Bebe Moore Campbell

by 72 Hour Hold

  “That’s it,” Justin said. He looked as though he wanted to flee.

  There were cars parked in front of the house on what would have been a lawn. An odd odor hung in the air, sharp and pungent. Something was cooking.

  Brad parked about fifty yards away; then he got out and strode to the house. Even through the rolled-up windows, I could hear voices and laughter. Everyone got silent when Brad knocked. Two or three guys came to the door. I could hear Brad talking, explaining things in a forceful tone of voice. They closed the door in his face. A few minutes later, it opened.

  We heard Angelica before we saw her. Her curses rent the still air surrounding us. When Brad came out of the house, he had his arm around her waist and was trying to hold her against his side. The guys stood at the door watching, not saying anything. Angelica’s arms were flailing, and she attempted to kick him as he dragged her to the car. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt with most of the buttons undone. Bethany got out and ran toward them. Brad told her to go back, but she kept running toward them, yelling and screaming incoherently. She rushed past Brad and Angelica and raced up to the three men, who were watching. “What did you do to her?” she screamed over and over, until the men, who never answered, went inside.

  When Bethany joined Brad and Angelica, she tried to grab her daughter by the shoulders, but Angelica shook her off. Then she tried to hit her. Brad had to hold Angelica with one hand and keep Bethany away with the other. Margaret and I tore out of the car and pulled her away. She tried to fight us too, but then she got very still and just stood where she was until she stopped weeping.

  By the time Brad got Angelica seated in the back between Margaret and me, sweat was dripping off his forehead. Angelica was wild, more agitated than I’d ever seen her. She was muttering furiously to herself and didn’t pay attention to any of us, except Bethany. She vented the last of her rage on her mother, who appeared to have slipped into catatonia, her face was so devoid of emotion. Angelica’s curses and threats were wasted on her.

  Brad went right to his glove compartment, retrieved his hypodermic, and gave her a shot of Haldol. After a while her curses became slurred and softer.

  “Do you know where Trina went?” I asked.

  I expected some version of speaking in tongues. Angelica hadn’t said one coherent thing since she’d gotten into the car, but now she turned and spoke clearly. “She doesn’t want you.”

  Margaret’s house was quiet when we returned, but not for long. When Brad tried to get Angelica to take her regular medication, she spit it out and filled the small bedroom with a stream of curses that echoed throughout the house. Bethany trailed into and out of the room, pleading with her daughter to take the pills. Meth-enhanced psychosis was a powerful adversary.

  Margaret began cooking, clattering pans and clanging utensils, which didn’t completely shut out the din from Angelica’s room. Bethany was smoking on the back patio. When I went out there, several butts were on the ground near her feet, and she was lighting another.

  “They should be shot, those guys.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And they’re supposed to be the fucking normal ones.”

  “Right.”

  “Like they couldn’t tell that she had a problem. Fucking assholes.” She took another drag from her cigarette and began muttering under her breath. “I guess I’ll have to get her tested.”

  I didn’t answer that one. I had no comfort to give Bethany, so I went back into the kitchen. Jean wandered in, took a look at me, and hovered. Margaret put a cup of tea in front of me. Maybe she thought it would make me feel better. I stood up.

  “I need to make some calls,” I said. Jean disappeared immediately and returned with Brad.

  “I’d like to speak with you, Keri,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Regardless of what’s happened, the confidentiality of the program must be upheld. The situation will be resolved. We’ll find Trina. So, I don’t want you to—”

  “I have to call her father and tell him our child is missing.”

  “I just want to impress on you—”

  “You don’t need to impress a goddamn thing on me. You find my child.”

  “Keri, you—”

  “Brad,” Margaret said. He looked at her and then at me.

  “The program is everything to him,” Margaret said, as soon as he and Jean had left and it was just Margaret and me sitting at the table. “His wife left him less than a year ago. That was his second.” She sighed and looked at me. “We’ll find her. My son used to run away… .” Margaret knew I wasn’t listening, but she kept talking anyway.

