Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  Another wave pounded him, and when he surfaced he could no longer find the boat. He turned in a circle. Which way was east? His waterlogged clothes pulled at him. He tried to kick off his shoes but ended up with another mouthful of water and a frantic race back to the surface. He needed to find east. The boat would keep moving but the shore would not. Swim to shore. Which way was the shore?

  Ramsey was a strong swimmer. The water wasn’t cold. The storm would let up.

  Another wave knocked him under. Which way was up?

  He surfaced again but no air came, only a hack, and more rain, and he vomited something sour, and when his mouth dipped below the surface again, that’s when the first full intake of sea-water came, and that’s when the first full moment of understanding came.

  And although he was drowning horribly in the pitch dark, surrounded by nothing and no one, anyone watching would have been proud to know Ramsey Miller, who did not give up.

  29

  Alive and Wrong

  December 26, 2006 * by Arthur Goodale * in Uncategorized

  “That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”

  So wrote the novelist Philip Roth in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel American Pastoral, which I read when it was published a decade ago. I remember that sentence striking me as surprising and provocative when I first read it, and over the years it has stuck with me. But only recently have I come to appreciate its insight. We spend our lives trying to understand the hearts of those around us and the actions those hearts inspire, and we get it wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Because let me say this now: I was wrong about everything.

  I knew—absolutely knew—that Ramsey Miller had killed his wife.

  I knew that Meg Miller was dead.

  I knew that the Miller case, my self-declared white whale, would remain open, at least during my lifetime.

  And on a more personal note: I knew, twelve weeks ago, that I was dying, my bad habits finally overtaking my acceptable genetics.

  Every bit of it, wrong.

  As you’ve probably noticed, this is the first post since my macabre musings of September 22. I’d have thought that recent events would motivate me to write a flurry of posts about the Miller case as well as my own road to recovery. Not so. (Wrong again, self!) In fact, I haven’t felt the urge to write at all. More to the point—after this entry, I plan to abandon the blog altogether. If I decide to resume it someday, then so be it. But I don’t think I will, now that the blog’s purpose has been fulfilled.

  For three years I believed I was casting my private musings into a vast and swirling world, when in fact I was reaching out to Meg.

  I just didn’t know it.

  Nonetheless, my blog did attract 75 of you along the way, and I owe you some facts:

  1. I did not die. :)

  (Until this very moment, I have never in my life used an emoticon. Let that, my loyal readers, tell you something about the vicissitudes of old age.)

  More precisely, if I was dying that weekend in September, I’m not dying anymore. The doctors demanded that I change my lifestyle, and that’s what I’ve done. You should see me eating oatmeal. You should see me eating fish. Also, after two-thirds of a century, I finally quit cigarettes back in October. Cold turkey. Boy, has that been a horror show. I’ve become an irritable SOB—but an SOB who walks the boardwalk five mornings a week and who no longer becomes winded climbing the stairs.

  2. Wayne Denison pled guilty to the second-degree murder of Allison Miller and the first-degree kidnapping of Meg Miller.

  Details from his confession can be found in any number of newspaper accounts. But a friend on the Silver Bay police force who shall remain anonymous did me the favor of showing me the actual document. After killing Allison Miller, Wayne Denison evidently abducted young Meg and drove her straight to West Virginia, where he convinced his girlfriend to look after her, and returned immediately—that same night—to New Jersey in order to feign surprise around plenty of witnesses when Allison’s body was found the next morning.

  Quite a different story from what he told police fifteen years ago—that he left Jackrabbits bar at 10:45 and drove straight home to his apartment. His earlier story was corroborated by his downstairs neighbor, who swore he saw Wayne entering the apartment—an alibi that we now know was purchased for the price of three marijuana cigarettes. In the days leading up to Allison’s funeral, Wayne dropped hints at work that he’d become disillusioned—after all, Ramsey, a man he’d looked up to, had apparently murdered his own family in cold blood. When Wayne quit his job and left town shortly after Allie’s funeral, nobody thought much of it. He returned to West Virginia, reunited with Kendra and Meg, and the three of them disappeared together, this new family that would remain in hiding for the next fifteen years.

