by Lisa Unger
The next morning, bright light flooded the loft as I made a pot of coffee. I turned the television on to watch the Today show as I got ready to head out, but muted it finally because I couldn’t stand the chatter, the incessant commercials. I zoned out on the screen for a minute as I sipped the strong coffee. There was a picture of a smiling man and woman in the corner of the screen. The words Missing Couple were emblazened above them. I think they’d been missing awhile, no clue to what might have happened to them. I got the horrible unsettled feeling I get about this type of thing when I considered the possibility that no one might ever know their fate. I don’t like unanswered questions, unsolved mysteries. They give me angst. I turned away from the screen. I had my own problems to worry about, not the least of which was a looming deadline for O Magazine.
I peered out the window and saw that the people moving along Park Avenue South were in coats and hats. It was sunny but cold, my favorite kind of New York City day. I lingered for a while and found myself searching the street for the man I’d seen in the photographs. I looked for the tall, thin form, the sunken face. But, of course, he wasn’t there. And Max was dead. I wasn’t sure of much in my life. But I was sure of that.
I took a shower and got dressed. As I bundled myself up in my black wool peacoat and light-blue cashmere scarf, I pushed aside the events of yesterday and headed out the door.
ELENA JANSEN WAS a tiny bird of a woman, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet. She had a grace and strength to her carriage, a steel to her posture that made her seem powerful in spite of the fact that she just barely cleared five feet. Her eyes, a deep cocoa brown, were warm and liquid, her handshake firm and sure. I expected to find a shattered woman, to see some evidence of her tragedy in her physical bearing. But what I saw was defiance, a dare to the Universe to try to take her down again. I’d seen this before. In fact, I’d say it was the defining feature I’d found in the survivors I’d interviewed lately. A refusal to cower, to surrender, even when the world has revealed all its ugliness and horror. I imagined that sometimes I’d seen it in my own reflection, though that might have just been wishful thinking.
I followed her into a warm parlor overlooking Central Park. The room was decorated in deep reds with cream and gold accents. The walls were a gallery of photos of her years as a dancer and of her children. She was beautiful now in her early fifties, but as a younger woman, she had been truly stunning. I’d seen many of these photos in my preliminary research for this article I was writing for O Magazine.
“Well, then,” she said, sitting elegantly in an overstuffed brocade chair by the window. She motioned toward the matching sofa across from her. I took off my coat and extracted my notebook and pen from my bag and sat. “Shall we begin?”
She seemed not to want to waste any time, launched right into her story. “People say ‘stormy,’ and there’s a kind of romance to it, you know?” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “But I don’t think many people understood how dark, how dangerous those storms could be. At first even I thought his temper, his jealousy were signs of how much he loved me. But I was a stupid girl. What did I know?”
She told me how she met her husband. He was a wealthy surgeon who fell in love with her as she danced across the stage at the Met, was bold enough to send her a dozen white roses every day until she consented to dinner. Their engagement was brief, their wedding one of the social events of the year. She constantly heard how lucky she was to have found a man so in love, so devoted. She believed it, too, so it took her longer to notice the signs—or maybe she just ignored them—that there was something wrong with him, something frightening about him.
Slowly, the things she’d found so charming became oppressive. Things that were once romantic—the way he planned all their evenings, showed up unexpectedly in cities where she was performing—started to feel controlling. After a year, she began to wonder if they’d married too quickly. She felt trapped, oppressed, and her performance suffered.
“Maybe trapped wasn’t the right word,” she said, looking at me. “Because I could have left, really. I guess I liked the illusion as much as everyone else. And there were plenty of good times. I don’t know…” She let her voice trail like a woman who’d spent a lot of time contemplating the past and still came up short on answers.
Then the children came, first Emiline, then Michael. By the time Alex, their third, was born, she had stopped dancing. Gene seemed more relaxed now that Elena was settled into her roles of wife and mother, with most of her independence and her life without him a memory. Not that the marriage was ever what she hoped it would be. Gene was an emotional and physical abuser, an angry controller demanding perfection from Elena at all times.
“But it just became normal,” she said with a shrug. “He never touched the children. And I developed techniques for avoiding his rage—he was predictable in the things that set him off. I just managed.”
“You never thought of leaving him?” I asked. It was hard for me to understand how a woman of such obvious strength would endure a marriage like that, but I knew enough to understand the psychology of an abused woman. There’s a systematic erosion of self-esteem, a slow fading of personal power.
She laughed. “I thought about it every day. But the consequences of leaving just seemed too monolithic. In a weird way, I didn’t have the energy—he robbed me of that.”
Emiline was eight, Michael six, and Alex just three when she finally realized she was unable to manage anymore and decided to leave her husband.
“There was no event I could point to, exactly. It was more like I looked at myself in the mirror one day and I saw a woman I didn’t recognize. I looked…haggard. My hair was brittle and going gray. There were black circles beneath my eyes. The corners of my mouth had started to turn down, as if I hadn’t smiled in years. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. I saw someone shelled out…empty. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid for myself—I’d abandoned myself a long time ago. I was afraid of what kind of role model I had become for my children.”
