Remember Mia

by Alexandra Burt

  As I told Riverton my story, I tried to decode her, interpret her body language. Did she furrow her brow, did she nod in understanding? She doesn’t wear a wedding band, but she may be a mother. A mother who also struggles and empathizes with my story or she might judge me more harshly than any man ever could.

  The rest of the night unfolds in stretches of waiting and then more questions, and ultimately I am escorted outside, where there is a van to transport me back to Creedmoor “for the time being.” Detective Wilczek tells me he will drop by and have me sign the statements “once everything checks out.”

  Back at Creedmoor I fall into a deep sleep. Wistful dreams and occasional moments of waking—yet I’m at peace with the chaos of my thoughts. I spend the following days in my room. Between meals and discussions with Dr. Ari about my future, I fill up an entire composition book. I don’t leave a single line blank, for its completeness gives me the illusion of also being complete myself. That’s the theory anyway. I don’t want to spend another minute wondering what I might not remember in the future. I feel as if I’ve been floating in open water and I’ve come upon an island that is able to sustain me and I don’t ever want to be caught off guard again.

  Two days later I get my release papers.

  “We checked out your story,” Wilczek says.

  “Upon entering, the officers . . .” His muffled voice echoes in my head, as if he’s speaking down a well. I allow his words to unfold in front of me like a movie: Entering Anna’s house, the officers walk with a mission, threadbare carpet underneath their feet. Their eyes glance over the shiny travel catalogs in the living room. They hurry down the hallway, enter the room in which I saw Anna from the street, holding my daughter.

  “There were lots of baby clothes and toys,” Wilczek says and now he no longer looks me in the eyes, but reads off his notes as if he can’t remember the details. “The clothes range from newborn to school-age children. We found photos, ledgers with names and dollar amounts, dates, and even contact information. We’re checking into missing children’s cases all over the state. There’s a couple of promising leads but nothing I can elaborate on at this point. It’ll probably take months to sort it all out.”

  If I’m not the only one whose child they’ve taken, then there are other mothers out there . . . I can’t even allow myself to complete the thought. My own loss is all I can handle, I’m not equipped to take on someone else’s burden.

  Entering the kitchen, the officers found the yellow floral china I described and the baby spoon. They didn’t find any dirty diapers underneath the plastic pots and empty seed packages in the garbage bin.

  “There were empty diaper boxes and wipe wrappers. Nothing contained any DNA. The garbage had been collected that day and taken to the landfill.”

  Officers found the cornfield yet the decrepit barn has not been located. He calls that fact “rather insignificant.”

  I wonder what “rather insignificant” means. Maybe it’s just proof that crazy people get away with holes as long as they are irrelevant and inconsequential to the story itself.

  The encounter in front of Anna’s house also checks out; no official report was filed but two Dover police officers confirm an insignificant altercation between three parties on Waterway Circle.

  “The diner’s had many owners over the years, this year was a seasonal operation. It closed down right after Halloween once the corn maze was shut down. It’s the only one in the entire county so there’s quite a bit of traffic. An elderly couple leased the diner but hired seasonal waitstaff on a part-time basis and there’s no paperwork, no contracts, nothing. And if that wasn’t disappointing enough, they hired a professional cleaning company. The entire building has been bleached and wiped clean, no DNA, not even a partial print.

  “Forensics dug up Lieberman’s body. He died of a gunshot wound to the back. That’s preliminary but quite obvious.”

  I buried a body. I dug a hole and buried the body of the man who abducted my child. I’m not haunted by any of this.

  “There’s an APB out on Anna Lieberman, but so far we haven’t been able to locate her. I don’t see how she can get your daughter out of the country—she has no birth certificate, no passport, nothing. Sooner or later her cover will blow. The moment she seeks medical help, tries to enroll her in day care or school, it’ll arouse suspicion. Even a traffic violation or her name showing up on a lease will trigger the system. It’s only a matter of time. She can hide, but only for so long.”

