The Girl Behind the Door Read online

  Erika shot me a scowl. “I knew it.”

  Dianne continued. “All of the symptoms are there—the rages, tantrums, academic problems, antisocial behavior. It’s that crowd she hangs around with. They’re a bad influence.”

  I chewed on my lip as I listened, bristling at the accusation that my daughter had a drug problem and that her friends were somehow enabling her destructive behavior, like pushers. I glanced at Erika, perched on the edge of her seat.

  “Do you think we should put her in rehab?” Erika asked.

  “At this point I don’t have enough information to say one way or the other, but I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

  I laced and unlaced my fingers as we sat in silence again. We’d failed at parenting and failed at therapy. And now we were told that the root cause of Casey’s problems was either a lack of bonding or drugs or both.

  Was she a hopeless case or was there a magic pill that could fix her? Medication had always been my last resort.

  “Dianne, what do you think about medication?” I asked.

  “Well, I can’t make a diagnosis,” she replied. “But it might be wise for you to have a psychiatrist evaluate her. My associate, Dr. Palmer, is an excellent child psychiatrist and can prescribe medication. He’s right across the hall.”

  Perhaps sensing my frustration, Dianne said, “Look, I know this is a lot to digest. I haven’t spent much time with Casey, so I can’t be certain of anything yet. There’s a lot we don’t know about early childhood trauma. And without any information on her physiology or family history, Casey’s drug use could have serious consequences.”

  I sank back into my chair and stared at a Japanese watercolor on the wall. The fighting at home, anxiety over schoolwork, the purging, cutting, drugs, and fruitless meetings with therapists had been debilitating. We couldn’t keep changing therapists.

  I looked to Dianne for help. “Where do we go from here?”

  “I’d love to continue seeing Casey,” she said. “But she has to want to come back, and right now she doesn’t.”

  I cradled my face in my hands while Erika rubbed my back.

  Dianne looked heartbroken. “I’m so sorry. She really is a wonderful girl. I was drawn to her instantly.”

  We got up to leave and Dianne gave each of us a long hug. As we turned to leave, Dianne spoke up. “You know, there’s a good book about attachment disorder you might want to check out.” Erika jotted down the title and author.

  On our way out to the car, I tried to grasp the magnitude of Dianne’s words. Attachment disorder? Drugs? This was serious stuff that was hard to take in. Every pediatrician and therapist who’d seen Casey since she was a toddler had been amazed at how far she’d come. No one had ever mentioned any connection between her behavior and her infancy in the orphanage.

  I resisted Dianne’s implication that Casey was some kind of druggie, but she was the expert. I wasn’t qualified to challenge her opinion. Though I’d come around to considering medication, it still worried me after stories I’d read about their potentially deadly side effects.

  We were running out of options. Erika and I agreed to set up an appointment for Casey to see Dr. Palmer.

  At home, we found Casey sitting on the sofa in the living room, watching TV and eating a bowl of Cracklin’ Oat Bran. Igor was curled up on his pad on the floor next to her. Knowing that we’d just come from Dianne’s office, she said in her most charming voice, “Don’t worry, I finished all my homework.” She shoveled a spoonful of cereal into her mouth. “Oh, and I got a B-plus on my science test. Sorry, I couldn’t wait for dinner. I was hungry.”

  She didn’t appear the least bit anxious about our meeting with Dianne, and I felt like she was playing me again with her charm. But the sight of her together with her loyal canine friend was oddly hypnotic and took the edge off the tension that had hung over us since we’d walked through the front door.

  “So what happened?” Casey asked.

  I rummaged through the refrigerator looking for nothing while Erika checked the phone for messages, both of us ignoring her. Give her the silent treatment and let her squirm for a while. It was about the only weapon we had left.

  “Hel-looo?” she said.

  Erika and I walked into the living room and sat down on a love seat facing her with grim looks on our faces. “We all agreed that you should be in therapy.” She scowled at me. “But we also agreed that you have to want it and obviously you don’t right now.” Her face relaxed. I could almost hear her inner voice screaming a triumphant Yes! with a hearty, imaginary fist pump.