  I left in the middle of her monologue. In the bedroom, I tried to collect myself, to practice saying, Clyde, Trina is missing, and it’s my fault. The phone at Clyde’s office rang seven times before his answering machine took the message, which I repeated for his home phone. His cell just rang and rang. My arms began to ache. I can’t lose both of them.

  Orlando answered his phone on the second ring. He said, “Hey, baby, you feeling better?” And he listened when I told him no, no, not better, and explained what had happened, not everything, not the part about the program, just the part where I admitted that Trina was missing.

  “Don’t panic, baby. You have your cell phone. Maybe she’ll call you.”

  Maybe she’ll call me. I thought, She’s riding in a car with two strange men. And then I told him everything. While I was talking I could hear him saying Listen to me, listen to me, listen, listen … But I couldn’t listen. I hadn’t called to listen to him. I just wanted to hear my thoughts pitched against his voice. I just wanted to know he was there.

  “Where are you? How long would it take me to get there?”

  “Isn’t opening night soon?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “I have an understudy.”

  “I don’t even know where I am, Orlando. Somewhere outside of Sacramento. I don’t know the address. I’ll call you back as soon as we find Trina.”

  “No,” he said. “Get the address and give it to me. I’ll hold on. Go get the address.”

  I went inside the kitchen carrying the phone in one hand; with the other I looked in a pile that appeared to be mail but turned out to be school papers. In the family room, there was a stack of magazines on the coffee table. I began going through the pile. Vogue. Mrs. Margaret Schultz, 13899 Villalobos Road, Corinth, California.

  “I’ll be there in the morning,” Orlando told me.

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you.” I could feel myself breathing again and noticed a pinching sensation in my shoulders as they came down a little.

  But I wanted Clyde.

  After I hung up I thought about the night Ma Missy put my mother out, how she sat on the sofa in front of the picture window in the living room, smoked Salem cigarettes, one after another, and wailed as though something had been cut from her body. The next morning, she woke me up, took me to school, and went to work. We didn’t see my mother for nearly a year. And except for that first night, I never heard her crying again.

  I cried a lot. I got bad grades that year. I picked fights with my best friends, and mostly I lost. At night I dreamed of my mother, and during the day I cursed her name in little-girl language. A piece of the woman who had groaned me out into the world was better than an empty space at the table. I pushed people far away, to a place where they could never come back and hurt me. I told myself I would show her; she’d be sorry; I didn’t need her at all. One night I slipped out of my grandmother’s house and wandered through the streets in the dark. I was trying to find her, but I ended up losing myself. I fell asleep in a stranger’s backyard; the police brought me home at three in the morning. One look at Ma Missy’s shocked face, and I felt like a failure. No wonder, I told myself. No wonder she left me.

  And now I knew that that had been the easy part of my life.

  “She missed her eight o’clock,” I said aloud to no one. The medication hour had come and gone. Trina wouldn�
��t notice the time. She was high, she had missed her medication, and she was with strange men. Are you praying for me now, Mattie?

  I put my phone away and went back into the kitchen, where Jean and Margaret were sitting. Angelica was still cursing and yelling from the room where Brad was watching her. I heard her say something about the FBI having her under surveillance.

  “Oh, goodness. How come it’s always the FBI and the CIA?” Margaret asked. She was opening what looked like an industrial-size can of ravioli and dumping it into a pot. “How about the SEC or the USDA?”

  Jean glanced at her, a slight smile forming. “The NBA, the NFL.”

  We all began to giggle.

  “Don King Productions is following me.”

  We went on and on, laughing hysterically as we listed more and more ridiculous names. And then we stopped and the kitchen was quiet again, and Angelica was the only one howling.

  “I have to do something. I just can’t sit here,” I said.

  “I know it doesn’t make you feel any better, but it’s all part of the illness,” Margaret said. “They drug, they drink, they run and bang their heads against a wall. You just have to step back, not go under with them.”

