January First: A Child's Descent Into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her (12 page)

For three years I have been hoping to see those eyes again.

There is another photo. One Sara took as we left Violet’s birthday party. In it, Janni’s face is expressionless, devoid of emotion. Looking back at that photo now, I can see what I missed then: There is no emotion in her eyes. When I come to visit Janni, I don’t expect a return
to those eyes of three years ago at the park. All I am looking for is a softening of her expression into an actual emotion. I’m looking for some sense of the rebirth of peace. This is what I wanted Alhambra to fix. But they didn’t.

Janni is leaving on the same medications she came in on: Seroquel, an antipsychotic, and Depakote, a mood stabilizer.

I look down at the discharge summary. Next to “Diagnosis” is simply “Mood Disorder NOS,” meaning “not otherwise specified.” Meaning Wingfield doesn’t know what is wrong with our daughter. After two weeks, we are right back where we started.

Three days ago, I got a letter in the mail from Blue Cross, Susan’s health insurance, addressed to “January Schofield.” When I opened it, the letter read, “After careful review, authorization for further inpatient days is denied, based on one or more of the following criteria:”

      1.
The patient no longer meets the criteria for acute psychiatric hospitalization as per your
Blue Cross Patient Handbook.

The requirements for acute psychiatric inpatient care are that the patient must be an
immediate
(meaning in this exact moment in time) threat to him/herself or others. The fact that Janni has continued to react violently to Bodhi’s crying, forcing us to leave visiting hours early, apparently does not qualify, since Janni has not articulated an actual plan to harm him.

      2.
The patient is not responding to the current course of treatment
.

Apparently, if you have a psychiatric illness, you better hope the first course of treatment is the right one. Somehow, I don’t think Blue
Cross would say this to a child with leukemia who hadn’t responded to the first round of chemotherapy.

      3.
The patient is not improving and there is no reasonable expectation of the patient making a recovery or improving beyond his/her current status
.

I pick up the phone and call Blue Cross, asking, “So what are we supposed to do?”

“You can take her to a state hospital,” the soulless woman on the other end replies.

“There are no state hospitals anymore,” I inform her. Former California governor Pete Wilson closed the last state psychiatric hospital, Camarillo State Hospital, in 1998. Ironically, the former Camarillo State Hospital is now the newest campus of the California State University system, the very same university system I work for. There are a handful of places with “State Hospital” after their name, but these are actually prisons for sex offenders, not psychiatric facilities.

The woman on the other end of the line has no answer for me.

Janni is being released not because she’s gotten over whatever it is that brought her to this place, but because the insurance company won’t pay anymore.

I turn to Janni, who is waiting in the hallway with her Disney Princess roller suitcase.

“You ready to come home?” I ask, looking for anything in her demeanor that shows change.

“Yep,” she answers. I see no gravity in her face, no appreciation of her impending freedom.

“You got Hero? We wouldn’t want to leave him here.”

“I got him. Where are we going to eat?”

“Well, since this is a special day, I thought we’d go to Pizza Kitchen.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“Well, there’s gonna be some traffic right now. It might take us an hour or so.”

Janni screams.

I look to Susan, who quickly covers Bodhi’s three-month-old ears with her hands. She looks up at me, naked fear on her face. We lived without this for two weeks and didn’t realize how much of a vacation it was.

The nurse cuts in. “Janni. What did I tell you? No screaming.”

“Fine,” Janni says, sulkily. “But I don’t want to deal with Bodhi’s crying.”

I look at the discharge nurse. “Are you sure she’s ready to be released?”

“You have to allow for readjustment time,” the nurse replies, reading our faces.

It’s almost evening and the sun is setting as we walk back to the car. I close my eyes, enjoying the warmth of the sun on my face.

I open my eyes and look at Janni. Her face is blank, her head down, plodding along pulling her suitcase.

We reach our car and I load her bag. When I put my hands on the rear hatch to close it, I realize they are shaking. I’m terrified of my own daughter, of the first explosion of violence I can still sense in Janni, waiting to erupt.