The divorce and custody battle that followed was textbook in its viciousness. But Elena attained full custody; Gene was allowed to have the children every third weekend. Elena had lobbied for supervised visitation only, but she lost that fight.
The weekend after their divorce was final and the uneasy custody arrangement had been settled, Gene picked up the kids for some time in the country. Elena would remember that he seemed relaxed and cordial, even regretful on their last encounter. He was taking the children to a rented cabin on the grounds of a resort in the Adirondack Mountains. Emiline loved birds and Michael was learning to horseback ride. Alex just adored his father and couldn’t wait for the canoe trip Gene had promised.
She never imagined that Emiline wouldn’t see any birds or that Michael would not ride a horse, that Alex wouldn’t get his canoe trip. She couldn’t have conceived that Gene would take their children that weekend and kill each of them, suffocating them as they slept, then shoot himself in the head.
Elena’s face had changed subtly as she recounted her story for me. The color drained and her eyes had grown distant. She suddenly looked gaunt, haunted. How could she ever be anything else? How could she ever have a moment of peace or joy again? I wondered. We were interrupted then by a small voice.
“Mommy?”
A little girl toddled in, unsteady on her white sneakers. Her mother leaned down and outstretched her arms; the little girl ran happily to her.
“Sorry, Elena,” said a young woman, probably the nanny, as she came in behind the toddler.
“That’s all right,” Elena said, smiling, pulling her little girl into her lap and giving her a squeeze and a kiss before letting her go back to her nanny.
“I never would have believed that life could continue,” she said to me when the two had left the room. “In those dark, dark years that followed, I often wished that death would come for me, too. But it didn’t. And I was too cowardly to chase after it. Th
en life came for me instead.”
She told me how she met another man and fell in love again, how they married and had a daughter. She told me how she turned her life into a crusade to help women trapped in abusive marriages, offering counseling and, if necessary, a means of escape through an organization she founded called Follow the Signs.
After all of it I asked her, “Were there signs that you missed? Did you know on some level what your husband might be capable of doing?”
She looked at me and gave me a slow, thoughtful nod as if this were a question she’d asked herself a million times. “Because what he did was so unimaginable, I can’t really say at the time that I did. But knowing what I know now…yes, there were signs.”
She sighed. I didn’t push her to go on. Then: “I think we can cast people in our lives, almost assign them roles and then stop seeing them as they truly are. And when we sense something truly dark, something monstrous, we can pull a veil over our eyes…because to acknowledge it is to take responsibility. Once you know, you have to do something about it. And that can be the most frightening thing of all.”
Her words were ice water on my face. I felt every nerve ending in my body come alive. I knew all about pulling the veil away from my eyes. I just didn’t want to believe that there might be more to see.
AFTER THE INTERVIEW I took the train back downtown and walked from the Astor Place station to Jake’s studio on Avenue A. I found him in the office, a small windowless room that stood to the side of his workspace (where I knew he hadn’t done any sculpting in six months). The last thing he worked on, a huge Impressionist figure of a man, hulking and mysterious, brooding and strange, stood half-finished and accusatory beneath a bright light.
He heard me come in, got up from his computer, and walked over to me.
“What’s up?” he asked, looking into my face in that way that he had, concerned and knowing.
“I want to know,” I said.
“What?”
“I want to know what you’ve learned about m—Max.” I had almost said my father, but I caught it at the last second. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked hard into my eyes.
“Ridley, are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said. I might have even meant it.
5
The Detroit Metro Airport was absolutely grisly. The walk from my gate past dirty walls and over worn, hideous carpet was endless; I swear it was at least a mile before I made it outside. Standing out in the bitter cold, I waited for what seemed like an eternity for the rental car shuttle as the wind whipped at my thin leather jacket, snaked up my sleeves, and chilled me to the bone. I felt nervous on top of it. I was shaken by the things Jake had told me yesterday and had a strange feeling of being watched. I hoped I was just being paranoid.
The area surrounding the airport was equally grim. I stared out the filthy shuttle-bus window at miles of flat gray landscape, black dead trees, and ground already dusted with snow though it was only early November. Because of the thick cloud cover, it was hard to imagine the sun ever shining down on this place.
I’d been here before as a child, though I barely remembered those infrequent visits to my grandparents when they were still alive. My father hated the place where he’d grown up with Max. They both hated it, remembered it as a rough industrial town grinded by poverty, crime, and bitter cold. He and Max spoke of their leaving as if it had been a prison break.
“Places like that breed a low expectation of what your life can be. That grayness leaks concrete into your skin. So many people never leave, never even think of leaving. Once you do, you can hardly stand to go back even to visit.”
