The Girl Behind the Door (20 page)

A tip from her friend Roxanne led to another secret online destination, a social networking site predating Facebook where we found heartbreaking journal posts dating back to 2005, when Casey was fourteen.

February 2005:
My body is sort of a benign tumor. I believe that is why I'm so terrified of relationships.

April 2007:
I never let anyone get too close. I want someone to fix me, to hold me, tell me they love me with all my imperfections. I'm hopelessly flawed.

October 2007, just four months before her suicide:
I've been failing for five years now. Five fucking years. Good job Casey, good fucking job. What should I put on my college application? “Extremely adept at killing myself slowly?”

Casey had spat venom at us many times in fits of rage. But they were the remarks of a petulant teenager who wanted to rattle her parents. These online journal posts were private. They chilled me as I read them.

There was still more.

Erika kept Casey's iPhone close by so she could listen to her voice on the mailbox greeting: “
Please leave your message for
 . . .
Quasey
.”

On Valentine's Day, two weeks after Casey died, we picked in silence at a plate of unheated pasta in the kitchen, left behind by well-wishers, when Casey's phone hummed. Erika grabbed it, trembling as she looked at the screen. There was a text string from a girl named Rose.

Casey are you there?

Casey are you all right?

Casey, what's going on? Isabel and I are starting to worry about you.

“I'm going to text her back.” Erika punched at the screen with her thumbs. “I don't know who she is, but she obviously doesn't know what happened.”

Within seconds the phone erupted with a gangster-rap ringtone. Erika picked it up. “Hello?”

Her expression turned from curious to somber. She put her hand to her mouth and abruptly left the kitchen. After a half hour she returned to place the phone back on the countertop. Her face was ashen, as if she was in shock.

I spoke up. “Honey, what happened?”

Erika explained. Rose was at a boarding school in Michigan and had met Casey through another online message board when they were both in middle school. They talked openly and anonymously about depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, cutting, and suicidal thoughts. They'd connected regularly with a circle of girls from as far away as Texas, Pennsylvania, the U.K., Norway, and Brazil.

According to Rose, many of them were estranged from their parents, lonely and misunderstood, often self-destructive. It was in the safety of this online forum that Casey opened up about her own battles with demons and despair.

We learned that she'd driven the Saab to the Golden Gate Bridge late on January 27, the Sunday night before she died, apparently intent on jumping.

Listening to Erika's words, I felt as though I'd been smashed in the face by a two-by-four. My throat tightened as the story unfolded. Images of how it might have played out consumed me.

I pictured her parking the Saab in the Dillingham parking lot on the southbound side of the Highway 101 approach, taking the rickety wooden stairs to the pedestrian walkway under the bridge so that she could get to the northbound side facing views of the city and the bay.

Even late on a Sunday night she would have heard the
br-brapp, br-brapp
drone of traffic hitting the ribbed joints of the roadbed overhead. Then she would have climbed the stairs to the parking lot at Vista Point where the tourist buses stopped and maybe lit up a Camel Light, just as she did the following Tuesday morning. Then she would have headed for the pedestrian walkway that led onto the bridge.

A cautionary poster attached to the gate reads:

SEE SOMETHING? SAY SOMETHING!

A blue sign mounted over a yellow call box announces:

CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL. THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC!

But it wasn't the warning signs that stopped her. The six-and-a-half-foot gate to the walkway had automatically closed and locked at nine o'clock that night; it would reopen again at five o'clock the next morning. So Casey returned to the Saab and drove home.

Stunned, I asked Erika, “How did Rose know this?”

“She said that Casey reported the whole thing on the message board after she came home.” She held up Casey's iPhone with the message from Rose for me to see.

I had a really bad scare last night. It was so close between life and death.

I'm not sure if I made the right decision. I'm just so tired of life and everything in it.

I hope I never even think of doing such a thing again.

:| :| :|

I stared at the words as if they'd been written by a stranger.

I'd always thought that if someone was bent on taking his or her life, nothing would stop them. But I've since learned that suicide is often impulsive—a transient urge. Once the impulse passed and the victim had an opportunity to reconsider, the chances were good that he or she wouldn't try again.

