Undone

by John Colapinto

  He returned to Chloe’s room. Head banging. Mouth a desert. Now he noticed, for the first time, that her closet stood open, the hangers free of clothes. Her dresser drawers pulled out. Emptied. He crouched, at great danger to his banging brain, and looked under the bed. Her carry-on was not there. Fled. Escaped her abuser, her attacker. Her rapist.

  Him.

  He clutched at the edge of her dresser.

  He had gone insane. Morally, sexually, insane. Crossed a boundary from which there was no return. He had committed acts of unequaled evil, the most heinous a parent could commit. Never mind what Dr. Geld had told him. That was all theoretical, abstract, symbolic. He was not meant to act upon it. Yet he had. Had used the excuse of the doctor’s words, and his own drunkenness, guilt and grief, to sanction acts of debased savagery. To murder one’s daughter was at least to make her suffering finite; what he had done to Chloe would haunt her for the rest of her life, the ever-fresh, just-inflicted wound.

  Unless, he suddenly thought with terror as he hastily pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, she chose to end that suffering herself …

  His heart revved, raced. Toxic alcohol sweat prickled along his hairline and upper lip. His armpits flared. He pictured her shrieking in terror as she plummeted from an overpass into roaring traffic. Gouging open an artery in her wrist with a broken bottle in an alley where she had taken refuge—from him. Gurgling down a bottle of bleach, searing her entrails, trying to burn away forever the memory of the raping father—to whom she had turned for protection, for hope, for love, when she had no one else.

  With an inarticulate cry, he ran to the telephone in the kitchen. He snatched up the receiver and punched in 911. “I’m reporting a rape,” Jasper shouted at the operator. “A sexual assault. It’s my daughter. I attacked her. She has run away. You must find her before she hurts herself!”

  The operator, bewildered, asked him to repeat himself. He did. Clearly no closer to comprehending him (“Who did you say attacked her?”), she asked for his address, took down the details and said she would dispatch a car.

  “Hurry,” he bleated.

  As he returned the phone to its charger, he heard someone pounding on the front door. A fist repeatedly slamming against the wood. He ran out to the foyer and put his eye to the peephole. Two uniformed police officers, one short and dark, the other tall and fair, were standing on the front stoop. How had they responded so quickly? He had only just hung up. Had they been patrolling the neighborhood and, while passing this very house, heard his emergency call on their police scanner?

  “Just a sec,” he said and turned the lock. The door flew open, nearly striking him in the face. The cops piled into the foyer and backed him against the wall, hands hovering over their holstered guns.

  “Name?” one of the cops barked at him.

  “Ulrickson,” he gasped out. “Jasper Ulrickson. I called 911. To report a rape.”

  “You reported a rape?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking back and forth between the police officers, who were staring at him in confusion.

  “Who was raped?” the tall one asked, a note of suspicion in his voice.

  “Daughter,” Jasper said. “My daughter.”

  “What’s your daughter’s name?” the short one asked.

  “Chloe. Chloe Dwight—or Ulrickson. She only recently came to live with me. I’m not sure which name she would use. Anyway, she’s gone. I don’t know where. You’ve got to find her. Before she—before she hurts herself.”

  “I see,” the dark cop said, a strange note of sarcasm in his voice. “So you got no clue where she is?”

  “That’s why I called you,” Jasper said. “You must find her. She could hurt herself.”

  Now the cop frowned, as if suddenly angry. “Hurt herself?” he echoed in a tone of incredulity. Incredulity mixed with menace. “Hurt herself?”

  “Yes,” Jasper said. “She might try anything. Suicide or—”

  “Okay,” the tall cop said. “I’ve had enough.”

  He grabbed Jasper’s elbow, swung him around and pushed him hard, face-first, against the wall. Jasper heard behind him a swift grating sound and felt something close around one wrist, then the other. Handcuffs. He had felt them before—while researching a Bannister novel. He had asked a cop of his acquaintance to cuff him. These were considerably tighter and bit painfully into his wrists.

  The cop swung him around to face them.

