The Empty Place at the Table

by Jode Jurgensen John Ellsworth

  Mark and I had been an item almost since our freshman year when we met at a football game between Illinois and Northwestern. I was enrolled at Northwestern, Mark at the University of Illinois. We went to a party at my friend's home and later bundled up and walked along the shore of Lake Michigan in the pre-dawn light. After that night--and next day--we were inseparable on weekends. During the week, he was downstate and I was in Evanston. Which meant it was FaceTime and texting, which really wasn't a bad way to go to college, because we both were eager students and worked hard at keeping Honors GPA’s.

  He loved my looks, which all young women love to hear. I was five-eight, about one-hundred-thirty, with blond hair and eyes that alternated between blue and gray. My hair was usually chopped short because I didn't like to waste time on it in college days. At one point I actually made the Northwestern Cheerleading Squad but quit after two weeks when I saw what a time-sink it was going to be. Good grades were my siren call; I didn't have time to travel and rah-rah I had found out.

  Mark loved my family. My sisters were much older than me but Mark hit it off with them right away. But the problem was, my parents were never in the U.S. just about the entire time I was in high school and college. My dad worked for the State Department but could never talk about his work. To this day, I still think he's a CIA spook, but he would never admit it even to me. So we aren't that close, in parent-child terms, although financially they've always supported all my dreams. I tell them I love them when we talk on the phone, and they say they love me, but I knew early on that I was going to do family differently when it came to my turn.

  Mark was the father of the baby. Maybe some women would have thrown him over when he got their roommate pregnant, but I didn't. I had my reasons, not the least of which was I loved this man with all my heart and I wanted all the parts of him that I could have. The baby was born during our final semester, and my lawyer immediately filed the adoption papers. We went to court that same week, and the judge signed the papers. Lisa and I celebrated with a meal out. Lisa didn’t cry through any of this, which I took as a positive sign.

  The early days were hard. Mark and I were very different. I was a Chicago native who had attended Northwestern University and earned a degree in journalism. He was all about hunting and fishing and NFL football. But he wasn’t a chauvinist and he didn’t abuse the animals he hunted and fished. He took only what he could eat and shared that with his welfare grandparents who’d raised him.

  Mark had been in Army ROTC at the University of Illinois, and he was overseas when Lisa came into the world. We hadn't wanted it that way, of course, but the Army orders came, and Mark had no choice. He was gone a week after the orders came, before Lisa's birth. It left me with a very whiny birth mother whose legs and feet were swollen, whose back ached, who couldn't sleep with all the kicking inside her womb, and who had just screwed up her final exams at Northwestern because the symptoms and pains ran her to the ground. She basically just gave up on everything.

  Three years later, he had been stateside once and had seen our daughter. Upon his return to combat, two weeks later the helicopter he was piloting during a firefight outside Kandahar crashed. The plane was so hopelessly incinerated there wasn't enough left to positively ID the pilot and co-pilot. What human remains could be found were blindly divided between two body bags. The funeral was closed casket; I had seen the last of my husband when I said goodbye to him just after Thanksgiving. With Mark's death, my OCD relented. There was no longer anything to hold together with my obsession glue.

  When he was killed, I was working as an associate producer on Laura in Chicago, the worldwide TV talk show watched almost exclusively by women. The money was good enough that we’d managed to purchase a condo in the Loop. Mark's parents helped with the down payment. Still, I earned enough to keep current after the purchase. When the news was delivered to me at work that Mark had been killed in action, I left the Laura Studios and went straight home on the L train. I paid the babysitter up to the minute and told her she wouldn't be needed for two weeks. I then went into withdrawal with Lisa by my side. I refused everyone who wanted to come see me and help me through the tragic time. It wasn't until the next day that I let anyone close, and that happened to be Mark's parents. They hadn’t been told about Mark’s fatherhood. Still, they needed to see Lisa, who they regarded as Mark’s offspring. They told me Lisa represented their last living connection to their son.

