“Christopher,” Sarah said. “His mother brought him to visit us in his wheelchair.”
“Yes, that’s so sad.” I didn’t know how much of this Nathan was taking in, but Sarah understood the gravity of the conversation. “Listen, kids, this is really, really hard to tell you. I’ve been worried because I couldn’t get in touch with your mother. Last night when you were sleeping, I made some phone calls and I found out there was a terrible accident. Your house in Jamaica Plain? The one where you live when you’re with Mommy? It caught on fire and burned down.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “From smoking?” Her question reaffirmed my fears about Lucy.
“Yes, from smoking. I guess Mommy fell asleep and left a cigarette burning.” I pulled Sarah onto my knee. “Sometimes an ash drops, and it’s just a little tiny spark. Then suddenly it catches fire, and everything burns really fast. The firemen came but there was nothing they could do. No one could get out of the house…and Mommy died.”
“Nuh-uh,” Sarah said. “You’re telling a fib.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s true. Mommy’s dead.”
“Don’t
say
that!” She tried to claw my face. I clutched her arms and held her tight. She stopped struggling and began to sob. Nathan looked confused. Then all three of us were crying and hugging. An elderly couple who were about to sit down at the next picnic table gave us a concerned look and walked away.
I got the key for the bathroom and took the kids in and wiped their faces.
Sarah said, “Did Griffin die in the fire too?”
I hadn’t thought about him until she asked. “Yes, he did.” I’d have lit the match myself.
“And Rory?”
“Yes, I’m afraid old Rory is gone too. It’s what they call a total loss, honey. Everything is gone. Pictures, toys, books, clothes. Good thing you brought Sundae on the trip with you.”
Nathan said, “I want Mommy.”
My heart was breaking. This was the cruelest thing I had ever done. Monstrous. Unforgivable. Necessary.
Sarah said to me, “Is Mommy up in heaven now?”
“Yes, Mommy’s in heaven with the angels, smiling down on us.”
We got in the car and drove on. Sarah whimpered. I touched her cheek, and she took my hand and squeezed my fingers.
From the backseat, Nathan said, “Play the radio, Daddy.”
I looked at Sarah with questioning eyes to ask if it was okay. She nodded, her lips pinched as she fought off the tears. I turned on the radio. “You pick, Sar.”
She scooched forward in her seat and pressed the buttons till she found a station she liked. Nathan seemed to love any kind of music, but she was a rock ‘n’ roll girl. A song by The Police came on, “Every Breath You Take.” She knew all the words. Nathan tried to sing along too. I knew there would be more tears, but the two of them were already adjusting to life without their mother. I was living proof that a child could have a great upbringing with only one parent. Who knows what sort of father mine would have been? He might have been a bully or a bigot. One thing for certain, I didn’t spend my youth slouching around, bemoaning how miserable my life was without him.
Sarah said, “Are we going to go back home, Daddy?”
“No, sweetheart. Everything’s changed. Not like it was before. It would be too sad for us to go back to Boston.” It was the only true thing I’d said.
***
We spent another four days on the road. I took the kids to another amusement park, a carnival, and a county fair—busy places with lots of families where we wouldn’t stand out. The days tired them out, but the nights were harder. Sometimes they woke up and cried for their mother. Both of them began to wet the bed. I needed to find a place where we could stay for a while and settle into a routine. Small towns were out of the question. Too many people asking questions, wanting to know where you were from. The anonymity of a big city offered a much better chance to slip quietly into a new life. Next stop Chicago.
On the bulletin board at Loyola University, I saw an ad for a furnished apartment for six months starting July first, which was only a week away. The professor who was subletting the apartment had a wife and two small children, so the place was ideal for the kids and me. It was in a large building with lots of people coming and going. I could tell the professor was desperate to find a tenant. Perhaps he sensed a little desperation in me. We’d left Boston for Disney twelve days ago, but I felt like we had been on the run for months. I got a motel room while we waited for the apartment to be available. Not an hour went by when I didn’t worry about getting caught. It seemed remote, but I kept thinking the authorities might be able to trace me through the Chevy Malibu, so I put it in a covered parking lot and began using cabs and public transportation. The day before we moved into the new apartment, I drove to Milwaukee, removed the license plates, and left the car parked on the street with the keys in the ignition, no identifying papers in the glove compartment. The kids and I rode the train back to Chicago. Another adventure for us.
“You know what?” I said on the train. “We’re living in a new city now. We’re moving into a new apartment. I think we should pick new names.”
“Pretend names,” Sarah said.
“Yeah, but we can keep the new names if we like them.”
