rolled around for a second, then she fainted in a dead heap on the carpet. I gasped. I didn’t know what she had taken, or if she’d overdosed or what. I got down on the floor next to her and shook her. She came to, as confused and frightened as I was.
“What are you on?” I cried.
“I was … I was just smoking a joint.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From Nancy.”
“I knew this was going to happen. I knew it. You’re going to see a shrink, young lady!”
I overreacted. I immediately lunged for professional help, terrified that Suzy was drug-involved and in serious trouble.
“W-why do I have to see a shrink?”
“Because I said so!”
“O-okay,” she agreed. She was so scared she’d have agreed to anything.
She went to see a therapist twice. Then she came to me and said she wanted to stop. I asked why.
“Because I don’t wanna go. Because I’m not Nancy.”
A few days later Nancy ran away.
“Don’t be concerned,” said Brooke over the phone. “We think she’s in New York City.”
“New York City!” I cried.
“Yes, we’ve called the NYPD and they’re looking for her. One of the girls gave us an address there. If you hear from her, let us know.”
We waited by the phone. Nancy didn’t call. This was something new and disturbing. She had run away before, but always with the purpose of coming home to us. If indeed she was in New York, well, she was fourteen. You heard stories about what happened to runaway girls in New York City, about how they become prostitutes and drug addicts.
We waited by the phone. “Don’t worry, she can
take care of herself,” Frank said at one point, unconvincingly.
Neither of us slept that night. Brooke called the next day, just to say there was no word.
I slept fitfully the second night Nancy was missing. I dreamed I was driving to the store in the morning and passed a group of teenage girls waiting at a school bus stop, giggling and talking. As I drove by them, I realized that one of them was Nancy. She was smiling and happy. I’d found her! I stopped the car and called out to her. As soon as she saw me she glowered, then ran off. I couldn’t catch her.
After three days the police found Nancy at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She was okay. Brooke said she was being put on a bus for Avon.
Nancy was back at school that evening.
“Why did you run away?” I asked.
“It’s your fault,” she replied. “You wouldn’t take me out of here. So I got away on my own. I had to.”
Clearly, Nancy was not responding positively to the Darlington environment. Far from it. She was using drugs. She was becoming a runaway, in danger of ending up a teen prostitute, one of those pitiful girls they find dead in some Times Square fleabag with a needle in her arm—an entry on the New York City police blotter. This was too nightmarish to even conceive of. We had to get her out of there. I had to find her another school. There had to be another one out there somewhere. Maybe I’d missed one on my prior search.
I picked up the trail where I’d left off four years before and found a school in Florida that seemed capable of treating Nancy, but part of the entire staff had just been arrested for smoking pot. Then I found a fine school in Topeka, Kansas—Menninger’s Clinic. They worked with emotionally disturbed children of Nancy’s age. They also charged $18,000 per year. There was simply no way we could afford it.
I even went so far as to see the senior rabbi at our synagogue. He was a learned, prestigious man. Maybe he could help us.
Frank and I weren’t devout members, but we did like to go to Friday night services sometimes. We both found comfort in the ritual and prayer. The temple was a retreat from Nancy.
The rabbi saw us in his office. He listened with great patience and empathy as we told him of Nancy’s pain and of our confusion. We asked him if he knew somewhere she could go. We asked if he could help us, if the Jewish Federation could help us, if anyone could help us.
He was kind, but he was no help.
“You have a dilemma,” he said, “to be sure. I am sorry to say, however, that I have no answer. As far as I know, the Jewish Federation will be unable to help you. I wish I myself could ease your burden, but I cannot. I know of no place for your Nancy.”
We were lost again. We had no idea where to turn.
Then one day I read an article in a health magazine about Dr. Allan Cott, a psychiatrist in New York City who believed that certain types of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, were caused by chemical imbalances in the body. Thus, he felt, talking therapy was meaningless. His unorthodox and controversial method of treatment, called orthomolecular medicine, involved treating patients with chemicals, large doses of vitamins, and a sugar-free diet. There were a few other psychiatrists practicing this orthomolecular medicine—none of them very popular with the American Medical Association.
What attracted me to Cott’s ideas was that the article referred to the case histories of several children who had shown remarkable improvement under him, children who had, from infancy, been restless, poor sleepers, angry, and incapable of holding on to friends. Children like Nancy.
I mentioned the article to Frank. Coincidentally, he’d just been speaking to a customer whose problem child had been helped by Cott, helped so much that he was now able to function at home.
“Do you think we ought to talk to him?” I asked.
“She’s not getting any better where she is. It’s certainly worth a try. What have we got to lose?”
We had nothing to lose.
I made an appointment with Dr. Cott. It was two months before we could see him—evidently a lot of other people had similar problems and were anxious to talk to him. A week before the scheduled appointment he sent us a very detailed twenty-page questionnaire covering Nancy’s physical and behavioral development. We filled it out. Then Frank and I rode up to New York City to see him.
