The Girl Behind the Door (16 page)

“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 notch 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. “Ohh
hh
 . . .” 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.”

“Mr. DiStefano said he'd give me a good recommendation.”

I smiled. “See? C'mon, honey, try not to worry. You've got plenty of time. You're gonna be fine.” I hoped I sounded convincing. I dreaded the thought of a meltdown—or worse—if she didn't get into one of her dream schools.

“Yeah, right.” She sighed and flipped another glossy page of the brochure.

Later that night, I was alone in the living room on the sofa watching
60 Minutes
. One of Apple's cool commercials came on for the iPhone that was due to come out in late June. Casey shuffled through the room on her way to the kitchen from her bedroom. She was wearing her black hoodie, skintight jeans, and fuzzy lamb's wool slippers. Stopping at the TV, her head dropped, mouth wide open. She pointed at the screen and croaked. “I want one!” Unfortunately, her birthday had passed and she already had a cell phone.

“Everybody wants one,” I said.

“Ohh
hh
 . . .” She looked at me with pleading eyes.

“Besides, you just got that Razr phone.”

She put on her best pouty five-year-old act. “I know-
ow
 . . .”

“Maybe someone will be nice and get you one for Christmas.”

“Da-
ad
,” she whined. “That's like six months away-
ay
.” She was playing with me again, and probably didn't expect me to drop four hundred dollars on a new phone. We tried to teach her the virtue of delayed gratification, waiting for special occasions to dole out those kinds of gifts.

Feigning disappointment, she dragged herself to the kitchen, grabbed a Diet Dr Pepper from the fridge, and headed back to her room, glancing at me as she walked by, her lower lip stuck out in a pout. At seventeen, she still knew how to tug on my heart. I turned back to the TV. Mike Wallace was interviewing Jack Kevorkian—Dr. Death.

Minutes later, Erika walked in from the bedroom and planted herself between the TV and me, a grave look on her face. Had I done something wrong, like throwing out the newspaper or pouring out her cold coffee before she was done with it? I sat up. “What's the matter?” The look on her face worried me.

“I want to show you something.” She stood rigid as if trying to contain an explosion. I followed her to our bedroom. She closed the door and pointed to my dresser. “Look at what I found in our daughter's room.”

My dresser looked like the scene of a drug bust—a formidable collection of pharmaceuticals and paraphernalia that Erika had arranged in a neat display. In stark juxtaposition to this pharmacy sat two framed photographs—one of the three of us at Casey's baptism in Simsbury and one of her smiling from her new bike when she was six.

I gazed at the evidence. There was a glass pipe that I picked up and sniffed—grass. A small, clear, self-sealing bag contained what appeared to be a few grams of pot. But what caught my eye were things I didn't recognize. I picked up a gray plastic film container—the same kind I used as a teen to store my grass—popped the lid off, and poured the contents into my hand. It was something organic, brownish with no smell. Mushrooms? An orange plastic pill bottle that had once contained my Paxil prescription was now half full of round white pills with smiley faces printed on them. What the hell were they? Acid? Ecstasy? Another clear plastic bag contained yet more pills that had a strange organic look to them. Erika stood next to me, arms crossed, close to tears.

I was so stunned I couldn't respond. I'd been duped by my teenage daughter and now felt like a world-class chump. Like a gullible idiot, I'd prayed this whole problem would blow over or fix itself. Maybe we
did
need to carry through on our threat to send her away.

Screw college.

“Goddamn her,” I muttered, disgusted with myself and my daughter.

Erika picked up the bottle with the white pills. “We've lost control over our daughter.” Looking at the pipe, pills, and weed on my dresser, it seemed as though there were more drugs than a single person would need for casual use.

Maybe she had a serious addiction, but how was that possible when we saw her every day? If she was doing drugs under our noses, she must have had a talent for never looking high. She always looked perfectly straight. Could she have been dealing? I wanted to put her in front of a firing squad. “Let me get her in here,” I grumbled.

