Bebe Moore Campbell (4 page)

As I said, the end of that day was unremarkable. Nothing really stood out. Everything flowed, the kind of flow you take for granted when your shackles have been removed, the scars from the last beating have all faded, and it’s Sunday on the plantation. But I did pray. I will always pray. This is what I prayed:
Mother Father God, let the healing continue.

2

TRINA GAVE ME A KISS WHEN I DROPPED HER OFF AT THE Weitz Center two weeks later, on a Wednesday morning. Watching her as she ran up the stairway to the five-story building, I didn’t drive off until the thick glass door closed behind her. The Weitz Center was part of Beth Israel Hospital, the Beverly Hills medical behemoth, renowned for innovative patient care and VIP rooms. In another wing I’d had my uterus and two useless ovaries removed when Trina was nine, which didn’t end my yearning to bear another child, only the possibility. An ER doctor had stitched up Trina’s bleeding foot after a bicycle accident when she was fifteen. In that case, I’d passed by two other hospitals on the way to Beth Israel, which was, in my estimation, one of the finest.

In those early years I’d thought of hospitals as places to mend bodies. But that was before a broken mind had rampaged through my life. The Weitz Center was a place to heal brains. From nine to three, Monday through Friday, Trina had group sessions and individual counseling on the first floor. She’d been attending the partial program, outpatient therapy for people with psychiatric disorders, ever since her third hospitalization, almost six months ago. Her three hospitalizations had run together during the previous summer and fall after Trina had graduated from high school just after her seventeenth birthday. Graduation summer, her teenage rebellion had exploded into one manic episode after another, a nightmare summer of long nights, smashed glass, and broken dreams.

In the beginning, it was like being suspicious of a husband. Those little pinprick inklings tickled the inside of my skull. I explained everything away until I couldn’t. The reason he was gone all the time was because he was working; the reason she talked so fast was because she was excitable, emotional. The reason he didn’t reach for me at night was because he was tired from working so hard. The reason she couldn’t sleep at night was because she was so wound up from studying. None of her old friends came around anymore because—well, people outgrow each other. The silence at the dinner table, the quiet in our bedroom— he was preoccupied with his work. All the speeding tickets? Didn’t all young people speed? The spending sprees? That was my fault. I never should have let Trina have a credit card. But then she cursed at me. His silences grew deeper. How could she say those things? Baby, what’s going on? Trina, what’s wrong?

Years before, Clyde had told me, “There’s nobody else; there’s just no
us.
”

With Trina I drew my own conclusions:
My child is sick.

I waded through quicksand to get to those words. It was up to my neck when I finally spoke them aloud.

“Your daughter is bipolar, also known as manic-depressive,” the doctor at the second hospital had told me. That was at UCLA last August, a week before she was scheduled to leave for Brown University. I had taken her there after Trina began telling me that I was a devil who had stolen her from her real mother. I sat with her in admittance and told the clerk that my child needed psychiatric care. I whispered the words, but they came out of my mouth all the same.

“Are you her mother?” the clerk asked.

“Yes.”

“Is she under eighteen?”

“Yes.”

She looked up from the paper she was filling out. “That’s good.”

The woman checked our insurance, and then she found a bed for Trina in the psychiatric ward on the nonacute side. When I returned the next day, I demanded a psychological evaluation. When she’d been sent to the Weitz Center for her first hospitalization in June, the psychiatrist had told me it was too early to tell what was wrong with her. But this was the second time. I had to know. The UCLA doctor was Russian, his accent thick. His words bewildered me. I asked him to repeat what he’d said.

“Ms. Whitmore, your daughter is bipolar.”

That was the scariest part, the way he said it. She
is
bipolar, not she
has
bipolar
disorder.
You
are
cancer. You
are
AIDS. Nobody ever said that.

“How long before she gets better?”

“Woman,” the doctor said, not unkindly, “don’t set your clock.”

I’d almost had her hospitalized during the Christmas break when she was in eleventh grade—but for drugs, not psychosis. My ex-boyfriend and I had returned from the movies. When we drove up to my house, every light was turned on and music was blaring. Inside I found Trina wearing one of my cocktail dresses. Her face was a garish rainbow: silver eye shadow, red lips, pink cheeks. She was heading for the door.

