Island Practice (33 page)

Barbara believes that “for Ben, it was a huge thing. Here was this person Ben could look for at any time. The fact that he just kind of disappeared off the planet was, I think, a difficult thing for a kid like Ben. But I didn’t connect the dots.”

When Ben’s senior year ended, Barbara did not think the issue of teen suicides “would still be in the air.” Ben seemed to be having an enjoyable summer, putting together rave dance parties with friends. She was aware that “he was experimenting with drinking, a fact of life around here.”

But not long before he was supposed to leave for college in New York City, things began happening that his mother only learned about later. In early August, Ben was arrested again. He was downtown when he and an older boy came across each other. Both of them had been drinking and the other boy called him a fag, and they fought. This was surprising, says Detective Tornovish, because Ben “was not known to be violent.” Because Ben was eighteen, the police could not call his parents, and he spent four hours in jail, bailing himself out for $40 at 5 AM on Thursday morning. He was scheduled for court the following Monday. Ben didn’t breathe a word about the arrest to his mother, who was asleep when he came home.

Later, Barbara, reflecting on the street fight, considered whether Ben was gay, but dismissed that idea because no one who knew him thought so. Ben had had girlfriends, Barbara knew, “but nothing serious. I had a sense he was in love with a girl who didn’t return it, but I didn’t get the sense it was a big deal.” Although Ben didn’t seem to be struggling with his sexual identity, she thought someone who was might have encountered challenges because “islands are different than small towns.
There’s no town over. There’s no place to drive to. There’s no anonymity. If a kid is gay, there’s no big city where you can meet up at a gay bar.”

That Thursday morning, August 7, Barbara was surprised that when she woke up, Ben was already awake. “He seemed kind of cheerful and lighthearted. I thought maybe he had met a girl.”

She went to yoga and an off-island doctor’s appointment, and when she returned at 5 PM, Ben and his brother were watching TV. Later, Ben was getting cleaned up and dressed to go into town. He seemed happy.

“I had no awareness of him being depressed, but I had the sense that that upbeat light feeling came with him having made a decision,” Barbara recalls.

By that evening, when Ben went with some friends to the creeks, his happy mood was gone. The young people were lying around, looking at the moon. Ben was carrying around a large rock, then threw it, and it landed on someone’s porch. “Fuck promises,” Ben said. Nobody knew what it meant at the time. When Barbara heard about that later, she thought he might have been talking about breaking his promise to tell her if he ever felt suicidal.

Later that night, after attending a party, Ben had some friends drop him off downtown. And strangely, Barbara notes, “with all the busyness of summer, nobody saw him.”

When Barbara didn’t see Ben the next day, Friday, August 8, she began calling his friends and had Ben’s brother text-message them. Then she went to Ben’s bedroom and found paperwork about his arrest. They looked for Ben for hours. Around 11 PM, she called police and filled out a missing person’s report.

Around 1 AM, Barbara’s older son remembered that when he was using Ben’s computer the previous day, he noticed that Ben had looked up safe methods of suicide. Then he told Barbara about a place in the woods where some of Ben’s friends had been building a fort. She and her older son got on their bikes and rode to the state forest.

“And,” recalls Barbara, “we literally walked straight to him. It was pitch dark. We were walking to the fort calling his name.” Ben’s brother “started looking in the fort, and I started looking around, and that’s when I found him. There was a rope hanging from a tree.”

Barbara and her older son called the police and stayed in the forest for hours. She wanted to “go back and see Ben,” but police had blocked off the fort as a crime scene. Lepore was called to examine the body. An autopsy conducted in Boston showed Ben was sober and had had nothing to eat or drink for twenty-four hours. There was a trace amount of pot in his system, but that could have been weeks old.

“This is a kid, little bit of a goth, dabbled in some drugs and alcohol but a good kid, very, very bright kid,” Lepore says. “There are a lot of people very surprised by it.”

Barbara pored over the coroner’s report with Lepore, but it contained no revealing clues. “Here’s this perfect boy,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s intact. Except there was blood on both his hands and blood on his neck. Dr. Lepore thinks the rope cut his neck, and I think he may have reached up at the last minute.”

Ben left no note. He had brought nothing with him except a backpack that police found high up in the tree. It contained a stuffed monkey Ben had had since he was three years old. “I still have it,” his mother says. “Now, Monkey is a kind of talisman.”

Barbara partly blames the police for the way they handled the fight two nights earlier. “Here’s a kid who’d grown up on-island, he’s going off to college—putting him in jail doesn’t seem like a good idea when he’s part of this class that just lost so many people,” she says. “Whatever made him decide to do it, I think it was highly affected by the fact that other people had done it.”

Barbara also thinks that in retrospect Ben “was really scared to go to college. My children were simply not prepared to live off-island.” Others who have grown up on Nantucket have felt the off-island challenge too. Lepore’s son Nick says, “Some kids would go to college and
then come right back to the island. You’re in kindergarten with the same kids, in middle school, in high school—it’s almost like it kind of stunts your ability to meet people in a way, because you don’t have this shared history.”

Whether that was Ben’s real fear, his mother will never know. “Where a person goes when they decide to commit suicide isn’t the same place that you live in when you’re with the rest of the family,” she has realized. “Your kids try to protect you too. They don’t want to tell you things that will make you mad. You wish you could just hold them all the time and never let them get hurt.”

After school one afternoon, a twelve-year-old girl named Julie was lounging around the house like she always did. She usually lied to her mother and said she had already done her sixth-grade homework, or that she had none to do. Then she would submerge herself in video games, often bloody and violent ones like Diablo, which she was playing that day.

