Paul and Goat and the family are gone when we arrive, and in their place are two men in identical dark suits. With a deep breath, I bravely step toward them to face my future.
The two men stand. They’re both well over six feet and both are black, and I wonder if the FBI recruits ex–NBA players the same way the post office recruits Vietnam vets.
Both men shake hands with Gordon.
“Mrs. Kane?” the shorter one says.
I nod.
“And this must be Drew?”
I nod again and put my hands on Drew’s shoulders, pulling him back against my hip.
“A lot of folks have been looking for you,” the man says, bending slightly at the waist and extending his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Drew weakly gives the man a handshake.
The man straightens. “How’s your daughter?”
My stoicism abandons me, and I feel a griefquake threatening. “Don’t arrest me till I know?” I plead. “Please, let me just wait until she’s out of surgery and until she’s woken up. Let me at least say good-bye.”
Drew stiffens at my breakdown, and I try to pull myself together for his sake, if not for my own. “Please,” I say with only a small tremor, “I just need to know she’s okay.”
Both men look at Gordon. I can’t bring myself to look with them.
Drew is pulled from my grasp.
“Arrest her,” Gordon says. “Arrest her before I kill her. It’s her fault Addie’s here in the first place.”
And with his arm around Drew’s shoulder, he leads him away. I watch as they walk out the doors that lead to the cafeteria. Drew cranes his neck, his eyes over his shoulder, until he can’t see me anymore.
W
e walk into the cold night, the two men flanking me like suited columns. The rain has stopped for the moment, but the world is wet. My hands are cuffed loosely behind me. It’s regulation, the shorter man explained apologetically. Both men are very polite.
A shadow walks toward us, and the men on either side of me stiffen.
“I’m a friend,” Paul says when he’s ten feet away. “Do you mind if I say good-bye?”
“Hands where we can see them,” the taller one says, sizing up Paul and not liking what he sees.
Paul raises his arms, and the man walks toward him and runs his hands up and down his body, and I want to scream,
He’s not the one you should be frisking. He’s not the one who’s a sadistic animal. The one you should be patting down is the one you just handed my children over to.
“You’ve got one minute,” the man says, taking a step back.
Paul nods and steps toward me. “How’s Little Fish?” he asks.
I shake my head, and tears run down my cheek. He wipes them away with his finger, then leans in close, so near I feel his unshaved skin against my ear. His left hand rests on my swollen stomach. “You’re better than him,” he whispers. Then, for a pause, we stand unmoving, the moment that will begin the rest of our moments without each other between us, the icy Spokane mist around us. When he pulls away, his warm lips graze my cheek.
“I’m glad I knew you, Ntamqe.” And I watch as he limps into the wet night.
* * *
The federal holding facility is in Seattle.
From there, I’ll say good-bye to my escorts and be extradited to Orange County to await trial. The two agents are courteous, even kind. They exchange discouraged looks and talk in a cryptic language that makes me believe they’re not fans of Gordon.
I was uncuffed as soon as we were out of the hospital parking lot, and the taller one gave me a bottle of water and a protein bar.
When we’re an hour into the drive, the shorter one asks, “Is there someone you’d like to call?” He holds out a cell phone.
My hand trembles as I dial.
“Jill,” my mom cries with joy, then her voice cracks into fear. “Are you okay? Are the kids okay?”
And I start to cry. I can’t bring myself to tell her all that’s happened—to recite the misery and to drown her normal life in the aberrance of mine.
“Jill, please,” she pleads, “you’re scaring me.”
I nod. She should be scared. Her perfect daughter, magna cum laude from Berkeley, her daughter who was an accomplished architect, who had a gorgeous husband, two beautiful kids, a designer home. Her daughter, who she bragged about to all her friends. Her daughter is now pregnant with her dead lover’s child and on her way to jail to await trial for kidnapping. Her four-year-old granddaughter is having a tumor removed from her stomach, and her grandson is in the custody of her maniacal, sadistic son-in-law.
When the hysterics continue and my mom’s squawking escalates through the earpiece to fill the car, the tall man reaches over the backrest and takes the phone from my shaking hand.
“Good evening, ma’am,” he says smoothly.