Nathan did his ET impression, and we started calling him Elliot. Sarah wanted to be Alex Owens like the girl in
Flashdance
. The movie was rated “R,” but that hadn’t stopped Lucy from taking her to see it. Sarah loved to bop around to the video of the theme song when it came on MTV. I chose Adam for myself. I liked the name and the not-so-subtle idea of being a new man. Owens seemed like a good last name. Common enough but not too common. One day some girls at the playground teased Sarah and said Alex was a boy’s name. She got upset and wanted us to call her Mary. Then Rachel. Then Eloise. Some names didn’t last an entire day. Finally, I suggested she go back to Sarah and make it different by dropping the
h
. She liked that idea. Sara, Elliot, and Daddy (Adam) Owens. It became a game, using our new names. We corrected one another if we slipped up. In a few weeks we no longer had to.
I bought an old typewriter and filled in the birth certificates. I left the middle names for the kids blank. I kept Sara’s birthday the same. She was turning five in mid-July, and I didn’t want to try to convince her that she misremembered the date of her birthday. For Elliot, I changed it from late January to early February. For their mother’s maiden name, I wrote Lucille Anne Padley. I typed in my mother’s October birthday for my own, which made me a month younger.
With my new identity and established address, I applied for a Social Security card. For all my paranoia, I knew enough about government bureaucracies to know that a low-level clerk buried under mountains of forms in a neon-lit cubicle would not launch an investigation to inquire why a thirty-three-year-old man had never needed one before. A few weeks later, my card came in the mail. Using my new name and Social Security number, I got an Illinois driver’s license and bought a three-year-old Jeep Cherokee.
Sara and Elliot adjusted well. They stopped wetting the bed, and I took them shopping for new clothes and toys. They rarely mentioned Lucy. When they did, it was mostly Mommy liked this or Mommy used to let us do that. One day Sara asked if we could go visit Nanda and Thorny. I told her Nanda had gotten sick again, like she did the day the police stopped her, and now she was in heaven with Mommy. I said Thorny was too busy at work to see us. She got sad for a minute and didn’t ask again. For little children the world is a mysterious, magical place unencumbered by logic or doubt. They believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. They believe that Santa Claus flies around in a sleigh with a sack full of Hot Wheels and Barbie dolls and Darth Vader sabers, delivering gifts to millions of children in a single night while pausing at virtually every house for a snack of cookies and milk. But a child’s magical world isn’t always kind and good. There are monsters and dragons, ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. For every prince charming and fairy godmother, there’s a witch or a troll or a hungry wolf lurking in the shadows. For every Peter Pan there’s a Captain Hook. They believe what their parents and other adults tell them. No doubt the kids would ask me questions about Lucy when they got older, but by then they would have only hazy memories of the life we’d left behind. They were Sara and Elliot Owens now. Day by day the make-believe world we created over the summer became more real. I didn’t say much about Lucy, but when I did I praised her to the hilt. She was already becoming a legend—attentive, patient, creative, amusing. The perfect mother they never had.
I registered Sara for kindergarten and found a day-care center for Elliot. He was shy, and I wanted him to meet other children.
I missed working. It was tough to leave the courier business when things were going so well, to say nothing of the equity I had built up in the company. But I didn’t dwell on it. I was determined to push on without regrets and got a job as a laborer with a construction crew. Then I met a master carpenter named Paolo Agrillo, who agreed to take me on as his helper. I explained that I was a widower with two small children. I said it in a way that implied it was a painful subject, and Paolo wasn’t the type to ask more. I liked working with my hands, and Paolo was happy to teach me. He said that every piece of wood was alive, and our job was to make it sing.
The professor’s wife kindly left me a list of babysitters. One was a teenage girl who lived on the fifth floor of our building, and Sara and Elliot took a liking to her immediately. I began to treat myself to an occasional Saturday night out at the movies. One evening I stopped in a club and struck up a conversation with an attractive woman. She gave me her phone number, but I never called. I didn’t want to get close to anyone who might start asking questions.
As the weather got chilly in October, I began to worry about the cash I’d buried in New Hampshire. I wanted to get it before the ground froze. Regardless of whether I flew or drove, I didn’t want to take the kids to the park with me when I retrieved the money, and I couldn’t leave them alone in a motel room. Hiring a stranger in New Hampshire to look after them for a few hours was out of the question. It would be better to have them stay in Chicago while I went east. But I was wary of leaving them with a teenage babysitter in Chicago, even if it was for only one night.
