Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  28

  THE FEAR first hit at a carnival. It was 2002, and I was in Davis, California, visiting family friends with my wife and my two kids, a three-year-old and a newborn. We were riding the wild carousel of early parenthood: the donkey rides and cotton candy, the face painting and sand art. Our friends had young kids too, born around the same time as ours and raised for a few years down the block in Brooklyn until they moved out west. We had known them since we were teenagers, and marveled at our new roles as moms and dads. Life had transformed from dive bars and Dead shows to Chuck E. Cheese’s and the Wiggles.

  On one hand, it was incredible pressure—the feeling of having to provide and care for these little human beings, to make money, to make a home, to keep them alive and clean in the storm of mayhem and meltdowns. But we embraced the joyful chaos. As we pushed our overstuffed strollers around the suburban fair, sticky sippy cups and ragged baby dolls spilling from our arms, we did so with the harried insanity and good-humored amazement that every new parent knows. I wanted my kids to have the same sense of freedom and adventure that my parents had given me, despite the nightmare of Jon’s murder, and I didn’t ever want to stand in the way.

  But, as I learned in a flash that afternoon, the freedom comes with fear, too. All of a sudden I realized that my three-year-old wasn’t beside me. I asked my wife where she was, and she didn’t know either. Panic shot through my veins, a kind of paralytic seizure that immobilized my body and mind. Where is my kid? The crowd seemed to thicken around me, the people replicating in numbers to obstruct my view and block my path.

  The fear turned to adrenaline as I pushed my way through the families and called my child’s name. As my feet quickened and my words became louder, the fear grew, enveloping me and distorting the surroundings. The sun grew brighter and rides more blurry. The music turned deafening and the fair grotesque; the man churning kettle corn and the woman twisting balloon dogs completely oblivious to the fact that I couldn’t find my little girl. Time slowed terrifyingly, the carousel of joy just a moment before grinding down to a halt. Where is she?

  As I shouted her name, I could see the faces of other parents turning toward mine in slow motion, the slow motion of disconnect. This wasn’t happening, was it? Could it happen again? A stranger snatching my child, just as strangers had snatched my brother. The sanctity of statistics had long been a comfort for me in my own life, the near-impossible likelihood that what had happened to Jon could happen to me or my brother. But now it felt like it was happening again. With each leap, it didn’t even feel like something I was imagining, it felt like something real. My daughter was gone. She was gone. Gone forever. Taken. Whisked away. In the back of a car, a truck—I had no idea—but I knew it. I was convinced. She was gone. It was happening. This was real.

  In the panic, I caught a glimpse of my wife’s stricken face; she felt it too. She hadn’t even been through what I had been through in my life, but by marrying me, she was a part of it now. She was a trauma victim, turned inside out from the knowledge that the ultimate nightmare is real, that it can happen, that it does happen, that it happened to my family, to my parents, to me—and now to her. For so long, she had felt like an interloper, like the horror was not hers, like she didn’t have the right to share the shock, the fear, the grief. But she did. And, I soon realized, she was suffering from the same plague of silence that had isolated me. She had been selective in whom she told about Jon’s death, just as I had been. But by doing this, she felt estranged from her peers, unable to have the other moms understand just why she might have felt more hesitant to let her kid out of her sight than they did. But she had every right to feel and own her pain. Trauma is a virus, and it infects the people who love you. It is intergenerational. She loved me, and she was traumatized, just as, I knew, my own children would experience their own unique experience of their uncle’s death too.

  Finally, that day at the fair, I caught sight of my girl. She was with her friend by the pony ride, oblivious, smiling, laughing. She must have just run off for a moment, despite knowing better. Then she got separated, drawn perhaps by the sound of the other children riding on the animals’ backs. The fear that had so devoured me in the last few minutes gave way to a rush of relief, a cascade of warmth flooding the cold inside me as I ran up to her and lifted her in my arms and said, “Where were you? What happened? Where’d you go?”

  She had no idea why her father was acting this way, why he seemed so scared and so strange, why his face had this look of devastation, this weird mix of distress and release. And as I held her, I talked myself down as best I could. I told her never to run off like that again, to always stay beside us, to be careful in crowds, not to dash off without us knowing. And for a moment, she looked into my eyes and said, “Okay, Daddy, I won’t.”

  Then she pointed to the ponies and asked if she could have a ride. And I was reaching into my pocket, taking out some cash, handing it to the man with the reins. And then I was standing there with my wife, still shaken, as we watched our daughter ride in circles on the pony. We saw the way she was delighting in the feeling of motion, the strong animal carrying her around, the country music on the radio, the smell of cotton candy, the freedom of the moment and the feeling of life.

  29

  DESPITE EVERYTHING I had learned over the years about Jon’s murder—even the details about the crime and candy from the parole hearing—the resolution that I hoped would come with such knowledge was still eluding me. The reality of Jon’s death, and perhaps the reality of death itself, remained incomplete. The fear was alive. I had children now, and I would have to find a way to stay sane, to remain functional, to not let the fear of death and, more particularly, the fear of abduction, overwhelm the freedom I wanted them to experience in life. I could see already that I was not alone in this struggle. My friends were going through the conflict too. Kids were not going off on their own like we did when we were young, not even the older kids.