Julie was surprised when her mother, Patricia, sidled over and handed her a cup of hot chocolate. “Well this is strange,” she thought. “She never does that unless I ask her for something.”

Patricia, forty-seven, had moved Julie and her older brother from New Hampshire to Nantucket the year before, a few years after she’d gotten divorced from their father. Patricia had a cousin on Nantucket who rented them an apartment. But not long after they moved, Julie’s brother left and went to live with their father, and Julie and her mother lived a kind of tensely balanced existence. Julie was glued to video games and seemed precociously savvy about activities more appropriate for
teenagers; Patricia had various health complaints and struck her daughter as a somewhat disengaged parent.

“She always had migraines,” Julie notes. “She would take a bunch of different medications. She would always be in her bed or lie on the couch watching TV.”

That’s why the hot chocolate seemed to come out of the blue. “I drank it,” Julie recalls. And then, “I felt, like, wicked weird. I felt like I was going to pass out and stuff.”

She announced to her mother, “I’m going to lie down in your bed,” but before she could make it there, she staggered and clutched herself, “I think you better call the hospital,” she whimpered.

Patricia resisted at first. A recovering alcoholic, she had been sober for years, but that night, she’d had a drink, Julie recalls. “Oh, you’ll feel better,” she told Julie, “and it’ll be done.” But Julie wasn’t feeling better. Patricia ultimately called 911, and an ambulance raced Julie to Nantucket’s hospital. There it was discovered that Patricia had laced the hot chocolate with Klonopin, a drug used to treat anxiety disorders. Too much Klonopin can cause confusion, hallucinations, memory loss, mood changes, seizures, even suicidal thoughts or actions. And the Klonopin was mixing with a brew of Julie’s other medications: for depression, attention deficit disorder, and sleep problems.

Julie’s mother had apparently tried to poison her.

A nurse picked up on the poisoning, and Lepore, standing by, praised him for the quick diagnosis. There wasn’t much to be done except to watch Julie until the Klonopin passed from her system. She didn’t lose consciousness but was groggy. She stayed hospitalized for several days because in such cases, “you never quite know whether they’re on the uphill or the downhill,” as Lepore puts it. And “if a kid comes in in that type of situation, you have to come up with a plan.” Police and social services agencies have to be called. “Everyone has to be figuring out what happened, why it happened, and what is going to be done immediately.”

Julie recalls snatches from that time. “I was so out of it. The guy put the needle in me, and it hurt so bad, and I was like, ‘Oh fuck.’ And the guy got very mad at me and said, ‘Don’t ever talk like that again.’ I was very paranoid.”

Her mother didn’t hang around long, as Julie remembers it. Telling her daughter she was “just going to go into another room,” she ran out of the hospital. “They caught her at the Essex playground. I haven’t seen her since.”

That was October 6, 2006. Patricia was arrested and charged with two counts of assault to murder. “This was not a whodunit,” recalls Thomas Shack, the prosecutor on the case. “Julie was able to communicate with us what had happened. They got the cup for the hot chocolate from the kitchen, and that was corroborative of what Julie was saying. There were some writings—statements to the police—where Patricia laid out exactly what she had done.”

Patricia ultimately reached a plea bargain; in lieu of going to prison, she would serve four years of probation while undergoing psychiatric treatment. She was also barred from having any contact with her daughter until Julie’s eighteenth birthday. She went to California and entered a treatment facility, “which I liked because it was 3,000 miles away,” Shack says.

Patricia’s motive wasn’t entirely clear, although Shack says, “basically she was going to use this medication in a dose that would potentially cost Julie her life, and she would commit suicide afterwards.”

That’s what Julie believes, too, that her mother intended the two of them to be joined together in death. After her arrest, “she wrote a letter that said, ‘I want to commit suicide and take her with me,’” Julie says. “She was very depressed.”

Julie was immediately removed from her mother’s custody. “It was a very difficult case,” notes Shack. “I remember thinking the entire time, ‘What’s in Julie’s best interest here?’ Is it in the best interest of the child that their parent ends up going to prison? Are we setting the
child up for a feeling of, ‘Geez, it was my fault that my mother went to prison because if I had just said nothing, nobody would have known?’ Julie was at an age where you’re not young enough to forget and you’re not old enough to understand. We always thought that the best interest is letting her know that her mother was treated for what happened as opposed to her mother was punished for what happened.”

Julie was placed with a couple she knew, experienced certified foster parents who took care of her for a year. But it was a rocky experience.

“Julie was like a feral cat,” recalls Cathy Lepore, who was Julie’s counselor at school, where she was in a special education program. “She was literally addicted to computer games. Nobody had ever said she couldn’t watch an R-rated movie. She was watching movies like
Pulp Fiction
at age nine or ten. They got this kid, and, you know, they have rules—most people do.”

Julie says that living there was okay at first, “but it started to get hard. When I was living with my mom, I didn’t have to do anything, no chores.” Now, she was expected to do chores and limit her video gaming. “It was very different to me, and I would get into fights with them a lot.”

Eventually, says Cathy, the foster family “just had enough.”

But the Department of Children and Families was at a loss. The agency couldn’t find anyone on Nantucket willing to take Julie, and she faced the prospect of leaving Nantucket and being placed in foster care elsewhere.

“I was scared,” Julie remembers. She confided her fear in Cathy.

“We won’t let that happen,” Cathy told her. “You can move in with us.”

“Oh my gosh,” Julie thought. “This is going to be awesome.”

Cathy recalls that her feeling was, “this kid has already been through so much. We’ll try it for two weeks.” Two weeks turned into two months, two years, and more; the Lepores became Julie’s foster parents. The doctor had to lock up his guns so the house could pass muster with
social workers. And the Lepores began the odyssey of parenting a damaged and difficult child.