  Which was when I let his parents in on the secret: Mark was Lisa's bio father. I explained the birth mother was actually my college roommate who'd had a fling with Mark one night. She admitted to me that she had seduced my boyfriend just to see if she could. Surprisingly--even to me--I didn't move right out of the dorm and allow my love for my roomie to turn to hatred. I didn’t because I was impossibly in love with Mark and wouldn’t risk driving him away. Plus, I could parlay this into a win for everyone.

  I strategized what came next—I’ve always been good at chess because I can see moves at least three ahead. Truth be told, I didn't scratch out my roommate’s eyes, because I knew her career path wouldn't allow for a baby in her life. She was a BSN student and, as soon as she graduated that May she was scheduled to begin a summer program in California before entering medical school in August. A baby just wasn't going to work in her life, but she was Catholic, so abortion was out. So I made her a proposal: I would adopt the baby. No need for Mark to adopt; he was going to be named on the birth certificate as the father anyway.

  My roommate agreed. There was talk between us to the effect that I would allow her to visit Lisa anytime she ever wanted, but, like much sentimental talk, it didn't happen. Once the roomie was in med school at Stanford, she never returned to Chicago again, that I knew of. And if she had come back, she hadn't bothered to contact me. Nor did I call her. Better left alone, I decided. Up to the day Lisa was abducted, my roomie had never seen her offspring. Because of this, I never harbored a thought that the person who stole Lisa out of the hospital might be her birth mother. It just wasn't like that.

  When I shared the story with Mark's parents, they were speechless. Then, in a sudden rush of competing emotions, they began crying and laughing: they were ecstatic that their granddaughter carried their son's genes. She really represented their son now that he was gone, and she was a part of him, something tangible that they could still hold and cuddle and kiss. So a special bond was formed the day I told them.

  Mark's parents were wealthy--living in Glencoe, second in average income only to Hollywood. They made it clear that they would do anything they could do to help us in the years ahead. The kind of financial help they had in mind never was needed, though. Eighteen months after Mark's death, I was promoted to Executive Producer of Laura in Chicago, and my salary with bonuses shot into the seven figures. Our cramped condo was sold; the proceeds were used as a down payment for a horse farm outside Schaumburg. Now we had a pond and geese out of one window in our family room and a sunny woods out the other.

  After Mark’s death, there were other men, and dates and parties, but no one even began to equal the love I had shared with Mark. I knew what real love felt like and I wasn't going to settle for less now in my new life. So I pretty much lived alone with Lisa and concentrated on giving my baby the best environment and parenting possible.

  Then this sudden spiking fever put Lisa in the hospital. The doctors had not decided on a diagnosis by the time she was abducted, though they tended toward thinking it was some form of meningitis. But the night of the kidnapping—after Lisa had disappeared—lab reports indicated she had turned a corner. She would be well enough to go home soon. I was heartbroken by the irony: Lisa was to have been discharged to go home the next day. It was just all too much to comprehend.

  DETECTIVE MCMANN GUIDED me out of the hospital. Her car was parked in ER parking. Six inches of new snow had to be scraped from her windshield. I pulled the hood of my parka back off my head once we were inside the car and the heater was putting out warm air.

>   We followed behind a uniformed officer driving my Subaru SUV. Kendra handled the black Impala easily and nosed out into traffic, heading west toward Schaumburg. Twenty minutes later, we exited at the Schaumburg exit, passed by the mall, and headed west on Golf Road. It was lightly snowing that January night and previous snows were plowed into the median.

  As we drove home, I alternated between calm and contemplative then frantic with outbursts of tears and sobbing. Plus there were self-recriminations for leaving her alone in her room. I wracked my mind trying to think of someone who might wish to steal my daughter. I wondered whether my being listed in the TV show's credits had anything to do with Lisa's abduction. Might someone out there have decided I was an earner able to pay a fortune in ransom? It was very possible, Detective McMann said.

