Up Close And Gone

by Jennie Spallone

  “Then I found out my sperm was for shit; my wife required a donor to impregnate her. Do you know how worthless that makes a man feel? The jocks used to tease me in high school because I was six-feet, two- inches and couldn’t make a basket! My mother wouldn’t let me play football because she was scared I’d get brain damage. Brain damage would have been better than going through four years of hell.”

  Deborah laid her hand on his shoulder. “Honey, it’s okay.”

  Alan thrust her hand away. “It’s not okay, ‘cause God wasn’t finished with us yet. He had to send us three babies, two dead in utero but delivered, and a third, Justin was his name. He lived one week before I pulled the plug. Yep, doc, I pulled the plug on my own baby because his organs were irreversibly damaged. He couldn’t breathe on his own. What kind of life is that for a child? For the siblings yet to be born?”

  The words tumbled out as if a dam had broken inside him. As if he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to. “It was actually a relief, yes, a relief, to unhook Justin’s breathing tube. After what my wife and I have gone through, I knew with all certainty that should he have miraculously live, Deborah and I could never have endured raising a severely disabled child.”

  The doctor’s shocked expression matched Deborah’s own. She thought she and Alan had been on the same page, releasing Justin from needless suffering before his certain death. Alan had never mentioned a secondary motive for unhooking Justin from life support. It cast their baby’s death in a different light. Could Justin have been saved? Did she really know this man at all? She swallowed the lump in her throat and steeled her resolve.

  Although she was devastated at this new development, Deborah knew the next few minutes would determine their future as parents. She wasn’t going to let anyone stand in the way of keeping this child.

  She looked over at her husband. At 6 ft. 4 inches, Alan was at least five inches taller than the doctor. She wondered if Alan was manic enough to kill him. “Come on, Alan,” she said, her voice soothing. “Let’s take Daniel and get out of here.”

  “About that…,” said the doctor.

  “You think we physically injured our son?” Alan asked incredulously. “This child, who, even with his fucked up behavioral issues, is our hope? Our redemption? All we want to do is love him. Heal him.”

  The doctor’s eyes grew hard. “Heal him?”

  “We’re not talking cults, here,” Deborah snapped. “With God’s help, we will heal Daniel by caring for his emotional and physical needs, setting limits, and rewarding positive behavior. Unconditional love, that’s what a child needs to feel whole.”

  “But you admitted to killing your other baby,” said the doctor.

  “Doctor,” Deborah said carefully, praying that her words were true, “my husband expressed his guilt over a selfish thought he experienced at the time of our baby’s death, but this was secondary to the compassion he showed toward the baby while he still lived. Our doctor and rabbi can vouch for this. Is it really so unusual for a parent to feel relieved when such a severe obstacle has been removed? We are, in fact, only human.”

  The doctor pondered her comments, then offered them a sad smile. “Daniel’s emotional and physical well-being is all that concerns me. If, in fact, it is Daniel who inflicted these wounds upon himself, it’s going to take a lifetime to heal this child.”

  “There’s an old African proverb, doctor,” said Deborah. “‘It takes a village to raise a child.’”

  The doctor put his hands on theirs. “I am risking my license by not reporting the two of you and giving you a second chance. Don’t make me regret it.”

  Chapter 51

  Shana

  The lead smell of blood assaulted her nostrils. Her eyes widened in fear.

  She attempted to scream, but her vocal chords had been severed. As flames engulfed her, the words shot through the top of her head. My Child!

  Ahh! Shana awoke, her body trembling.

  David put his book down and enfolded her in his arms. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”

  Shana looked wildly around her. “Where am I?”

  Detective Hernandez strolled into the room. She stared at Shana’s face. “Looks like your nap didn’t go so well.”

  “She had a bad dream,” said David, smoothing the hair from her face.

  “It wasn’t a dream!”

  The nurse rushed in to once-again check Shana’s heart monitor and blood pressure. “I’ll be right back with something to calm you down,” she told her.

  “Maybe you’d like to share it, this dream of yours,” said the detective.

  “No stress,” David reminded the detective.

  “A monster was slashing me over and over again. I froze. Couldn’t move. Flames all around. I burned to death.”

  David rocked her in his arms. “Poor Darling.”

  “Your left cheek does have a slash mark scar.”

  Shana raised her hand to her cheek in surprise.

  “Detective, if you’re going to upset my wife, you’ll need to leave.”

  Detective Hernandez raised her hands in resignation. “Gotcha. Where’s your kids?”

  “We didn’t know how long Shana would nap, so we had Rachel wheeled back to her hospital room. Becca went back to the hotel.”

  “Must be costing you a mint to be staying at the Roosevelt all this time,” the detective observed.

  Shana’s face brightened. “So that’s the name of our hotel!”

  Her husband looked at her quizzically.

  “I wanted to go back to the hotel but couldn’t recall which U.S. president it was named after! My cell phone died, so I couldn’t Google it.”

  “So you said,” remarked the detective.

  “I was furious with myself for forgetting to bring the phone charger along with me to brunch.”