I mentioned my problem to Paolo in a casual way, not saying why I needed to go back east. Paolo had a big Italian family. He said one of his daughters or daughters-in-law would be glad to take care of Sara and Elliot, there were so many cousins floating from house to house they’d hardly notice if two more were added to the mix. I told him how grateful I was. Paolo, Javi, Sandor, Uncle Joe—I’d always been lucky to find friendship and guidance from other men. I felt bad thinking how, in the end, I’d abandoned them all. Not Paolo, not yet, but it was only a matter of time.
I told the kids I had to go away overnight on business. Elliot got a little clingy, afraid perhaps that I would disappear like his mother. But Sara reassured him, and Paolo’s grandchildren distracted him as I slipped out the door. Going back through Boston was out of the question. I had no desire to return to the scene of the crime. Instead I flew to Albany and rented a car. Then I drove to New Hampshire and retrieved the money easily, no FBI agents sitting in the trees with binoculars and loaded weapons waiting to apprehend me. Halfway back to Albany, I got a motel room. I had been thinking about Uncle Joe before I left Chicago. Sitting in my room that night, I wrote him a long letter explaining what I had done and why. I told him I was sorry I couldn’t contact him personally and hoped he’d understand. In the envelope I included the key for the T-bird along with the title, signing it over to him. I told him exactly where it was located in Boston and said the rent for the garage was paid up through the end of the year. The next morning, I mailed the envelope from a little town in Vermont.
Sara liked school and made friends easily. Elliot’s day-care center was excellent. I loved working for Paolo. Things were going well, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my past would catch up with me. One day a man stopped me on the street, and the instant before he began asking for directions, I was sure he was going to say my real name. Every time I relaxed and let my guard down, some sixth sense seemed to slap me awake. In November I considered looking for a new apartment in Chicago in anticipation of the professor’s return, but something told me it was time to move on. I couldn’t put my finger on it, only that I had a vague sense that the net was closing in.
As we were loading our stuff into the car a few days after Christmas, the wind stinging our faces, I said to the kids, “Enough of this cold weather. I think we should go find some sunshine.”
Sara gave me a funny look, then said, “Okay, Daddy.” She seemed to want to get back on the road as much as I did.
Lucy
“You have to eat something, babe,” Griffin said. “Why don’t you take a shower? Put on a nice outfit. I’ll take you out to dinner.”
I shook my head. It was a Wednesday, June 29, nineteen days since I last saw Sarah and Nathan. I was living on coffee and ginger snaps, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day; my fingers were chewed to open sores. I had probably lost ten or twelve pounds but didn’t have the energy to step on the scale to find out. Sometimes I’d wander around the house saying the children’s names aloud, as if they were playing hide-and-seek. I went into their rooms and sat on the floor and read their books, wound up a music box, buried my face in the sheets on their beds and inhaled the sweet smell of their bodies.
Griffin came by in the late afternoon and said, “Let’s go out to dinner tonight. It’ll do you good. I’ll take you to Maison Robert.”
“Please, Griffin, no. I can’t.” Can’t get dressed, can’t eat, can’t imagine leaving the house knowing the telephone might ring.
Amanda was upstairs taking a nap; Thorny had gone back to work in New York but stayed in contact with the Pinkertons. The detectives had been so positive in those first few days after the abduction. They’d posted thousands of fliers with pictures of the kids and Matt (including a mock-up of him with a beard), but aside from that motel in Texas, they didn’t get a single credible lead.
It’s a big country,
the Pinkerton man said.
We’re dealing with an ex-police officer. He obviously knows how to cover his trail. I’m guessing he’s already changed his name again, maybe ditched the car. Frankly, at this point, it’s going to take some luck. A slipup on his part or some vigilant citizen who recognizes him and the kids from one of our fliers.
All of this must have been costing Thorny a fortune.
“Please, Luce,” Griffin said, his voice tipping from compassion to frustration. “The kids aren’t going to come back any sooner with you…”
“With me what? Sitting around feeling sorry for myself?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you
think
. You think I should get over it. ‘Oh shit, lost my kids. Bummer. Well, guess it’s time to move on.’”
“You have to start taking care of yourself, Lucy. You need to be strong so you can see this thing through.”
“You just want me to get strong so you can start getting laid again.” He got a pained look in his eyes. We hadn’t made love since the kids left. I said, “I’ll suck you off if you want.”
Griffin forced a smile. “I’ve got to run over to my apartment and get some paperwork.” He put his hand on my shoulder like a pal. “I’ll bring back some ice cream.”
