* * *
An hour after I got home from identifying the picture of Gregory, Officer Richards called again. “I want you to do one more thing for me. I want you to send a text message to Nicholas.”
The idea was to send Nicholas a message, reassuring him Allison was still on the bus, still following through with the plan to meet him the next morning. Officer Richards wanted me to do this in private, without Allison knowing, because he wanted to set a trap to catch the person who had sent the bus tickets.
I wanted that too. But how was I supposed to sound like a fifteen-year-old girl? A girl who thought she was in love with a boy she had never met, but was about to meet. A girl who was tired and hungry after a two-day, cross-country bus trip.
I decided to get Allison involved, in spite of Officer Richards’s request to send the text without her knowledge.
Allison and I sat next to each other on the couch and I told her what Officer Richards wanted the message to say. I had her write her message down on paper, because I had been trained as a writer: first you draft, then you edit, all before you turn in a final copy. I guess I was waiting for a sign of reassurance, a sign telling me the message was good enough to catch the criminal.
After a few deep breaths, I asked Allison one last time if that message felt right, then gave her her phone. She typed the message in. We looked at it one more time, each took a deep breath, and watched her thumb hover over the send button.
As soon as we saw that the message was sent, she turned the phone off, took the battery out, and handed it all back to me. We hugged, and then I called Officer Richards to let him know it was done. Thirty minutes later, another officer rang the doorbell. He was sent to pick up Allison’s cell phone, considered as evidence in the case.
About 7:00 a.m. the following morning, Officer Richards called my cell phone. “I just wanted to let you know that they caught the guy,” he said.
I was swept away with so many sometimes oddly conflicting emotions. First, and most importantly, were the feelings of extreme gratitude, relief, awe, and disbelief. The police had caught the man who had seduced my daughter to run away from home with nothing more than a gentle voice, a willingness to listen to her talk about her fifteen-year-old life for hours on end, and an envelope of pre-paid bus tickets. Then, there were the emotions of disappointment, because I heard Officer Richards’s two-year-old crying in the background. Hearing her cries reminded me that this was merely a business call. I pushed down all of my emotions and words that might have poured out to him at that moment. I know it’s sometimes easier to say what you really feel through the phone rather than in person. Instead, I took the high road of polite thanks before ending what I again thought of as my last conversation with Officer Richards.
* * *
Three days later, Officer Richards called my cell phone again, this time while I was at work. “How are you?” he asked.
I didn’t know how to respond. I think I asked, “How should I be?” I couldn’t imagine why he would be calling unless there was more bad news. On Monday, two plain-clothed officers had appeared at our front door shortly after I had gotten home from school, wanting to ask Allison some follow-up questions. Since this was my first police incident, I didn’t know any better than to admit them. After they left, I drove Allison over to the shopping mall in town to “hang out” with a few friends for about thirty minutes. While I sat in the car in the parking lot, reading my book, another police officer called me on my cell phone—Allison had been caught shop-lifting a pregnancy test kit, and I needed to come retrieve her. By Wednesday afternoon, I couldn’t deal with any more surprises, especially from police officers.
I was also a bit thrown to have him calling me at work. I had gone to great efforts not to reveal to anyone what had taken place over the weekend. For the sake of all outside appearances, this was just another Wednesday. The little voice inside my head told me this call might end my composure. Additionally, hidden beneath all of that was the fact that I was still nursing my broken heart. I didn’t want to be constantly reminded of the perfect man I had fallen for. I wanted to get my life back in order.
“I need to ask Allison a few more questions. When can you bring her over?” he said.
Damn. That meant seeing him again. I took a deep breath and replied, “Okay, I’ll bring her over when school’s done.”
“Great. I’ll see you about 3:30.”
After I hung up, I comforted myself with the fact that I was wearing a more flattering outfit than the previous two times he had seen me.
When Allison and I arrived at the station, we didn’t have to announce ourselves in the waiting room, as Officer Richards spotted us through the bullet-proof glass of the reception center before we had a chance.
He came out to the lobby through an interior door, invited us back to the interrogation room where he had taken Allison’s testimony just days before, then asked me to join him back out in the hall.
I slumped against the hallway wall, still tired from the last five days’ events. I noticed he was taller than I had remembered.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak with Allison alone this time,” he said. “I have a few more questions to ask her, and think she might be a little more forthcoming if you’re not in the room with her. She trusts me . . .”
I stopped listening after that. Part of me was relieved to not have to hear any more questions meant to draw out information about my fifteen-year-old’s sexually oriented involvement with either the man who sent her the bus tickets or the nineteen-year-old “boy” whose father had driven her to the bus station that April afternoon. I also knew all activities in the interrogation rooms were both audio and video recorded, so I wasn’t worried about Allison’s safety. Part of me was saddened, though, by the thought that I was being deemed “no longer necessary.”
