Come Back With a Bonus Excerpt: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

by Claire Fontaine

  Which is exactly what happened. For years, Nick hadn’t paid for any psychological care related to the abuse, as he was court ordered to do, nor his share of doctor bills, but now, to get back at me, he wanted visitation rights.

  My happy life collapsed and I didn’t know how to shore it back up. He had the means to outspend me in court. Going to court in California was risky anyway. Fathers got visitation no matter what they did or what the child wanted. I could just see Mia screaming and trying to crawl under a coffee table in the name of family unity. I’d sooner disappear than leave her alone with him ever again. And I knew how.

  I’d heard of an “Underground” that secreted away women and children when courts wouldn’t protect them. The only other option I saw was doing what Dr. Elizabeth Morgan did in her well-publicized case. She had her parents spirit her child to New Zealand, and she went to jail for it.

  I was prepared to do either if I had to. I felt so emotionally overwhelmed that I called a social service agency for counseling. A therapist named Fran called back and I poured out the whole saga in between sobs. As we were making an appointment, I asked her full name. Fran Blair, she said, then spelled it out for me: B-l-e-y-e-r. That’s an unusual spelling, I said, are you related to a Peter Bleyer, from Philadelphia?

  Why, yes, as a matter of fact, he’s my husband, she said, why do you ask?

  I’d come all the way across the country to escape from Nick and the one psychologist in the entire state of California I happen to call is the wife of a P family friend. Who had been at my wedding. I don’t know who was shocked more, she or I.

  Paul came home to find me staring at the phone, practically catatonic.

  If I had any doubt Nick would learn where we lived, I didn’t anymore. It took me exactly one day to find the Underground. I met a well-dressed young woman at a café and explained my situation. She listened quietly, then led me to her car without a word.

  She drove to an apartment in a seedy part of town, locked the door behind us, and then told me this was the first stop in going underground. I looked around and thought, here I am again, at the nexus of Nick, desperation and dirty orange shag carpet. The worn sheets on the bed matched the one strung across the window. We stepped over toys and sat on the sagging plaid Herculon sofa to talk about the mechanics of “disappearing.”

  We could take nothing of our old life, not even a stuffed animal. There’d be new histories, new hair colors, a new profession. Every day would be a lie. Paul would be watched.

  I wish I could tell you that you’ll get used to it, she said, but you won’t. And if you ever do, that’s when you’ll get caught, because you’ll get careless, it’ll be good-bye Mia, hello prison. Once she was eighteen, Mia could resurface, but I never could, I’d face charges. I would go to my grave looking over my shoulder. Underground was an apt name, I was feeling cadaverous already.

  We would wait here until she got everything set up for us. There was a doorless closet against one wall full of Goodwill cast-offs. She pointed to them and said I could pick out new wardrobes for Mia and me once we got settled in.

  I scanned for the least drecky choices. Triple-pleated, puce trousers; a flowered sweatshirt; and a slick, thin blue belt that looked like a Tupperware cake dish handle.

  Or I could hold the pants up with that Navajo beaded belt and use the Tupperware belt to hang myself. God help me, it was vanity that made my decision.

  Forget it, I told Paul, Mia will have to lie every day knowing that if she screws up, Mommy goes to jail. And it’ll flat out kill me to become Jane Smith, tight-lipped blond bookkeeper for Frank’s Fuel-n-Feed.

  I found another lawyer in Chicago who established that nothing would happen without the Sex Offender therapy Moran ordered. Nick finally withdrew his motion.

  But the damage to Mia was done. Because I made the single worst choice I’d ever made in raising her. From the start, I felt it was best to hide all this from her until I had no choice. My hope was that it wouldn’t come to that. But, for some reason, a sister-in-law kept harping on me to tell Mia, saying, “You must always be honest with your kids.” I was of the opinion that your kids didn’t need to know some things. But I was so exhausted and fearful, and she so insistent, I gave in.