  The culture had changed. CNN broadcast news stories of missing kids. We heard about Amber Alerts, followed drawn-out abduction stories on Nancy Grace. The stories were flying across the internet too. Of course, this wasn’t to say that parents had no reason to be mindful. But at what point does fear subsume mindfulness? Parents, drunk on the fear, began hovering over their kids. Psychologists had coined a term: helicopter parents. Instead of letting the kids run free, free time became regimented. Suddenly there were playdates, and play had to be scheduled like dentist appointments. Instead of heading out the door and running off for hours, kids were shuttled around by their parents. Instead of playing basketball up the street, they were signed up for a relentless crush of after-school activities.

  When kids weren’t enrolled at some after-school activity, they were home on their computers or playing video games. The personal computer revolution swept the country, providing a new source of leisure and entertainment—a convenient new phenomenon for parents who were more comfortable having their kids indoors. There was nothing wrong or corrupting about the new technology: it was just a tool that parents employed to make their lives easier.

  For kids, it felt like a secret world inaccessible to grown-ups, a digital tree house all their own. The Web was their new secret woods, and they were fleeing there. But the promise of new adventures online carried the same old fears. The more time young people spent on the net, the more parents and pundits worried about child predators lurking there. This just seemed like a new means for a kidnapper to lure and kill kids. Once again, the perceived threat overwhelmed the rarity of the reality. Kids were more likely to die from an accident inside the house than get murdered by a kidnapper. But the reality of statistics didn’t matter. We had gone from a generation of freedom to a generation of fear.

  At the same time, there were more, and beneficial, precautions in place. Unlike when we were kids, teenagers now knew about AIDS and other STDs. The drinking age was now higher in most states. Driver’s licenses couldn’t be altered into fake IDs as easily as when
we were young. But despite all this, the fear still lived in me. I had spent a lifetime not knowing the whole story of what happened to my brother that October day in 1973. The less I had known, the more the specter of his murder had grown.

  This was partly because I was afraid to ask the questions and partly because I didn’t know which questions to ask. But I was different now. I had been working as a journalist for years. I knew how to report and re-create a story, how to dig up facts and bring the past back to life. I realized that I could use my reporting skills to dig up my brother’s story like I had never done before. I could talk with people, research the case, discover all the missing pieces, and put them back together once and for all.

  Something inside of me needed to know the full story so well that I could tell it myself. Perhaps I wanted to do this so I had a sense of control, of understanding. Or perhaps I just thought that by bearing witness, I could feel closer to Jon and somehow make the feelings of panic go away. I just didn’t know how to go about this, what I would do, how I would do it, what I would say. The fact was, I just wasn’t ready at the time. I didn’t know why, or really question it. But eight years later, the moment would come, and it took the experience of death to get me started.

  30

  WHAT HAPPENED to the truck that was in front of us?” It was February 2010 when my father, now seventy-six, asked me this question. His beard had become short and gray, a black beret over his wavy gray hair, his brown eyes blinking calmly behind his round-framed glasses. He was sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my car as I was driving to give a lecture on one of my books. A large truck had been driving in front of us, and now my dad wondered what had happened to it, as if it had suddenly vanished into thin air. In fact, the truck had pulled away from us a half hour before, but he was just aware of it now.

  There was a reason for his strangely delayed reaction. For the past eight years, he had been fighting cancer, which had recently spread from his lungs to his brain. The brain tumor was degrading his memory, and he seemed to be forgetting more and more. My father wasn’t a fearful person—something I always found remarkable given Jon’s murder—but losing his faculties was something he long seemed to dread. “If I can’t read anymore,” he once told me, “I wouldn’t want to live.”

  Losing my parents was something I’d obsessed about as long as I could remember. I seemed to fear it more than my friends worried about their own moms and dads. Perhaps it was Jon’s death that left me this way. But I always had a heightened vulnerability that my parents could be gone at any second. This manifested in those paranoid visions and moments, like when I convinced myself that one of them was in a passing ambulance or had been murdered by strangers.

  With my dad’s cancer, that fear became more real and pronounced, a ticking bomb that sounded nearly every day. Not only was I afraid of losing my father—a man who in addition to raising me was also a close friend and inspiration—but also I was afraid of losing another connection to Jon. Because I had so few memories of my brother, I looked to my dad, my mom, and Andy as repositories of the past. They could remember the brother who eluded me, hear his voice, recall his touch. When people die, they live on in the ones who knew them, and I needed my family to help Jon live on inside me.

  The problem was that I long feared talking about Jon with them. It felt too painful, too frightening, too selfish. I was still overprotective, scared to upset them by asking them to recall their dead son and brother. I’m sure this wasn’t entirely altruistic, though. By not talking with them about Jon, I didn’t have to feel my brother’s presence myself or feel the horror of his demise. But the older I got—the older they got—the more I had a sense that my time was running out. When my father died, a piece of Jon would die with him.