  “I am under,” I said.

  I was ready to renew the search, to sally out again into the strange town on my mission, but Margaret persuaded me to stay put. It was nearly eleven o’clock, she pointed out. All the stores were closed. If she was at someone’s house, it would be futile to go looking for her. She might be on her way back here. There was a chance that Trina had seen the address on the front door, noticed the street. If she came back, wouldn’t I want to be there?

  “Want something to help you sleep?” Brad asked me around 2 a.m.—or, in mental illness time, six hours past meds. Angelica was finally quiet. I was sitting on Margaret’s kitchen chair. The only light was from a low-wattage bulb above the stove. Brad held out a pill in one hand, a glass of water in the other. He looked tired under that light. I figured I looked worse.

  “No,” I said.

  “You need some sleep, Keri.”

  Whatever he gave me cushioned the world in a hurry. So this was how it worked, I thought. It was like taking a big, big shot of double-acting liquor. Everything was soft and grainy, slightly out of focus. I would have cried, but I was too calm. Brad helped me out of the chair, put his arm around my waist, led me to the bedroom, and placed me on the bed. I barely heard the door close.

  IN THE MORNING, JEAN BROUGHT ME ORANGE JUICE, COFfee, and a plate of eggs and sausages. A slight wooziness had settled into my brain. A Haldol hangover, something to be worked off during the day. Jean sat on the bed, watching me. I didn’t eat the food. After a while, she took the tray back to the kitchen. It was still too early to call the police. I heard someone at the door, and when I looked up Brad was standing there.

  “I went back out after you fell asleep, and this morning too. Want you to know how sorry I am about all this. Truly sorry,” he said.

  What did he expect me to say, That’s okay, don’t worry about it?

  Brad sighed.

  “The thing is”—and here his voice swelled a bit, just enough so his emotions had room to maneuver and settle down—“we have saved so many lives. At least seventy-five since we started. Seventy-five young people who are alive and productive because of the work I do—the work we do.”

  “I just want my kid back. That’s all I want.”

  “We want her back too. You once asked me how I got involved with this work. My mother had schizophrenia, and she wouldn’t accept any treatment. I grew up with a woman who wore way too much makeup, didn’t bathe, and had conversations with people who weren’t there. Kids at school laughed. The neighbors whispered. For the longest time, I thought I’d done something wrong.

  “My mother used to beat my brother and me with anything she could hold in her hands. She’d always say that the Lord told her there was evil in us; she had to beat it out. My brother wound up in the emergency room with a broken arm. My dad lied and said he fell, because he didn’t want us to be taken away.

  “I can’t tell you how many times my father called the police or took her to the hospital, only to be turned away and sent home. The few times she was actually admitted, she wasn’t there long enough to do any good. She’d come home and stop taking the medication. Then we’d be right back where we started. We weren’t rich. My dad couldn’t afford a fancy residential treatment program. It was such a waste of a life—and my father’s too. When she died, we were just relieved that the ordeal was over.”

  He paused. He was trembling. “We have contacts in this city, Keri. Our people are looking for Trina as we speak.”

  “My mother used to say that Satan sent us to her. I wanted to do good in this world.” I thought he was going to cry, and I didn’t want to witness that. Maybe he would have, but Margaret appeared, holding my purse. Inside it my cell phone was ringing.

  GodGodpleaseGod.

  “Keri. I got a call from Trina,” Clyde said. “She’s at Somerset Hospital in Sacramento, on the psych ward, acute side. She’s on a seventy-two-hour hold.”

  28

  THE PSYCHIATRIC WARD OF SOMERSET HOSPITAL WASN’T THE freedom I’d dreamed of, but at least I was no longer wading in the water. I could lay down my burden for a little while. A sign-in sheet awaited me with a cold polite African (Ghanaian? Nigerian?) manning the desk. There was the buzzer to press, a nurse to wait for, a sterile hall to walk down, wandering mumbling patients to ignore. There was fear, my steadfast companion, circumstantially amplified this time: Didtheyhurtherdidtheyhurther? And in spite of my apprehension, dueling it, the same old hope began leaping up, entirely unbidden, impossible to quell: Maybethistimemaybethistimemaybethistime.

