“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.
A nurse takes Mia to get settled while someone gives us a tour of the ward, which is fifteen minutes of beigeness. We’re given a stack of information and a cheery good-bye. We have almost no idea what her treatment will be and we don’t get to talk to a doctor. Which means their primary source of information will be her. We’re afraid she’ll do what she did with us for the last year, and no doubt with Colleen, figure out what they want to hear and give it to them.
Mia refuses to come out to say good-bye to us. It is a knife.
What the hell is wrong with her? Everyone here’s anorexic, except for an OCD who wipes himself bloody every time he takes a shit. All I did was run away, so why the FUCK am I here? God I hate her. Two days ago everything was perfect and now I’m locked up with Twiggy and the ass-wiper in what’s gotta be the creepiest place on earth.
Paul and I navigate the sterile halls for our first visit with butterflies in our stomachs. I feel like I’m going to a maternity ward to see my new child, the one I didn’t know I had. I see our faces reflected in the chicken-wired glass of the visiting room. We look like basset hounds.
Mia’s physical presence had always been sharply defined, vivid with contrasts—light eyes, dark brows, light hair, olive skin; her live-wire limbs carved a big space in the world for herself. People always noticed Mia.
Now, when Mia slinks into the room and scrunches into a chair, a darkness emanates from inside her that’s blurred and blackened her edges. My bold-contoured Matisse of a girl has become a smudged Mona Lisa, mysterious and unknowable. She doesn’t even sound the same, it’s as if she, like, dropped, like, fifty IQ points, like, overnight, dude.
We ply her: Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Hopkins, sweetie? Do you want to try Beverly High? Do you this, do you that, can we this, can we that. We’re begging is what we’re doing. We’ll do anything because we’re scared. And she knows it. She’s got the power of a teen with terrified parents.
She answers with snotty shrugs, sarcasm. Rain and Talia are already gracing some alley in Haight-Ashbury. Without her. And it’s all our fault. We rained on her parade. Mainly me. I ruined everything, I spoiled her Big Plans.
“This place isn’t going to change me. You’re wasting your money,” is what she leaves us with.
We walk back to the car in the rain. How appropriate the weather has been, the sky dumping buckets on us. It makes me feel even more pathetic. Paul starts to cry.
“I can’t get the look in her eyes out of my mind,” he says miserably, “when she was on the floor in the kitchen. There was a flicker of the real Mia in her eyes, just for a second. She looked so scared.”
We stand there holding each other up amid the shoppers and the rain and the traffic, two sad parents huddled under an umbrella. We drive home and the whole city is full of Mia. That was where she played soccer for five years, this was where we walked her to school, here’s her best friend’s street. Even the car makes me ache. In LA, mothers and daughters spend half their life together in the car; we’d talk about sleepovers, which trail has the best wildflowers, what she wanted to be when she grew up.
Homeless drug addict wasn’t on the list.
What a joke. They can’t possibly think a psych ward is going to do anything besides waste enough money to feed a small country. Even if I needed “help”—which I don’t—why would I talk to anyone here? All they do is nod and pretend to listen, while really trying to figure out if you’re better labeled as having a mood disorder or acute paranoia. Which really just means you’re bitchy and irritable or worry too much. Nothing that couldn’t be solved with a joint and a shut the fuck up.
Helen, my social worker, now she’s another animal altogether. She’s not interested in labels or pills, she wants to reach out and touch someone! People like her all love being able to “reach a troubled youth,” it makes them feel good or some shit, like their lives have meaning because they’ve figured you out. She’ll be so easy to bullshit.
Mia’s treatment consists primarily of sessions with a social worker, Helen. I guess the anorexics get the PhDs. I tell Helen I think this may be linked to Mia’s early molestation. In the two weeks she’s there, they never address it at all. Because Mia says it has nothing to do with it, it’s ancient history, my mother’s crazy. And Helen believes her.
Mia’s back to no showering, she wants to drop out, do drugs, and live among homeless gutterpunks but they think she’s fine, she needs more independence, I’m too controlling, her school’s too rigid. And the pièce de résistance—we’re supposed to agree with Mia’s plan of action: if she goes straight home she’ll do drugs and run away, if she lives somewhere else for a while, she won’t. Helen is proud of Mia’s “reasonable solution.”
“That’s not a solution, that’s a threat! Can’t you see Mia’s manipulating you? Am I the only sane person in this room?”
I had no idea my life with Nick was training camp. Back down the rabbit hole.
Helen looks at Mia sympathetically. “Mia feels you don’t acknowledge her feelings,” she says in that gentle therapist tone that makes me want to strangle her.
You nitwit! Mia’s not running away because I don’t acknowledge her feelings. It’s because I do. It’s not about the drugs or her school or arguments with me at home. My daughter is running because she’s in pain. And I know why. She hates me for that.
