Undone

by John Colapinto

  “Pauline,” he said. “She knew. She dictated it all to Maddy. Remember the alphabet game?”

  “The alphabet game …” Chloe limply echoed. She recalled that first night in the house, when little Maddy had pulled at her arm, on the sofa, and mentioned the game. They had played it many times in the weeks that followed, Chloe saying a letter and Maddy having to write it down. Those happy weeks before the disaster. The disaster of his diary. Followed by the disaster she had visited upon him. Upon his family.

  “Pauline saw everything,” he went on. “The woman you called mother,” he could not resist adding bitterly. “She figured out everything. Not just the DNA scam. But Dr. Geld.”

  At the mention of Dez’s alter ego, her head shot up and she gaped at Jasper, stunned, terrified. He did know the truth. He had found out. Not only about the fraud, but about Dez. “Oh my God,” she said.

  He tapped forward. He was standing over her. He wanted now to see her, to see her expression. But her face remained only a blurred oval, and he was afraid to move his own face closer in case she did throw off this strange, unexpected torpor and attack him. But she had no intention of attacking him, had no wish to hurt him further.

  “I know the whole sick, disgusting game,” he said. “But there are two questions I have for you. Why? I need to know why you did it. Why did you destroy my family?”

  “I didn’t want to destroy your family,” she whispered.

  “Then why?”

  She pulled up, in memory, those rationales that Dez had drummed into her, rationales that now sounded so weak, so laughably lame. “We—to pay you back for my mother,” she said in a barely audible voice.

  “Your mother?” he said, mystified.

  She felt a surge of defensiveness, felt the old certainties flare up, a final, desperate effort to convince, not so much him, but herself. “You took advantage of her!” she wailed. “You never called her! You thought you could just, just sleep with her—seduce her—then leave and—and—and—and never talk to her again!”

  He was genuinely baffled. “But it was your mother who initiated everything. Your mother who pursued me—”

  Yes, Chloe thought, that would be true of her poor mother. All those men she brought home from the bars every weekend, slept with and then kicked out. Of course she had pursued Jasper the same way back then, taken her pleasure and then moved on. Back to Hughie, her boyfriend, Chloe’s father. Not pined away, for years, in sadness for this man. Not waited by the phone for his call. Chloe had always known it, on some deeply buried level. So how could she have swallowed Dez’s version? Dez’s lies?

  “And Maddy!” she now cried in desperation.

  “Maddy?” he said, even more bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

  Her hands flew to the sides of her head. She stopped up her ears, refusing to hear what he was saying. She had to silence any protest of his, any counterargument, just as she had had to silence, in herself, the terrible, stealthy doubts that had tried to seep into her mind over the years since his arrest and imprisonment. “You—you—you would abuse Maddy next,” she cried. “Just like you abused me.” Aware of some fatal flaw in this logic (after all, she had set out to seduce him; she had set his lust in motion), she changed tack. “I trusted you! I loved you. Like a daughter.” She added, on a weak, helpless sob, “I never, ever—I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

  He had not expected this. He had expected jeering, insults, threats, even gloating. Not tears. Not this obvious pain and remorse. It was worse, so much worse than any defiance or denial she might have retreated behind. “But surely you set out to seduce me?” he said. That pink nightie. The glass of Scotch. “Wasn’t that your plan?” Had he somehow gotten everything wrong?

  “At first,” she said, woefully, weakly. “At first.” She raised her eyes and peered at the pathetic creature before her, saw the look of confusion on his ravaged face, a confusion accentuated by the round, owlish black glasses obscuring his eyes. She owed him at least some explanation. Some insight. “I did set out to seduce you, at the very beginning, when you came to get me. But then I didn’t want to go through with it. I didn’t think you would go through with it. I never believed you would have those feelings. I thought you liked me. I thought you loved me. Like a daughter.”