  “Did you notice anybody following you at the park?”

  She shook her head. “I was focused on finding an exit.”

  “There’s map boards all over Central Park.”

  The nurse came back into the room and tinkered with Shana’s IV bag. “There you go. Have a nice visit.” Then she left the room.

  “We need to get her a nice gift for being so kind,” mused Shana.

  “Map boards, Mrs. Kahn,” said the detective, a slight edge to her voice.

  “I’m not good at reading maps.”

  The detective flipped through her notes. “You were a reporter, right?”

  “I grew up in Chicago, so I didn’t need maps to get around.”

  Detective Hernandez once again produced her photos. “Do you recognize the person holding the umbrella?”

  Shana glanced at the pictures. She gulped air. “My monster.”

  “Detective, I warned you.”

  “Is this the monster who gave you those rope burns on your wrists and ankles?”

  Shana nodded.

  “Detective, I demand that you….” interrupted David.

  “The same monster who slashed your cheek?”

  “Yes!” Her scream felt refreshing, emboldened.

  David shook his cane at the detective.

  Shana placed her hand on his. “I have to help the detective kill the monster!”

  “Nobody’s going to kill anybody,” said the detective.

  “But you must. He already killed my rapist.”

  David sank into his chair. “Rapist?”

  Shana remembered once reading a Gloria Steinem quote: The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. So what if she was doing it in reverse order. “It was a week before college graduation. I’d just gotten hired as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.”

  She noted the stony expression on David’s face. “You weren’t even onboard at the Newspaper yet!”

  “Whatever.”

  “I
celebrated by going to a frat party. Danced all night. Disco. Strobe lights. D.J. Got drunk. Went to the bathroom. Came out. He put a roofie in my drink. Next morning, I woke up in a strange bed, naked. Wet. Smelling of semen.”

  “Did you report the rape?” asked the detective.

  Shana squeezed her eyes. “It was the ‘80s. Female victims were blamed 99 percent of the time. My reputation would be in the toilet. This was my first real job.”

  “So your answer would be ‘no’?”

  Shana glanced at David. “I was so drunk, I didn’t even know my rapist’s name, let alone the name of his fraternity.”

  “Why did your ‘monster’ want him dead?”

  A spark of memory flew through her brain, but her mental tweezers were unable to grasp it. “Maybe he saw himself as an avenging angel.”

  “What was the connection between you, your monster, and your rapist?”

  Another spark, this second one almost invisible. “No clue.”

  Shana glanced at David. He was biting his lower lip, a familiar facial expression that signaled his disgust to her little white lies. He’d never understood that a reporter had to do what she had to do to get results. This time, though, Shana had no clue what that truth was.

  “Do you know the identity of your ‘monster’?”

  A butterfly of a name hovered just above Shana’s head, but when she attempted to catch it, the butterfly fluttered past. Shana’s thoughts drifted back to the woods, her captor looming over her, a bicyclist stopping to offer help to them both. Another name came to her. Although it felt off somehow, she knew both the detective and her husband needed an answer. She took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Rod Stewart,” she said forcefully. “My monster’s name is Rod Stewart!”

  Chapter 52

  Alan

  September 1990

  “Today you start fifth grade. How do you feel about that?”

  Alan was videotaping his son, just as he’d done in years past on this day of celebration.

  Daniel tossed his cereal spoon into the air. “Excited! I’m a big kid now.”

  Last night, Deborah had worried about him over that very fact. “Daniel’s tall for his age, but his maturity level isn’t that of a normal ten-year-old. Boys with winter birthdays play catch up throughout their school years. They’re always the youngest in the class. Their eye-hand coordination, gross-motor skills, social skills, spelling skills, reading skills often lag behind the other kids.”

  Alan had been on the same page as his wife, regarding kindergarten. They planned to do Montessori—a multisensory program that enables a child to explore learning at his or her own pace—for the one year between pre-school and kindergarten. But in the end, they had acceded to the school counselor’s assurance that holding such a bright boy as Daniel back a year would be detrimental to his self-esteem. They’d learned the hard way to follow their gut instinct.

  Alan continued filming rather than stopping to clean the milk and Cheerios mess on the wall. “What do you hope to learn this year, Daniel?”

  His son gulped his remaining drops of orange juice. “I want to learn how to read good, write good, and play kickball! I want to make friends, too!”

  The blinking red light signaled the video camera battery was about to die. “Last question. How do you plan to accomplish all these great things, Daniel?”

  His son jumped up from the table and grabbed his new backpack. “Listen to my teacher. Use my library voice in class. Talk, don’t hit. Let’s go, Dad!”

  Alan zipped the mini-video recorder back in its pouch. “Got your lunch bag?”

  “Got it, Dad. Come on!”

  “All right. Let’s do this!”

  By the time Alan reached the front door, his son was already half-way down the street. “Wait up!” he yelled into the falling autumn leaves.

  The crossing guard was holding out her arm for his son to wait while cars passed.

