LOCK UP by Mary Koral
We discussed the plan with her therapist the day before we took our daughter away. We were clear, terrified at what we intended to do, but clear. I hoped the therapist would agree. I wanted her to say, “Yes. I think you should do that.” If she said that, it would mean we were tracking right. Or even if she said something tentative, like: “Maybe that would be for the best.” Not total backing if she said that, but still, qualified agreement. We could manage if that’s how she played it.
She did not play it like that.
She recoiled. Sucked in her breath and raised both her hands in front of her – to make us stop? Ward us off?
“This is very extreme,” she said. “This is very extreme.” No kid she worked with had ever been treated like this – taken away and driven off to lock up. The parents of her clients never, ever did that! She leaned forward in her chair, unwrapped a mint from the dish she kept nearby, gestured that we were welcome to take one and sucked reflexively.
I heard the mint knock against her teeth from time to time.
What had happened to our daughter? What made her behavior so risky? That’s what she wanted to know. She dropped her usual careful style and looked at us like we’d been withholding information; she sat back and waited for us to answer.
Who knew what made our daughter behave the way she did? Anita had always been part enigma, a living mystery come to us from India. I’d learned about mysteries in Catholic school: joyful, glorious, sorrowful. You were supposed to ponder a mystery while chanting the rosary, creating a mystical experience of identification with the spiritual. What kind of mystery was our daughter? Sorrowful? Not entirely. She could be joyful sometimes. We needed another name for the mystery of our Bengali babe, our mystical experience who brought us to our knees with fear.
When she was little: two, three, four, she hid herself: in boxes, underneath the sink, once in the old milk chute. We’d go looking for her and exclaim with joy when we found her. She loved that game, and we were glad to play. But still, it was a little unnerving that she could hide herself so well, make herself so small that almost any space became a hiding place. What if she hid herself where we couldn’t find her? What would we do then? Sure enough, once she turned thirteen, she did just that all the time. She found places to hide in that we never knew about, places she had no intention for us to ever find her. We never got to exclaim with joy anymore. “Look! Here she is. Here’s our Anita!”
Living with her as a fifteen-year-old, the age she was when we made the choice to take her away, was like living near a land-mine; any move invited death. We could only watch and wait, barely take breath. The smallest wrong gesture and we’d be in pieces: arms, legs, torsos all over the place.
People plant land mines intending to kill other people. I didn’t think our daughter intended to kill us, but doing a little damage might have been on her radar screen. She was a froth of anger and we’d become a landing place for that anger. And while we still had all our limbs, eyes, ears, nose and mouth, it had become necessary to live with very little in the way of expectation.
Something as simple as making the bed or doing the laundry could stun you into numbness, just freeze you in place. It might happen that while making the bed, the phone rings and a person you love has not shown up for school. You have no idea where she is; she has, most likely, hidden herself again. The person on the other end of the line hangs up while you stand there frozen.
It could also happen that while tossing a pair of jeans in the laundry, you discover a note that makes it clear a major sales operation is going down – your beloved daughter might land in jail or worse.
Anything might happen.
Going upstairs, you stop on the landing and feel your heart pumping, feel the blood racing – and you wish for a time when you didn’t notice so much. You wish for a time when you had the normal American state of daily, confident expectation.
Of course, it had always been true that things about us lent themselves to notice. Anita had dark brown skin, our sky kid come to us from southern India. We, her parents, were white, sort of champagne-colored, from the Midwest. She had two brothers, also adopted, but their skin shade was more tan than brown. They attracted notice, but not, usually, obvious comment, never the same tenor of color issues that shaped Anita’s life. Once she became a teen, this snared our daughter. She was caught between love for us and anger.
We, her parents, had created the life she had. We were a family of choice, not origin, and she didn’t look like a single person in the family. Her brothers at least resembled each other. What were we thinking? What was she supposed to think?
She had loved us fiercely as a child, wrapped her arms around us and covered us with kisses. She only slept if we sat nearby and held her hand, and I still believed in that love, trusting that it was there somewhere inside her even if neither one of us could find it. But there were days I saw her watching me and her father. Her eyes tracked movement like maybe she was an ethnographer trying to understand the place she had landed in, trying to understand the people who called her daughter. Trying to find a clue to something that must have seemed taken from her, lost or hidden. Who was she? Where was she supposed to be?
