His Bright Light by Danielle Steel

Author:Danielle Steel [Steel, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56650-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

12

A long, hard summer

The rest of the trip to Europe went well. The kids had a good time, and so did John and I. But the reports I was getting from the hospital where Nick was were not terrific. What we had anticipated as a short stay was now being stretched out longer. They felt that he needed residential treatment and would benefit from staying for an indeterminate amount of time, perhaps the entire summer, or longer. And Nick was miserable about it.

I wasn’t sure which way to turn. He sounded upset, but they kept assuring me they could help him. The director of the hospital was someone I had spoken to and liked, and at first the counselors and therapists he had there seemed interested in him. But within days, the director left for a month’s vacation, and the counselors were beginning to sound frustrated and hostile. The longer he was there, the less Nick was cooperating with them. He was sounding angry and aggressive, and they were playing our old, familiar theme song, to which I knew the lyrics only too well. Neglected celebrity child, and spoiled, indifferent mother. Great. But there was no denying that Nick wasn’t well. Even with medication, he seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was upset about being in the hospital, or if he was actually getting worse, from a psychiatric standpoint. Dr. Seifried flew out to see him, as promised, and agreed that Nick wasn’t ready to come home yet. And once again, once hospitalized, Nick was becoming less functional, and cooperating less than ever.

John and I went to see him on the way home, and I didn’t like what I saw. He looked pale and tired and sounded irrational and desperate. He wanted to come home with me, but he seemed too wound up for us to handle. He needed to calm down again before I could bring him home, no matter how badly I wanted to free him. And I tried futilely to explain that to him. He thought I was abandoning him there, and he was afraid I would leave him there forever.

The problem the hospital had with Nick was that he didn’t fit in anywhere. He was too bright and too sophisticated to fit in with the kids his own age, who were there for a variety of reasons. But when they put him in with the adults, although he interacted well socially with them, and in therapy groups, he actually had nothing in common with them. Their life experiences were just too different. He wasn’t dealing with children and wives and jobs he couldn’t cope with. But he ran rings around the adolescents, and some of the counselors. And as usual, he was creating mayhem all around him. He was once again unable to follow their rules, ignored their smoking taboos, and had set fire to the carpet in his room, and scorched an entire wall by

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