The Girl Behind the Door (21 page)

“Well, when I asked her to go to ‘that place,' she'd scream at me.”

None of this was helpful, so I tried yet another track. “Dianne, why do you think Casey jumped?”

She stiffened. “It was the drugs.”

I was weary over her incessant drumbeat about drugs and spoke up. “I disagree, Dianne.”

Casey was hardly a meth addict. Her drug use wasn't much different from that of many Marin County teenagers acting out or, in her case, a teenager trying to escape intolerable feelings. Unfortunately, Marin's rock 'n' roll hot tub legacy was well known, infecting younger generations with a blasé attitude toward underage drinking and weed. Wild parties at absent parents' homes had been regularly written about in the local press. I didn't excuse or minimize teenage drug use as something entirely benign, but for her therapist to say that it drove her to suicide struck me as an attitude straight out of the 1930s movie
Reefer Madness
.

Lots of people who did drugs didn't kill themselves.

Apparently taken aback by my challenge, Dianne said, “Well, they weren't helpful. They may have confused her and distorted her ability to make rational decisions.”

We sat in awkward silence until Dianne continued. “I think she saw me only as a doorway to medication.”

I bristled at the picture Dianne painted of Casey, even in death, as some kind of crazed drug addict, but kept quiet. Erika broke the tension with some small talk until I glanced at my watch and announced that we should be on our way. “Thanks so much for your time, Dianne. This has been really helpful.”

I kept my true thoughts to myself.

As we stood to go, Dianne said, “Take good care of yourselves. You can talk to me anytime.” We gave each other hugs that felt somewhat more artificial than they did when we arrived. We walked through her cramped waiting room to the hallway. I turned to Erika. “What did you make of that?”

She rolled her eyes. Her expression said everything.

“Right.” I nodded.

We didn't even bother to bring up the
Social Intelligence
book or ask why Dianne had recommended it. At that point, it was just another waste of time.

A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know . . . Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and travelling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.

—Henry David Thoreau

I
had the first draft of Casey's story finished by the time I'd met with Dr. Palmer and Dianne. Other than recounting Erika's and my journey to Poland, there were only glancing references to and speculation about the effects on Casey's behavior of her abandonment and adoption. They were never pursued or treated seriously, even after Dianne had raised the issue in passing. It just seemed inconceivable to me that Casey's infancy had anything to do with her later life and death. After all, I reasoned that I had no memory of my own life before the age of seven other than from photographs and home movies. How could she? But some people see clearly what others can't. They are too close to the subject.

I had been working with a group of memoir writers who convened weekly in the home of our writing coach at her stately yellow-and-white-trimmed Victorian home on the outskirts of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It wasn't until our coach critiqued my draft that she found the story I had completely missed. It was that glancing reference Dianne made in our last meeting after Casey had quit therapy four years earlier, in the spring of 2007.

Attachment disorder.

I thought about Casey in her room, shutting us out with a battered, splintered door. In the years since her suicide it had been replaced with a new six-panel door painted a glossy white, in a vain attempt to paper over the memories of battles raging on either side. Across the hall there was a dimple on the wall that a splash of paint couldn't hide, the result of one of our fights. So many times I'd stood outside that door listening to her wailing and sobbing inside, helpless to console her. Once I'd opened the door, ignoring a photograph she'd posted on it of an oak tree, on which she'd written,
Entrez-Vous? Non!
It was French for “Keep Out!”

As soon as I walked in, she abruptly stopped, as if a needle had been lifted from a record. She fixed me with a hard stare but her mouth quivered.

“Get out.”

I paused for a moment, searching for something to say, some way to connect. “Honey . . .” Once again, I couldn't find the words quickly enough.

“OUT!”

My face burned with humiliation as I retreated.

The minute I was back in the hallway and shut the door, the awful howling resumed. It was a cry for help. But when help came, she refused it and slammed the door.

Why?

Now, years later, inside her room, taped to the hutch on her desk was a piece of crinkled computer paper with a message in red crayon, all in capital letters, the awkward, uneven creation of a five-year-old Casey.

DEAR MOM AND DAD

I LOVE YOU AND MISS YOU BUT I DON'T HATE YOU

BY CASEY

There was an overstuffed pencil holder emblazoned with the Japanese cartoon character Domo, which sported its trademark angry, toothy snarl that American girls found so impossibly cute. Erika had taken a Father's Day card that Casey had made when she was thirteen and propped it against Domo. In her distinctive, left-handed curly scrawl, Casey wrote:

You sir (yes, you!) have been *NOMINATED* to receive . . . THE BEST DAD AWARD!

I
U!

I hope you enjoy this card written, produced, directed and pretty much made by me.

U are the best dad ever!

Her black IKEA bed was in the corner of the room with the
Trainspotting
poster overhead. There was an inscription at the bottom in bold letters that was tragically ironic:

CHOOSE YOUR FUTURE.

CHOOSE LIFE.