  The short, dark-haired cop told him that he had the right to remain silent and that anything he said could be used against him in court. Jasper had expected something like this, but only after he had explained to the police about how he had attacked Chloe. “Yes,” he said when they had finished reading him his rights. “I understand.”

  The tall cop, pulling painfully at his arm, wrestled him across the foyer to the front door, where Jasper was allowed to pause just long enough to kick on a pair of Adidas running shoes that lay there. As they frog-marched him down the flagstone path, he saw lights come on in his neighbors’ houses. Silhouetted figures appeared in windows all along the street. The tall cop pushed him into the backseat of the squad car. Jasper settled in awkwardly, elbows akimbo in his handcuffs, behind the metal mesh that separated front seat from back.

  Just then, another police cruiser roared up the street and stopped in front of the house. A lean, rangy cop with graying hair shaved down to a military crew cut, like iron filings, got out. “We got a 911 call—missing child?” he said, speaking to the tall cop, who now stood with one foot in the cruiser.

  “She’s not missing,” the tall cop said. He climbed into the driver’s seat in front of Jasper. “She’s with the DA. Been there all morning. Undergoing a rape test. She says this asshole did it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Her fucking father.”

  11

  They drove him to the Beckford Correctional Center, a long, low, gray stone pile on the city’s northern fringe. There, they ushered him through institutional corridors of off-white cinder block and fluorescent ceiling lights to a large, bustling booking room where they took his fingerprints, then posed him against a backdrop marked off with feet and inches hash marks, and photographed him, front view and profile. Waiving his right to a lawyer, he sat with a detective in a small, windowless room and confessed his criminal attack. He was allowed one phone call. With a guard standing at his elbow, he called his sister in San Francisco. It was still early on the west coast—6 a.m.—and Laura had clearly been woken from a deep sleep. He explained that he had gone insane, raped Chloe and was under arrest. He would be spending some significant amount of time behind bars—years—and she must come to Connecticut and begin proceedings for taking custody of Maddy. Laura, groping to comprehend the incomprehensible, tried to interrupt, but Jasper spoke over her, telling her to hurry, that Maddy was in Deepti’s care but that she needed a family member, that she was without either parent.

  “But where’s Pauline?” Laura cried.

  “Hospitalized—possibly a stroke,” he said. “Also my doing.”

  “Good God!” Laura said. “I’ll book a flight the minute we get off the phone.”

  He passed the night in an eight-by-seven-foot cell, on a hinged metal cot, shivering beneath a sandpapery gray blanket. At six the next morning, a pair of guards cuffed his hands and shackled his ankles, then led him, in shuffling baby steps, out to an idling van. He was driven into the city of Beckford, to the domed and pillared courts building. In a brightly lit hearing room, with the district attorney (a vulpine woman with a frozen wave of blond hair cresting her sharp profile), a court reporter and three armed guards present, he listened as the judge, a tiny, bespectacled man with a fuzzy fringe ringing a pate so bald as to appear waxed and polished, read in a slow, sepulchral baritone the charges against him, which included second-degree sexual assault, incest, oral sodomy and sex with a minor. “This last charge might require some explanation,” the judge said. “At eighteen, the victim has passed the age of consent in Connecticut, but w
hen the accused is in the role of guardian and responsible for her general supervision and welfare, the victim is classified as a minor. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” Jasper said in a cracked whisper.

  The DA then laid out the probable cause for Jasper’s arrest, which included not only a sworn affidavit from the victim but semen samples taken from her vagina and throat on the morning following the attack, and from the sheets and clothing recovered from the victim’s bedroom. Search of a personal computer seized from the home revealed an extensive written record of the accused’s unnatural obsession with his daughter. There existed, in addition, a digital video recording of the assault secretly made by the victim, who feared that, owing to her father’s fame and reputation, no one would believe her claims of an attack. “On that digital video recording,” the DA said, “the defendant’s face and voice are clearly recognizable and the victim clearly refers to him as ‘Daddy.’” The DA ended with a vehement appeal that bail be denied. “The defendant is a rich man and a significant flight risk.”