  And so, often before I saw my father, I had the same conversation with myself: Talk to Dad about Jon, I’d think. Take out a tape recorder. Have him tell you the story. But then I would see him, and I wouldn’t say anything about it. I would just give myself over to the flow of our time together—talking about my kids, the Bucs, my writing, his retirement, hanging out, eating, laughing, enjoying our walks—and then I’d be gone.

  Now, however, I had the terrible feeling that I had already lost some of my dad, even though he was still alive. His mind was going. A tumor was growing inside, pushing away his memories, or whatever was left of them. He couldn’t even remember when the truck in front of us had driven away; how was he going to remember the story of Jon?

  Though I still couldn’t muster the courage to ask him to do this, I did want to make sure that he knew of my intention to write about Jon someday. I wanted his blessing, his okay that I wasn’t somehow exploiting myself or my family by telling our story. This wasn’t the first time, though, that we had this conversation. I had first mentioned it years before. After the publication of my first book, Masters of Doom, in 2003, I began thinking seriously about writing about Jon one day, and sat down with my parents to discuss this with them.

  They were, as I expected them to be, completely supportive. This was consistent with how they had led their lives, founding the grief support groups in Tampa, and becoming so active in the grief support community. My parents weren’t perfect, but they were talkers and thinkers and feelers, despite the fact that talking and thinking and feeling about Jon was often too painful to occur inside our own home. My dad had taken both a personal and anthropological interest in death and dying, lining his office shelves with books on the subject. When he donated his massive library upon his retirement, the couple dozen books he kept were the ones about death.

  “Wow, what a heavy, heavy task you’ve laid out for yourself,” he wrote me in an email after we first talked about my writing a book on Jon, “but it will also be an enlightening one, in the sense that it will make you lighter and even wiser than you are now at the same time. And if you’re looking for books to read, we have some . . . whatever, you have, as you know, made a very large decision, and I wish you well on your journey. I think you and I will find that my memory about lots of things is lacking. This may be a pattern with me. You know how I remember so little from my boyhood . . . the shrink suggested I blocked out much of my first 10 years or so because that was my response to my father’s death when I was 9 1/2. I may well have done the same with Jon. We’ll see . . . anyway, godspeed.”

  Other emails followed, more recommendations for books to read, such as Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, the diaries and letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, about the kidnapping and murder of their baby Charles Jr. in 1932. “Lindbergh said, actually, that suffering alone doesn’t make for wisdom,” Dad wrote. He often used ellipses in his emails, as if to indicate his stream of thought. “One has to remain vulnerable . . . open . . . to more suffering . . . and to more love . . . it’s rather wonderful, as I recall.” He referenced a portion of the book where Lindbergh attributes her survival to the support she received from others, how she said, as my dad put it, “you gotta have at least one person whom you love and who loves you, and talk to that person and be supported by that person.”

  Later, one day when we were standing on the sidewalk in front of the house in Tampa—the same sidewalk where I thought I had last seen Jon—my father told me, “It will be the best thing you ever write.” As reassuring as this was to hear, something in his words unsettled me. Despite everything I told him, I wasn’t resolved about writing about Jon yet, not completely. I still hadn’t even mustered the strength to discuss Jon with him beyond this cursory idea. My father was just trying to lend me his support by giving me this encouragement but, in a way, it felt like a burden, an assignment from a professor that I didn’t want to complete.

  Several years later, during the drive to New York, I broached the topic again, talking of my intention to write the book one day. But this time was different. Inside me, I felt an inevitability, that if I did ever write the story, it would happen after my father was gone, and that I would have to live with the re
ality that the conversations I long feared of having with him might not even be an option. Maybe he knew this too, but as we went down the highway, he told me again how much he supported my pursuit. Perhaps, somehow, I would be completing work for the both of us.

  31

  ON MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND 2010, I was with my father at hospice when he died. My mother, wife, and kids happened to all be there, too, when the moment came. To watch someone die, let alone my own father, was something I never imagined, and the reality was beyond anything I had experienced before.

  As frightening as it felt to hear his breathing change and see the blueness crawl from his fingertips over his body, it felt like a privilege to be there with him, to share his last seconds, to make sure he wasn’t alone. My father had lived with death for so long, from the death of his father to the death of his son. He had read about it, studied it, joked darkly about it, and I was grateful to be there with him when it was his time. When his last breath left his body, it was remarkable to see that it was just a body he’d left behind. It was my father, but it wasn’t my father. It didn’t feel scary to me anymore, it just felt like he was gone, like there really was some ineffable essence that had escaped, and that the body was no longer his.

  But then an even more unexpected series of events was set in motion, as we got swept up in the ceremonies and rituals following his death. Suddenly our family was the focus of grieving again, something that had not happened since Jon was killed. This wasn’t something stated explicitly, but it was felt. And, for me, it felt so cyclical. There I was in the synagogue, forty-two years old, just about the age my father was when he lost his own son, and I was surrounded by many of the same people who had come there in 1973 for Jon’s memorial service.