Her bed was a mountain of pillows. She liked to cocoon herself. But she was never the sentimental type, never into dolls, never into collecting things, other than her Beanie Babies and Pokémon cards (she thought they'd be worth a fortune someday). Though she had plenty of stuffed animals, such as plush pink Piggy, Toucan, and big old Pooh Bear, she didn't have a favorite to drag around and hug in bed at night as I did.

Her only constant companion was her comfort pillow from Poland. Erika had it restuffed and re-covered many times over the years, and had propped it neatly against the headboard.

I sat in my home office in front of my computer and Googled
attachment disorder.
The first hit brought me to Wikipedia:

Attachment disorder is a disorder of
mood, behavior,
and
social relationships
arising from a failure to form normal attachments to primary caregivers in early childhood. Such a failure would result from unusual early experiences of neglect,
abuse,
or abrupt separation from caregivers in the first three years of life.

Then I searched a related term,
reactive attachment disorder
, or
RAD
:

Children with RAD are presumed to have grossly disturbed internal working models of relationships, which may lead to interpersonal and behavioral difficulties in later life. There are few studies of long-term effects, but the opening of orphanages in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s provided opportunities for research on infants and toddlers brought up in very deprived conditions.

“Orphanages in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.” This couldn't have been just Romania. It was the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland. I searched and sifted through mounds of data and studies from sources ranging from attachment experts and clinicians to blog posts by adoptive parents. A behavioral profile of the adopted child began to emerge.

Emotional Regulation: Because of the absence of the modulating influence of a dedicated caregiver in infancy, the adopted child frequently has a low tolerance for frustration, ineffective coping skills and impulse control, and trouble self-soothing. She can be clingy, hyperreactive, quick to anger or bursting into tears over what others might consider insignificant or nonexistent slights. It can be difficult to calm her with logic or discipline. She may have out-of-control, prolonged tantrums long past toddlerhood that are disproportionate to circumstances, giving the appearance of emotional immaturity.

Control: Abandoned in infancy, the adopted child has learned early not to trust. Controlling her environment and distancing others around her—especially caregivers—become paramount as a way to protect herself from further abandonment. This can affect her social realm, where she must navigate relationships and read social cues. She may feel threatened by others, have trouble tolerating relationships or participating in competitive games other than on her own terms. She can be a sore loser when things don't go her way. She may have trouble sharing toys, food, or friends, long past what is age-appropriate. She may lack cause-and-effect thinking and blame others for her mistakes. Convinced perhaps that caregivers are unavailable and untrustworthy, she might avoid asking for help. She might be seen as bossy, but not to everyone. She can be manipulative—extremely charming, in fact, even indiscriminately affectionate, toward strangers—but cool and remote at home.

Transitions: Because of her need for control, the adopted child can have difficulties with transitions, especially when they come unexpectedly. She can't easily “go with the flow.” Rather, she does best in environments of structure, predictability, and regularity. Changes in routine—such as transitions from the school year to summer, vacations, and holidays—are times of great stress and acting out.

Discipline: Trust, control, and discipline go hand in hand for the adopted child. She may display a pattern of disobedient, defiant, and hostile behavior toward authority figures that goes beyond the norm, giving the appearance of being unduly stubborn and strong-willed. Epic battles can erupt over the most trivial things.

Self-Image: The adopted child whose needs are not met in infancy builds up a pessimistic and hopeless view of herself, her family, and society. She may be uncomfortable with physical closeness or intimacy. She can hear compliments from parents yet feel no association. She's not worthy of love or respect, and may have enclosed her heart in a vault and fought to deny access to anyone who truly loves her. “I love you” can strike terror in her heart. She can't feel love, believes that it hurts, and wants nothing of it. She may manifest destructive behaviors such as self-mutilation, eating disorders, and suicidal tendencies.

A simple Google search explained everything about Casey. The uncontrollable tantrums and crying jags. Her lack of patience, whether waiting an extra minute in her high chair for some ice cream or, years later, learning to skate or snowboard. Her tendency to be thin-skinned at home with no tolerance for the most benign joke or jab aimed at her. And my reaction to this? Out of sheer frustration, I told her to stop crying, grow up, and act her age.

Great job, Dad.

She didn't handle threesomes well and would stomp home in tears from a friend's house feeling left out or slighted, losing it when something didn't go her way. I remembered our earliest meeting with Dr. Klein, when we probed him for an opinion about her bossiness and combativeness, but he described an entirely different child at school—a delight in the classroom who rarely had to be reprimanded.

Power struggles erupted over the most ridiculous things—
Casey, please put your dirty dish in the sink; Casey, please don't leave your wet towel on the bathroom floor; Casey, please take Igor for a walk.
We were stuck in a never-ending cycle of time-outs, withheld privileges, abandoned reward programs, groundings, and empty threats to spend her college fund on a year in purgatory. We resorted to spanking her, even threatening to hit her, violating every tenet of good parenting and giving her more reason to despise us.