Erika stayed in the bedroom while I went to Casey's room. The door was open, so I walked in. She was in her usual place, hunched over her desk with her iPod plugged into her ears. She looked up at me innocently and pulled out an earbud.

“Casey, could you come with me, please?” She followed me to our bedroom, where Erika waited by my dresser. Casey looked at the arrangement of substances and paraphernalia as if they were totally alien to her. Erika stood silently while I asked, “What is this?”

Casey shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Erika couldn't contain herself. “Casey, I found all this in your room!”

Casey's face flashed red. “WHAT?! YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO SEARCH MY ROOM! THAT'S A VIOLATION OF MY
PRIVACY
! HOW
DARE
YOU!”

She looked at both of us, indignant. She was angry at
us
? Man, this kid had chutzpah. I picked up the pill bottle and shook it in front of her face. “What the hell is this, Casey? Ecstasy? Acid? Where did you get this stuff?”

She shook her head at me, her eyes filling with fear. “This isn't mine, Dad! Someone wanted me to hold it for them!”

Erika jumped in. “Oh, really? Who?” That was exactly what I wanted to know.

Casey's fear turned to rage. “I would never rat out my friends to
YOU
!”

Erika fired back, “Casey, are you dealing this stuff?”

She shot Erika a piercing look. Pushing past me, she marched back to her room. I called after her, “Casey, get back here!” Her door slammed and she proceeded to pummel it, her screams echoing through the house.

Erika and I planted ourselves on either side of her door like two hostage negotiators. Trying in vain to control my temper, I told Erika under my breath, “I want to strangle this kid.”

“I HEARD THAT!” Casey screamed from the other side of the door as she gave it another hard kick.

I wanted to take a sledgehammer to that door.

“SOON I'M GOING TO BE EIGHTEEN AND I'M GOING TO GO AWAY!” she howled. “YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO BOSS ME AROUND. I'LL NEVER CALL YOU AND YOU'LL JUST GET OLD AND
DIE
!”

Now
I
hated my own daughter. Her behavior wasn't normal—the vicious tirades, primal screaming, smashing her door. It was like a force had taken over that she couldn't control.

I tried pushing on the door with my shoulder. Though virtually inoperative from our many attempts to pop it open, we had decided to take the lock off in a futile attempt to treat her privacy as a privilege, but Casey had a grip like a vice on the other side.
Jesus Christ, she's strong
. Meanwhile, she wouldn't stop screaming, crying, and kicking.
Goddamn it, the neighbors will surely call Child Protective Services this time.

Erika and I took turns trying to twist the doorknob. We were scared to death of what might happen on the other side of that door. I was tempted to kick it in, what was left of it.

After a half hour of trying unsuccessfully to pry open the door and get her to calm down, I'd had enough. I talked to her through the door as if negotiating with a terrorist. “Casey, if you don't stop, I'm calling the cops!”

Another kick. We left for the kitchen, where I dialed the Tiburon Police.

I walked back to Casey's door. It was open, but now the bathroom door next to it was locked. We hadn't noticed that she'd slipped out of her room and into the bathroom while we were in the kitchen.

Erika hurried to the bathroom door. “CASEY, WHAT'RE YOU DOING IN THERE? OPEN THIS DOOR!” She pounded on it, but there was no sound from the other side. She screamed, “Ca
SEY
!”

An image flashed through my head of my worst nightmare—breaking down the door to find Casey on the floor inside, unconscious, covered in blood, a razor blade in her cold, limp hand. Even though we hadn't seen any evidence of cutting in a long time, we still tried to hide the blades in the house.

The doorbell rang. Erika joined me as I opened the door to a Tiburon police officer. His cruiser was parked on the street. He was young with a strong build, military-style haircut, and wraparound sunglasses. His name tag read
GILBREATH.
He could've been Casey's older brother.

We explained the events of the past hour, leaving out the part about the drugs, though I was tempted to teach her a lesson by handing her and the drugs over to law enforcement. Officer Gilbreath was calm and professional as he listened to us.