“Whoa,” I said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“You can’t stop me, Demon Queen.”

She began screaming, and when I listened to what she was saying— calling me a devil, accusing me of killing her real mother, themes she would return to again and again—I became alarmed. My ex-boyfriend and I tried to settle her down.

“What are you on?” I asked her over and over. Her answer was more screaming and cursing.

Ex-boyfriend and I drove straight to the hospital, but when the attendant suggested that her problem might be mental, I balked.

“My daughter doesn’t have a mental problem,” I told him.

By that time, Trina had calmed down so much that when the emergency room physician said he didn’t see anything wrong, I was ready to believe him. Keep an eye on her for the next forty-eight hours, he told me. On the way back, Trina apologized for her outburst, swore she hadn’t taken anything, explained she hadn’t been sleeping well because she was studying so hard for midterms. It was a plausible excuse; that’s what I told myself.

This junior year holiday episode was but a shadow of the post–high school graduation episode that landed her in UCLA. That night in August she seemed to be floating on a jet stream of hallucinatory energy that punctuated her every word. Around four o’clock that morning I awoke to her footsteps, kitchen cabinet doors slamming shut, music playing in her room, television voices that were way too loud. She began calling people on the telephone and had dozens of disjointed conversations, one right after another, as though she were frightened of being without a connection. Later, there were soft thuds as she ran down the back stairs into the kitchen, then more slamming, shutting, opening of drawers, cabinets, the refrigerator. After a while I smelled food. When I came downstairs, I found ten cold pancakes, lopsided from syrup and butter, piled on a plate.

Days before, I’d pulled two joints from her purse. I had screamed at her then, a frantic tirade; she cursed me. By that time, most of our conversations had deteriorated into verbal beat-downs, Thrillas in Manilas, with Trina as Ali to my tongue-tied Frazier. So I already knew something was terribly wrong. For the rest of the day, she stayed in her room. For at least eight hours, the light on her phone didn’t go out for more than two minutes. That light mesmerized and terrorized, like a whip dangling from ol’ massa’s hand.

I was in the kitchen with Ex-boyfriend when she came down the back stairs that evening. It was Saturday. I had called her father, but I couldn’t locate him. So my ex-boyfriend came. We were sitting at my kitchen table, and I was describing Trina’s behavior.

“Baby,” he said, as gently as he could, “it sounds like crack or maybe meth.”

Hearing my worst suspicions voiced by another, I began to cry. Then we heard the clicking of high heels on the stairs. Minutes before she appeared, the room became filled with the odor of way too much perfume. Not a good sign. Nine o’clock and she was going out. Not a good plan. It was Mom’s job to try to stop her.

Trina had on a micromini red leather skirt, a transparent white blouse, and, underneath, a black bra I’d never seen before. But what really took my breath away was her war paint. Her pretty mouth was a slash of iridescent white. The lids of her large clear eyes were smeared with bright green. Brick-colored blush accented her high cheekbones. She had shaved off her eyebrows and penciled in two black half-moons. There were splashes of pink spray paint in her hair. He’s right, I thought. Ex-boyfriend took my hand.

“Give me your leather coat,” she called from the steps..

Different strategies and ensuing scenarios collided in my mind. Casual: Let her go, don’t make a fuss. Make an appointment with the rape counseling center now. Aggressive: Scream,
“You’re not going anywhere!”
as loudly as possible. Block the door with my body. Bribery: “Trina, if you . . . I’ll take you . . . I’ll buy you. . . .” But all the well-planned words would result in yelling and screaming, and by that time I’d begun to be afraid of where arguing might lead. The thing was, I couldn’t stop choking, couldn’t get my breath back, couldn’t speak.

“Let me have your leather coat,” Trina repeated.

“No,” I said weakly, managing to add, “Where do you think you’re going looking like that?” I got up from the table and walked over to the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m going to meet some very important people. They’re helping me get into medical school.”

“What people?”

She ignored me.

“Trina, have you looked in the mirror?”

“Why don’t
you
look in the fucking mirror sometime?”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Ex-boyfriend said. “Watch your mouth.”

“You’re not my father.”

“You don’t have to use that kind of language. What’s gotten into you?” I was trembling.

“Shut up!” She reached in her purse and pulled out a cigarette and held it between her fingers.