I pull my hands down and rub them roughly together. I have to get control of my emotions. I have become “shell-shocked,” living for so long in constant fear of Janni hurting Bodhi that I can’t remember ever not feeling this way.

Janni opens the front passenger door and climbs in.

“Janni, you need to sit in the back,” I say. “It’s the law.”

“No,” Janni answers.

“Janni, get in the backseat,” I repeat, trying to sound commanding but hearing the fear in my voice.

“I don’t want to,” Janni answers.

“Let it go,” Susan tells me.

“No,” I reply, trying to sound stronger than I feel. “She needs to do what we say.”

“It’s fine,” Susan answers, already in the backseat. “I’m tired. I want to go home.”

I look at Susan, wanting her to back me up, but also understanding. I don’t really care if Janni wants to sit in the front. Like Susan, all I really want is peace. I just want us to go home.

As I load Bodhi’s car seat into the car, a distinct odor reaches me. I’m going to have to change Bodhi. He cries in the car anyway, but a dirty diaper will only make it worse. When Janni was an infant, she never seemed to care.

I take Bodhi out of his car seat and gently lay him down in the grass in front of the car to change him.

“I want to go,” Janni calls from inside the car.

“Janni, can you bring me the wipes?”

“I’m hungry!” she yells.

“Janni, I have to change him. I never left you in a poopie. I always changed you right away.” I want her to understand that everything I do for Bodhi I also did for her.

Janni reluctantly gets out of the car and brings me the wipes. She remains standing by me as I change Bodhi. I feel a rush of hope. This is what I want, her beside me.

“I’ll go throw it away,” Susan calls, getting out of the car.

“No, I will.” I hand her the freshly diapered Bodhi and stand up. There is a dumpster in the far corner of the parking lot.

I start walking and light a cigarette. I have to be calm for the drive home. It’s going to be a long one.

I come back to the car and climb in the driver’s side.

Bodhi begins to cry.

Instantly, every nerve in my body goes on full alert. I watch Janni. For a second she doesn’t react. Then she puts her hands over her ears and screams, “Bodhi! Stop crying!”

“Janni!” I call, warning her, my voice threatening. “You want to go to Pizza Kitchen, right?”

“He won’t stop crying!”

“Janni, we’re not going anywhere until I know you’re going to be okay with Bodhi.”

“Make him stop crying!” she says to Susan, almost begging, as if she really believes Susan can stop it.

“If you want him to stop crying, why don’t you play with him?” I say. “Entertain him.”

She grabs a bottle of water next to her.

I put my hand over the bottle of water. “Janni, if you throw that at him, we are not going to Pizza Kitchen!” I say, staring at her, hoping she’ll accept my threat and back down.

She lets go of the water bottle. I relax. “Good girl,” I say, turning back to the steering column and putting on my seat belt.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Janni take off her shoe. I grab for it, but the seat belt won’t let me reach. Janni turns around in her seat, gets up on her knees, and throws the shoe back. Susan knocks it away.

I release my seat belt and grab Janni’s other shoe. Janni starts looking around for something to throw.

“Janni, sit down!” I command. The fear is gone, replaced by adrenaline. I am back in battle.

Janni ignores me and reaches for her CD cases to throw. I take them from her. As I do, she hits me and screams again.

“She wasn’t ready to be released,” Susan cries from the back.

“I know that!” I snap. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

“She needs to go back!”

“No! We are not going back! She is part of this family and she has to learn to follow our rules!” I reach past Janni and open her door. “Get out,” I order.

Janni looks at me, that same evil grin on her face. “No.”

“Get out!” I say again. “When you calm down, you can get back in this car.”

She doesn’t move. Instead, she’s staring at me, grinning, daring me to pull her out.

So I do. I get out and go around and pull her out onto the pavement, where she sits down like a sullen child.

I go to the back of the car and get Hero Bear out of her suitcase. “Here, hold Hero.” I hold her bear out to her. “When Bodhi cries, just squeeze Hero Bear.” I realize I’m ping-ponging back and forth between treating her like the child she is and treating her like the angry teenager she might actually be. I don’t know who she is.

