And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Read Free Page A

have a right!”
    â€œHow dare you call the police!”
    David went out the door after the two reporters, fists clenched, face red. Six feet tall and powerfully built, he ran toward them. They turned and took off. He chased them across the lawn and down the block to their car. They jumped in, surprised and frightened, and sped away.
    When David came back, I asked him to please go to school, to at least make the effort.
    â€œYou sure you’ll be okay here all by yourself?” he asked.
    â€œI’ll be fine.”
    â€œWhy are you wearing your coat?”
    â€œI’m cold.”
    He walked to his car and drove off. The phone rang. I thought about not answering it, but it might be Frank. Possibly he’d heard the news. I picked up the phone. It wasn’t Frank.
    â€œMrs. Spungen, it’s Anne Beverley,” said Sid’s mother, her voice strained.
    We had spoken once before. She had phoned two days after Nancy’s murder to offer her condolences and to say she was certain Sid couldn’t have done it. It had been a bizarre call, but not as bizarre as when Sid himself had phoned me the following day.
    â€œI’m … I’m sorry your son is dead,” I now managed to say. “I’m sorry for you.”
    â€œThank you. Our children were very special children. I suppose this is the way it was meant to be. You know, no one else understood them except you and I.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œMrs. Spungen, may I bury him next to Nancy?”
    I covered the phone, gasping from the pain in my chest. And from horror. How could she ask me to let her bury her son—my baby’s accused murderer—next to her?
    â€œMay I, Mrs. Spungen? They meant so much to each other.”
    â€œYou … 
can’t
.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œIt’s … it’s a family plot.”
    â€œThen what will I do? Where will I bury him? Perhaps somewhere else in the same cemetery?”
    â€œI can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
    I hung up. The doorbell rang again. More reporters. I let it ring.
    I went through the kitchen to the garage and found a piece of heavy, rubber-encased wire with which to hang myself. I’d been thinking about it each and every day for several weeks. In fact, suicide was all I thought about. I kept putting it off. Every day I told myself to wait until tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow the pain would go away. Maybe tomorrow I’d want to live again, have a reason to live again.
    But I couldn’t take the pain anymore. It was unbearable and there was no end to it. Death was the only way out. I had no other alternative. Today was the day. This was it.
    I went back inside the house with the wire, tied a noose around my neck, and looked at myself in the dining room mirror.
    Nothing had worked out the way I’d planned.
    Once I had looked forward to life. Twenty years before it had been full of promise. I was twenty then, a nice, reasonably attractive middle-class Jewish girl from Philadelphia. I was a college student, a good student. I had plans and ambitions. I had a kind, young husband who loved me as much as I loved him. I had dreams. Twenty solid years of anguish was not one of them. What had I done to deserve this?
    Once I had been happy. I had known how to laugh. I had known how to cry. I hadn’t cried in twenty years. There had never been any time to cry since the day Nancy was born. No time for the luxury of tears. I had made a promise to Nancy the first time I saw her there in the maternity ward nursery. I had promised her a life of quality and dignity. It took every bit of my strength and my love to keep that promise over the twenty years of my daughter’s frightening, misunderstood, tragic life. It took every minute of every day.
    I didn’t cry when I finally had to admit to myself that she was not like other little girls.
    I didn’t cry when I realized she was angry and in pain and that nobody,