Still – she was risking so much. Her whole life! Why hang with older guys, guys old enough to be called men? Guys who wanted nothing more than her lovely brown body? Why get involved in deals that could only lead to disaster we’d never be able to get her out of? What was there for her, and how could we hope to know? We loved her like crazy. Everybody in the family, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, her brothers wrung their collective hands, tried to enfold her. “Anita,” every single member of the family said, “We love you.” Anita stayed quiet when someone said that like she would rather not hear it. Love was too much trouble. Love required that she allow for loss. People you love get sick, die, leave you to be flown halfway around the world to live in a completely different place. She didn’t want more loss, had had more than enough. She was wary of love.
Risky was the ticket. Risky only required that she be able to move fast, think on her feet. She knew she could manage that. We knew that too.
So we knew that much. What else was there? What could I say to the woman sucking her mint and looking to us for some explanation?
“I don’t know why she does what she does,” I said. “I don’t even care, I’m afraid. There are people who could hurt her.” I could not bring myself to say, shoot, knife, kill. I could not say those words to that woman, but they were words I said to myself. Our daughter knew guns, drugs, and the real likelihood that she could be taken from various scenes in a body bag. Sometimes she intimated as much to me – she knew real life. I was a wimp. If I cried out or grabbed at her, she laughed, seemed not to care. Our Midwestern life had no zest, no zing. Her life was full frontal action. Nothing sentimental or ordinary: a person had to stay on top of things, be ready to light out. Fast, fast, fast! “I’m action oriented,” she said. “You guys talk way too much.” Maybe she was right.
One night, someone rang the doorbell then banged on the door, mean, angry pounds that woke us with thumping hearts. Her father crawled to the window. He could see in the light that spilled over from the front porch. Three guys stood on the front lawn. They wore sweats and had blue scarves wrapped around their heads. They stood there like colonists claiming our lawn as territory. They called to her, “Baby Girl, we know you’re in there. We’ll be back.” They took off then. We crept to Anita’s room. She was awake, big-eyed and defiant. “They can’t hurt me. I know people who have my back.” She got up to pee and returned to bed to sleep or pretend to sleep. I didn’t know which. We sat outside her room all night and went to the police the next day.
“Get her out of here, that’s the best you can do. Find a place where she can’t run. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you differently. You can’t keep her safe from this crowd. They mean business. Make sure your doors and windows are locked and watch out yourselves.”
If a person isn’t used to high-voltage living, it can be hard to accept you’re about to be zapped. Real danger? Not just trouble? There were actual police officers telling us to take our daughter to a place with no way in or out. Lock up.
We planned her disappearance in low voices, planned how to take her away, no warning, no clue she could read. Get her in the back seat of the car, click the childproof lock. Like kidnapping. Was it kidnapping? She was our daughter and we wanted her to live, so we had to get her away. That couldn’t be called kidnapping, could it?
But it’s like the ache you feel in a bone you broke years ago, the time you slipped on the ice. Mostly, it’s okay. You function just fine. Sometimes though, it hurts, a reminder that you broke it.
The therapist finished her mint and looked mournful; she took both our hands in hers and cried. We stood still and we didn’t cry. We left and never saw her again. Sometimes we come across her ad in the paper: Adolescent Counseling. She was like many therapists back then, in the years of the 1990’s. Nice and well-meaning, but unable to comprehend the depth of Anita’s grief and anger. It isn’t reasonable to place blame, and I did anyway. I remember the time she suggested that Anita’s behavior was maybe normal adolescent rebellion. I should cut her some slack. I remember Anita shooting me a look of satisfaction. “Fuck!” I yelled. “Fuck! This isn’t normal stuff we’re talking about. Thirty-year-old men?” She forgave me the outburst. “You’re distressed,” she said.
Anita flicked me a look of almost admiration. Perhaps I wasn’t such a wimp.
* * *
We had given ourselves twenty-four hours to follow through. Twenty-four hours wasn’t nearly long enough, and at the same time, way too long. What if she disappeared before we left? What if those guys came back?
If we took her away, I still thought if, like there was really a choice, I wanted a place that promised complete safety and a happy girl returned to us. In the end, the place we took her to was, like most of our Midwest life, ordinary: behavior modification, talk therapy and graduated privileges. It came recommended by someone who knew about such things, somebody who knew trouble. “It’s a good place,” she told us trying for comfort. “But it’s basic, nothing fancy, plain but clean.”