They don’t get it, I’m NOT going back. She’s psychotic, she always has to make it about him, dredge up the past for no reason. She’s the one that’s driving me nuts now, that reads my diaries, asks me if I’m in a cult, sticks me in this shit-hole. She’s the one who’s always nagging, questioning, commenting. I’m weird, I’m dirty, I’m lazy. It’s like living under a giant microscope that sees any minor flaw in cosmic proportions. I accidentally leave my shoe in the doorway and the next thing I know I’m the spawn of Satan. Which maybe isn’t too far off—that would make her the Devil.
I may have won a battle in capturing her, but she’s got the will of Patton, this girl. In our last session, Mia pulls out the big guns. She’s also not coming home because there is A Man in our building who was “bothering” her, you know, sexually threatening her. In unison, Paul and I go bug-eyed and swivel our heads at her.
It is a comically strange moment, Paul and I looking from Mia to each other to Helen to Mia to each other. Paul and I know she’s lying, the only man it could be is gay. Mia knows we know, and all three of us know that we can’t say so or we look like horrible parents. I’ll prove everything she’s said about me, how I never believe her.
Paul starts to ask her about this Man but Helen cuts him off—Mia’s not ready to talk about it, it’s too upsetting, we must respect her privacy.
I needn’t have worried about Mia’s IQ. Her tactical brilliance is stunning.
Paul and I stagger out of there like it’s Groundhog Day and we have to keep reliving one bad Mia day after another.
“Goddamn idiots,” Paul says angrily. “She’s too upset to even talk about what some ‘man’ in the building did, but they haven’t called the police?”
“Now, you’re saying this, in the parking lot? You couldn’t have said it to Helen? God forbid you cast any doubt on what Mia’s been saying about me. Now you know how I felt the last year when you all told me nothing was wrong with Mia!”
I fume the whole way home. I hate it now, walking past her bedroom window to the back door. I hate walking into my own home. It’s the same place, the same high ceilings and crown moldings I’ve always loved, the same antiques and gleaming oak floors, but now it feels like it should have crime scene tape around it, the site of recent carnage.
I storm around the kitchen making dinner to let off steam. I finally slam the frying pan down on the stovetop.
“I’m not the reason she ran away and you know it!” I yell at Paul. “What none of you idiots get is that I’d be thrilled to death if it was all because of me! Because if I caused this, then I could do whatever it takes to uncause it!!”
Paul looks like a deer in headlights, staring at me with his big celery-colored eyes. I don’t have a physical temper, I’m not pot slammer.
“Okay, Claire, you were right,” he says softly, “but we can’t go back, it’s done. What can we do now? There’s gotta be something we can do now to turn this around.”
Yeah, right, and I know what it is, I just forgot to tell everyone. He’s doing what he usually does—leave all the decisions with consequences to me.
Something suddenly occurs to me: Mia writes everything down. I march down the hall to her bedroom and flip on the light.
“The truth is somewhere in this room.”
While the rain pounds outside, we scavenge for Mia’s inner life. And little by little, the clues come out. Random slips of paper tucked in a science notebook, entries between math assignments. A tiny blue spiral jammed inside a binder pocket.
I pick up a diorama Mia made last semester, showing her outer and inner self. The outside is covered with trees, the ocean, her friends. Inside, she’s made four quadrants, four selves. There’s a jungle, tigers, her National Geographic self. There’s a palette, guitar pick, horses. And there are two little houses, in a blackened corner painted with red slashes. One house has flowered curtains. This must be her happy house, I think, the good memories. I pick up the roof and inside are the words lies, depression, pervert.
The other house has a black roof with a red eye, carefully glued down. Outside are two men. One is a magazine photo of a man’s face, with the horns of a devil pasted on. The other is a little ragdoll man. It reminds me of the anatomically correct dolls that haunted me for so long. There’s a strand of yarn attached to him that disappears under the roof. Already, my heart is sinking.
I carefully tear off the roof and find the sad buried treasure. The yarn is attached to a girl doll inside the house. She’s such a tiny thing, rammed in upside down, with her bare legs sticking straight up. I suddenly see Mia’s four-year-old, skinny legs sticking up in the air. Curled around the girl doll is a poem she wrote, called “Him,” on three little pages with Mia’s writing:
Why did he do it to me? Dreams now about the abuse, no blocking anymore, can’t ever be happy, life sucks. I feel so depressed and angry. I hate myself.
I carry Mia’s writings to the hospital as if I carried her very salvation in a nine-by-twelve brown envelope. I carry it like Helen’s head on a platter. Hail, the conquering Mother, riding high astride the steed named I Told Them So.
I might as well have arrived in a tumbrel.
First charge: Invasion of Privacy. How dare you read your daughter’s journals?
Second charge: Making Assumptions About That Which You Know Not Of. Those writings mean nothing, you aren’t trained, you have no ability to judge.
Third, on asking again about the mysterious Man who’s threatening her: You Have No Respect for Boundaries. Mia will speak when she’s ready. Bad mother, baaad mother.