  In exchange for his guilty plea, Wayne was spared a first--degree murder charge. He is now serving forty years with no chance of parole in the U.S. penitentiary in Allenwood, PA. Kendra Denison claimed that she had been duped by Wayne all these years into believing that she was lawfully protecting Meg (who has grown up using the name Melanie). Prosecutors found Kendra’s story hard to believe but reduced the charge to second-degree kidnapping in exchange for testifying against her husband. She was sentenced to ten years in a federal correctional institution. She is currently serving her term in Cumberland, MD, and will be eligible for parole in five years.

  3. Regarding the many news stories praising David Magruder’s investigative prowess as instrumental in cracking the long-cold case and leading the police to the proper suspect, I have only this to say: Don’t believe everything you read.

  4. Ramsey Miller’s whereabouts remain unknown.

  Yesterday, I ate Christmas dinner with Melanie and Phillip Connor. Like every time Melanie has invited me into their home, I felt uncomfortable and intrusive on the drive over, until the moment their front door opened and I realized there was nowhere I’d rather be. This time there was another guest as well, Eric Pace, whom I failed to recognize from our few conversations years earlier. He was physically larger than I’d remembered, yet somehow diminished. We had nothing in common save our mutual affection for our hosts, but that was enough.

  Eric hadn’t yet seen Phillip’s scar, a fact that Phillip remedied by lifting up his shirt at the dinner table and recounting what happened on the sidewalk outside the police station on the night of September 29. He used phrases like My body was her shield and In a fair fight, I’d have.... Having now heard the story on a few separate occasions, I will note only that Phillip’s role in the narrative seems to increase in drama and heroism with each telling.

  “Your face was highly effective against his fist,” Melanie added.

  Good for them, I found myself thinking, for tinting a tragic moment with comedy in the retelling so they can move beyond it.

  It would be impossible for me to gush properly about the Connors or for me to enumerate all the reasons why I tear up so easily in their presence—especially now that Melanie is well into her pregnancy and visibly showing. Suffice it to say that I ate too much last night, stayed too late, and went to bed feeling immensely grateful and lucky.

  After sleeping late this morning, something I rarely do anymore, I awoke with that line from Roth’s novel in my head and went to my bookshelf to discover that it’s actually part of a much longer passage that includes the following:

  That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

  I’d like to say that from now on I’ll live my life that way—-content with being along for the ride. Trouble is, I’ve had an entire lifetime to practice being wrong. I don’t know if I can stop this late in the game. So let me close out this post, and this blog, by saying the following:

  Melanie Connor—formerly Melanie Denison, formerly Meg Miller—rose from the dead, sought me out, and became my friend. That will always be
one of the great joys of my life.

  About that, I know I’m not wrong.

  Posted by Old Man with Typewriter at 12/26/2006 5:42 PM | Comments are enabled.

  30

  June 17, 2009

  Eight a.m. and already a scorcher. Soon the slides will all be too hot to ride.

  Melanie sits on the park bench while her daughter climbs and slides, climbs and slides, and monologues a nonstop jumble of songs and stories that Melanie can only half follow.

  The two of them are alone in the park. All the other young children in town are either later sleepers or their mothers are less desperate than Melanie to start burning off excess energy.

  Phillip is at the high school administering final exams to restless seniors. If the weather holds, the three of them might head to the beach in the afternoon.

  “One more, sweetie,” Melanie calls to Brianna, who turned three in April. They named her Brianna—Brianna Allison Connor—because the name is trendy and other girls have it. Melanie wants her daughter to have many things in common with other children.

  “Two more!” Brianna shouts back.

