“Please, Mom?”
I tried to explain how foolish that request seemed to me. After all, I was sitting right there! Why should I leave the school alone, just to drive over to the middle school and wait for her to get off the school bus there like I did every other day?
“But Mom,” she pleaded.
Rather than make a scene in front of the school’s principal, who may or may not have already been wondering about my effectiveness as a parent, I reluctantly agreed to let her go on the bus. “But I’ll be waiting at the middle school for you, dear!” I reminded her.
Only after I got into the car to drive to the middle school did she dare to ask me her next question—via text message. “Can I go to the mall?”
I was so annoyed with her by this time. Her behavior had just resulted in my leaving work early, looking like a know-nothing parent in front of the school’s assistant principal and police liaison, and now she wasn’t even coming home with me? My head wanted to tell her that that was a most stupid request, but my heart saw the request as a way of demonstrating my unconditional love and trust for her. Since her brother wasn’t ready to go home yet either, thanks to his after-school sport’s practice, I agreed to let her go to the mall with her friends.
* * *
While waiting for Allison to be done with her friends at the mall, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to do a little investigative work of my own. I thought about some of the information the school principal had shared with me from the note during our phone call. He had mentioned that Allison’s plan was to go to Massachusetts, and I remembered that a Massachusetts number had been showing up on our caller ID at home recently. Then I remembered how Allison had borrowed my cell phone when we were returning from a weekend visit to my mom’s the weekend before, after the battery on her phone had died. Could she have possibly spoken with this unidentified Massachusetts guy on my cell phone?
I checked the “recently dialed” section of my cell phone’s memory and discovered a phone number I didn’t recognize. I sent my first text message to that number at 3:39 p.m. It simply read, “Who is this again?”
At 3:40 p.m., I got a reply. “Who is this?”
Okay, buddy, I thought. I’ll play along. If you are actually a teenager, I’ll recognize the way you respond—but if you’re not a teenager, I’m going to have the authorities hunting you down a lot sooner than I had them hunting for Jamie.
At 3:41 p.m., I sent my next text message: “Your number is in my ‘top texts.’”
I received a response a minute later: “Your number came up here; you are you.”
I did not find his evasive answers amusing. While I was proud of my own ability to disguise my typing so that it would appear like the text-message short-hand my daughter had been sending me for almost a year, I didn’t want to play a mindgame with someone I was hoping to trap in my own web of deceit. Better to play along, though, I rationalized with myself. It might be the only way to snare this jerk. I sent a third text message: “Lol [laughing out loud]—Nick or Blake?”
His reply, a minute later, mirrored my query tit for tat: “Hailey or who?”
Anticipating where the game was going, I quickly shot off a text message to Allison. I asked her not to feed anyone answers to questions I was asking, hoping that she would understand my request and cooperate.
Apparently the silence was too much for the Massachusetts text sender, though, as I received a second reply to my identity question. “I am Nick.” Then, a minute later, I received another message: “Are you Allison’s mom?”
Remembering that I had no reason to hide, I sent back my reply. “Yep. How did you two meet again?”
A minute later, he came back with “Science class. How are you?”
The nod to social courtesies annoyed me all the more. “Science class where?” I sent back.
This time, his reply took a little bit longer to come back. “Wrong person. Richard’s cousin.”
Crap. That simple change of direction showed me that Allison, in spite of my request to stay out of it, was feeding him the answers. She had previously tried explaining the Massachusetts phone calls as being from a cousin of Richard’s—another boy whom I had never met, who supposedly had moved from our Wyoming town to North Carolina with his family about six months before we moved back to Minnesota—so the fact that this guy’s story was changing midstream meant that she was feeding him the “right” answers from the mall after all. Why wouldn’t my child just listen to me for once?
After two minutes of silence, he sent me another text message. “How does she know Blake?”
It took me a few beats to make the connection back to what he was talking about—I had asked earlier if he were Nick or Blake—but couldn’t understand why he was so concerned about how Allison knew other boys. If this were a real boy I was having a text message conversation with, and she were having a real relationship with him, I would be warning Allison about my suspicion that Nick was a little controlling. Suspecting that this was an adult predator, though, I ignored his question and launched back into the driver’s seat with my own question: “So it’s Hailey you know from science class?”
“Yea,” came his quick response.
“I know Hailey—what school?”
A full three minutes passed before his response to that question appeared. I knew that was plenty of time to have an exchange with Allison at the mall, unfortunately. He replied, “I don’t know if we are talking about the same one. The Hailey I am talking to is twenty-eight from Ohio.”
“So, how old are you?” I shot back at him in record time. The way I saw it, there was no way a twenty-eight-year-old woman was going to be talking to a seventeen-year-old boy, unless they were related.
A full two minutes later, his reply arrived. “Just out of curiosity, why all the questions?”