But Casey did try again. Less than thirty-six hours after she'd sent that text she went back. Her jump—her despair—had not been impulsive. There was something deeper.

T
hree years later I remained haunted, just drifting through life. I lost my job when my division at Wells Fargo Bank was axed in the 2009 financial meltdown, but I didn't care about work or anything else anymore. I threw myself into writing Casey's story even though I'd never written a book before. In the spring of 2011, I sat in Dr. Palmer's office. I wanted to know what he'd learned in his sessions with Casey.

He was cordial but professionally detached, almost robotic. It was as if we were talking about any other patient rather than a dead child. I asked him what he remembered about Casey, anything that stood out. He flipped through his notes to jog his memory, as four years had passed since he'd seen her. Then his face brightened.

“I was impressed that she was a very bright kid with a piercing intelligence.”

I nodded at his unexpectedly favorable opinion.
A piercing intelligence
.

He checked his notes again. “I remember asking her about her life when she was nine.”

He explained that, in his experience, these were often a child's golden years, before the challenges and pressures of middle school and high school.

“She said that she was pretty happy then. She had a lot of friends, played soccer and video games, and she said she even had vivid dreams.” He paused, studying his notepad. “She told me that was a pretty good time.”

My mood lifted at the image of Casey sitting where I was, telling this bearded, professorial type about the good times in her life. It was gratifying to hear that we did something right. Life wasn't always miserable for her.

“That's nice to hear,” I said. “What did she have to say about her high school years?”

“She talked about being irritable a lot of the time and she often had trouble sleeping.” Perhaps noticing the concerned look on my face, he added, “She didn't like being irritable or angry, and she didn't necessarily blame it on you and Erika.”

That was a pleasant surprise. “Really? She said that?” I asked. “I thought everything was our fault.”

“She was actually quite unhappy that there was so much friction in her relationship with you.” Dr. Palmer looked up from his pad. “She didn't like losing control of herself and she was even shocked by her own behavior sometimes.”

I looked down at the floor, searching for another question as Dr. Palmer flipped back and forth through his notepad.

“I did ask her several times if she had any suicidal thoughts and she swore she didn't.” He also reported that she'd insisted that she'd never used drugs, cut herself, or purged. I allowed myself a smirk. Casey was not about to divulge anything to an authority figure such as a parent or a shrink. I wondered if Dr. Palmer believed her denials or chose to avoid confrontation, but I said nothing.

“I'm afraid that's about all I've got,” he said. We sat for a minute until he asked, “So how are
you
doing?”

His clinical demeanor remained unchanged. He was pleasant enough but I didn't sense an opening to spill my guts, so I swallowed the lump rising in my throat and mumbled, “Not very well,” without elaborating. This wasn't a therapy session and he wasn't offering a salve for the pain. Nonetheless, our short meeting yielded some important information about how Casey saw herself and how she might've felt about her relationship with Erika and me. If only she'd had a bit more patience, Dr. Palmer might have found that magic pill she so desperately needed.

The following week, Erika and I met in Dianne's office. We sat across from her in the same oversize black leather chairs that seemed so comfortable years earlier when we'd first met. But this time there was an awkward tension between us.

I leaned forward so that I was at eye level with her. “You were Casey's last therapist. What did you see in her? What did you talk about?”

She prefaced her remarks with an outline of her therapy style—getting to know the patient, gaining their trust and connecting as a precondition to doing the work. She emphasized that in her forty years of practice, the overwhelming majority of her young patients had thoroughly embraced her. Then she drew a sharp distinction with Casey, describing her as bright and bored, but also exhibiting behavior typical of someone into drugs—sardonic, sarcastic, and disdainful of authority figures.

As I listened I couldn't help but think that this could have described any teenager, and I was irritated at her attempt to single out Casey from her other patients as if she were some kind of bad apple.

Erika and I exchanged scornful glances. I searched for a way to redirect the conversation. Dianne had mentioned something a while back about Casey's infancy, but I couldn't remember the term she'd used. In my foggy state my thought bubble vanished before I could decipher it. “Did you ever talk to her about her infancy or any memories she might've had about the orphanage?”