  Only time would tell. And that would come in the form of a demand for ransom. The detective felt but didn't say to me that night that she would have preferred a ransom note to silence. Ransom was a hope of getting the child returned. No note meant that the child was taken for other reasons. Usually, those other reasons were sexual assault and homicide or a selling of the child into the slave trade. I pulled out my phone and brought up Lisa’s most recent snapshot. Detective McMann shuddered and her slack jaw clenched. She was the exact model of the child the sex trades were seeking. Blond. Blue-eyed. Beautiful.

  “She’s a beautiful child,” the detective said as she drove us into the horse farm neighborhood.

  “Yes,” I said. “She is perfect.”

  “I’ve got good feelings about this one.”

  “Do you have good feelings about all of them?”

  “Never.”

  3

  Detective McMann's tone turned light and chatty.

  “Where did you grow up?" she asked me.

  “Evanston. I went to high school and then college in my hometown.”

  I told her about Mark and how Lisa came into our lives. As I talked, I would catch myself about to refer to Lisa in the past tense, and I would freeze up. Then there would be a pause while my brain tried to rephrase my comments as if Lisa were still with me. No past tense. Past tense meant you were acknowledging something was then and not now. I wasn't ready to do that--nor would I ever be. As we drove along snow-covered streets, I was thinking maybe some of what I told her was useful and maybe some of it was just her way of keeping me occupied.

  She asked about my parents. Is there some thought my parents might be involved in Lisa’s disappearance? The thought would never have occurred to me. She asked about their closeness to Lisa. I told her they had only seen Lisa one time in her first four years. But they had been that way with me and my sisters, too: remote, always traveling, fantastic providers of goods and services but falling way short of meeting our emotional needs. It just never seemed to occur to them that you owed kids more than the economies of childhood; I had sworn to myself even before Lisa was born that she was going to get all of me, not just the bank account parts.

  By the time we arrived at my house, Detective McMann had a pretty decent idea who I was. The uniformed officer driving my car pulled in first. We waited while the garage door rolled up, triggered by the unit in my car. Then we rolled inside the four-car garage and parked beside my car. We three went inside my house through the mud room door. Then the uniformed officer flicked a wall switch, bringing the articulating door back down. He followed us into the kitchen.

  We gathered around the large kitchen table with its seating for eight. Detective McMann opened her laptop and turned it on. I disappeared into a back room and emerged a few minutes later with Isaac, my teenage nephew. Was I having uncomfortable feelings about Isaac at that point? Evidently something was bothering me; I wanted him to be interviewed then and there.

  "Detective McMann, this is my sister's son, Isaac. Isaac lives with us while he’s attending Roosevelt here in Schaumburg. I thought you'd probably want to talk to him, too."

  McMann looked up from her laptop and shot a tight smile Isaac's way. "Sure, Isaac. Grab a seat and let's take your statement. Officer Rhodes," she said to the policeman who had driven my car back from the hospital, "why don't you have Ms. Sellars show you how to brew up a pot of coffee on her machine? It's going to be an all-nighter."

  Taking the cue, I made coffee while the uniformed officer watched. Isaac took a seat across from Kendra and pulled out a box of cigarettes.

  "May I?" he asked.

  "Not my house," Detective McMann said. "Ask your aunt."

  "She doesn't care."

  He produced a BIC lighter and fired up. Just when he was settled and getting relaxed, the detective began.

  "Okay, my tape recorder is rolling, so let's jump right in. Tell us your name, please."

  "Isaac Toms. My aunt is Melissa Sellars."

  "Your aunt has told you what happened tonight?"

  "Jesus, why aren't you all out looking for her?" Isaac complained. "She's only four years old, probably scared shitless right now."

  "Isaac!" I shouted from the coffee pot. "Enough!" But he was right and my sharp tone only meant I couldn't handle the truth just then. At least not yet.

  "Well, I'm just saying."

  "I know what you're saying. We already know that. The police, for your information, are out looking for your cousin. These officers are assigned to setting up a command post in our house. That's why we're all here and not out looking for Lisa, as you put it. Please save the criticism for later, all right?"