  I took Mia outdoors, by her favorite fountain, and somehow managed to force the words from my mouth, “Your old dad wants to see you again.” She grabbed me and started to cry. She shrunk into a ball in my lap and I knew immediately that I’d done something I’d regret for the rest of my life. It didn’t matter that I told her that I was going to fight hard to stop him; her safe world was shattered. I was furious at my sister-in-law and myself. I could see in Mia’s face that her little life was snapped in two. Her first Before and After.

  Mia was never the same. Sometimes, she’d stare off into space and a fleeting melancholy would pass across her features. She began to pick at her fingernails and jiggle her knee, or she’d get these shudders up her spine, like someone cracked the whip from her tailbone to her neck. Her nightmares returned, either with Nick chasing her in that wig or snatching her off the playground or scaring her with snakes (Freud got that one right).

  One night as we walked to her favorite restaurant for dinner, she galloped in front of an alley without looking, just as a car was pulling out. The car’s brakes squealed and Mia froze inches from the bumper. It was the second time in a few days she’d done it. We scooped her up and scolded her about looking both ways. By the time we ordered dinner, she seemed fine. Then her mouth and shoulders suddenly sagged. I asked what was wrong.

  “I just have this feeling that I don’t like being a person,” she said quietly.

  I took her to see a child psychologist, Colleen, a very caring woman who spent over a year helping Mia through this time. Though Mia grew to feel safer, she remained a changed girl. She became a nervous child. There was a shadow across her heart.

  She was afraid something would happen to me; her fear of being alone in bathrooms got worse. Until she was twelve, she wouldn’t shower unless I was in the bathroom or Paul was outside in the hall. “A bad guy could come in, and I can’t see through this shower door, you know!”

  The fallout from Nick finally hit me as well. Not long after, I woke up crying every morning, with a sick, mushy feeling in my stomach that was inexplicable, followed by losing ten pounds in as many days. The CD from the film The Piano became the soundtrack to the depression movie I starred in, Crying in Three Positions. Standing, sitting, lying down, it was all I did. When Mia got home from school, I’d somehow pretend to be her smiling mother, make dinner, read stories, ask about school.

  I learned why most people committed suicide. It’s impossible to describe what it is to have your heart literally hurt so much that only the stopping of it will end the pain. Stopping it becomes the bright and shining light at the end of the tunnel. Just the thought of it, with its secret, thrilling promise of release, is enough to lift you up to where you can perform basic functions, like brushing your teeth or eating or drawing that pricey chef’s knife across the jugular. Somewhere in the mountains where it wouldn’t leave a mess for someone else to clean up.

  I finally got on an antidepressant and in six months I no longer needed them, but I knew a hole had opened up in the terrain. And that if I wasn’t careful, I could fall in.

  It was little things, it always is. Things only a mother notices. A subtle withholding, waiting too long to wash her hair, a book choice, red cheeks.

  When Mia was thirteen, I noticed her cheeks were often red. It was winter, it couldn’t be the sun. My cheeks aren’t red, she’d say. Paul agreed, as he nearly always did.

  But they were. I had no idea where the thought came from, but out popped, “I think you’re scalding your face.” As soon as I said it, my brain agreed with my intuition.

  Did I catch hell. What a mean thing to say, leave me alone, leave her alone, they said. I didn’t say anything else about it, but I had sprouted a new antenna. One that would cause increasi
ng discord in our home as it picked up the subtlest things in her behavior.

  Her heroes had always been Jane Goodall and Audrey Hepburn. Suddenly, it was Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten. She read his autobiography several times. “For a school assignment,” she said. She began to let her personal grooming slide. She’d stay in the bathroom forever, but whatever she was doing didn’t involve soap and water.

  It’s odd, I told Paul, something’s off. It’s typical teen behavior, Paul said, leave her alone. No, it’s not, I told him, teenage girls are fanatic about their appearance.

  “You can’t keep at her like this, Claire,” he said irritably, “for heaven’s sake, she’s a great kid, she’s not doing anything wrong.”