My father had told me that more than once, and driving out of the rental car lot, I could see it. The landscape alone was exhausting in its ugliness. As I pulled onto the highway, I thought about Max and Ben, how they never talked much about their childhoods.
“Not much to tell,” my father would say. “I worked hard at school. I obeyed my parents. Then I left for Rutgers and never went back for more than a weekend at a time.”
But really, there was a lot to tell. My father and Max grew up together, met each other while riding Big Wheels up and down the block. Ben was shy, the good boy, loved and cherished by strict parents, an only child. Max was the wild one, always unkempt, always in trouble. My father told me he’d look out his window late at night sometimes, after eleven, and see Max riding his bike up and down the road beneath the yellow glow of the street lamps. At the time he was envious of Max’s freedom, felt like a baby in his Howdy Doody pajamas, his homework done and packed in his bag for the next day, his clothes cleaned and pressed and laid out for him.
“I worshiped him,” my father had said of Max. Max echoed the sentiment more times than I can remember.
If you’ve been with me from the beginning, you know what happened to Max. His father, an abuser and an alcoholic, beat Max’s mother into a coma where she languished for weeks and finally died. Max’s father was found guilty of murder, largely due to Max’s testimony, was sentenced to life in prison, and died there years later. Rather than let Max become a ward of the state, my grandparents took him in. Max, who’d always been in trouble, who’d always done poorly in school, calmed down and excelled in my grandparents’ care. They raised him as their own and somehow managed to help both boys through college on my grandfather’s autoworker’s salary.
This is a story I’ve known all my life. I’ve known that my wonderful and loving grandparents took Max in and saved him from God knows what fate. That Max was the wild boy, the rebel child. That my father was the good boy, the honor student. But that wasn’t the truth. My truth was that my father was the abused child, that my grandfather murdered my grandmother and then later died in prison. That was my legacy, that’s what I came from. When I think about it, I feel as if someone hit me in the head with a two-by-four.
I have always been the good girl with my pajamas on and my homework done…just like Ben. Except lately I’ve begun to wonder, what if I’m not like Ben at all? What if at the core of who I am, in the strands of my DNA, I’m more like Max? Even before I knew we were kin, I knew we were kindred spirits. What if nature wins out over nurture? Who am I then?
I THOUGHT ABOUT the conversation with Jake that had precipitated this unscheduled trip to Detroit. He’d had a lot to say about Max. None of it made much sense and I was seriously starting to doubt Jake’s stability. The conversation ended with us screaming at each other like trailer trash and my storming out. I did a lot of storming out where Jake was concerned. Always had, even from the beginning. He had this way of being his most calm when I was at my most furious. And it never failed to throw me over the edge. Okay, so it was me who ended up screaming like an idiot last night in Jake’s studio, while he sat in a state of patient empathy. He’s lucky I didn’t punch him, I hated him so much in that moment. But he was used to this. Jake’s karma was to be the truth sayer, to seek out and bring to light the things that everyone else wanted to bury. It seemed to me that that was his cosmic role, in my life especially.
“I’m just not sure you’re going to want to hear what I have to say,” he’d predicted.
“I do,” I’d said. “I really do.”
Elena Jansen’s denial had cost her the most precious things in her life—her children. There’s always a cost for denial. How high a cost depends largely on the importance of the truth being ignored. You deny that you’re unhappy in your chosen profession and the cost might be, say, migraine headaches. You deny signs that your abusive husband has a psychotic need to control you and he kills your children. Not that I’m blaming Elena, of course. Of course not. What I’m saying is that our actions, our choices have consequences that are sometimes impossible to predict. But when our actions and choices are based on fear and denial…well, nothing good can come of that. Ever. I had learned this the hard way. Was still learning. That was why I had decided that if there was something to know about Max, I wanted to know it. Not that I believed that he�
��d come back from the dead.
“Okay, Ridley,” Jake said with a sigh. “As you know, after the feds cleared your father and found Esme Gray to have too small and ambiguous a role to prosecute for Project Rescue on anything but possible conspiracy charges, they decided to close the case,” Jake began. “All the major players—Max, Alexander Harriman namely—were dead. Everyone else who might have been involved in the shadow side of the organization was a ghost. There were no records. Project Rescue was a labyrinth of dark connections, impossible to navigate.”
“I know all this,” I told him, sitting on one of Jake’s work chairs.
He nodded. “Those were hard days for me, Ridley.”
“I know,” I said softly, remembering. I thought maybe I hadn’t been there for him like I could have been, but the truth was that I didn’t have a whole lot to give on the subject; I wasn’t exactly standing on solid ground myself.
“I just couldn’t get past it,” he said. “I just couldn’t accept that there were things about my past that I’d never know. That the people responsible for fucking with so many lives would never face any consequences. It ate at me.”
This was the point where Jake disappeared from the relationship, mentally and emotionally. It was like being in love with an addict. He could never be present because he was always jonesing, always fidgeting and preoccupied with his next fix.