  “And one more thing.” I didn’t want to bring up Dianne’s lecture about drugs just yet. It would just lead to another fight, and I had no fight in me at that moment.

  “We’ve made an appointment for you to see a specialist to be evaluated for medication.” I purposely substituted the word specialist for psychiatrist so that Casey wouldn’t freak out about another probing therapist. I expected another burst of protests, but Casey remained silent, staring sullenly at the TV.

  I tried to catch her eye. “Okay?”

  She shrugged and stared straight ahead.

  Erika picked up. “Before you go out and celebrate, Casey, you need to know that none of us—Dianne, Dad, or I—are the least bit happy about this. So since we can’t force you to go to therapy, we expect your behavior to be nothing less than exemplary or you’re grounded—forever.”

  I cringed at the thought of Casey permanently grounded. That meant that we’d all be grounded, but I remained quiet as Erika continued. “That means no nastiness, no cursing, no more letters from school about your attendance and work, none of this purging, and most of all, no drinking, smoking, or drugs.”

  Casey gave Erika an icy glare. “I don’t purge and I’m not into substances, MOM!”

  I stepped in, speaking to her calmly but firmly. “Casey, knock it off. I suggest you not abuse our trust, because I’ll tell you right now, if we find anything on you, we may have no choice but to send you away for treatment.”

  Later that night after dinner, Erika and I retired to our bedroom, drained from the events of the day. Erika was in the bathroom brushing her teeth as I picked up the Chronicle. Flipping through the Bay Area section, I stopped at the obituaries.

  An announcement and photograph caught my eye. A sixteen-year-old Mill Valley boy had “died suddenly” but they didn’t say how. I recognized his name. It was the boy Casey worked with at Williams-Sonoma just a month ago. Erika walked out of the bathroom in her white terry-cloth bathrobe, towel-drying her hair. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. “Honey, you’re not going to believe this.”

  “What?”

  “Remember that boy from Mill Valley Casey liked so much who worked with her at Williams-Sonoma?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He died.”

  With her hand to her mouth, Erika practically whispered. “Oh my God.”

  I learned the next day through a Google search what “died suddenly” meant. The boy who made Casey laugh at work had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

  FIFTEEN

  Every time we pulled Casey out of therapy, we’d been rewarded with some family harmony. In the months that followed our separation from Dianne, Casey was a model teenager. When a fight brewed, we managed to keep it down to a minor skirmish. Erika and I considered this a victory. It seemed we’d allowed Casey to teach us how to parent her by avoiding conflict altogether.

  We took her to see Dr. Palmer. She didn’t resist the idea of medication. Despite my misgivings, perhaps a magic pill would be an effective substitute for invasive therapy sessions. Several of her friends swore by antidepressants such as Zoloft and Prozac.

  I was comforted to hear that Dr. Palmer treated teenagers first with natural remedies that minimized the risk of side effects, before resorting to more powerful prescription drugs. He put Casey on a B vitamin supplement called Inositol that had been shown to reverse major health issues such as depression, anxiety disorder
, hyperactivity, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Though she’d never been diagnosed with any of these conditions, this seemed promising. We were at the end of our rope, grasping at anything. Other than Dianne’s brief reference to an attachment disorder, no one drew a connection between her behavior and her past.

  Unfortunately, Inositol was not the magic pill. Casey complained of irritability and insomnia. With her patience short, she gave up, so we dragged her back to Dr. Palmer.

  He put her on Lamictal, a mood stabilizer, claiming that it helped “calm the mind.” “People feel like themselves again,” he said, “without any negative side effects.” Perhaps that was the perfect antidote for Casey’s symptoms. But after a week, she complained of headaches. She was tired of therapists, psychiatrists, and medication and wanted to stop everything. No amount of cajoling, pleading, or threats would sway her.