  It’s true, she wasn’t doing anything wrong, but something was wrong. I felt the same way I did when I met Nick’s family, something was wrong with the picture. I couldn’t see it but I could feel it.

  Then, one day, out of the blue, Mia said to me, with cold curiosity, almost with contempt: “How could you have married him?”

  I arranged for her to see Colleen again, to deal with whatever was coming up for her about Nick. Mia was old enough then that the sessions were confidential.

  Mia asked to see the court papers; she wanted to read all the reports for herself. We decided she would read them in Colleen’s office, where she could ask me questions and deal with the emotions that were sure to come up.

  Mia seemed appropriately angry, curious, bothered. Some things she remembered well. Some she remembered remembering. All of it she remembered feeling. She remembered how the abuse made her feel most of all. I told her it was okay to be angry with me, it was normal. She was surprised—why would I be mad at you, Mommy?

  In her mind, we escaped him together, we were the crusading duo triumphing over evil. My question challenged the bond that had defined us. I realized that she couldn’t conceive of me as being fallible.

  “What a pervert!” she said on the way home. “It’s not fair that he’s not in jail. I can’t believe he could do something like that to a little kid and get to go on with his life.”

  “A little kid.” Maybe talking about herself in third person made it easier. At bedtime, she thanked me for being her mother, for going through “all that,” as if I had the biggest burden.

  She never spoke of him again and it seemed the issue was behind her, though she did want to continue seeing Colleen. I thought they might deal with some of the things that continued to bother me about her behavior. The problem was, what had been bothering me still wasn’t bothering anyone else. Which meant the problem became me.

  She began hanging out with a new student, the one who was into witchcraft and push-up bras. For once, Paul and I weren’t at odds about Mia.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about that girl,” he said.

  Mia became even more slack about her hygiene and grew more sluggish and quiet. Thus began a few months of a duet that went something like this:

  “Colleen, she won’t shower for days.”

  Claire, her hygiene is fine.

  “Colleen, she’s withdrawn, she’s dropped all her old friends, and she’s reading Johnny Rotten for the twentieth time—that’s not normal.”

  Claire, you can’t control everything she does. You must let her make some of her own choices.

  “Colleen, she’s lost so much weight her ribs stick out, and she’s always tired. Are you sure she’s not depressed or doing drugs or still having issues about her old dad?”

  No, Claire, Mia is not depressed and her weight is fine. Mia’s not doing drugs. And she never talks about her old dad.

  The stress level at home had escalated, and Mia seemed increasingly determined to provoke me. As only a child can do, she had the dynamic between Paul and me down to a science.

  Paul and I had let little things between us fester for a long time. He hated conflict so much that even a simple disagreement made him squirm. He liked staying under the radar at all costs. Which is what makes submarines so deadly. He punished with such graciousness and refined manners, it was almost possible to believe him when he’d say, who, me, passive aggressive?

  There’s little that’s passive about me. I’m expressive, the barometer that gets blamed for the storms. Granted, I did cause some of the storms. I practically had my own weather system that summer. I felt like I was in the middle of a tornado, barely hanging on while my life blew out of control around me.

  “Paul, she’s been in that bathroom for an hour and I don’t hear the shower running. I don’t care what Colleen says about her privacy, I’m going in there.”

  Don’t come in, she yelled when I knocked. My antenna shot up and I pushed on the door. Noo!! she yelled. Paul was hissing at me to leave her the hell alone. I pushed harder and found her standing there with her razor.

  “Mia, what are you doing?” I asked, puzzled.

  “What do you think I’m doing!”

  “I have no idea,” I said honestly.

  She looked angry at my ignorance. Then she started crying and said, Mommy, I’ve been cutting myself. I put my arms around her and said, what, when you shave your legs, honey? We’ll get you an electric shaver. She sunk down to the floor and I sank with her, bewildered.