  The judge, peering at Jasper over his bifocals, asked if he wished to hire private counsel. Jasper said no. “I’m guilty, so I—”

  The judge interrupted and said that this was not the time for him to enter a plea—that would come at his arraignment. “For the time being,” the judge added, “I will appoint a public defender. I am in agreement with the district attorney and hereby deny bail. Defendant shall be remanded to custody.”

  Jasper was led out a back exit of the building and across a small parking lot seething now with a scrum of yelling, jostling reporters and paparazzi who, by whatever occult methods used by the press, had learned of his arrest. Voices shouted: “Where’s your other daughter?” “Did you attack her too?” “What happened to your wife?” “Will your publisher withdraw your memoir?” “Have you heard from Tovah?” He made no reply. A guard helped him step up into the police van, which then nosed its way through the scrum—flashes strobing the interior—until it finally broke free of the encircling herd and sped off.

  That night, as he again lay shivering on his cot in the Correctional Center, he tried to keep at bay thoughts of Maddy facing the bewildering terror of the disappearance of both parents. Also prowling the edges of his consciousness were images of Chloe in her feverish abandon, images which, instead of waking desire in him, were like the memories a contrite killer might have of his victim as she succumbed to a murder committed when the subject was in a state of temporary, but florid, insanity. When he managed to push these visions from his mind, he was visited by memories of Pauline in the ICU, where his actions had put her: gray-faced, unconscious, jerking with the respirator, hovering between life and death. He had wrought this destruction on his entire family. He alone. It was unencompassable. Incomprehensible. A single act of moral weakness, a single night of poisoned pleasure, that had blighted four lives, forever.

  The next morning, his court-appointed defense lawyer arrived. A stocky Irishman with a red face and wheezing breath, he introduced himself as Declan McInnis. He glanced around the tiny cell, rejected the option of sitting on the steel toilet and remained standing.

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” Jasper said in a low monotone, “because I’m guilty and will be pleading that way.”

  McInnis tried to dissuade him. “But if you stick to that line, my advice would be to plead nolo contendere—no contest. You don’t deny guilt, but you also don’t admit to it. Leaves some wiggle room. When you plea-bargain, the judge might be inclined to knock some time off. While we’re on that, you might start thinking of mitigating factors to bargain down your sentence. Not to steer you, but—purely as a ‘for instance’—if there was a sense of your being seduced or entrapped—”

  “No, no,” Jasper said, turning his face away and staring at the putty-colored wall beside him. “Nothing like that. It was me, and me alone.”

  At his arraignment ten days later, Jasper, in orange prison jumpsuit, hands and ankles enchained, stood before the bench. The visitors’ gallery was filled to capacity with reporters. “Guilty, your Honor,” he said.

  Loud whispers started up in the gallery. The judge banged his gavel and demanded order in the court. Then he moved on to the penalty phase. Ordinarily, the judge said, he might need some time to arrive at a sentence. “But I find myself in no great confusion about this case,” he said.

  He explained that he had taken into consideration the heinous nature of Jasper’s actions. The accused had grotesquely abused his daughter’s trust, in the most craven and despicable manner possible. That Jasper was lionized, throughout the country and world, as a model husband and father—owing to the widespread popularity of his best-selling memoir—only compounded his betrayal, for his daughter would have had every reason to expect that Jasper would be an especially loving and caring parent. For these reasons, and to set an example in what had become an internationally known case, the judge was handing down the maximum term afforded by the federal guidelines: two years for each charge, served consecutively. Jasper would serve eight years, three years suspended with good behavior.

  “I only wish, sir, that I could give you a far longer term of incarceration,” the judge said, “but our sentencing guidelines fail to perceive in sex crimes such as this that the effect on the victim is at least as dreadful as murder, if not more so, since she is obliged to live with the scars from your crime forever.”