“Don’t light that thing in here,” I said, as sternly as I could.

She rushed down the last steps, and in an instant we were nose to nose on the bottom step. “You’re such a bitch,” she hissed.

“You need to chill, babygirl,” Ex-boyfriend said.

“Fuck you.”

Ex-boyfriend stood up.

“Maybe you’d better go,” I said to him.

“No, she’s on something. I’m not leaving you with her,” he said.

“Just go. I’m all right.”

“No.”

He stood there at the table. I could feel her breath on my face, see the flames rioting in her eyes. That’s when I knew she wanted to hurt me. I knew that what was wrong was soul deep and strong as chains. What was wrong wasn’t drugs. What was wrong was why she needed them.
My baby is sick.

“Trina, you need help.”

I embarked on my own Middle Passage that night, marching backward, ankles shackled. I journeyed to a Charleston auction block, screaming as my child was torn from my arms, as I watched her being driven away. Trina didn’t belong to me anymore. Something more powerful possessed her. I saw her hand moving swiftly toward me, the fingers tightening into a ball, then opening again. The first blow was a slap, the next a punch. I fell against the counter, raising my arms to shield myself. Below her peek a boo blouse, Trina’s chest was swelling. Her green eye shadow glared under the bright kitchen light. She raised her hand a third time, but by then my ex-boyfriend was coming across the floor.

“Fucking bitch!” she screamed, and ran out the door.

I wasn’t hurt, not really, wasn’t even stunned. In a way, I’d been expecting the blows. I didn’t want a witness. The assault was meant to be a secret that got locked up in the internal vault, along with Uncle-Danny-liked-to-play-peepee-games-with-me or Mommy-used-to-get-drunk-every-night-and-that’s-how-come-I-stay-with-Ma-Missy. Your pedophile uncle and your alkie mama aren’t your fault, of course. Your child, however, is always your fault. If she grows up to be president, you did a good job. If he wears a black trench coat to high school and starts shooting up the place with his buddies—well, I damn sure didn’t want to see that particular judgment reflected in anybody’s eyes.

“I’m all right,” I said, and then cried in my ex-boyfriend’s arms. Those arms promised to keep my secret, to hold me up. It took me a while to realize how strong they were.

I made my ex-boyfriend leave before Clyde arrived, thirty minutes later. He had on a tuxedo, and he was buzzed from two or three glasses of champagne. Clyde had been in a happy partying mood when he finally answered his cell, and the news of his daughter’s rampage had brought him down.

“Look,” he said when Trina didn’t come home after two hours, “this is obviously some mother-daughter stuff.”

“It’s more than that. Something is seriously wrong with Trina.”

He shook his head. “It’s just a stage,” he said. “This happens when kids are about to go off to school. They have some fears about leaving home and so do the parents, so everybody acts out and pisses each other off so it won’t be so hard to separate. It will pass.”

“She hit me, Clyde.”

No amount of arguing could persuade my ex-husband that whatever was going on with Trina wasn’t part of normal adolescence. But his logic didn’t sway me. After he left, I called the police. When Trina finally returned home, they were waiting. They heard her hysterical threats at the door. I followed their car as they drove to the hospital. When I called Clyde from the psychiatric ward, he yelled at me that I was overreacting.

“I won’t have anything to do with this!” he said, and then he hung up.

“Do not look for reasons, Mother,” the Russian doctor told me. “This runs in families, like diabetes or high blood pressure. This is mostly genetic.”

“Or bad parenting.” I began weeping.

Dr. Ustinov leaned across his desk and brought his face close to mine. “This is not clear thinking, Mother. All parents make mistakes. My own father beat me with a broomstick for the slightest infraction. I am damaged, but I am not mentally ill because I’m not genetically predisposed to this sort of disease. Did you give her this illness? No. Be careful, Mother, you will make yourself depressed, even physically sick. Most likely you have bipolar in your family or in your husband’s.”

I wasn’t ready to let myself off the hook. Guilt was easier to manage than futile rage.

“But if it’s in the family, why don’t I have it? Why doesn’t my husband have it?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “There is no rhyme or reason. Sometimes there are triggers. Drugs. Alcohol. Traumatic events. Just because you or your husband don’t have this doesn’t mean there is no bipolar disorder among your relatives.”