  It was rhetorical. Detective McMann continued.

  "What is your age?"

  "Twenty-three."

  "How long have you lived here with your aunt?"

  "This is my second year. I just started the second half of my sophomore year in school."

  "What are you studying?"

  “Languages. I want to work for the CIA.”

  "What are your parents' names?"

  "Robert and Ina Toms. Stanleyville, Missouri."

  "Why are you in school here in Chicago?"

  "I--I got in trouble in Missouri. I was ordered to either remain gainfully employed or stay in school. College or trade school, he didn't care. But it had to be one of them."

  "Who didn't care?"

  "The judge."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "I got someone pregnant. Then she told her dad I had raped her. But we were a couple, I didn't rape her. But it was my word against hers, and I had been in trouble before, so they took her word."

  "What kind of trouble before?"

  "No big deal. Shoplifting."

  "No big deal? That's a crime of moral turpitude."

  "If you say so."

  At that point, I came to Isaac's rescue by interrupting to take drink orders. My mind had overruled my initial bad feelings. I remember thinking, Why am I feeling unsure? Isaac had nothing to do with Lisa's disappearance. He is the definition of the good cousin who plays with his cousin, takes her to movies and to the park, and generally treats her like a little princess. Move along.

  I passed out cups and filled them. Soon, everyone was nursing a coffee, including the uniformed officer.

  "So am I done?" Isaac asked me.

  "Ask me," said the detective. "And no, you're not done. I want to ask about your relationship with Lisa. Tell me about you and your cousin."

  "Well, she lives here, and I live here. We don't see much of each other because she's in bed by the time I get home from Mickey D's."

  "You work at McDonald's?"

  "I do. And I've got the greasy shirts to prove it."

  "Do you ever spend time with Lisa?"

  "Weekends I'll see her more. I might pull her around in the wagon when the weather's good. Two weeks ago we went tubing in the snow. She loved it. But then she got sick."

  "Did the tubing make her sick?"

  "Hey, officer, did you hear me? My major is Arabic, not medicine. How would I know what made her sick?"

  "Good point, Isaac. I'll withdraw the question."

  "You should. Don't
try to trip me up, please. Last time I talked to the cops, I went to Juvie for a year. Never again."

  "No, you won't go to Juvie if you get in trouble again. You'll go to adult prison. Or jail. Now, Isaac, I want you to think carefully about this next question. And I want you to reflect on how serious it is to lie to the police before you answer. Here it is: Did you have anything to do with Lisa being taken from the hospital tonight?"

  "Oh, shit! Aunt Mel, can't you stop this crap? You know me better than that. Tell her, please!"

  "Just answer the questions," I muttered. My attention was focused on him. My feelings were all over the map, and I was again wondering about Isaac’s honesty that night. I was seeing Isaac in a whole new light. "You know what?” I continued, this time to the detective, "I had no idea about the rape charge against Isaac. I thought it was domestic violence since Isaac was living in the girl's basement when it happened. I didn't know about the rape. Why didn't you tell me, Isaac? Why didn't my own sister tell me? I'm feeling pretty stupid right about now."

  "Hey, it was no big deal. I didn't do what they said, Aunt Mel. You know me better."

  "I don't know that part of you, Isaac. You lied to me. You had me believe it was something else."

  "Now you know the bad story, Aunt Mel. Do I have to move?"

  "You know what? I'm thinking about that."

  "All right," said McMann, "the recorder is still spinning, so let's get back to my questions, please. Isaac, did you want to do harm to your cousin, Lisa Sellars?"

  "What, are you on something? Hell no! She's my cousin, Dude."

  "Did you help anyone kidnap your cousin? Maybe tell someone where she was tonight?"

  "Hell no!"

  "Did you ever want to have sex with her?"

  "Aunt Mel, do I have to answer this crap?"

  "Go ahead, Isaac. Just give your answers, and we'll soon be up to speed."