  School, day care. “That could be years from now,” I say and shake my head. “What do I do in the meantime? Where do I look?”

  “I’m not sure if looking for her is the answer. Anna counted on everyone to believe the suicide and the confession story. The fact that you survived makes it almost impossible for her to find, please excuse my choice of words, a taker for your daughter. It’ll be easier looking for both of them together than separate. I know it’s hard but you have to wait this out.”

  Hundreds of missing children every day. Their photos in store windows and on milk cartoons. I’ve scanned the posters before, appalled by the years that have passed since they’ve been last seen. Teenagers usually, disappeared, never to be seen again. Some thought to have run away. Running away is not a crime. Are they even looking? Don’t fight it, I tell myself, there’s no end to this. It’s a bottomless pit, my daughter just one of many.

  “I want to apologize to you but I know there’s nothing I can say to make this better, so I’m not even going to try.”

  Sorry. The cheapest of all words. It’s as if he’s trying to cut open the lion and retrieve its victim, expecting life to go on. It doesn’t work that way.

  “Let us do the looking. All you have to do is be patient,” he adds.

  “Right,” I say and put on my gloves.

  —

  Patience. It’s starting to wear thin and I haven’t even left Creedmoor yet. For every minute Mia’s out of my reach, I gain something else. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s growing. Resolve maybe? Courage? Hope? Maybe I needed to lose one thing to gain another, for there’s a limited number of items I can carry in my hands. If I let go of the pain, I pick up hope. Is that how it works?

  The next day, as Creedmoor sits silently overlooking the East River, I say goodbye to Oliver. It’s not a traditional farewell—no embrace, no small talk—just me touching his hand ever so slightly as I walk past him, more of a clandestine ritual on my part. For anyone watching this exchange, it’d appear to be a coincidence. The acorn he gave me is in my pocket.

  Marge cries as I hug her good-bye. Her body is large and soft, and I feel as if I’m melting into her. We promise to keep in touch but we both know that’s not going to happen.

  I walk down the pebble walkway on the north side of Creedmoor. I count five floors down and three up to locate my former room. I find the nest I used to watch through my window. What once was a well-built structure of tightly woven sticks and twigs is now flattened, dilapidated, and abandoned. No worrisome parents nearby to watch the fledglings on their clumsy flying attempts. Life goes on in so many ways.

  Dr. Ari sees me in his office one last time. I attempt to take it all in: the diplomas on the walls, the scent of shoe polish, the view of the smokestacks in the distance.

  “I wanted to wish you good luck,” he says later as he escorts me outside. “And that I hope for a happy ending to the story.”

  “There’s nothing else I can do but wait for Anna to make a mistake. Luck can’t be all I’ve got left,” I say and my eyes tear up. I blink them away.

  “I’m a great believer in luck,” he says and closes my file for the last time.

  “Speaking of happy endings, you never told me about the woman with the egg.”

  Dr. Ari furrows his brow, then his eyes light up. “I forgot I told you about that.”

  “So, what was it if it wasn’t the egg?”


  “She’s passed since and I guess it’s okay if I share her story with you. It was the spoon she ate the egg with.”

  “The spoon?”

  “She ate off a silver spoon. The silver reacted with the sulfur in the egg, created a tarnish on the spoon. The spoon had a foul taste and reminded her of a rather violent experience in her life. The memory emerged and rather than deal with it, she shut down.”

  “So that’s the story of the egg woman.”

  “That’s it,” Dr. Ari says.

  “Will I ever see you again?” I say after a long silence.

  “You have no need for a man like me in your life.”

  As he extends his hand, I grab it and pull him into an embrace. He’s stiff in my arms, but only for a second. Then he softens.

  I watch him through the rearview mirror of the cab one last time, straightening his tie and removing invisible specks of lint from his suit.