Janni takes Hero from me. But instead of hugging him to her, she starts yanking at his head.

“Janni, what are you doing?”

“Trying to pull his head off.”

“Don’t do that!”

I take Hero from her. She grabs him back and pitches him into the parking lot.

“Janni, why did you do that?”

“I don’t want him anymore. He’s a bad bear.”

“She’s not ready to go,” Susan says again.

Suddenly, Janni reaches in through the still-open front passenger door and starts throwing anything she can get her hands on into the parking lot. The contents of the front of the car are piling up on the asphalt behind me.

Bodhi is still crying. Janni moves to the rear passenger door, Bodhi’s door, and starts to open it. Inside, I see Susan immediately put herself over Bodhi. I grab Janni and pull her back, away from the car.

“She needs to go back!” Susan screams at me. “How long are you going to wait? Until she kills him? Do you think those idiots back in there,” she points to Alhambra, “will care if she kills Bodhi? They’ll just say ‘Oh, well.’ ”

I know. I should have brought both cars, I think angrily to myself, but I decided on one car, to have us ride as a family, to prove to myself that we could function normally. But Janni has been out for thirty minutes and we can’t even make it out of the parking lot. This is not going to work.

“Come on, Janni,” I say, defeated. “Let’s go.”

Janni immediately stops trying to hit Susan and Bodhi and looks up at me. “Where are we going?”

“Back inside.”

Janni doesn’t protest. I pick Hero up off the pavement and hand him to her. This time she hugs him to her. I get her suitcase out of the back of the car.

Susan follows, Bodhi in her arms, as we retrace the steps we walked forty minutes ago. It is a walk of shame.

I pick up the phone outside the gate.

“Nursing,” comes the answer on the other end.

“It’s Michael Schofield. We’re still here. We never made it out of the parking lot. Janni has been hitting and screaming the whole time.”

“So what do you want us to do?” the woman replies, sounding confused, like this has never happened before.

“We’re bringing her back.”

“But she’s already been discharged!”

“I realize that, but nothing has changed. She is still violent.”

“Just a minute.”

I wait. The discharge nurse who walked us out comes on the line. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing’s changed, that’s what’s going on. She’s still as violent as ever.”

“I told you it would take time for her to get readjusted.”

“We can’t even get home,” I reply.

The nurse sighs. “We’ll be right out.”

We wait. Janni is calm now. The nurse comes out with one of the technicians.

“What’s going on, Janni?”

Janni suddenly kicks at Susan, while trying to reach up and hit Bodhi. Susan lifts him clear.

“Whoa, Janni!” the tech says, moving forward to take her by the shoulders. “You can’t do that.”

“I am going to get scissors and cut off my feet!” Janni announces.

All of us fall silent, stunned.

“Why do you want to do that?” the nurse asks.

“Because then I can’t kick Mommy and Bodhi.” She is breathing heavily from the exertion of fighting to get free from the tech, her eyes still fixed on Susan and Bodhi.

Everything goes dead inside me … all the anger and frustration. I feel nothing. Behind me, I can hear Susan break into a sob.

“Okay, Janni,” the nurse says. “Come with me.” She holds out her hand.

Janni abruptly stops fighting against the technician and calmly takes the nurse’s hand with Hero in her other as they turn toward the adolescent unit, looking like a child happily going off with her mother.

Except that her mother is sobbing behind me.

“Janni,” I call, still not sure if I’m doing the right thing.

She twists back, still walking away. “It’s okay, Mommy and Daddy. Just bring me my food and visit me at visiting hours.”

WE DRIVE HOME in the darkness, the seat beside me empty. Susan is in the back with Bodhi, who has thankfully fallen asleep as
we ride in silence. I can hear her sobbing softly. I know I need to comfort her, but I don’t know what to say. There is no comfort.

Finally, Susan calls her mother.

“She said she wanted to cut her feet off,” Susan cries into the phone. “She wanted to go back. She knew she wasn’t ready to come home, so she told them what she knew would get her back in.” Susan chokes on a sob. “She’s happy there.”

I drive, listening to the only side of the conversation I can hear.