As we drove I began to understand the plight of the families of terminal cancer victims. Often they will seek out controversial treatment for their loved ones. And why not? It’s impossibly difficult to stand by and watch someone you love deteriorate right before your eyes. So you begin to grasp at straws. This is not to say that Dr. Cott was a straw, but he was unpopular with the medical establishment. So what if he was? Here was a chance to administer another form of treatment. The present one wasn’t working.
His office was on East Thirty-eighth Street. He was a small, slightly built man with gray hair and a concerned manner. He had thoroughly digested our questionnaire.
“Mr. and Mrs. Spungen, I have a few more questions about Nancy. Some of them may sound a bit odd to you, but please bear with me. They could be important. Okay?”
We nodded.
“Was Nancy an affectionate infant? What I mean to say is, did she like to be cuddled or did she react negatively by, for example, stiffening her limbs?”
I gasped. “How did you know that?”
He made a note in her file. “Would you call her affectionate now?”
“She doesn’t like to be hugged,” I said. “At least, not by us.”
He made another note. “You mentioned this psychotic episode she had at age ten, an apparent allergic reaction to Atarax. You mention she inflicted punishment on herself. By that, do you mean she began to bang her head and pull her hair out? That sort of thing?”
“That’s exactly what she did,” exclaimed Frank.
“And she continued to do it during other episodes?”
“Yes!” we both cried, excited. Cott was the first professional we’d ever seen who actually seemed to know Nancy!
“Does she take drugs?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “We think she does.”
“What kind?”
“Marijuana. Pills.”
“Hard drugs? Heroin?”
“No way,” Frank assured him. “Nancy’s hysterically afraid of needles.”
“Even so, I’m afraid she’s a real candidate for serious drug problems. She’s vulnerable. She was overmedicated as a child, and society has failed to provide the means to ease her pain.”
“What exactly is causing the pain, Doctor?” Frank asked. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Well, I’d have to examine her before I made a definite diagnosis. But based on reading your report, and talking to you, I’d say Nancy’s a schizophrenic.”
At last, after fifteen years of searching, someone had told us what was wrong with our child.
Chapter 11
“Can you help her, Doctor?” I asked.
“I believe I can, yes. I’d need thirty days to stabilize her. I’ll put her in a hospital so I can control her intake, get the sugar out of her diet. I’ll feed her megavitamins. Then we’ll see.”
“What are the odds?” Frank asked. “What are the odds you can help her?”
Dr. Cott took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I can’t make you any promises. It wouldn’t be fair to you. All I can tell you is that I have seen other young people like Nancy and I have helped them.”
“We didn’t know there were others like her,” I said. “We’ve always gotten the impression that … that …”
“That she’s some kind of unique specimen? A freak? She’s not. She’s just misunderstood. Nobody’s gotten to the root of her problem, which, in my opinion, is chemical. Give me thirty days. There will be a dramatic improvement in your daughter or none at all. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground with this kind of treatment. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be the first to tell you.”
Frank and I looked at each other, nodded. Then Frank stood up, beaming, an
d stuck his hand out across Dr. Cott’s desk.
“You’ve got yourself a deal!”
We practically sailed home on our enthusiasm. He’d given us hope, the first real hope in ages. We were so thrilled.
I phoned Walter Froelich, a staff social worker Mr. Sylvester had assigned to us, and told him about Dr. Cott. I explained that Dr. Cott thought she could be schizophrenic, that he wanted to examine her and, if his diagnosis held, withdraw her from school for a month so he could hospitalize her. Froelich said he would have to discuss it with Mr. Sylvester.
Mr. Sylvester’s response was swift and negative. He phoned personally.
“We had a boy here last year who had been on this Dr. Cott’s program,” he declared. “He wasn’t any better at all. The whole thing is a lot of meaningless garbage, a scheme to peddle a lot of vitamins.”
“We don’t see it that way,” I said. “We see it as an opportunity to help her.”
“It’s not,” he snapped.
“We’d like to withdraw her for a month,” I said firmly.
“Fine, but I can’t guarantee her place will still be here.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we have no such thing as a leave of absence here. If you withdraw your daughter she won’t automatically get back in. She’ll have to take a place on the waiting list.”
“How can you do this to us?” I cried. “We’re trying to help her!”
“And I’m trying to save you unnecessary grief and expense, Mrs. Spungen.”
I hung up, enraged, and phoned Dr. Cott. He was sympathetic.
“You’ve got a difficult decision on your hands,” he said.
“What do you advise?”
“I’m not going to lie to you, Mrs. Spungen. There’s a good chance I can help Nancy. There’s also a chance I can’t. If I can’t, and Darlington won’t take her back, then there won’t be any place for Nancy to go after her month is up, except home. She has to remain in a school environment. She can’t just move back in with you and not go to school.”
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 19