  Seconds later, Alan caught up to them. “Hey, bud. We talked about this. You can’t just run out of the house like an airplane on fire!”

  Daniel began to guffaw. “Airplane on fire. That’s funny, Dad.”

  As they crossed the street together, Alan prayed this school year would go better than last year. Wishful thinking.

  Chapter 53

  Detective Hernandez

  Detective Hernandez chuckled at Shana Kahn’s lame attempt to insert humor into her investigation. “Rod Stewart, huh?”

  Shana shook her head impatiently. “My kidnapper was way taller and younger than the classic rock singer.”

  Thanks to the bicyclist who’d found Shana, Hernandez already was privy to the kidnapper’s description, including the alligator-patterned high tops, but she wanted to confirm whether or not their stories meshed. “What kind of shoes was he wearing?”

  Shana burst out laughing. “He didn’t wear shoes during my bondage, detective.”

  “Did he reveal any other personal information about himself?”

  Kahn seemed to consider her question. “I heard him tell the bicyclist who discovered us in the woods that he’d been jogging when he found me lying there. He also said he was a medic and had to get to work.”

  “What time of day did this occur?”

  Shana appeared to be fishing for a memory. “The sun was going down. I must have laid there for several hours because my skin felt raw, and my mouth tasted like stale French bread.”

  “How did you get to the woods?”

  She stared up at the ceiling over her hospital bed. “I remember my wrists and ankles being bound.”

  “Was Stewart the person who bound you?” continued the detective.

  Shana gave a quick nod. “He threw me in the back seat of a fancy black car. Said we were going on a field trip.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Take it slow, detective.”

  The detective observed Shana flutter her eyes at her husband. Looks like she appreciated this new and improved model.

  “No problem,” said the detective. “What do you remember about the car ride?”

  “We drove for a long time.”

  “Freeway? Gravel road?”

  “Smooth road. Driving fast. It was freezing inside the car. I asked him to turn off the air conditioner. That’s when he pulled to the side of the road and hauled me into the woods. He dropped me on the blacktop trail. Said he’d be back for me that evening if the wild animals didn’t get me first. Then he left.”

  Shana began to sob. The detective handed her a tissue.

  David Kahn frowned. “You seriously need to stop!”

  “Shut up!” said his wife. “I’m doing this!”

  Her husband heavily came to his feet, grabbed his cane, and stalked out of the room.

  “I’m such a bitch.”

  “You’re upset. Your husband will understand.”

  “Poor guy’s taken forty years of my shit.”

  “It takes two to tango, they say,” said Hernandez.

  “True that!”

  The detective poured her a glass of cool water. “Did anybody come upon you while you were lying in the woods?”

  Kahn stared up at the ceiling again. Then she said, “A little girl dressed in a red coat, red hat, red shoes. She was skipping down the path, carrying a red parasol.”

  The detective’s eyes narrowed. No parent would dress their kid that way with the temperature clocking in at ninety degrees. “Was the little girl with somebody?”

  “She was all alone. Weird, don’t you think?”

  The whole story was weird, thought Hernandez. “What time of day did you see her?”

  This time, the woman answered without hesitation. “The sun was straight overhead, so it had to be around noon.”

  “Did she talk to you, or you to h
er?”

  “I pleaded with her to help me, but she just let go of her red parasol and skipped away.”

  Hernandez noticed the victim’s faraway gaze. If she had been left in the sun all morning, dehydrated, she could be hallucinating. “Anybody else stop to help you?”

  “It must have been a workday, because nobody passed me for hours. I thought I was dying. Then a homeless frog woman stopped to chat. She was dressed in a big plastic cape.”

  The detective glanced up from her notes to see if she was joking, but the woman’s facial expression was solemn. “Her polliwogs were waiting for her at a nearby pond. She asked me which pond my polliwogs and I were staying.

  “I said I didn’t know. Then I asked her to untie my ropes. The frog woman laughed. ‘Frogs don’t use scissors!’ Then she left.”

  That Shana took seriously her encounter with the frog lady was a bad sign. Hernandez stood and placed her notebook in her pocket. She felt the need to somehow comfort this woman. “It’s not unusual to hallucinate following trauma and dehydration.”

  “I am not hallucinating,” Kahn said harshly, “but I am done answering your questions. Please tell my husband to come back in now.”

  Hernandez shook her head in frustration as she exited the room.

  Chapter 54

  David

  David remained on the hospital bench, uninclined to rejoin his wife in her room. On one hand, Shana’s bitchy words signaled she was back in good form. On the other hand, the few days he’d spent apart from his volatile woman—the few nights he’d spent away from her since she’d retired—had been a blessing. The horror of not knowing if she was dead or alive? He wouldn’t wish those feelings on Jack the Ripper himself.

  Still, it had been a huge relief to not have to account for every decision he made, no matter how minute. He’d deepened the bond with his daughters through collaborating on finding their mother. The abject loneliness he’d experienced sleeping without his soulmate, not knowing whether his would be a temporary or permanent occurrence. All these experiences had taught him that no matter what transpired, he could make it on his own.