At this point, I knew that I wasn’t talking to a seventeen-year-old boy. This was someone with something to hide. I also knew that Allison wasn’t going to give up on Nick without the kind of proof it took to give up on Jamie. I had to find a way to make this person stop talking to Allison the way Jamie had finally stopped. I pulled out what I thought of as the big guns: “That’s what parents do, sweetheart.” I was hoping he would get the honey-sweet stickiness of that last word and realize that I wasn’t playing.
Unfortunately, two minutes later, he sent another message. “I know, lol. I am seventeen.”
I wanted to scream at him, There’s no fucking way you are only seventeen, buddy! but knew that wasn’t going to be enough to make him stop. I instead tried to step up my warning, sending back what I hoped would be a more aggressive-sounding message: “If you came to my door, I would get to see for myself.”
“What do you mean by that?” he sent back.
At this point, my mind was racing between anger at his arrogance, frustration with Allison for helping him along so much, and wondering what I would have to say in order to make him stop talking to her altogether.
Before I could finish gathering my thoughts, he sent another text message in response to my previous comment: “Yea, you would.”
Mere seconds before that message came into my phone’s message-box, I had pushed send on a reply to his first comment: “Like Dr. House [character on a television program], I think everybody lies—I’m a profiler.” I hoped that that would shut him up, or at least shut him down for the time being; I was getting too irritated to keep up the banter.
Four minutes later, I received his next reply: “Oh, okay. You judge them by their looks, lol. So you want me to come by?”
Even as I write this a year later, I still get very angry by Nick’s arrogance. Was he suggesting that he could just come over to my house and take my daughter away from me? Or was he thinking that a tryst with Allison’s mom might be even more enjoyable than what he might find with a fifteen-yea
r-old girl? Although it still makes my stomach turn to think about such things, I’m not naïve enough to ignore the possibility that those are the kinds of thoughts traveling through a predator’s brain.
While part of me wanted to send back a reply that would encourage him to come over to the house—so that the police could be there to greet him—I opted to not respond to the last remark at all. Rather, I asked him where he lived.
“North Carolina,” he replied.
Annoyed by the affirmation that Allison was feeding him the answers from the mall, I stopped sending text messages to Nick. Thankfully, he followed suit.
* * *
After picking her up from the mall, I tried explaining to Allison about my text messaging conversation with Nick, and why I had done it. “I’m telling you, sweetie, he’s not a seventeen-year-old kid.”
“Why? How so, Mom?”
“I put him through the wringer with a bunch of questions. Oh, and thanks for feeding him the answers, like I asked you not to do. Anyway, he’s not answering my questions like a kid would. Not only did he spend too much time trying to twist me around with his bullshit logic, but he also used words and expressions adults would use, but a kid wouldn’t.”
As usual, the drive home from the mall ended in another fight. What happened to the little girl who used to understand, and even appreciate my age and wisdom? She used to trust me when I would tell her things. That afternoon, my daughter yelled at me, hurling nasty words, such as, “You think you know everything!” with as much venom as she could muster.
5. If You Love Me
In the days and weeks that followed Allison’s running away in April of 2009, my mother said something to me that continues to haunt me to this day. I no longer remember the context of this statement—but she suggested that running away was some kind of game Allison was playing, a way of testing my love for her.
It made me mad to hear my mother suggest that Allison was trying to manipulate me the way Frank had. But it was a thought I had already had.
It made me sad to think that Allison would feel the need to test my love for her, because I only thought about having to do that in relationships with men—not my family. Didn’t she already understand how much I loved her? Every big decision I made since the divorce included a careful review of what I thought would be in the children’s best interest.
At the same time, it made me angry to think that Allison didn’t unconditionally love and trust me like I unconditionally—and sometimes stupidly—loved and trusted her.
From my perspective, Allison had it all. She had a brother and mother who loved her no matter what, and an extended family that cared. She had a home she could feel safe to be in, and nourishing food on the table when she was hungry. She had a petite, natural beauty, and a graceful body that I could only ever dream of having.
I believe that there is no greater love than the love a parent has for a child. We choose people to have long-term friendships with, we choose a partner to share our lives with, we choose how close to keep our extended family members—but children are a gift. All they ask in return is unconditional love.
Perhaps Allison and I are alike that way—because our fathers didn’t show us unconditional love, we were left on our own to discover what real love looks like. Or we are so in love with the idea of being loved that we trust people we shouldn’t.
* * *
I was only ten years old when my dad got “sick.” My mother, sister, and I were visiting my grandmother in northern Minnesota for a week of summer vacation when the phone rang. My world changed. In some ways, that phone call brought a positive change for my life, but I wouldn’t begin to recognize the good for ten years. In other ways, that phone call signaled the end of my existence.
The person on the other end of the line was calling to inform my mother that my father, her husband of fifteen years, had been found in a public restroom in Chicago and was being prepped for surgery. He had had an aneurysm in his brain. If the doctor couldn’t get the bleeding to stop, my father would die. The surgeon predicted a fifty-fifty chance of survival. My mother immediately made the decision to leave my sister and me with our grandmother, and headed back to Chicago to be by her husband’s side.