  Erika and I were back in our same old place—exasperated, exhausted, and furious with our daughter for refusing to cooperate with our repeated attempts to help her. Unwilling to continue throwing money at our problem, we decided to give in and take a break from Dr. Palmer. Summer was approaching; maybe we’d revisit this again in the fall.

  Maybe there was something to this attachment disorder that Dianne had mentioned. Erika found the book at the library that Dianne had recommended. It was called Social Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman. But as we read through it, we found that it had little to do with adoption or attachment at all. It was mostly about the biology, brain science, and behaviors associated with human interaction and relationships. Neither Erika nor I could understand what Dianne was thinking.

  With that, the issue of attachment disorder was laid to rest.

  At the end of her junior year in June 2007, after she’d turned seventeen, Casey passed her driving test and got her license. With her access to wheels, we had another carrot to dangle in front of her for good behavior. We also had something new to worry about—Casey getting maimed or killed in a car accident.

  With school over, the weekend party circuit was in full swing. One Saturday evening, Erika and I sat together on the sofa in the living room with a bottle of wine, getting ready to watch a DVD that we’d been curious about. It was a bit gruesome, and we didn’t want Casey to see it.

  It was a documentary called The Bridge, about people who’d committed suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. It was controversial because for the first time since the bridge had been built in 1937, it exposed its dirty little secret as the world’s top suicide magnet. We were aware that people jumped from the bridge, but couldn’t fathom why anyone would do such a thing. I couldn’t shake the thought of the sixteen-year-old boy who jumped, the one that Casey liked so much from Williams-Sonoma. I wondered if she knew.

  We settled into the sofa and I pushed PLAY. As the opening credits rolled in front of an image of a fog-shrouded bridge, Casey walked into the room, fully equipped for an evening out. She was wearing her favorite tomato-colored quilted hoodie over a long black sweater with gray stonewashed jeans and suede boots, her teal Marc Jacobs handbag slung over her shoulder. She glanced at the TV as I fumbled for the remote.

  She looked perplexed. “What’re you guys watching?”

  “Nothing,” Erika said. “Just a documentary.”

  She glared at us as if she’d just caught us smoking pot. “Are you guys watching that bridge movie?”

  I tried to change the subject. “Casey, we’d just like to watch our movie. Okay?”

  She hated to be kept in the dark. Looking at us suspiciously, she shook her head. “God, you guys are so sick, watching people kill themselves.” There was a moment of awkward silence. “So . . . can I have the car keys?”

  Even though she was a relatively new driver, she whined that she was the only kid at Redwood without a car. But Erika and I considered wheels a privilege, not a Marin County entitlement.

  We had designated my VW, with more than 100,000 miles on it, as the “shared car.” Thus far, Casey had gained our trust by taking it out and getting herself and the car back in one piece. She would have to live under that restriction, a small price for transportation.

  As we followed her to the front door, I fished my keys from my pocket. Turning to her, dangling the keys in my hand, I made her work a bit for them.

  “Homework done?”

  “Yup.”

  “Room picked up?”

  “Yes, Dad.” I bent down to kiss her cheek and caught the fresh scent of Marc Jacobs’s Eau de Parfum. No cigarette smoke, thank God. With a playful grin, she snatched my keys and was stepping out the door when Erika piped up. “Casey, wait a minute!” She turned around, her jaw hanging open, a look of annoyance on her face.

  “Do you have a flashlight?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “And the Mace?”

  “Ye-es. In case you forgot, I’m not five years old anymore.”

  “Make sure to bring water so you don’t get dehydrated and check the gas so you don’t run out!”

  Casey inched her way toward the car. “Mom, I’m not a retard.”

  “Okay, drive safely!” Erika waved excitedly as I stood next to her with my palm raised in a perfunctory salute.

  Casey snapped back. “No, Mom, I’m going to drive into a tre-ee. I’m not an idiot!”

  She gave us a sheepish smile and wave from the driver’s seat as she buckled in, adjusted the mirror, and lurched away from the curb. I felt a mixture of pride and anxiety as she drove away.

