Heart Scars

by Jeanette Lukowski

  Are you kidding me?! I wanted to scream. We’re here to collect Allison and get the hell back home. Don’t try cozying up to me now, you bastard.

  Instead, I politely declined his offer. My head was pounding too much for any more jaw movement. Allison had been gone for almost a whole day, the three hours of fitful sleep I got that morning were now light-years away, I was thirsty, and I still had to find my mother.

  * * *

  The drive over to the psychiatric hospital was a blur. I had to call to confirm with a nurse that I was on my way over from the airport. My mother wasn’t sure she could even remember the way to go. Frank was sitting in the backseat with Tommy, making small talk. “So, what do you like to do?” Frank asked Tommy, the way a stranger might.

  It didn’t take long for classic Frank to appear. “So, I’m having back surgery next week” he said to the car in general.

  Always having to be the center of attention, even at a moment like this. I was regretting my decision to call him.

  * * *

  I was apprehensive as I left the car and walked toward the entrance of the psychiatric hospital. What was I going to find when I got inside? Was Allison going to be tied down to a bed? Was she sitting in a padded room? Was she going to be something ugly, transformed during the bus trip from our small town to this huge city two states away? Was she going to be happy to see me, or would my presence pale in comparison to that of her absent father?

  When I was led into the waiting room, I saw Allison sitting on the type of chair that might appear in any living room, with her feet up on the chair like she did at home, arms curled protectively around her knees. I sailed across the room and landed in a heap at her feet, crying.

  Neither of us spoke. Allison rested her hand on the top of my head and started stroking my hair like I had done to her countless times when she cried onto my shoulder.

  After my tears stopped flowing, I looked up into her face. She had been crying as well, and now we both managed to smile at each other. That’s when I remembered there were others in the room. I told Allison to look over towards the door, where her dad was still standing, waiting.

  To my surprise, she didn’t jump up to hug him. In fact, she didn’t look in his direction at all. Instead, she just quietly said she knew he was there, and put her head back down onto my arm.

  Then it was time to have our meeting with the psychiatric hospital social worker. Frank, Allison, and I joined the woman in a very small conference room. Allison and I sat next to each other, holding each other’s hands, Frank sat in a chair near the wall to the right, and the social worker sat in a chair near the wall to the left. Part of me wanted to tell Allison’s dad that he didn’t need to be in there with us, as he was no longer a part of our family, but the other part of me thought maybe this was exactly the shit he needed to hear, so that he would get his head out of the sand long enough to hear just how dramatically his absence had affected his daughter.

  The social worker was very nice, but it was difficult to tell her about how Allison had been cutting herself in Wyoming. I was scared that Frank was going to blame me and fight to get custody of the children, I was scared the social worker was going to say that this was enough evidence to prove that I was an unfit parent, and that she was going to have the state take Allison away from me. I told the truth, though—Allison’s long-term health and well-being mattered to me more.

  “Well, since you are here and Allison lives in another state, there’s nothing we can really do with her here, except recommend that you get her in to see someone when you get back home,” the social worker said, looking directly at me.

  Relief coursed through my body. That’s it? You’re not going to lock her up, or let her dad try to raise her? What came out of my mouth, though, was a quiet, almost subservient, “Thank you.”

  “Good luck,” she said to me as she left. “You can stay here as long as you want, but you can also leave whenever you’re ready.” Then she was gone.

  The three of us returned to the secured waiting room. Allison sat next to me on the sofa. Frank sat on a couch on the wall to our right, just like he had done in the room with the social worker. It felt awkward to me, though. I didn’t want him seeing how she and I interacted. I’m not sure if I wanted him to sit on her other side, the other bookend to my image of parental support, or if I wanted him to leave the room altogether.

  Allison and I continued to sit there, together, not talking for another five or ten minutes—and then we got up to walk out of the highly-secured inner waiting room.

  When we got out to the outer waiting area, I saw Frank on a couch on the far side of the room, reading a newspaper, while my mom was sitting on a couch closer to the door that Allison and I had to travel through. “Why don’t you go over and talk to your dad, dear,” I said to Allison. “I’ll just sit over here.”

  How easily I could have fallen asleep right there on that couch. I had seen and touched my daughter—and she was fine. I was hungry, though, and we still had to get back home.

  The father/daughter talk only lasted about fifteen minutes. I remember thinking that Allison’s body language looked uncomfortable the entire time. When Allison came over to ask when we were leaving, I told her it was up to her. My sister had taken Tommy with her, in her car, while Frank, Allison, and I spoke with the social worker. So Frank, Allison, and I walked out of the psychiatric hospital together, and got into my mother’s car. Once again, I rode in the front seat, next to my mom, and Frank sat in the back—this time, next to our daughter. Frank tried to turn the spotlight of conversation onto himself again, so I suggested we all stop for food. Frank declined the offer, saying that we were on the “bad” side of the city. Instead, he asked to be dropped off at a certain street so that he could catch a city bus to take him back to the “safe” side of the city. For the rest of the drive, I ignored Frank the best that I could. I counted the moments until he was out of the car.