  CHAPTER 26

  Months pass and Mia is still missing. Jack and I talk about the possibility of having to identify her ravaged and abused body in unimaginable stages of decomposition—we agree we’ll make the identification together—yet we can’t quite agree on how to live our lives until then.

  In the meantime, I rent a small studio apartment on 58th Street, and even though it’s just a short walk off Sutton Place, it’s affordable and Jack is surprisingly generous. I enjoy living in walking distance to the 4, 5, 6, N, Q, and R trains, on a quiet, treelined street.

  Jack, once his contract in Chicago has ended, finds a position as assistant DA, “entry level, no pay, and long hours.” His furnished apartment, the Tribeca Suites, allows him to remain “in transition.” We don’t mention the word divorce quite yet, we allow life, according to Jack, “to play out,” whatever that means.

  Even though we both hate to admit yet another failure, we’ve been sitting ducks for a long time. Marriages confronted by tragedy don’t break apart because of that fact per se, but it seems as if there’s only so much resolve to go around and everything pales in comparison to Mia’s disappearance. And so we live separately and wait for the inevitable burial of our union. We know the demise of our marriage is nearing, like a sure winter storm, its icy breath approaching the hairs on the back of our necks.

  Once a week Jack and I meet at a coffee shop in a bookstore. There, we are surrounded by a contrived normalcy among people discussing the books they’ve read, trips they’ve taken, conversing about normal things that normal people do.

  During our time at the coffee shop Jack struggles to wrap his mind around the facts of Mia’s disappearance. He makes me recount every minute detail and obsesses over where he was and what he did while it all played out.

  “I feel responsible,” he says, raising his voice, causing people to turn around and look at us. “I feel it was my fault. I hired this lunatic, I took the job in Chicago, and I told you to move into the brownstone.”

  My sense of guilt for not having protected my child pales in comparison to Jack’s loss of potency. There’s nothing he can do and he’s not equipped to deal. Jack goes on and on about what he would give if he could go back and take a different path, but he knows it’s impossible. He speaks about how guilt eats at him every moment of every day, when he is going to sleep, when he wakes up, during lunch, in the shower, at the gym, watching the news, how these monstrous thoughts pop in his mind and demand to be prioritized, an infinite punishment for a mere momentary oversight. How he is tired of thinking about it, how no amount of analysis is going to turn back the clock.

  And during those moments, during those fleeting minutes of remorse, for a split second, I feel something for him that resembles compassion, and I hold his hand. Yet I struggle to find a single word of consolation for him. Since the day he dropped me off at Creedmoor I haven’t been able to cry in front of him. I don’t know if I’m gaining strength or if I’ve lost my soul, but it’s easier that way and so I don’t analyze it.

  As a prosecutor, Jack doesn’t invest in the notion that even behind a most wicked and incomprehensible deed is a human being. His world is not so sunny, doesn’t allow for any such concessions, his world has only a few rainbows and frolicking puppies. He is quick to see the bad and even quicker to judge, and that’s just how Jack is. And Jack judges himself. Because Jack’s a logical man.

  While I can “claim”—what a choice of words—while I can claim to have suffered from a medical condition, he was inept in his task to protect his family. This lasts for mere minutes, then Jack stiffens himself and clears his throat. Composed again, he enters some sort of twisted stage, holding the curtain for all the others to enter: Lieberman, Anna, the police, an array of guilty parties jointly responsible.

  Sometimes I don’t know what to say and so I just sit there and stare down at my empty coffee cup. Jack’s not the man he used to be, he now depends on me for support, and on a certain level I feel annoyed by his emotions. I need him to be strong—not for me, for himself—because I was able to cope, have been coping, but I just can’t add any more weight to my Jenga stack of agony.

  But all he wants to do is talk, talk, talk. And I let him go on and on and on, listening for what seems like days on end, sometimes tuning him out for long stretches at a time, hours even, his voice without inflection or variation, monotonous and low. Eventually he gets hoarse and we sit among the scent of coffee, the sound of beans dropping into the mill, the grinding noise drowning him out for a few merciful seconds. Finally his voice turns into a raspy whisper and we both go home.