  The main focus over the summer of 2007 was college. Casey would be sending out applications in the fall, so we used the summer break to narrow down choices and visit campuses. Her A list was a collection of small, competitive liberal arts schools: Reed, Bard, Bennington, Marlboro, and Hampshire. Other than Reed, these were all East Coast schools. Casey wanted an East Coast experience, having long since forgotten about her early years in Simsbury. More important, however, was her desperation to get as far away from Mom and Dad as possible, something that she reminded us of constantly.

  “When I go away to school, don’t expect me to call every day like Mom does with Grandma.”

  “I’m not going to visit you over the summer. I’ll probably have an internship in New York.”

  “And by the way, what am I gonna do for transportation? I’ll need Dad’s car.”

  Having gotten used to her mouthing off, I didn’t take it personally. I wasn’t about to pick a fight over every insult that spewed from her mouth. Besides, I didn’t think she really meant it.

  One Sunday afternoon in June, I found her at the kitchen island flipping through a slick glossy brochure from Reed College that had just come in the mail. Reed was her top pick at that moment. I put my hand on her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “Hello. What’s this?”

  “It’s a brochure from Reed College.” ItsabrochurefromReedCollege.

  I looked over her shoulder. “Hmm. Good school.”

  She sighed. “Yeah. I probably won’t get in, though.”

  I winced. “Don’t say that, honey. You know how smart you are.” I put an arm around her shoulder and she let me give her a squeeze.

  “Dad, my grades suck and I blew the SAT.”

  “Your grades last semester were fine, honey.”

  “Yeah but my GPA sucks. I got like a two-point-eight.”

  She needed to hear a compliment from someone other than me to let it in. “Well, the SAT isn’t everything and you still have this coming fall semester in senior year to get your GPA up.”

  “Dad, you don’t get it. The average GPA for Reed is like a three-point-nine. My friend Alex has like a four-point-two.”

  I looked at her, puzzled. “I thought the most you could get was a four. How did Alex get more than that?”

  She casually flipped to another page. “A.P. courses. Alex is Asian and he’s hella smart.” I chuckled at Casey’s reference to the overworked, overachieving stereotypical Marin kid. But I was also shocked at the admissions standards for schools that were a notc
h below the Ivy League.

  We looked at photographs of a bucolic college campus—cherry blossoms in front of a red-brick building, a kid working on his laptop in the library, a teacher pointing at a cluster of formulas on a blackboard.

  I wondered how many hours Casey had spent in her room in front of her laptop poring through images of a college life she’d be part of in another year. She envied her friend Roxanne, who went to boarding school in New Hampshire. I bet Casey imagined it like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts and wanted a place like that for herself.

  “So what do you like most about Reed?” I asked

  “The senior thesis program.” Theseniorthesisprogram.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s this hella huge project you do in senior year. You give an oral presentation, then they bind your thesis and put it in the library.”

  I was taken aback. “You like that?”

  “Yeah!” she said, excited.

  “Sounds intimidating to me, but then I know you’re a smart cookie.” I admired her genuine hunger for knowledge. She was nothing like I was in college, wasting my time following the path of least resistance to get my ticket punched.

  She patted my shoulder. “Those were the good old days, huh, Dad?”

  We looked at a page devoted to Reed’s campus dogs. There was a picture of a long-nosed greyhound. “Ohhhh . . .” she whined. “I wish I could bring Igor.”

  “Then you have to feed him and pick up his poo.” She playfully punched my shoulder.

  “Dad, do you have any money to send me to college?”

  “Why would you even say that?”

  She shrugged, looking down. “I thought we were broke.”

  What was she fishing for? An excuse to be disappointed? “Okay, Casey. First, we’re not broke. Second, your college is already paid for. Third, that’s not your concern anyway.” She snorted a faint sign of approval and I added, “Luckily, I just have one kid.”

  She gave me a mock scowl.

  “Fortunately, the schools you picked don’t focus on just one thing,” I said. “You need to show them what a gifted writer you are and get some good recommendations.”