About forty-five minutes later, they came back out to where I was waiting. Allison asked to use the restroom, and Officer Richards asked to speak to me in the building’s entryway, between the two sets of doors into the building, where there were no video cameras to record our conversation.
Before he began speaking, he adjusted his posture a bit, and glanced quickly over to the office, as though to make sure no one was watching us. Was he posturing for my benefit, I wondered, like a male peacock revealing his colorful tail feathers to a female peacock? Officer Richards asked me how things were going. I told him I had an appointment scheduled to get Allison in with a counselor in town, and expressed some concerns I had about the future. All too soon, though, Allison exited the bathroom and came out to join us.
“Allison, I want you to understand what a really incredible mother you have here,” Officer Richards said.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to turn and yell right into Officer Richards’s face, You know, I’ve spent almost the last ten years of my life waiting to hear a man say those kinds of things about me—and now you are. I don’t think you realize how that’s messing with my head! But I kept my silence, and lowered my head a bit, hoping to hide the sadness I was sure was apparent on my face.
“This woman loves you so much,” he continued. “Some day, you’re going to understand . . . but I want you to really love this woman. I want you to be in love with this woman.”
I couldn’t stand it any more. Like a pressure cooker about to explode, I had to release some of the emotions building up inside of me. I turned to Allison then, and snidely remarked, “Not like anyone else is.” All of this attention from a good-looking guy, and me not even knowing if he meant it for himself, or if he was just saying it to my daughter the same way he would be saying it to one of his own children if they were to end up in a bad situation like Allison had created for herself.
I know that Officer Richards said a few more things after that, but I shut down. I just couldn’t stand hearing anymore.
As Allison and I walked
to the car, I let it all out. “G-damn it, how can he say that shit to me?! That’s so fucking wrong. It just makes me so fucking angry . . .” I exclaimed.
We drove home in silence. All of the things I wanted to say, but couldn’t, had to be pushed behind the wall of silence I had erected when I was a child. I was angry because I had met a great guy but at the worst possible moment. Allison had run away from home because she was looking for love. If I were to get involved in my own quest for love, I might lose her again. One of the secrets she told me, that night in Chicago, was that she had lost her virginity to a boy in Wyoming. Rich had invited me and the kids over for a barbecue. After we ate, he set up a PG movie for his son to watch in the living room. Tommy sat by Rich’s son on the floor, while I sat next to Rich on the couch. Feeling ignored, Allison quietly left the house to find someone her own age to hang out with. I was so involved in the movie, I didn’t notice her absence until Rich offered dessert. When I discovered Allison was missing, I ran out of the house, jumped into the car, and drove through the neighborhood until I found her.
I was also angry because Officer Richards seemed to be sending out mixed signals. He wore no wedding ring, yet had a two-year-old child. He told me I was an amazing woman, told Allison to appreciate me for who I was, and shared very personal information about having been in counseling himself, yet said these things in uniform, while he was at work.
He made me think I was something special, like Ron Nelson had, yet kept reverting back to his role of being nothing more than a policeman doing his job.
I wanted to scream at Allison too, though, because she was the reason I met Officer Richards—but she was also going to keep us apart. Although she often told me, when she was younger, that she wanted a new dad, Allison was too competitive to let me be the center of any kind of attention. In her testimony, she revealed that she had never considered how I was going to feel about her running away. As far as she was concerned, her actions had nothing to do with me. She was so focused on finding love from a stranger that she was turning her back on me, the mother who had unconditionally loved her from day one. The idea that Officer Richards would be interested in dating me, knowing what he did about our family dynamic, now seemed ridiculous. Dating someone who had an out-of-control child, I rationalized, would just add more stress to his already complicated life. And what kind of role-model would Allison be for his eleven-year-old daughter? Based exclusively on what he had learned about us since the morning of April 25, 2009, I heard Officer Richards’s words ring hollowly in stagnant air.
I was mad at myself too, though. I didn’t know how to have a healthy relationship, what a healthy relationship looked like, how to let a guy’s interest grow naturally. For more than twenty years, I thought Hans would come back for me. For fifteen years, I thought that, if I did the right things, or behaved the right way, Frank would love me for who I was. The year that followed Allison’s running away would be full of counseling sessions, court proceedings, and introspective writing. What I didn’t know, though, was how much Allison and I were alike when it came to boys and relationships.
Rather than hurt Allison’s feelings, I pushed the feelings of anger and loss about Officer Richards behind the wall. Whether her inability to cope with stress and anxiety was a genetic characteristic she inherited from her father, or was a knife of manipulation that she wielded against me like an expert samurai warrior, I didn’t want to be blamed for any more cutting, or binge drinking, drug abuse, or other self-destructive behavior psychologists link to an adolescent’s inability to feel in control of his or her life. By the time Allison and I got home from the police station, I had once again suppressed my feelings of anger and loss, hoping for a better tomorrow. My heart ached, but dwelling on it wasn’t going to put our lives back together. Only forgetting about Allison’s running away was going to do that.