  I allow months of these meetings to pass and watch layer after layer of guilt pile on top of him like shovels of soil on a coffin. I tell him about a legacy, his legacy, something constructive he can do with the monsters trapped in his head—those were his words, monsters trapped in his head—but Jack is Jack and that’s all there is to it.

  “You could start a foundation in Mia’s name. You could speak in front of people, to groups of parents, you could assist in searches for missing children. Jack, there’s so much you can do. I think it’d be good for you.”

  “You know I’m not comfortable around people. That whole speaking thing is just nerve-racking for me. Trust me, if I thought it made any kind of a difference, I would, but . . . once the brownstone sells, I’ll put up a reward. Rewards have solved cases before, it’s probably the most effective action I can take. That’s helpful, right?”

  I wonder if Jack has it worse because he was taught to be stoic, to “act like a man.” At some point maybe Jack realized he just cannot survive this kind of despair, cannot allow himself to be dragged down, and so he focuses instead on walking away. Maybe his trick is to keep the suffering at a distance.

  “I can go for days feeling normal,” he says, “and then I think of nothing else and I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  One day, at the coffee shop, I feel his judging eyes on me while I search through missing children’s databases on my laptop. Like a hawk watching a sparrow, he scrutinizes me as I keep track of body parts washing up on shorelines. He frowns, and when I hand him a list of private detectives, he looks away.

  And I start getting angry at him. Angry at his inability to fight the monsters, angry at the fact that money is what his solution is, angry that he expected me to grow beyond my limitations, told me to just “snap out of it”—those were his words—yet he’s unwilling to do the same.

  Eventually everything about Jack strikes me as silly. Those fanged rippers, those elusive little shits he can’t get under control when the real monster lived in the same house with me while he was working on foreign exchanges and equity deals.

  Fuck you, Jack. Fuck. You.

  Eventually the monsters have mercy on Jack and disappear. They seem to just vanish because one day he appears to have gained his strength back, his step is quicker, less restrained, and the bags under his eyes have faded. He even has a tan, as if he’s spent
the weekend in the sun. And I watch him, after the obligatory display of grief, mentally severing himself from the uncomfortable fact that this crisis will never come to an end. We’ve held on until there is nothing to hold on to anymore. And then we agree to sign divorce papers.

  Jack will go on with his life, someplace else, with hardly a backward glance, no call, no text, no e-mail. He hates complicated relationships and I have no doubt that his emotions, once again, run like a train on steel rails. He’s a DA last time I heard, in Boston, I think, I don’t remember.

  And eventually I realize I’m the only one looking. I request a copy of all documents, of all police files. I read through them, study them, and make mental notes of anything that could possibly shed light on Anna’s whereabouts. And when I’m through, I start all over again.

  And then there is the media. The amount of time the media spends on a case, any infamous reputation assigned, is directly related to the details they can dig up about your life, neighbors they can interview, and relatives who speak out on 20/20. I have none of that to offer. At the most there’ll eventually be a Cold Case Files edition or a Dateline legal show. After I decline all interviews, there is nothing else to be had.

  Pictures of Mia as an infant were subject to intense media coverage but photos of me were scarce, to say the least. By the time I rent the studio apartment, phone calls from reporters prompt me to change my number for the first time. There are calls regarding book deals and movie opportunities. I hang up the phone and again change my number. Then it quiets down. After all, there is no trial, no gavel-to-gavel coverage dedicated to bringing legal proceedings to the public. There is only so much media fodder and then the primary elections come up, and eventually other headlines take priority.

  Anthony now works for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Anchorage, Alaska, and heads an Evidence Response Team. The division also runs a Kidnapping and Missing Persons office at the same Alaska office.