No wilderness activities. No choral groups with kids looking like they were students in prep school, not oppositional, defiant teens. Nothing to make it seem like some normal variation of adolescence. Nothing to assure me our daughter would come home happy to join us for a night at the movies. No promises.
They had an empty bed and would hold it for twenty-four hours. We spent the night before we left talking about how it might have been, what other life we might be living: A fifteen-year-old who might be going to prom. Might be going on normal excursions, like shopping at the mall, buying jeans a little too tight, a top a little too sexy. We’d have to drag her back to return them and pick something more appropriate. Or she might be doing something as mundane as walking the dog. Shouldn’t that be the life we were living? But we weren’t. We had a fifteen-year-old who was crazed, who claimed she wasn’t scared but slept with her back to the wall and a light on, just in case.
In case of what? What was she worried about? What should we be afraid of? Where had she been those nights she never came home? One day, she said, very casually, like everyone had such concerns, that she was never sure what might be coming out of the wall. She laughed, like it was normal-funny and went off to answer the phone, some strange guy on the other end. I went into her room and looked at her wall. It was painted blue. I wondered about the other walls she’d seen, walls that were probably not painted robin’s egg blue, the color she had chosen the year she helped her father paint her room.
* * *
We told Anita’s brothers about our decision. “So you’re going to lock her up?” said Sõn, the older brother. “Like a jail?” He looked worried as if he or his brother might be next. “For her own good,” we replied. “To keep her safe, so that she can come back home.” But I didn’t know how that would work. Could she ever come back and be safe?
“Yeah, well,” he said. He shook his head. He’d shaved it just the other day. Stood over the sink and took the razor to his head, buzzed it until the sink filled with black hair. “I want something new,” he said. Maybe he was tired of Anita raking in all the concern, the talking and figuring. Likely. His skull looked like the surface of a strange earth. I reached out and passed my hand over his scalp. He allowed that. “Sõn, we will never stop loving any of you. Never.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” Like he wanted to believe, but intended to prepare just in case; his sister was going to be taken away by her parents, the same people who swore eternal love. What else might happen in the place he called home?
We moved swiftly, like felons. Did what we had to do. At dawn the next day, I went into her room and told her to get dressed. “So early?” she said – almost as if she knew. Did she? I kept quiet and held out a blue fleece-lined jersey for her to put on against the morning chill. She took it and left the house with me, a wind-up girl. Eyes straight ahead, walking past her brothers who sat in the kitchen watching.
“Mom? Mom, where are you taking me?”
I stood close while she got into the car then slid in beside her. Ken, alone in the front, took the wheel. We drove off with her brothers standing in the doorway, silent and scared, like they were watching a horror movie. Jung, the youngest, yelling as Ken pulled out of the driveway. “Don’t, you guys, don’t! Come back!”
“It will be okay,” I yelled. But nobody knew that.
When the kids were small, we often put them in the car then told them we were going to a secret destination. We’d end up at the local ice cream place or a park.
We weren’t going for ice cream or to the park this time. We were driving our daughter to a hiding place, the same girl who used to love to play the hiding game with us, only now she didn’t get to choose the place.
It’s possible to accuse me of abducting my daughter. It’s possible to say I did an unprincipled thing. People have said so. I was an implacable, unrelenting woman who put my daughter into the car with no warning, not even a threat, a woman who did not tell Ken to stop the car when Anita cried out and turned her face to the window: Don’t, don’t, don’t. You promised. You said you’d always keep me. Liar. You’re nothing but liars, the both of you. You can’t take the pressure.
I was a child stealer, and I would steal her all over again.
We talk about almost everything now, Anita and I. We talk about friends, hers and mine, family, money, things we both fuss about. But we do not talk about the day we drove off with her. She will talk about being away. She will sometimes joke about having been so bad we had to lock her up. But, she will not talk about the actual day we drove off with her.
I wonder what she remembers from the day we put her in the car and drove her to lock up? She often tells me she gets confused when she tries to remember that time. She will, sometimes, look at a picture and say, “When was that? Was I with you guys, or was I in lock up?” She asks this calmly, but it always makes me feel as though I killed her. She has a hard time remembering the day we took her away, when she died for a while.
Our daughter looked out the car window and I sat thinking, yet again, whether there was something else that we could have done, might still do. I couldn’t think of a thing.
