A Father's Love (7 page)

I secured my captain's license and became a partner in the fishing charter service. The boat business was a way for me to make a more consistent living for my family; it was sure money. If the weather held up, I was guaranteed a day's pay. Besides, being out on the sea again was refreshing and the business was a natural fit for me. I loved taking Sean out in the boat with me when possible. Bruna enjoyed going out on the boat, too. While Sean and I fished, she would relax and sunbathe.

Bruna's brother had attended the famous Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and had made some minor appearances in Brazilian telenovelas. Bruna dreamed of doing something similar—on a much grander scale, of course. She studied acting at the Actors Training Institute, a local school in Red Bank. She often came home from her acting classes boasting, “I'm going to be the next Catherine Zeta-Jones!” I thought she was just being cute; I didn't think she was serious. Maybe I should have believed her.

Life was good. We weren't living in a mansion, but we owned a lovely home in a beautiful part of New Jersey. We never missed a mortgage payment. We drove matching late-model Jeep Cherokees, mine gun-metal gray and hers silver. We enjoyed going to Broadway shows and ball games in New York City. I also always made time for a special “date night” with Bruna each week. Although we were not rich—a fact I later discovered really bothered Bruna—we were young and in love and having fun as a family.

We traveled frequently and took wonderful family vacations. Before we were married, we went on several “mystery trips” together. A mystery trip was one that I planned for Bruna, giving her only the barest amount of advance information to help her prepare for our destination. “We're leaving on the twentieth, and you need to pack summer clothes for at least ten days,” I'd say. Bruna loved the intrigue and suspense of it all. “Oh, come on,” she'd beg. “Tell me where we're going! Tell me, please.”

“Nope, I'm not going to tell you, but you're going to love it.” We went to Turnberry Isle, a beautiful resort in Aventura, Florida, and to Montreal, where we enjoyed the romance of the old city. We enjoyed traveling to places as close as New York and as far away as Europe and Brazil. Bruna loved these mystery trips so much that we did something similar with Sean when he was old enough to understand that we were going someplace fun. When we visited Disney World over Valentine's Day in 2004, we concealed our destination from Sean until he saw the huge Disney arch over the park's entranceway. His eyes lit up. I'm not sure who enjoyed it more—Sean, Bruna, or me!

 

 

AS WAS OUR custom, during the late spring of 2004, I often took Bruna's parents and my dad, along with Sean, out on my boat to go fishing. We'd have a ball. We'd catch the fish, clean them, and then bring them home to Silvana to cook for dinner at their condo, or back to our house, where I'd prepare one of my special seafood dishes.

The night before Bruna and Sean left for Brazil that last time, we attended the carnival sponsored by St. Leo's Church. Looking back now, it was another of those occasions when I should have seen the signals. Besides enjoying the rich food and the kids' rides, Bruna seemed especially happy to see her friends. “Oh, that's so good,” she said later that night. “I got to say good-bye to everybody.”

I assumed that she was simply referring to the end-of-the-schoolyear good-byes. Or, possibly, she meant that she was saying good-bye because she wouldn't see her friends for a few weeks while she was visiting Brazil. I never dreamed that she was saying good-bye to them permanently.

We had a swing set delivered the morning of Bruna and Sean's departure, and since their flight was later in the evening, I spent most of the day outside in the yard putting it together. Sean had a plastic shovel and helped me dig the holes for the posts.

Meanwhile, my dad and mom took Bruna and her parents to lunch at the Turning Point Restaurant in Little Silver. Now that I think about it, the restaurant's name seems pretty prophetic.

My dad later recalled that at lunch that day, Bruna brought up a rather unusual story involving a close friend from college, a Brazilian woman who had married an American citizen and subsequently obtained her U.S. citizenship. The couple was splitting up, but rather than divorce her husband, the woman merely remained separated. She then returned to Brazil and married a doctor in her home country, without ever being divorced in the United States. It was strange fodder for lunchtime conversation, especially on the day Bruna and her parents were flying off to Brazil with Sean. But it was just another story mixed in with the usual banter, and none of us gave it much thought.

When the family members returned from their lunch, they found Sean and me outside enjoying his new swing set. All too soon, it was time to get ready to go to the airport. Sean and I went inside and I bounded up the stairs to the master bedroom, where Bruna and her mother had laid open on the bed four large suitcases. I must have surprised them, because the moment they saw me they both stopped packing in mid-movement and the expressions on their faces were those of two kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Although I didn't ask, almost immediately Bruna blurted out an explanation of why she was taking so many clothes. “Oh, we have to pack extra suitcases because we will be attending a wedding in the mountains so we will need warm clothes as well as our summer things,” she said.

“Okay, if that's what you need”; it sounded logical to me.

Bruna changed into a Jennifer Lopez–style outfit, a tight-fitting, stretchy, comfortable sort of casual elegant ensemble. Her mom dressed comfortably as well, in khaki pants and a buttoned blouse, and a pullover in case she got cold on the plane. Raimundo, as always, was dressed in black, replete with a baseball cap, his usual look. There was nothing about the way the family dressed that evening that would have given me any hint that this trip was anything other than a normal family vacation.

 

 

BY THE TIME I loaded Bruna's four suitcases into the Jeep, along with her mom's and dad's bags, there was barely any room in the vehicle to sit, much less to get everyone safely secured with a seat belt. I've always been a seat belt advocate, so it was only natural for me to encourage the others. “Buckle up, everybody.”