  No, Mommy, cutting as in self-mutilating.

  Self-what??

  Neither Paul nor I had ever heard of such a thing. She may as well have told us she grew a third arm. As if the looks on our faces weren’t bad enough, I blurted, “But, it’s so weird! Mia, why would you do such a thing?”

  I wanted to understand the feelings that drove her to do it. But, all she heard was “you’re weird,” and it was downhill from there. Everyone started crying and she was so upset that I was upset, she ended up comforting me.

  “Don’t worry, Mommy, Colleen said it’s not that unheard of.”

  “Colleen knew?” Paul and I blurted in unison.

  We were appalled. I thought therapists of minors had to divulge something like that. Colleen later said that Mia wanted to deal with it on her own. And the implication was that I was largely the cause.

  Really? I alone had the power to make my strong-willed daughter ladder her thighs with so many slits they looked like a giant grosgrain ribbon? To make her stop showering, become obsessed with Johnny Rotten, drop her best friends to hang out with the Wicca queen, and lose ten pounds in a month? Wow, all that power in one single mother? Why bother with therapy, all Mia needed was a surge protector.

  Maybe all that power sizzled my synapses, but I’m wondering, doctor, there’s no chance that this has anything to do with her being molested? I mean, maybe it’s a stretch, but all this having happened after she asked for the reports of her abuse, there’s no chance at all? Call me thickheaded, but I just have to ask.

  No, Claire, this isn’t about her old dad, Colleen told me. Again.

  Some part of me must have had enough dismissal, or maybe it was all my fault; maybe I was simply tired of it all. Because I didn’t do what I usually do, which is to get information, gather knowledge, so I can analyze, judge, execute, fix. I just wanted Mia to stop doing it and she did. I knew because she showed me the countless red slashes across her upper thighs and stomach as they scabbed over and faded to pink. Rosy ribbons of proof that I wasn’t in denial, that my family was healed, my child was whole.

  Life returned to normal. Mia became her cheerful, funny self again. I was hired by a revered producer to adapt a book I loved. We were putting a bid on our first home and Mia was choosing the breed of dog she’d finally be able to have. At midnight on January 30, I sang all the way home from my office, under a sky full of stars. I sang down the walkway to my back door.

  I was singing when I noticed that her bedroom window was open.

  part two

  6.

  “Test her for every possible drug you can test for.”

  I’m with the admitting clerk in the hospital’s psych ward. A day after we found Mia in Venice, she’s still stoned. I wish they could test for the
gene for split personality. This déjà vu of my life with Nick is just the first of a series. The next two weeks will make me think I’m cursed.

  I keep Mia locked in my vision while I admit her, in case there’s an exit beyond my sightline. She sits listlessly on a gurney with her flushed face and matted hair.

  I corner a doctor and tell him I want a full STD panel, too. Her journal made it clear that the wholesome ski trip to Mammoth with her classmates was anything but.

  “I can’t do HIV without her permission,” says the pasty-faced doctor.

  “Her permission? She’s a minor.”

  Apparently in the sunny State of California I can’t have my minor child’s blood tested for AIDS, even if her life’s at risk. I have no right to ask them to hold her against her will for more than three days, even if her life’s at risk. And, I have no right to force her into rehab, even if her life’s at risk. Only she can make those decisions.

  “You’re putting a fifteen-year-old on drugs in charge of her own welfare? If she had cancer and I didn’t make her go for treatment, I’d get arrested for child endangerment—what’s the difference?”

  “There are good reasons for these laws,” he says as he scribbles.

  “Really? I’ll tell you what, Doctor, if my daughter is the one making all the decisions, then why don’t you send her your bill? Better yet, why don’t you send it to the ACLfuckingU.”

  I rarely curse but right now I want to do it in three languages. I want his children to join cults, shoot heroin, end up in the gutter. I want him to suffer a Saturday night with a voodoo-eyed kid. I want to keep feeling this anger because it feels better than the sick-hearted pain.