I hugged him around the waist and buried my face in his neck. “Thank you.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, and Amanda came downstairs and sat down across from me without saying a word. She looked as bad as I did, her body a shrunken walnut. She had started drinking again, not even trying to hide it. The weather outside was lovely, but we sat at the kitchen table, smoking and playing cribbage. Then Thorny showed up, and I hadn’t even remembered he was coming. Like Griffin, he said it was time for Amanda and me to stop moping around. He told us to shower and get dressed, he was taking us out to dinner.
At the restaurant Thorny said there was nothing new from the Pinkertons. After the police had turned us away, he began trying to get the newspapers interested in the story.
The
Globe
balked, but an editor at the
Herald
American
was intrigued by the idea that Matt was an ex-cop. Last Thursday, six days after the kids were due home, the paper had run a short article on page five along with the studio portrait of Sarah and Nathan I’d given the Pinkertons, Sarah with one arm around her brother and the other holding Sundae. The caption beneath the photo read:
Where
Are
They? Sarah Drobyshev, 4, and her brother Nathan, 2, have been reported missing by their mother.
Ex-cop disappears with children
A
former
Boston
police
officer
has
been
reported
missing
by
his
wife, along with their two children. Matthew Drobyshev, 35, was last seen when he picked up Sarah, 4, and Nathan, 2, on Friday, June 10, to take them on vacation to Disney World.
The
children’s mother, Lucy Drobyshev, 32, of Jamaica Plain, told investigators her husband and children were due to return on June 17. They had a brief telephone conversation two days after he departed, and she has not heard from him since.
Authorities
say
they
currently
regard
the
matter
as
a
domestic
dispute
between
the
parents, who are separated and share custody of the children. Sources say relations between the couple were extremely bitter during their initial breakup but had improved in recent months. Their divorce agreement will not become final until next year.
A
police
department
spokesman
said
he
did
not
believe
the
children
were
in
danger
or
that
there
had
been
any
foul
play. No criminal investigation has been initiated at this time.
Matthew
Drobyshev
was
a
Boston
police
officer
for
ten
years
before
going
into
business
with
a
private
courier
service. His former district commander said he served with distinction. Lucy Drobyshev works part-time in a restaurant.
I was livid when I read the article. The newspaper had taken the same stance as the police, calling this a domestic dispute instead of a kidnapping, as if this were simply a disagreement between Matt and me. Thorny had been trying to get them to run a follow-up article along with a picture of Matt, but so far they had refused. He offered to buy a full-page ad, but the editor said it was against the paper’s policy, the
Herald
American
was a news organization and couldn’t let private quarrels play themselves out in the press.
The waiter brought our food to the table, and I found myself eating a little of the chicken breast and rice pilaf I had ordered. Amanda picked at her food and drank.
“Listen, Lucy,” Thorny said. “I’m getting worried about you. I want you to go back to work, honey. It will be good for you. Help take your mind off things.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I can’t.”
“Sure you can. Take another week if you need to, but…” He paused to make sure he had my full attention. “This isn’t negotiable.”
Or
what?
I almost said. I didn’t think he would stop funding the search or rescind the offer of a reward. I wiped the tears from my eyes. Deep down I knew he was right. “Okay. I’ll try.”
“Good girl.” He turned to Mom. “Amanda? You can stay up here in Boston for a few days until Lucy goes back to the restaurant, then I want you home. With me.” She nodded tamely. I wondered how different our lives would have been all along if Thorny had been as involved and caring as he’d been in the last few weeks.
Tillie asked me if I wanted to work my way back into my job at Garbo’s slowly and just come in one or two days a week. I said I wanted to try to tough it out and work full time but she should have backup ready in case I faltered. Her niece, who was home from college for the summer, had filled in for me while I was gone. By the end of the first day, I was so tired I thought I was going to faint, but Thorny was right, the work helped to distract me and made the time go by faster. The staff at Garbo’s and many of my regular customers must have known what happened, but none of them said anything directly to me about the kids. That night I slept better than I had in a month. Amanda left two days later.
Griffin and I began to make love again. He, like myself, was expecting little, I suppose, and we got little in return. None of his old moves seemed to work. My sorrow had changed everything. It was like an open, cankerous wound, so hideous and painful and utterly perverse that it would draw us up short at the most intimate moments, as if it were impossible to ever find joy again.
One day Griffin showed up and said he had a surprise for me. He made me sit on the back steps with my eyes closed and said he’d be back in a second.
“Okay,” he said. “Open them.”
He laughed and placed a russet-colored puppy in my arms.
“Oooooh my goodness.” I drew the puppy close and nuzzled my cheek on his soft fur.
