No one expects to find themselves sitting in the parking lot of a psychiatric hospital, digging the drawstring out of their child's new pajama pants so they'll pass a safety inspection. Then all of a sudden there you are, or at least, there I was, tearing at the drawstring of Jordan's plaid pajamas with my teeth.
It is the evening of her second day at Fremont Hospital perched on the northeastern side of Silicon Valley, an hour inland from our Santa Cruz condo. My husband Jay and son Mouse will make the trip with me tomorrow night, but for this first visit, I've come alone.
Getting into the facility and onto the locked ward is no simple thing. There are guards, heavy doors and no less than three places where you have to show identification. I huddle silently with five other parents in the elevator and then we are unceremoniously dumped out onto the third floor in front of the nurse's station.
As the nurse behind the counter checks and records each of the items I've brought, Jordan comes bouncing up the hall to the final barrier which separates us. Still in her camouflage pants, but wearing someone else's t-shirt, emblazoned with Bob Marley's face, she taps her fingertips on the sturdy mesh gate and singsongs “open, open, open”.
I want to laugh.
I am going to cry.
We don't belong here. She's a surly kid but she's not sick. She's experimenting with drugs but she's not crazy. She's got an ugly temper and is intent on being as rebellious as possible but some boys are just like that, right?
The adolescent wing doesn't rate its own visiting area. Instead, families gather in the long hallway, flanked on either side by our children's rooms. There are too few chairs by half and those who aren't lucky enough to have scored one collect in tight circles on the floor along the wall.
As I come through the gate, she trips into me for a quick hug and then grabs the clothes in my hands.
“What'dja bring me?” She's in a surprisingly cheerful mood for someone on a 72-hour suicide watch. I don't know what I'd expected, but not this.
“Come on, I'll show you my room.”
I follow her down the hall, passing a crying mother and daughter in plastic chairs, a family of five playing “Go Fish” in a circle on the floor, a father and son leaning against the wall and staring at their feet, and a whispering circle of girls who pretend not to be watching us as we go. We approach a burly nurse standing casually with a paperback novel in his hand. Jordan jerks her chin up in acknowledgement.
“What's up?” The nurse asks.
“I'm gonna show my mom my room, k?”
He raises an eyebrow but he also works to suppress a smile, an expression I'm familiar with seeing on the faces of those who know not to trust my child but still find her disarming.
“I gotta put these away anyway.” Jordan says, holding forth the stack of clothes.
The nurse nods and we move on.
In many ways, it feels like that awkward Parent's Day visit to summer camp. The kids all know each other and the staff, like camp counselors, share an uncomfortable sort of intimacy with them, while we, the parents (identifiable by the mix of exhaustion and wide-eyed terror on our faces) are merely day-tripping into their curious little world.
“That's Tyrone.” she lowers her voice to an exaggerated whisper, “He's the guy they call when someone's gonna get the Booty Juice.”
Jordan ducks into one of the patient rooms and I follow. It is larger than I expected, and uncomfortably tidy. Two twin beds, two desks, two closets and a small bathroom.
“Booty Juice?” I ask skeptically.
”When somebody goes psycho, Tyrone'll hold 'em down while someone else gives them a shot in the bum and it chill's 'em out.” She throws the clothes aside to demonstrate the shot to her butt-cheek and then falls, splayed out onto the bed.
“No way” I say.
“Yes way” she insists, “The prophet next door got the Booty Juice this morning just before group.”
“You have a prophet next door?”
“Nah, he's really just psychotic, but he gets the best meds.”
She sits up and starts digging through the clothes, plucking out the Vans I swiped from Mouse to bypass the shoelace restriction, and her favorite Guayabera shirt. She slips the Vans over her hospital booties.
“My roommate Alan loaned me this shirt.”she plucks at Bob Marley's dreads, “He's got tics. You know what those are?”
“Like Tourettes?”
“Yeah, but without the cursing. Mostly he just clears his throat and winks a lot.”
“And he's in here for that?”
“Nah, he freaked out after drinking too much cough syrup and his parents had him locked up. He's cool, but mostly, I hang out with the suicidal lesbians.”
She's been a gossipy child for as long as I can remember, and in one of those “how did you NOT know” moments, years from now, I'll realize that all those times she gravitated towards groups of giggling girls growing up, she simply knew where she belonged.
Still, all I can see at this moment is my swaggering 14-year old son, slipping his favorite Cuban Gangster shirt on over Bob Marley and heading back out into the corridor to flirt with the darkly-pretty girls gathered near the payphone.
“Scarface wore these, you know.” I hear her inform them in a sly, knowing way as she flicks the collar and shrugs her shoulder.
I spot two recently abandoned chairs and make a beeline for them. A moment later, Jordan breaks off from the girls and joins me, flipping her chair around and straddling it, with her arms over the back and her chin nestled into the spot where they cross.
“The doctor thinks I might be Bipolar.”
“I've heard that's very popular.”
We talk in hushed tones for the rest of the hour. She implores me to find out from the doctor tomorrow when she can come home. I bring up the drug issue and she blows it off like it's nothing I need to worry about. During our conversation, I notice that Jordan's left eye is twitching. It is unsettling and I worry about what they're giving her that might cause it.
“What's up with your eye?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Is there an eyelash or something in it?” I reach out to prod at her, but she draws back and brushes my hand away.
“It's fine.” she insists, then leaning in again, “You see that girl behind me, the hot chick with the braids?”
I glance fake-casual over her shoulder and then back, nodding.
“She's schizophrenic. Supercool. She gets the best meds.”
For all her bravado, when Tyrone announces that visiting hours are almost over, I see Jordan's chin quiver for just a sliver of a second. Then comes the stab of realization that I have to get up and walk out of here without her, that I cannot just march to the gate with my child in tow and demand that they let us leave. How helpless it feels to hug her in that hall and walk out the door, travel down two floors in an elevator stuffed with anxious and weeping strangers, and out into the cold darkness of night.
I cry all I can on the drive back over the Santa Cruz mountains, hoping to get it all out before I reach home. I also make a mental note to read up more on the Depakote and Ativan they've been giving her, to see if either one would account for that worrisome muscle-spasm near her eye. As it turned out, neither one did and none of the medications that came after, seemed to effect it. Just every now and then, for the next couple of years, her eye would twitch.
Finally, when it seemed to be gone forever, I casually mentioned it Jordan (who by then was called Alice) and she laughed long and hard. “Oh that, it's just something I picked up from Alan back at Fremont. It works great to distract grown-ups who are just yammering on and on. You should try it some time.”
And just so you know, every once in a while, I do.
[I have written about my daughter previously in "The Boy Suit" and "Socks, Drugs and The Loch Ness Monster". This piece has also been cross-posted at laurustina.com]