  “But—but I did,” Jasper protested. Had he, though? Had he ever truly loved her with the purity of a real father? Yes—yes, in that first phone call, before he had ever seen her, when she had been only a detached, disembodied voice—a light, innocent, sweetly melodic voice—as now.

  “Then I saw your diary,” she said.

  It took him a moment to process this. “My diary?”

  “That’s when I knew how you really felt about me.”

  He saw before him the words of the diary he had kept during that nightmare summer. His foul catalog of lust. The computer had been seized by prosecutors, the contents used in court against him, but he had never known, until now, that she had read those shameful entries while still living in his house. “Oh God,” he said. That he now knew her not to be his actual daughter did nothing to soften his shame and horror and guilt. Those mortifying passages spelling out his degraded obsession.

  “And if you could feel that way about me,” she went on, “then what about Maddy?”

  “Never,” he objected weakly. “I would never—”

  “But that’s what he told me,” Chloe burst out. “He told me you were bad. Sick. He said that you exploited my mother, and that you were going to exploit me, then you were going to hurt Maddy.” She had spoken herself into boldness. “He said the only way to stop you was to put you in jail. If I helped, I was doing the right thing. And I believed him. I did believe him! But then—” She stopped. He heard a gulping sound, heard her wipe at her face with something that made a soft crinkling noise—perhaps a napkin left over from the pizza. He waited, reeling at her revelations, but she remained silent.

  “But then?” he prompted.

  “But then I started to wonder,” she said. “Things he said. The way he behaved. Especially when we got the money.”

  Should she be telling him this? Talking about this? But why shouldn’t she—now? He already knew about the scam. Knew about Dez! And she had held it all in for so long. She had wanted to tell someone, so many times over the years. But there was no one to tell, no one she could trust—not even Misty or Gabriella—and she had no blood relations left to whom she could confide the story, the story of the scheme, and the nightmare that came after it. Strange to think, but this man standing in front of her was the closest thing to family she had left in the whole world.

  “I mean, it was okay for a while,” she said, her voice low and quiet, almost as if she were talking to herself. “We bought a place downtown. I thought I was in love with him. I was in love. But I also wanted to do something with my life. I tried acting and modeling—but it didn’t work out. I stunk at it. He was happy about that. But it wasn’t too late for me to try something else. I wanted to go back to school. Study psychology. He said I was crazy. What did I need school for? But I got my GED, by correspondence. I wanted to go to college. He said no. He wanted me with him. Then he started with the drugs. Cocaine. Ecstasy. Other stuff. And girls. Young girls. Younger than me. Girls that made me feel old—and I was only twenty. He wanted me to be with them. I was with them a couple of times, because he—he—” She broke off.

  There could be no question about her sincerity, Jasper realized. Really, she was no different from Jasper himself, a victim of this man who had destroyed her life, or tried to. Who had preyed on her innocence and vulnerability.

  “I tried to kick him out,” she went on. “He just laughed at me. He said, ‘Kick me out? It’s my apartment.’ That’s when I found out that he had put everything in his name: bank accounts, property, investments, royalties from your books—everything. I don’t know how he did it. I mean, one day he had me sign a bunch of papers, but he said it was for taxes. One d
ay he showed me. Everything was in his name. I didn’t have a penny. I was completely dependent on him.

  “I guess he thought he could keep me there with him, forever. He didn’t expect me to run. But I did. He was passed out one night, with these girls we’d brought back from this club. I put some clothes in a bag and took off. Took three hundred dollars from his wallet. It wasn’t stealing, really. It was mine anyway. Or, really, yours. I didn’t care about the money. By that time, I didn’t trust anything he said, and I didn’t trust why I had done what I did. To you. To your family. Nothing made sense anymore. I just wanted to get away from him. To forget everything. So I left. I stayed in a shelter. Applied to school, and I got a scholarship to NYU. I met Gabriella and Misty. We found this place. And—and everything has been really good.”