* * *
Officer Richards started making appearances in my brain again about a month later, which both annoyed me and caught me off-guard. While one part of my brain announced loud and clear that I was single by choice to anyone who inquired about my status in life, the other part of my brain harbored some hope that I would be blessed with the unconditional love I had been denied all of my life.
I had been emotionally abused in almost every relationship I have ever had with a man. I didn’t know if I was even capable of trusting another man with my heart. Wrestling with this issue, I sought out some discussion from my friends by writing a blog on my networking site on May 26, 2009, expressing frustration and a wish that married men just wear their rings, so that girls like me knew whether or not a good-looking guy might be married. While I didn’t go into great detail about who I was irritated with, I did mention some of the things that Officer Richards had said to me, along with the information about the ages of his children. The responses I received from my two blog-reading friends were almost as surprising as what Officer Richards had said to me himself.
Hans provided a rare, intriguing comment: “Why didn’t you ask him if he’s married? Maybe his spouse died in childbirth.”
Karen, a twenty-nine-year-old single mother of two who was living with her current boyfriend of five years wrote, “Just because he has a two-year-old doesn’t mean that he’s in a relationship. A lot can happen in two years. Heck, a lot can happen in one night . . .”
Both were very good thoughts, but I didn’t see any way I could find out whether Officer Richards was married or single. It wasn’t like I could just call up the front desk at his work and ask. I headed for the local telephone directory instead, to see if it would reveal any sort of clue. Of the four listings for Richards, only one had the first initial of “V,” and that one only had “Richards, V,” with a phone number following. Short of calling the number and pretending to be a telemarketer, the phone book didn’t help answer the question at all.
The reality was that Officer Richards treated Allison and me with utmost respect at the point when we were at our most human—and fallible. This was what I found most appealing about him. Falling for a police officer had never been my objective. My history with police officers had been limited to the men who pulled me over for speeding violations, chased after us for violating drinking-age laws when we were teenagers, and wrote reports when our apartment was broken into. They weren’t nice, and their capacity to care seemed to have been replaced by the firearms they carried at their hips. When I realized I wanted to speak to Officer Richards on a more personal level, it was already too late for me to have an easy excuse for contacting him.
About a week later, I came up with an idea to contact him that would allow me to save the little bit of self-respect I still had. I could drop off a box of Girl Scout cookies we had in the cooler in the garage from the spring cookie sale, and add a little note asking him out for dinner. Crazy, yes—but having spent too many years working in jobs where I provided valuable services that seem to go under-appreciated, I thought the cookies would be a nice touch. So while my thirteen-year-old son was in his piano lesson on Friday, June 5, I sat on the nearby couch working on the perfect wording for the note that would accompany the box of cookies. Ultimately, the kids both helped: Tommy helped me capture the right level of “casualness” for the card, and Allison took the package in to the police station. The card simply read, “The ‘girl’ in me wants to thank you with dinner, but the ‘mom’ I’ve become doesn’t know how to speak to a good-looking guy anymore. If you want to grab a bite to eat sometime, give me a call!” with my full signature and home phone number underneath.
Watching Allison walk into the police station and then waiting for her to come back out was completely nerve wracking. The days that followed were almost as bad. First I was afraid Officer Richards was going to follow Allison out of the station, come over to the car, tell me to get a grip, and leave him alone. Then I was afraid that he was going to call the house and nicely but firmly reject me. Equally scary, though, was the prospect t
hat he was going to call me up and tell me that he wanted to go out.
Unfortunately, the one possibility that I had never considered came in the form of a letter mailed to the house on June 15. Tommy brought the mail in from the curbside mailbox that morning, just as he did most days when he was home for mail delivery, and announced, “Mom, you’ve got a letter from the police station.”
My stomach dropped into my lower intestine. I took the envelope from him with the other mail and waited until he was watching TV again before I slid my finger under the envelope’s sealed flap.
I was nervous as I removed the sheet of folded paper from the envelope—we had been receiving quite a number of these unannounced state and county letters since Allison’s return in April, notifying us of court cases both locally and in Massachusetts, or counseling services that we could take advantage of if we were interested. Since this was from the police department, though, I wondered if it was Officer Richards’s answer. I noticed there was a large amount of type contained on that sheet of paper, so it wasn’t a simple rejection letter. I quickly scanned down to the signature at the bottom of the page, and saw that it wasn’t Officer Richards’s, which brought a premature sigh of relief.
Heart Scars Page 11