  In not so long, Brianna will have a sister, or brother. Melanie peed on the stick this morning, and plans to tell Phillip tonight after Brianna goes to bed. If Melanie can hold on to the secret that long. She’s out of practice keeping secrets.

  “Okay—two more,” Melanie says. “And then we’ll feed the turtles.”

  There are newer, better parks in town, but this one has Turtle Pond. Melanie always enjoys coming here with her daughter, knowing that she used to come here with her mother. And with her father, who is out there somewhere.

  After Wayne and Kendra were arrested and briefly made national news, Melanie kept waiting for her father to return. She would scan the faces of men she saw in town, hoping for that flicker of recognition. At night she dreamt that she was still living with Wayne and Kendra in Fredonia, imprisoned in their trailer, and Ramsey would find her there and set her free.

  Her home phone number was listed. Her address was listed. Her information was there for the taking. He could have found her if he wanted. But as the weeks and months passed and the media moved on to other stories, Melanie began to accept that her father had chosen to remain hidden. He had been a fugitive for fifteen years, and it must have been agonizing for him, knowing he was innocent but that everyone had already convicted him. By now he must have started a new life somewhere and decided that, all things considered, the best choice was to keep living it.

  Still, Melanie wishes he’d return. There will always be a light on for him. But that’s his decision.

  She has decisions to make, too. She is enrolled part time at the community college but is still too many credits away from graduating. Her major—journalism—is a dying field, she’s coming to find. Or at least it’s shifting too quickly for her academic courses to adjust. Lately, she’s been thinking of something completely different: enrolling in the police academy. At first it was only a fleeting thought, but she’s warming to the idea. When she floated it to Phillip a couple of months ago, he shrugged and said, “Well, you’re tough enough.”

  She agrees with him—she is tough, but not tough enough to join the force while she’s pregnant or has a newborn. She can wait a couple of years, she supposes.

  “Okay, kiddo,” she says to Brianna. “Last one.”

  “Then the turtles!”

  “That’s right.”

  Silver Bay is hers now. She hasn’t returned to Fredonia and knows she never will. She visited Kendra, once, in prison in Maryland early on in her sentence. There were things Melanie wanted to know.

  I was so young, Kendra said into the phone receiver on the opposite side of the thick glass divider, and I loved him so much. He kept me safe when we were in foster care and made sure I didn’t get it too bad. When he left for New Jersey, I fell apart. I spent two months crying. Three years, he was away—I saw him a few times, but he seemed older. He was tougher. Then he came back all of a sudden. And he needed me so badly.

  Kendra sobbed into the telephone the whole time she spoke.

  But all those years, Melanie said. My whole life—you were never suspicious?

  He had those letters from the Marshal’s office. And why would I doubt him? Why would I try to wreck our family?

  Almost immediately, Melanie realized it was foolish to have driven the three hours expecting an honest look into Kendra’s heart when Kendra herself was unwilling to look there. A full minute passed without either of them saying anything.

  Melanie tried again: But how could you never even wonder?

  Anger flashed in Kendra’s eyes. I could ask you the same thing, she said. Then she began to weep again.

  The visit was scheduled to last a half hour, but after twenty awkward minutes, Melanie stood up to leave, and Kendra said, pleadingly, When are you going to visit me again? You have to tell me when. Her eyes were shot through with red. Melanie left the prison knowing little more than she knew before coming, and with no better sense of in what proportion to feel hatred or pity for the woman who had raised her.

  It doesn’t matter, Melanie told herself then and has continued to remind herself. I’m home now. This is my home.

  The beach, the bay, the roads, the neighborhoods, the shops and restaurants. The schools and cemeteries. At some point this week she’ll visit the cemetery off Cedar Lane, where her mother is buried and where Melanie does her best thinking. Should she try to become a police officer? she’ll ask her mother. Then she’ll ask Arthur Good-ale, who is buried there, too. She’ll leave flowers by both graves. She tries to make a point of doing that regularly, though she often goes too long between visits. With a young child, everything is hard.