  She tried to smile, but her voice cracked on the word “good” and she began to sob. Jasper, his own chest roiling, took a tentative step forward, but he did not, could not, reach out and touch her: what if she were to misconstrue the nature of that touch? He longed now to tell her that he did not blame her for anything, to comfort her, as a father would, with a gentle hand on her shoulder or knee. But that was impossible. He had rendered it so by his violation of her all those years ago.

  “You can believe me or not, but I always felt bad about you,” she choked out. “About what we did to you. And your family. But I pushed it out of my mind—I had to, to survive. Then I saw the newspapers when you got out of jail. I read about how you were beaten in prison. I wrote a card to Deepti after seeing the newspaper. I wanted to see if she would tell me anything about you and Maddy and Mo—Pauline. When I heard Deepti on the intercom, I buzzed her in, because I thought she would tell me how you were doing. I saw you on the stairs … I almost called 911. But I guess I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.” She started crying again. “Because I am. I am sorry.”

  She ventured a look at him and saw a face utterly without a vestige of the lust that had distorted his features on that last night, when he had come home from the hospital and stared at her with a desire that looked almost like fear; and, later, when he had come into her bedroom and stood over her, his face twisted into a mask of terrible need, twitching and sweating, his eyes boring into her. Now he was peering at her, blindly, two tear trails rolling out from under his dark lenses and down his desiccated cheeks. She was filled with that old sensation of yearning after him as a father, that instinct that had arisen in her in the courthouse and that had strengthened over the following days and weeks, when she had never felt so whole, so safe and so loved. She had never expected to feel that way again, about anyone. “I know you want to put me in jail,” she said. “I deserve it. But I am sorry.”

  “No, Chloe,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t want to put you in jail.” That was perfectly true, now. “And please don’t apologize. I’m sorry. There’s no excuse for what I did to you—none.”

  It struck him with unendurable force that her part in the conspiracy—her deliberate efforts to seduce him—did nothing to mitigate his crime of sleeping with her; if anything, her role as helpless puppet only magnified his guilt. In succumbing to his basest urges, he had in effect joined his nemesis in exploiting and victimizing her, the two adults whose only proper role would have been to keep her from such harm. That he could not now obey the instinct physically to comfort her was evidence of his vile kinship with the man who had directed her actions, and proof of how he himself, by raping her, had destroyed any chance of establishing with her a bond of trust or affection, the healthy bond that had moved him to tears that day on the phone, in his office, when he had first heard her featherlight voice. He might even now have become a kind of father to her, to alleviate their shared loneliness, to rebuild their mutually broken lives, had he not surrendered to that urge for fleeting, meaningless physical pleasure and destroyed everything between them forever.

  Thinking of this, he wondered, suddenly, if lust had even been his sole sin in regard to her. Hubris. Excessive pride. That, on reflection, was the catalyst, a kind of overconfidence in his own powers of self-control. He was visited with a memory of a comment he had made on that television show, all those years ago, when asked about his celibate life with Pauline. He had said something about the way straying men justified their infidelities by blaming the demands of their biology. “We can control ourselves,” he had asserted. Would he have been as susceptible to temptation had he not suffered from such an unshakable, unwarranted confidence in his own higher nature; had he recognized, from the outset, before even meeting Chloe, the peril of bringing into his home an eighteen-year-old girl, daughter of a past lover, when he was so vulnerable to his thwarted, frustrated urges?