She’ll talk when she’s ready, she’ll come home when she’s ready, she’ll stop doing drugs when she’s ready. Meantime, Helen and her supervising psychologist have agreed with Mia that she should live with our friend, Sara, her old second-grade teacher, for a spell. We’re not to ask Mia about drugs, forbid her to smoke, or bring up anything she doesn’t want to talk about.
In fact, the most helpful position we can take now is “sitting back.” Let her make her own choices, they say. I think a much more useful thing is to remind these two Einsteins what Mia’s choices have been lately. This does not go over well. I finally just give up. My blood pressure’s gone through the roof and I’ve ground the enamel off my molars but I smile and say Fine! Sure! Sara’s might be just the thing! It’ll give everyone a little break! It’ll keep me from killing my own daughter is what it’ll do.
“Ms. Fontaine, we laud you for being so open!” Laud, they actually use this word. Oh, it’s paeans and laurels for me now. Then they thank me for “sending Mia a message of trust.” What I’ve sent is a message of stupidity and weakness. I want to bang their heads against the beige wall. Better yet, I should bang my own, leave my blood as a warning to the next unsuspecting parent.
My memory is visual, my feelings are recorded in images. This exact moment, when being Mia’s mommy ended, will be remembered as an iron gray sky, as Mia’s averted eyes, as Paul’s fingers gripped on the arms of a stainless steel chair.
This is what is recorded when the cord is cut and the blissful bubble that was always my life with Mia lifts up without me in it for the first time. And with it goes my anger. My fury melts and recasts itself into something that feels much worse. Resignation, defeat, acknowledgment. That we will never again be to each other what we were.
Thank God they’re gone. I feel like shit. They look so miserable and confused. That’s why I never wanted them to see this side of me, why I kept it hidden. And they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t tried to find me! That’s why I get so mad, they fucked everything up and now I end up feeling guilty!
Two days ago I was so happy. Rain took us to the beach, across from the tide pools, to this huge drum circle. Joints and bottles were passed around and the beats being pumped out were so strong the sand seemed to shake. It was all so primal. It was a castaway circle filled with shouting Rastas, angry punks, hippie girls in flowing skirts twirling about like dancing fireflies. It was so alive.
It was awesome, one minute I didn’t know a soul and the next I had a group of friends and a place to crash. That’s what I love about the streets, how unpredictable it is, how chaotic and raw.
And now they want me to go back? Back to Hopkins’ manicured world? Back to hiding under a straight-A face, to walking around smiling and hollow? I’d rather slice my hand open to remind myself I’m flesh and blood and not plastic.
I leave there feeling motherness drain out of me with each step. I’m skin in the shape of a woman but nothing inside feels solid, wet, living.
It materializes suddenly, as if I turned a corner and there it was in my path. Something I laughed off long ago, then let slither along in our shadow for a dozen years, just out of memory’s reach, but licking at my heels. Now, here it lies, coiled and patient, waiting all this time for my certain arrival.
Ella’s warning. Ten years ago, she had told me so. On a balcony outside her office in Chicago, just before we moved to L.A. Mia was galloping around the courtyard below us like a giddy pony, stopping to whinny and throw her head back. It was two years since she’d last seen Nick.
Ella told us Mia was doing well and didn’t need therapy anymore.
However.
When Mia becomes an adolescent, she added, and becomes sexually aware, issues will come up for her about Nick and the abuse. She’ll have problems. Have her see someone who deals with early incest trauma.
I only half listened to her. Adolescence? That’s years away, she’ll have had so much time to heal and be happy. Adolescence is a lifetime away!
I call the hospital in the morning and request a psychiatrist specializing in Mia’s issues. The day of our appointment, Paul and I return to the ward with cautious hope. If, as Ella said, this behavior is so predictable, perhaps a treatment for it is, too, by someone with appropriate training.
The tall, blond doctor is waiting in the hall for us. I don’t know what I must have been in a former life to have earned this karma—a warthog, Caligula—but she extends her hand with a kind smile and says,
“Hello, I’m Dr. P.”
Oh. My. God. Paul and I stand there with our mouths hanging open. She stares at us, waiting. We can’t even stammer a reply.
“Is something wrong?” she asks patiently.
“Yes!” I finally manage. “Are you related to Nick P from Philadelphia?”
Twelve years later and thousands of miles away, the one psychiatrist in the entire state of California that I happen to get is Nick’s cousin.
History isn’t repeating itself, it’s stuttering.
“Him”
He enters my room and the eyes on my dolls shut, stuffed animals bear witness with glazed eyes
That can’t shed tears.
With his every footstep I watch the footprint permanently imprinted in the tufts of my carpet.
He stains it gray.
Somewhere in the background, I hear running water and wish it would wash over me,
Like thousands of hands calming me, streaming over me with my mother’s angelic smile.
But instead of her laughing, joyous face, I can see only his leering grin towering over me,
Like trying to coax a fox into a trap.
But, I have tricked him, my father,
And I leave, dissipate into the air.
He finally leaves after eternity has ended but I remain paralyzed on the floor.
My stuffed animals’ eyes are frozen open in shock.
MIA, AGED 14