  How hard it must have been for her mother, she often thinks, with her father away so much of the time. Phillip goes to Atlantic City for the New Jersey teachers’ convention just two nights each fall, and she always dreads it.

  But it must have been hard for her father, too, being away, knowing he was missing all those small moments that transform a child every day, it seems. She wishes that Ramsey could meet his granddaughter, get to know her. But if he were going to reach out, he’d have done it by now. She knows that. She also knows that her father might not be alive. Yet she chooses to believe Eric’s assessment. Since her return to Silver Bay, Eric has introduced her to a side of her father that was unavailable in any newspaper, the side of him that explained why he once had friends and a wife who loved him and a daughter who did, too. So she chooses to believe, as Eric does, that Ramsey Miller is too stubborn to die, and is still out there somewhere.

  Of the several scenarios that she imagines for her father—he has a new, adoring family; he works as a mechanic in the mountains, maybe Colorado; he drives a big rig under an alias—here is what she always comes back to.

  Somewhere outside of the United States, maybe in Panama or Costa Rica, a quiet man with a slight limp rents out his small fishing boat for day trips. He has a kind face and is the most mild-mannered man anyone has ever met, and although he’s only in his fifties, he seems much older. He never misses a day of work unless the ocean is very rough. Each night, he returns home to his cabin in the woods, away from everyone and everything. He pours himself a single drink, looks up at the stars, and thinks about his wife and daughter with nothing but fondness and light.

  To Melanie’s surprise, after going down the slide one more time, Brianna comes right over and takes her hand.

  “Did you remember the bread?” Brianna asks. (Three weeks ago, Melanie forgot the bread, an oversight that caused a full-on tantrum.)

  Melanie removes the zip-lock bag from her purse. “Right here.”

  Brianna drops Melanie’s hand and runs toward the footbridge, stopping at the center. Melanie follows her, and when they’re together on the wooden bridge they both look over the railing.

  “There’s one!” Brianna says. A small turtle is sunning on a branch sticking out of the shallow water. Moment
s later, a second turtle swims their way. The turtles know. For years, decades, people have been feeding them from this footbridge. Now, all you have to do is stand on the bridge and the turtles begin to gather.

  Melanie removes the slice of bread from the zip-lock bag and hands it to Brianna, saying, “Remember—small pieces.”

  Brianna breaks off a corner and tosses it over the railing and into the water.

  The second turtle swims closer, jerks its head forward, and grabs the bread. Brianna breaks off a few more pieces and throws them into the water as more turtles gather. As always, the turtles multiply, until there are fifteen, twenty, thirty, of every size. The largest are probably forty pounds and almost certainly swam this pond before Melanie was born.

  By now the turtles are churning up the water only a few feet below. It’s a little unnerving, all those prehistoric creatures jockeying for bits of stale bread, furiously snapping and climbing over one another. But Brianna isn’t afraid.

  She feeds the turtles one small piece of bread at a time. And when a third of the slice is left, the massive head of one of the largest, oldest snapping turtles rises above the surface.

  “Look, Brianna!” Melanie points. “Over there.”

  There are probably only three or four turtles this large and old in the whole pond. They’re so heavy that usually only their heads rise out of the murk. But something about the sunlight this morning, the early hour, makes more of the shell visible—faded green and splotched with moss. The animal is easily sixty pounds and as many years old.

  “Look at it!” Brianna beams. She knows this is a rare sight. All the locals know it.

  “Why don’t you give him the whole piece,” Melanie says.

  “All of it?” asks Brianna.

  Melanie nods. So Brianna holds what remains of the bread over the railing—tentatively, with beautiful anticipation—before letting it fall down to the water. A perfect drop, it lands inches from the turtle’s head, which shoots forward and back again like a cobra’s strike, the bread vanishing in its jaws, and then the old animal drops beneath the surface and is gone.