  And when it came to that, how completely blind had he truly been to the danger? For one stubborn detail stuck in his mind, a detail that he had worried away at, and ruminated over, for days and weeks and months and years during his incarceration, a detail he had never been able to bring himself to mention to the prison therapist or in group sessions at the halfway house. He was thinking of one of the gifts that he had bought for Chloe during his shopping spree at Urban Outfitters, weeks before he ever laid eyes on her: that present purchased along with the shirts and jeans and sneakers—an item glimpsed, on a shelf near the back of the store, and which had somehow cried out to be bought. He was thinking of that pretty pair of strappy silver sandals, identical to the pair worn by Holly at the closing dance, and for which he had left her forlornly searching, with a pointed toe, in the dark sand. Those sandals, flat-soled, with the Y-shaped, glittering cross straps that left most of the foot bare, and which sat in the center of his mind, like one of those clues he liked to hide in plain sight in his Bannister mysteries. Certainly, in surrendering to that seemingly innocent impulse purchase in the days before Chloe came to live with him, he had not been conscious of trying to retrieve a mislaid piece of the past, had not been conscious of drawing a fatal link between the girl with whom he had shared a moment of excruciatingly arrested passion on a moonlit beach and the girl he was slated, soon, to meet—but it is in the very nature of the subconscious mind that often its devious needs, and darkest desires, remain unknown to us, until it is too late.

  “It was all my doing—I was in the wrong,” he now said, “and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

  She shook her head. “We were both in the wrong.”

  He was going to contest this, but thought better of it. “Perhaps,” he allowed. “But there was someone else in the wrong too,” he added, his voice quickening.

  He was aware of how much time had gone by since he had arrived in this apartment. Her roommates would be back any minute. And he had yet to put to her the second of the two questions he had come here to ask. A crucial question that must be answered.

  “This man you mentioned,” he said. “The man who put you up to this.” His shadow nemesis, his dark double. “What is his name?”

  She began vigorously shaking her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t. Don’t ask me that. I’ll tell you what I did, but I can’t give you his name. He would find me and kill me. I can’t do it. I can’t tell you.”

  “He must be locked up,” Jasper said. “He’ll hurt others. He’s a dangerous person. A sadist.”

  “But I can’t,” she said, “I just can’t tell—”

  There was a noise in the hall, a sound like an army running rapidly up the stairs, a great clumping commotion that seemed to shake the frail building. Jasper heard shouts—female voices—crying out: “It’s on the fifth floor!” and “Right at the top!” The pounding footsteps, growing louder, were mounting the final set of stairs. Before those footfalls reached the top landing, the apartment door burst open and Deepti ran in, screaming, “They have brought the police!”

  Chloe jumped up, streaked to the door and tried to slam it closed. But it was pushed open powerfully from the outside. She backed up across the room. Jasper saw huge dark shapes pile into the room. A male voice demanded: “Whe
re is he?”

  “There!” the Latina cried. “Right there!”

  The cops rushed at him and grabbed him roughly by the arms. One of them turned to Chloe and demanded: “This your father?”

  She hesitated.

  Jasper could summon no words. He simply stared imploringly at the hunched, dark shape of the girl he had once believed to be his daughter.

  “That’s—” Her voice caught, and she fell silent.

  “Who is it?” the cop barked at her.

  “Come on, Chloe!” the Latina girl cried.

  “That is my father,” Chloe said.

  The police spun him around. They disarmed him of his cane and pulled his hands behind him. The precious drawing tablet, which had been under his arm, fell to the floor. He felt the familiar sensation of handcuffs closing over his wrists. They tightened, biting into the flesh.

  “Chloe!” Jasper cried as the police wrestled him toward the door.

  Deepti stepped in front of the policemen. “Please,” she entreated, “let me explain! You must let him go!”

  Chloe’s roommates crowded over and yelled, “Take him away! Take him!”

  Chloe wailed, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”

  One of the policemen roared at everyone to shut up. The room went silent.

  “This man is under arrest,” the cop said. “There is an APB out on him in three states. He is a fugitive from justice. Now, stand aside.”

  They pulled him out the door. Jasper went limp in their arms. They half carried, half dragged him down the stairs. They would put him away for years. He thought about Pauline. Of how he would never see her again. She would never survive. Maddy would be in her late twenties, her thirties, before he was free. Lost to him.

  They had manhandled him as far as the second floor when he heard a noise from above. A door wrenched open. The sound of footfalls pounding along a corridor.