  * * *

  Several months later, Allison told me some of what she and her father had talked about that day. “He told me that he had cut himself, too, after your divorce. He told me that he always knew I would be his little rebel.”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t understand how a father could tell his teenage daughter either of those things. What made it even worse, though, was the fact that she made it sound like he had proudly shared this information with her. I wanted to scream, He always knew that you would be his little what?! Like that’s a good thing? I’m so glad that we got divorced. There’s no way I want my daughter hearing that kind of crap, but kept my mouth clamped shut and hugged her tight.

  3. Warning Signs

  One of the hardest things I had to face in the days and weeks that followed Allison’s running away was the well-intentioned concern of those who knew what had happened. I feared what others would say, which was part of why I kept it a secret for so long. “Did you know she was involved with that guy?” I was asked. “Were you aware that she had posted that on her web page?” “Had she ever talked about running away before?” “Has she changed recently?”

  Of course she had changed. A lot of a teenager’s life is about challenging parental authority so that he or she can separate from the parents and become their own person. I first noticed a dramatic change in attitude when Allison turned twelve. She became even more confrontational and critical of my parenting when she entered high school. I was “smothering” her, I was “over-protective,” I wasn’t letting her do so many of the things her friends could do. Since each of these discoveries were made right after we had made a cross-country move, I thought they were hormonal outbursts caused by the stress of moving and trying to fit in with a new student body. I stayed involved as much as I could, but thought that time would heal her growing-pains.

  No, she had never talked about running away, even as a child.

  Yes, I became aware of the MySp
ace account announcing to the world that she was a year older than she really was. By the time a friend found it and showed it to me, it had been up for several months. When I confronted Allison about the site, she screamed at me. She told me it was an invasion of her privacy. Making her close the account wouldn’t have done any good. Having been taught the trick to get around age limit settings on Internet accounts by her friends, she would just create another account. Although we didn’t have Internet access at home, most of her friends did—and the public library had a teen room with eight computer terminals exclusively for teens.

  No, I didn’t know anything specific about Nicholas, or Gregory, or Blake, or Alex, or Jamie, or any of the other boys she had been friends with over the years. Some of her male friends had been over to the house, so I met them. Some I had given rides to, some I had only ever heard as voices over the phone. I could say the same thing about most girls Allison’s age. Life was different from when I was growing up.

  I’ve asked myself a million times since April 24, 2009, if there were warning signs. There were signs of some kind of trouble, but I don’t know if there was anything I could have done differently in order to keep her from running away.

  * * *

  Allison and I drove into town on August 3, 2006, and headed directly to the hotel. We had an hour before the appointment with the realtor for the pre-purchase walk-through on the house we had placed a purchase agreement on in May. The three-bedroom, two-bath home with a fenced-in yard was a real upgrade from the one we had spent the previous twelve years in. The exterior was blue with white trim, and there was a basketball net on the edge of the concrete driveway. The house felt like it had been built just for us.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon driving around town, filling out forms to hook up service for the utilities and driving past our respective schools—the college first, where I would begin my first year of tenure-track teaching, and to the junior high where Allison would be a seventh-grader in September. Since Tommy wasn’t with us, we skipped his elementary school that day.

  Then Allison and I headed back to the hotel to rest, swim, and make phone calls. The first call was to Tommy, still back in Minnesota with my mom, so that he could have one last hurrah: camping outdoors for four days with his Cub Scout den. My mom was going to bring Tommy out to Wyoming when camp was done, and stay for the week between the start of my work and the children’s start of school.

  In spite of how hot and draining our two-day drive had been, the excitement of the next day kept me awake much of the night. In the morning, I would be signing the paperwork on my very first house as a single woman. In retrospect, August 4, 2006, marked the day my dream life turned into a nightmare.

  * * *

  I earned my teaching degree in 2004, and managed to cobble together a life teaching part time at three different schools. While I made enough money to keep us fed, clothed, and housed, I had no medical or dental insurance, nor a promise of any work beyond the semester. In 2006, I got offered a full-time, tenure-track teaching job in a town out west, and gratefully accepted the offer. The children were still pretty young when we moved—Allison was eleven and Tommy was nine—but it was me who really needed to get away from the house their father and I purchased together. It was me who needed to get out of the town where their father had made too many drug contacts, and it was me who needed to cut the umbilical cord to my own mother. She had changed her retirement plan when I got divorced—buying a house thirty miles from mine, explaining that “someone needs to take care of Jeanette.”

  While the thought of a cross-country relocation scared me, I was motivated by stories I had exchanged with other divorcées over the years. I had heard about custody arrangements which barred the women from leaving the town or state of their divorce, and for a moment, I was thankful that Frank had simply walked away. Not wanting anyone to control my life anymore, I felt an almost urgent need to move as far away from the children’s father as I could, while still remaining close enough to my own mother in case I ever needed to drive back in a hurry.