  The judge imposed a permanent restraining order preventing Jasper, upon his release, from coming within one hundred yards of Chloe, and barring him from seeing his younger daughter, Madeline, until she was eighteen years of age, at which point she could decide for herself what kind of relationship, if any, she wished to have with her father. His name and mug shot would be entered onto the state’s sex offender registry and he would have to abide by the rules and regulations of the governing statutes, which included notifying his neighbors of his offender status, attending regular therapy, and meeting, thrice weekly, with his parole officer.

  The judge asked if he would like to make a statement.

  Jasper rose and, head hanging, spoke in a raspy, nearly inaudible whisper. He said that he wished to apologize to his family, his friends, his publisher, his readers and everyone who had ever respected him. Most especially, he wanted to apologize to Chloe, upon whom he had inflicted irreparable psychic and emotional damage. “Although I recognize,” he said, his voice breaking, “that it is far too late for apologies.”

  12

  For his own safety, he was placed in the Administrative Segregation Program—solitary confinement—away from the other inmates, whose code dictated that they beat or kill those prisoners convicted of crimes against children.

  He spent twenty-three hours a day in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell, with one hour for solo exercise, which he took by walking in a circle in a small yard bounded by high walls of gray brick, a postage stamp of sky visible overhead. His only other glimpse of sky was through a small barred window a few inches from the ceiling of his cell. He pored again and again over the letters that arrived, almost daily, from his sister, who told him of Maddy’s adjustment to life in San Francisco. “She’s settling in well,” Laura wrote. “She already feels like a member of the family, a twin sister to our Josie. She of course asks after you and Pauline, and we have told her that she will eventually be returning to Connecticut, but that at present you need to be able to devote all your time to Pauline.” In a letter one month later, Laura wrote that Maddy’s questions about her parents had dwindled almost to nothing—news which, for Jasper, was bittersweet: he was glad that the natural resilience of childhood had made Maddy bond so quickly and closely with her new family, but he was heartbroken to think that he and Pauline had already dimmed for her to ghostly presences, posthumous people.

  Three months into his sentence, he received notification of Chloe’s civil suit. As with the criminal trial, he refused to offer any defense. The judge entered a default judgment in Chloe’s favor, and her lawyer (an aggressi
ve New York attorney famous for winning record-setting cash awards, and recommended by Dez) argued strenuously for damages commensurate with the horrors of Jasper’s crime and as a warning to abusers everywhere. The judge agreed and seized Jasper’s bank accounts, securities, investments, cars and future royalties, as well as the Connecticut house. The property and possessions were sold at auction. The judge ordered the accumulated proceeds divided evenly between Jasper’s dependents: Maddy’s share put in trust until her eighteenth birthday; Pauline’s held in escrow against the day she either revived or passed away (at which point her portion would be split between daughter and stepdaughter); the final third for Chloe, who would take immediate possession, having passed her eighteenth birthday.

  News of his destitution was curiously comforting to Jasper, who felt that he had, in raping his daughter, abrogated all claims to humanity, including wealth and possessions. What character was it in the Bible who, stripped of everything, said that he came into this world naked and would leave it that way?

  He refused all visitors—saying that he would not, could not, face anyone from his former life. Deepti, however, wrote to him regularly with news of Pauline, whose condition, she said, remained unchanged. MRIs and other scans showed that her brain was alive, but she remained unresponsive.

  A daily, one-hour session of mandatory group therapy with a hangdog, mostly silent group of serial sex offenders—prison-pale, shifty-eyed men, with uniformly rounded shoulders and halting, whispery voices—was his sole human contact, save for the shouted orders of the guards (“Get back in there!”) and the implied presence of whoever it was that slid open the small hatch on his cell door to push in his three meals a day, an array of rubbery eggs, cold toast, greasy stews, gristly meats and vegetables boiled to limp, pale flavorlessness. His nights were filled with despairing dreams of Maddy and Pauline, and also of Chloe—dreams steeped in helplessness, hopelessness and horror, as when, in one recurring nightmare, he came to her weeping, begging forgiveness, touching her cheek with one hand as she looked down with troubled, confused eyes and he, in following her gaze, saw that he was, with his free hand, working deep into her spilling entrails a rusty blade.