“He’s a mutt from the pound. They’re always the smartest dogs.”
The gift was so touching and so spectacularly wrong, I didn’t know whether to cuddle Griffin along with the dog or call him a fucking moron.
Griffin said, “Maybe we can teach him to catch a Frisbee.”
That line was a clincher, remembrances of our first date and that brindled dog on the banks of the Charles. The puppy had an adorable face with a black, punched-in nose. My eyes welled with tears as I thought of how excited Sarah and Nathan would be if they could see him and hold him.
I named the puppy Frodo. He was curious and excitable, but it only took a week to housebreak him. The following week Griffin hired some men to put up a stockade fence to enclose the backyard so we could let him run free. Frodo yipped at the squirrels and birds and tried to play with Rory, who kept her distance.
***
July dragged on into August, the air so heavy it held you down like an unseen hand. Early one evening Jill came by with her kids—TK, Maeve, and Ryan—all of them with energy to burn. Jill and I sat on the back steps watching the two older ones bounce on the trampoline while Ryan chased Frodo around the yard. I lit a cigarette. I could feel Jill’s silent admonition—she didn’t like me smoking around the kids even when we were outdoors—but she didn’t call me on it. I took a few puffs on the cigarette and put it out. Jill let out a weary sigh and wiped the sweat from her neck. She was wearing a sleeveless dress and sandals, her fleshy arms and swollen ankles a clear sign that she was pregnant again.
I put my hand on her knee and smiled. “You can tell me about the baby, Jilly. I may be a basket case, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be happy for you.”
“Thanks. I’m sorry. I kept wanting to say something, but the timing never seemed right.”
“Sure, I understand.” It was only in the past week or two that I’d been able to step outside myself and see how gingerly people were treating me. No one wanted to see me crumble before their eyes. The fact that I was able to accept Jill’s apology and not react to it with withering venom or abject tears seemed like a small step forward.
Matt and the kids had been gone for a little more than two months. The Pinkertons still had several detectives on the case, but there wasn’t much for them to do except to keep circulating the fliers in various cities and towns and hope they got lucky; a father raising two small children on his own didn’t automatically raise people’s suspicions. Thorny and I were talking about it, and he said he understood the detectives’ dilemma. With new names, Matt and the kids could be anyone. I said it didn’t matter if they changed from Drobyshev to Betz or Smith or whatever, the kids wouldn’t say their last names much anyway, but they would still be Sarah and Nathan
. It isn’t just the last name, Luce,
Thorny said,
he’s probably changed their first names too.
I hadn’t allowed myself to think of that before. It seemed unspeakably cruel; Matt was erasing the children’s past lives entirely at the same time he was erasing me.
I had spoken to Carla briefly on the phone a few times since the abduction but hadn’t been to see her. One day she called and said she wanted to get together, it didn’t have to be a therapy session in her office, she’d be glad to come to JP simply as a friend. I was moved; she sounded a little undone, as if she felt partly responsible for what had happened. We went for a walk around Jamaica Pond. It was odd seeing her outside the confines of her office. I had flashes of anger as we talked, but mostly I was despairing, portraying myself as Matt’s lawyer had in the deposition—bad wife, bad mother.
Carla stopped and held my gaze. “It’s not your fault, Lucy.” I didn’t believe her, but it was nice to hear her say.
“There had to be something I did that pushed Matt over the edge.” I picked up a rock and tossed it into the pond. “Sarah’s broken wrist, I guess. I shouldn’t have—”
“Stop blaming yourself, Lucy. What Matt did was
wrong
. It was an act of insufferable hubris and spite. When the law catches up with him, he’s going to pay.”
“
If
they ever catch up with him.”
“Come on, don’t give up hope.”
“You have to help me, Carla. I try to be strong, but how can I go on?”
“Do you want to start coming to see me again?”
I nodded, and she said, sure, as often as I like; she’d call when she got back to the office so we could set up an appointment. As she was leaving she gave me a hug.
“Have you been writing in your journal?”
“No, not a word.”
“It’s terribly painful, I know, but it’s one of the best therapies there is. Don’t hold back. Write whatever comes into your head.”
That evening I got out the journal I’d started when I was going through the breakup with Matt. Carla was right; it had been great therapy and had helped me to sort out my thoughts and feelings about my failed marriage. I’d found it much harder to lie to myself with a pen in my hand. Things became much clearer when I saw myself making the same excuses over and over, or tried to avoid writing some truth I knew in my heart but didn’t want to put into words. I guess that’s why I had avoided writing anything since Matt took the kids.