  It wasn’t until a month after we settled in that I realized how isolated the town was for a girl who was raised in Chicago. We were a two-hour drive from any type of mall, men’s clothing store, bookstore, or decent variety store. Although the town had two grocery stores, two high schools, two middle schools, sixteen elementary schools, one college, one public library, and one variety store of the chain that appears in every suburb and small hamlet from coast to coast, the culture of the town was a shock. Combined with Wyoming’s pop-up blizzards that leave motorists stranded for days without warning, and the stigma of being “new in town,” the children and I each spiraled out of control in our own ways.

  I loved where I worked, though, and the people I came into contact with while inside the sanctuary of that building. If I had been a single person, I might have stayed there, more or less content, for some time. Unfortunately, I was so busy trying to be a good teacher that I wasn’t hearing all of what my children were saying about the chaos they faced every day at school and in the neighborhood.

  * * *

  About a month into the school year, I noticed that Allison was wearing black clothing almost exclusively. When we traveled the distance to the mall, she only wanted to go into what I referred to as “the dark stores.” If I said anything, though, she would point out that I was being judgmental and stereotyping people based on the clothes they wore. “You don’t like me saying stuff like that about your friends, Mom, so why are you saying it about mine?” was a common response.

  I was simultaneously proud of the nonjudgmental young woman she was becoming, and berating myself for not practicing what I preach. I had been referring to the color of people’s skin when I taught the kids about judging others, but she still had a point: skin color, clothing styles, piercings and tattoos shouldn’t make a person any less worthy of tolerance. Out of love for my daughter’s growing sense of individuality, I would pay for her black clothes—and ignore the negative looks she received. It was hard sometimes, because parents tend to be judged by their children’s behavior, but I didn’t want her to think I would stop loving her.

  Then came the day when a colleague, whom everyone considered a bit of a busybody, came into my office to impart some nugget of knowledge. “My daughter noticed that your daughter has some cuts on her arm,” she said with a smug look on her afce. Honey dripped from every harsh word that came out of her righteous mouth. Initally, I wondered why she was telling me this.

  “I think you need to take her to see someone about it,” she continued.

  Someone. Like a doctor someone, I thought, because I’m obviously doing a bad job of parenting. I had already decided that I didn’t really care for this woman. I had gathered from earlier conversations that she was a my-shit-don’t-stink perfect person, but I pasted on one of those phony, thank-you-for-imparting-such-vast-wisdom-on-this-lowly-woman looks I had become good at over the years, from dealing with the child support worker or the welfare office worker, knowing that feigning graciousness would get her out of my office sooner than confrontation. While part of me wanted to believe that the marks her daughter had seen were nothing more than book indentation marks left from carrying her textbooks around all day, another part of me knew I would have to have a talk with my daughter to find out what was going on.

  Allison denied it as long as she could, of course, but eventually I caught a glimpse of her self-mutilating behavior.

  Unlike some of the other girls and boys who cut, Allison chose, in the beginning, to scratch herself with safety pins. She would apply enough pressure to break the skin. I was a little relieved, thinking that she wasn’t in the same kind of danger of bleeding-out that some are prone to when they cut deeply with knives and razor blades, but it was hard to look at. She had about ten vertical lines in varying stages of healing on each arm, running from her wrist to the crook of her elbow.

/>   I was shocked, horrified, and ashamed when I discovered this. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea. As far as I was concerned, her life was so much better than mine had been growing up, and I had never done anything so self-destructive. I made every effort to give the kids everything I could since the divorce, so they wouldn’t feel like they were “missing out” by not having a two-parent home. The house in Wyoming was newer, prettier, and larger than the house in Minnesota had been, and I felt more financially and emotionally stable with this job. Allison had even made a new best friend the day we moved into the house. I couldn’t see what could be so wrong with her life that she felt she had to cut up her own body.

  The shame I felt about her cutting behavior, though, kept me from talking about it. I was only beginning to get to know people at my work, and feared their rejection of me if they found out what my daughter was doing, so I kept it a secret. Although we went to church every Sunday, I felt uncomfortable sharing with the husband-and-wife team of pastors, whose children were younger than mine. I didn’t want to tell my mother either. I already considered myself a failure in her eyes, I didn’t want to admit that I had screwed up my children as well. Most importantly, though, I guess I kept it a secret because I was afraid that some agency would come and take my children away. Instead, I told Allison to stop doing it, and then spent every weekend we could on the road.

  Each Friday afternoon, when the college would slow down and empty out, I consulted the computer for events taking place over the weekend. I checked the motor club travel guide website for drivable locations that might provide an educational experience and I would ask people at work what interesting things there might be to do or see in nearby towns. If Saturday morning rolled around without a plan and the weather on the radio sounded promising, I would simply tell the kids we were taking the two-hour drive to the mall for an all-day shopping expedition. Since I loved driving, the destination became less important than my desire to get away. My goal was simply to remove Allison from the environment that caused her to want to mutilate herself.