Ken missed the side street we were supposed to turn down and cursed. “God damn!” He hit the brake. Anita and I jerked forward. I put out my arms to keep her from hitting her head, but she shoved me away. Ken backed up, made a right turn and we ended up in front of a row of low brick buildings. There was nothing about them that said, lock up.
The woman who opened the door for us was friendly. She smiled, ushered us in, told us she would do the intake info. She offered cups of coffee and bounced around the room striving for an upbeat attitude.
After we left our daughter with them, she said, we would not be able to communicate with her for three weeks. Complete isolation from friends and family was required. In that time, Anita might earn letter privileges and, eventually, phone privileges. My skin iced over. What were we doing?
Anita was to see a therapist every day, the woman explained. Another therapist. Would this one help?
The three of us met the therapist, a woman who was, yet again, nice-looking, calm, and middle-aged. She seemed okay, matter-of-fact, not astonished by our situation, and assured us our daughter would be safe while she was with them. The outside door opened only with a buzzer and an intercom. Every visitor had to be on a list that was parent approved. Inside, there was a special hallway which could be reached only through another locked door. Residents lived down that hallway and were buzzed in and out of that door.
Anita will not be able to run. No one will be able to hurt her. I kept saying that to myself like it was a meditation mantra. Anita stayed quiet, eyes lowered, staring at her black Nike high tops, the laces hanging loose. The therapist did not promise a daughter returned to us, smiling and whole. There was, she said, a recidivism rate; depending how you looked at it, it ranged from thirty to forty percent. Maybe higher. I appreciated her honesty and hated it at the same time. I spent a lot of time hating back then, the therapists, the guys on the lawn, my life, but not Anita. I didn’t hate her. I just wanted her back, happy and whole, no recidivism.
“Do you want to say goodbye to your parents?” asked the therapist. “It’ll be a while before you talk to them again.” She did not. She turned and walked away heading to the locked door, the therapist beside her, making small talk. I watched my daughter’s dark hair, the slump of her shoulders, until she reached the locked door, went through and was gone from view. I called out to her.
We will be back. We’ll come back.
My kid was in a kind of orphanage all over again, a place for kids whose parents said, “I can’t do the job.” We drove home listening to NPR, both of us quiet. There was a deer carcass on the side of the highway, the blood-sweet smell of death. Ken glanced at the carcass, and said, “We don’t want her dead, do we?” We did not want her dead, no.
Later that night, I found him bent over in the bathroom, pale and wiping his mouth. “It feels like we caused a death.”
We sat on the bathroom floor rocking each other. I never pictured my husband sick with grief when we got our girl at the airport almost thirteen years before. Anita was two, small, big-eyed and scared. She was fifteen when we drove off with her to lock her up, still small, still big-eyed and, I guessed, scared.
Still, there was one thing and I offered it to Ken: we could sleep. We had not slept in a long time. I could not remember what it would be like to be able to close my eyes and sleep, no waiting for the phone to ring, no banging on the door, no more agony when she was gone, no idea where.
The next day the four of us went out for gyros. It was odd being together like that. Ken and I and the boys eating food we liked, smiling at each other, almost like we were celebrating. But we couldn’t be doing that, could we? What were we doing? I looked at our sons: Sõn, sixteen, with his shaved head and wary smile, Jung, only nine, waiting to laugh with somebody if anybody could manage it. Both of them wanting only to eat their gyros and chill, no angst, no talk about the missing person. They read jokes from a joke book to each other and began to laugh so hard they splattered their drinks all over the place. We laughed with them then, giddy, almost happy in that moment. I caught myself mid-laugh. What were we doing?
It was the way a person behaves after death. It was like that. For the moment, we took what there was. There were not five of us at the table, but four. Still, we were alive! People who are alive can laugh. We were alive, eating gyros, and laughing.
Once a week, for a year, we drove to visit Anita and have therapy. Sometimes, Ken and I went alone; sometimes, we took Sõn and Jung. But they never liked to come, hated to see us ring the buzzer, hear the door click open, then shut.
Jung was the one who said it. “I’m locked up too when I go here,” he said. “Why am I locked up?”
“Dope,” said his brother. “If you aren’t locked up, then she can get out.” The four of us waited, to see their sister, waited to see our daughter. Waited for our girl to come down the hallway to the visiting room, shuffling in her black high tops, no shoe strings.
Mary Koral’s work has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Cream City Review, Tusculum Review, Pisgah Review, and Interim.