My father had stayed home during our trip to Minnesota, as he often did. For my father, taking a vacation meant leaving the three of us. I only remember seeing his family once, when I was seven years old. The four of us went to visit his mother, two brothers, and two or three sisters in Pennsylvania. The photographs are the only reason I know that we were there.
I’ve always referred to my father’s aneurysm as the time he got “sick” because I don’t want people having too much sympathy for him, or thinking that I’m cold because I don’t have much sympathy for him either. Anyway, the aneurysm had burst, leading to his collapse in the public restroom. I don’t remember if he had been working as a bartender, or meeting a client for his advertising salesman job. All I remember is that he collapsed in the public bathroom in Chicago and he was being rushed into surgery.
My father survived the first surgery, but remained in the hospital for a while, so my mother left my sister and me with our grandmother for the rest of the summer. I was glad to be in her house, where I felt loved, but missed my home because I hadn’t brought toys to last more than a week. I know it was the middle of July, because a cousin who typically spent the entire summer with our grandmother has a picture of my sister and me standing behind her while she blew out the candles on her birthday cake. I remember my mother explaining, through the long distance telephone line, that she was never at home anyway. She would get up in the morning, go to work, then go straight over to the hospital to sit with my dad until the hospital staff kicked her out for the night. She would go home, go to sleep, and get up to do it all again the next day.
When we were back in Chicago with my mother, I remember hearing that my father had to have another surgery. There was too much fluid collecting in his brain, so the doctor wanted to run a tube from his brain to his stomach. The idea was that the excess liquid would leave his brain, be drained out through his stomach, and exit his body like other bodily fluids. He was back in the hospital, but I was too young to visit. On Saturdays or Sundays, my mother would take us with her to the hospital, but my sister and I would have to sit quietly in the waiting room.
My dad eventually came home again, and tried to return to work, but my mother said that he wasn’t “any good” at his job after the aneurysm. I remember her saying that he was running up his Diner’s Club card taking clients out to fancy restaurants for expensive lunches and dinners, but he wasn’t selling anything to pay the bills.
Then there were the bill collector calls. I remember those because my mother always taught us never to tell a lie, whereas my dad made me lie, saying, “Just answer the phone—but tell them I’m not home.”
I was thrilled to have my dad’s permission to be on the telephone, but I hated having to tell a lie.
There were other changes with my dad as well. He walked with a limp, like a shuffle to his left side. The tube from his brain to his stomach didn’t seem to be working well, as he was always spitting. He would spit into the sink, with the dirty or clean dishes still in there, into the toilet, on the sidewalk. It didn’t matter where he was, or how we were dressed, he would always just spit. Eventually, he would dedicate an empty metal coffee can to be his portable spittoon. To look down at it when it was half-full, to hear the sounds when he would spit into it, the sound as he poured it into the toilet, the times it would spill . . . I still get nauseous whenever I think about it.
* * *
Even before the aneurysm, my dad had always been mean. No patience for anyone, ever—and he got even meaner after he drank his evening beers. My dad’s preferred beverage was Schlitz, from a can. If I were to be sitting in the living room with him, watching TV, he would have me run down the
long hallway of our apartment to get him another beer from the kitchen. If he was sitting in the living room alone, he would yell through the length of the apartment for someone to bring him a can of beer. If no one heard him, and he had to take the long walk to the kitchen himself, there would be hell to pay.
I didn’t mind getting his beer, though. I would open up the can in the kitchen, where my mother was most often sitting at the table working, or standing at the sink washing dishes, turn the sharp left corner around the refrigerator—and then, momentarily blocked from view, I would get a mouthful of the cold, bubbly stuff to carefully swallow before I reached my dad in the living room.
Whether he noticed this daily practice of mine or not, he never said—unless my mom would ask for a mouthful before I left the kitchen. Her mouthful, plus my mouthful, would result in my dad’s yelling at her, “What the hell happened to my beer! You drank half the damned can.” He never yelled it at me, though. It was always directed to my mom. I don’t know if he realized I was taking swigs out of each can.
When I was in college, taking some kind of drugs-and-alcohol class, I read enough about the characteristics and behaviors of addicts to make me question my mom about my dad’s drinking habit.
“Are you asking if he was an alcoholic?” she asked, disbelief in her voice.
“Well, we did always have so much alcohol in the house,” I said.
“That’s because your father was a bartender.”
I’ve never understood why his occupation had anything to do with the contents on our pantry shelves. It’s not like we ever had any company over, and needed to serve them exotic mixed drinks while they sat in the living room. This was just one of the many things my mother would say to me over the years that remain unexplained. At seventy-three, my mother still says that, “he wasn’t an alcoholic, because he didn’t get meaner when he drank.” My mother was the classic enabler—in more areas than just the alcohol.
Heart Scars Page 5