More squawking, then silence as he grimly explains what he can about the situation. His voice is low and compassionate and breaks when he discusses Addie, and I wonder if he has a daughter.
“Your daughter will be arraigned in Seattle, and if you post bail, she’ll be released there and you can avoid her being transported by bus to Orange County.”
I
’ve been numb and nearly mute since my mom picked me up from LAX. My parents took a loan from Jan to bail me out, and one of the conditions of my release is that I not contact or come within a hundred yards of my kids until my trial. If I violate the condition, I’ll be arrested, the bond will be forfeited, and I’ll remain incarcerated until my trial.
For most of the drive, I gaze dazedly out the window. My mom talked with Addie’s surgeon. The tumor was removed successfully and had not attached to any organs other than her left kidney. This is good news. The tumor and her kidney are gone, and the rest of her is tumor-free. In a day or two, when she’s strong enough, she’ll be moved to the children’s hospital in Spokane, where she will recover, and then she will return to Orange County to begin chemotherapy.
The surgeon wouldn’t speculate on the type of cancer or the prognosis, and I didn’t want him to. I couldn’t handle the information he’d already delivered, couldn’t handle that my baby had woken up in the hospital without me, or that she was in pain and would be subjected to more pain, and I wouldn’t be there to hold her or help her through it. Like the cancer, I’d been abruptly, savagely cut from her life.
As my mom drives, my memory replays the journey we took seven weeks earlier backward until we reach the place where it began. We drive through the town of Laguna Beach, and I wonder if the people here were starting to forget about me—if when they saw my parents, they remembered only to say how sad it was, believing the scandal was a thing of the past and that now it was over.
It’s a little after two, and Main Beach is crowded with tourists and beachgoers—the boardwalk bustling with kids eating ice cream, skateboarders showing off, couples strolling hand in hand through the craft boutique. Pretty people blissfully enjoying the gorgeous summer day.
Everything is familiar, and in the crowd are faces I recognize.
That everyone who lives here knows about my crimes and my arrest, that it’s most certainly been headline news, creates temporary heart stoppage, and jail is starting to become the more attractive option. At least there, nobody knows me. In the same way the name Charles Manson conjures
Helter Skelter
and the bludgeoning of Sharon Tate, in the microcosm of Laguna Beach, population 23,000, my name will be synonymous with child abduction and insanity.
My parents live in the north part of town, in a turn-of-the-century Normandy Revival cottage with a wavy Cotswold roof. The home is featured annually in the home tour and is affectionately known as the Hansel and Gretel house. My mom’s fat roses are in full bloom and spill over the short front lawn, and my dad stands crooked in the open, arched door.
At the sight of his bent body and slanted, encouraging smile, the chill in my bones thaws a little, and I’m transported back to a time when my dad could fix anything, or at least that’s what I believed.
“Welcome home,” he says and, with his good arm, hugs my shoulder and gives me a kiss on my temple.
I expected him to look weaker than when I left, but he doesn’t. His smile almost reaches both sides of his face, and he’s put on a few of the pounds he lost after the stroke.
Déjà vu haunts the moment. A year ago when I stumbled up these steps, my dad answered my knock dressed in the same flannel pajamas he’d worn when I lived with him twenty years earlier. Martha jumped and yipped around me. I wanted him to hug me. Instead, he took one look at the marks on my throat and turned, his face a mask of fury. He yanked on the loafers he kept beside the door, and when he reached for his jacket, he fell.
For a moment, nothing, then pandemonium.
My dad convulsed at my feet, his eyes frozen open, his mouth suspended in a silent scream. I collapsed beside him, screaming for my mom to wake up. Then Gordon leaped through the door like a superhero.
My mom shrieked into the phone that her husband was dead while Gordon knelt beside me breathing life into my father.
Then the world went black.
When I regained consciousness, a paramedic was beside me checking my pulse. Through the door, I watched as my dad was wheeled to an ambulance on a stretcher, my mom following.
The sirens faded as the ambulance drove away, and in the halo of the porch lamp, the fire chief held Martha in his arms as he congratulated Gordon on his heroism.
Thanks to Gordon, my dad was alive.
Gordon had followed me when I fled from the house.
“Where’s Martha?” I ask, suddenly aware I’m not being herded and barked at by a ten-pound rat dog.