  Clyde was waiting at the end of the hall. His face was unshaven, his clothes rumpled. He was speaking with a brown-skinned woman in a white coat. She extended her hand when I approached.

  “I’m Dr. Natal,” she said. “I can tell that you are the mother.”

  “Is she all right? Did they hurt her?”

  Dr. Natal put her hand on my wrist. “No one hurt her.”

  I heard a high-pitched mournful kind of sound, the kind tired old-school sisters used to make at church, after they’d finished shouting and the nurses were fanning their faces. The way I realized it was my noise was because of the look Clyde gave me, the way he appeared not so much worried as frightened when I began to cry.

  “I’d like to see my daughter.”

  One request, two voices in sync. Clyde was holding my hand.

  “She is sleeping right now. Besides, visiting hours don’t begin until two,” Dr. Natal said to both of us.

  Her voice was East Asian and had a lilting quality that turned statements into questions.

  I looked at my watch; Clyde looked at his. It was twelve-thirty.

  “She called you,” I said, looking at Clyde.

  Clyde nodded. “Around midnight from the pay phone.”

  Dr. Natal took us into a small cubicle with a desk, several chairs, and no windows, opened a manila folder, and scanned the contents for a few seconds before closing her file.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Whitmore, your daughter was brought in last night. She was paranoid and delusional. Has she had mental problems in the past?”

  “My daughter was diagnosed with bipolar disorder about two years ago,” I said. “She’s had five hospitalizations since then. Six. The last was a few weeks ago at Beth Israel’s Weitz Center in Los Angeles. She was medication-compliant for five months, and then a few months ago, she stopped. For the last two weeks she’s been taking her meds, but I’m pretty sure she’s been smoking marijuana and drinking for the last twenty-four hours.”

  Dr. Natal smiled. “That will do it every time. Is there the possibility that she took other drugs? Never mind,” she said when she saw me faltering. “They have probably already run a toxicology screen.”

  “How did she happen to get here? Was it voluntarily?”
/>   Dr. Natal opened the folder again. “No. It was involuntary. Two men brought her in. She’d hitched a ride with them and told them she was going to kill herself. Has she been suicidal before?”

  “She’s threatened. To my knowledge, she’s never made any attempts,” I said, glancing at Clyde. He was sitting on the chair, straight and stiff as a brick wall.

  “One of the nurses told me the men were on their way here anyway, so they brought her in.”

  Clyde coughed.

  “They just happened to be coming to the hospital?” I asked.

  Dr. Natal shook her head. “We run a day treatment program here, one for people with mental illnesses and one for addictions. There is a dual-diagnosis section for those who have both. The last meeting starts at ten o’clock at night. It seems that the men who brought in your daughter attend the dual-diagnosis program, so they knew what they were looking at.”

  “What was she doing in this area?” Clyde asked. “You never told me.”

  “I—”

  “Perhaps you need to talk,” Dr. Natal said. “There is a café downstairs where you can have a cup of coffee.”

  “How did she get here? Were you visiting somebody?”

  I looked at him, trying to gauge whether a public place would corral or accelerate his anger. “We need to go outside, Clyde.” I looked at Dr. Natal. “I want to talk with you about getting the hold extended. I intend to go for conservatorship.”

  “What do you mean, get it extended?” Clyde asked.

  “You both need to talk,” Dr. Natal said. “When you return at two o’clock, ask the nurse to page me.”

  We went outside to the parking lot and sat in Clyde’s car. I told him everything. His cell phone kept ringing, but he didn’t answer it. When I was finished, he looked at me for a long time. He seemed in a daze. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said finally. “You actually broke the law and kidnapped Trina. What do you really know about this group?”

  “Before I agreed, I talked to several people whose children had been in the program. They all said it helped.”