My mom frowns. “She was hit by a car. Ran out and got hit.” She says it quickly and repeats it, so I know she’s lying, but I let it go.
“Oh, Mom, I’m sorry.”
She hurries by me and into the house.
I want to run, flee from this moment, spare my dad any more pain, not tempt fate again, but his arm’s around me and he’s already turned and is guiding me through the door. He still limps, and his right side lags behind his left, but he’s graduated from a walker to a cane, and I wonder if he’s better off without me. My dad, Jeffrey, Addie—I destroy everyone who’s close.
I slide off my shoes beside the entrance, next to my dad’s loafers, my mom’s sneakers, and a pair of gardening shoes my mom wears when she works on her bushes. My mom doesn’t believe you should wear shoes in the house.
My parents’ living room is like their marriage—a struggle. Like Archie and Edith from
All in the Family
, each has contributions to the décor. The French silk, fussy couch is my mom’s, the La-Z-Boy leather recliner with massage and built-in cup holders is definitely my dad’s.
Exhausted, I stumble up the familiar stairs toward my childhood room.
In the hallway, beside the banister, is a new addition. On the narrow book table that throughout my childhood always held a bouquet of my mom’s roses is the twelfth diorama of our collection, five jubilant, white-bellied men and women parading toward a celebration—my birthday present. I run my hand over the smooth porcelain and almost smile, then almost cry, as I continue down the hall.
The room is exactly as it looked in my high school days. As a junior, I’d gone through a retro sixties stage. The orange walls are plastered with album covers from The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd; my bedspread is a medley of neon circles; and my curtains are sheets of purple glass beads I strung myself.
On the mirror, above my track trophies, are pictures of boys I knew and of girlfriends I thought would be in my life forever. My room is part of the house, but not really. It’s more of a shrine to the past, faded with age, and covered with a layer of dust.
T
he beads rattle as they’re pulled back from the window, and the sun blasts into the room like a flare of lightning when the shade snaps up.
I pull the pillow over my head, and a second later, it’s yanked away and thrown from my reach.
“Up,” my mom barks.
I fling my arm over my puffy eyes, and she grabs it by the wrist and pulls, spinning me sideways so I’m half off the bed. I scramble to my feet so I won’t land on my head, then slide against the mattress to sit on the carpet and put my forehead on my knees.
“Enough. It’s noon. Up and at ’em. You’ve got things to do.”
I shake my head.
No kids, no job, no house to clean, no clothes to wash—no clothes.
She’s wrong. For the first time in my life, I have absolutely nothing to do.
“In the kitchen in five minutes.” And she marches away, her sweats swishing against her thighs.
I crawl to my childhood bureau—it’s teal blue and plastered with bumper stickers: “I let the dogs out”; “Peace, Love, Fashion”; “Don’t have a cow, man,” featuring Bart Simpson; “Ross Perot for President.”
The drawer sticks from disuse, but then pulls open to reveal the wardrobe of my youth. I find a pair of gym shorts, “Property of Laguna Beach High School,” and a T-shirt that advertises the New Kids on the Block Magic Summer Tour.
The wall of the stairwell that leads to the kitchen is the obligatory portrait homage of our family. Oval framed, sepia-toned photos of ancestors I never met, but who bear a resemblance; grade school portraits with mottled gray backgrounds; and military portraits, most of relatives who died too young. I stop at a silver framed photo toward the left, but prominently displayed in the middle of the montage. In the photo, I’m glancing over my shoulder at Gordon, whose black tuxedoed arms are wrapped around my gorgeous, strapless Vera Wang wedding gown. I’m laughing and he’s smiling, and my mind strains to remember some sense of what it was that had made us so happy.
My mom sits at the table paging through
Redbook
and drinking her coffee as though the world is right as peaches.
I plop down across from her with a cup of decaf.
“Connor called,” she says. “He needs to talk to you about your DUI. He got you a continuance so you wouldn’t be in contempt of court.”
I drop my forehead to the table and roll it back and forth. There should be some sort of mercy law that says that if you’re arrested for a humongous crime like kidnapping, you get a pass on your minor crimes like having a glass of wine before you pick up your kids from your mom’s house.