Bruna's mom squeezed into the backseat and pulled four-year-old Sean onto her lap. She stretched the seat belt out as far as it would go and then wrapped the belt around both herself and Sean—not exactly a safe way of traveling. I started to protest and then decided simply to hold my tongue. We'd safely made the forty-five-minute drive to Liberty International many times before; we could probably do it one more time. This would be the last time we'd ever make the drive as a family.

M
OM'S NATURAL, WELL-INTENTIONED FATHER'S DAY GREETING ripped my heart wide open. I hadn't even realized that it was Father's Day. On past Father's Days, I always got a card from Bruna as well as one from Sean. On our first Father's Day after Sean's birth, Bruna gave me a framed collage that included Sean's first lock of hair and his footprint taken in the hospital the day he was born, along with the inscription “Sean's First Important Things for Daddy on His First Daddy's Day, June 18, 2000.” Bruna also included Sean's blue hospital bonnet, worn in those first hours after his birth, and even a sealed snippet of the umbilical cord. In the top left corner of the collage was the hospital record of Sean's birth: “Baby Goldman, May 25, 2000. Born at 3:26 P.M.; weight: 8 pounds, 8 ounces; length: 21 inches. Mother: Bruna; Delivery doctor: Dr. Karoly; baby doctor: Dr. Appulingan.” That first Father's Day gift from Bruna instantly became one of my most cherished possessions.

For Father's Day 2004, however, Bruna had left no cards for me to find, no special pictures of Sean—only the ragged knife edge of her words saying that she was not coming home. Still trying to process the basic information—that my wife was walking out on me for no apparent reason, and that she planned to separate me from my son, whom I loved—I stumbled around our home, the tears blurring my vision. I could barely carry on a conversation with Mom right now.

“Breathe, David, breathe,” I said aloud to myself and the empty house. The sound of Bruna's voice on the phone nagged at me. I had never heard her so cold. And where did she get all that information about what I shouldn't do? Bruna was a bright woman, but she was not a legal expert. And what about Sean? Did he know what his mother was doing? How was she explaining this to him? Surely he couldn't possibly think that I didn't want him to come home. I could still see his bright eyes and his incredible smile as we put the swing set together just a few days earlier. Surely he knew I loved him and that nothing had changed about my love. He knew that, didn't he? A thousand worrisome thoughts and bleak scenarios flashed through my mind.

I shook my head and tried to pull myself together. I had to stop dwelling on such dark, depressing images. But how? How could I possibly think of anything else? When I finally composed myself enough to function, I attempted to talk to my mom on the phone. “I'm coming over,” I said. “Bruna is not coming back, and she's keeping Sean.”

“What? Not coming back? Keeping Sean?” Mom's voice on the phone sounded frantic. “David, what are you talking about?”

“Yes, Mom. I just got a call from Bruna, and she says she's not coming back and she is going to keep Sean with her. She wants to stay in Brazil. And she says that she is not coming back.”

As I drove to my parents' home, the abhorrent situation nearly overwhelmed me. Divorce was unheard of in our family. My grandparents stayed together all their lives; my parents had been together for more than forty years; my sister and her husband had been married for more than a decade. To think that Bruna would simply up and leave was beyond comprehension. And that she would take our son, the joy of my life, without even discussing her feelings was more than I could possibly understand. Didn't she love me? Didn't she want to live in the United States? Hadn't her parents loved New Jersey so much they'd purchased property there? We were a loving family. Bruna's actions made no sense.

A few hours later I called my friend Gene Quigley. Gene and I had been buddies since our teenage years. When I told him that Bruna had left with Sean and had no intention of coming back, he tried to calm my fears. “Maybe she just needs some time away,” he suggested. “Don't worry. She'll calm down. She'll come to her senses. Give her some time, and she'll be back.”

I appreciated Gene's attempt to console me, but he hadn't heard that voice on the phone. It wasn't Bruna; at least not the same Bruna to whom I had been happily married for more than four years, with whom I had created a beautiful child, and with whom I had made love two nights before she departed for Brazil.

 

 

BRUNA AND I talked by telephone several times over the next few days. The conversations usually began in a friendly tone, but quickly degenerated because the content remained the same. She urged me to come to Brazil. At times she attempted to play on my love for Sean. “Don't you want to see your son?”

For my part, I continued asking her to come home, but she wouldn't hear of it. Agonizing as it was, I waited patiently each day to hear from Bruna, clinging to every opportunity when she allowed Sean to get on the phone with me. From the beginning, I resolved not to let on to Sean that anything was amiss, that his mom and I were having problems, or that I was overly concerned about seeing him. I gave no indication that he might not be coming home after the vacation. I wanted him to know that I loved him and that I missed him terribly, but I kept my part of the conversations upbeat.

When Bruna allowed Sean to talk, I could hear the excitement in his voice. “Hi, Dadda!”

“Hey, Sean. I love you and I miss you. When you guys come back, I'm going to give you the biggest hug and kiss, and pick you up on my shoulders. We're best friends forever. My heart beats for you.”

“Dadda?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you forever.” Sean's innocent, heartfelt words thrilled me and crushed me at the same time.

I gathered my composure. “I love you forever, buddy. We're best friends. Who's your best friend?”

“You are, Dadda.”

The phone conversations shredded me emotionally, but they were my only contact with my son, so I cherished every moment of them.

 

 

OUR FRIENDS WERE shocked at the news that Bruna had run off with Sean. Nobody could understand what might have motivated her to leave me, much less take Sean away from his doting father. Michelle and Dan Langdon knew Bruna well. The Langdons have a son one year older than Sean, and the boys enjoyed playing together. Michelle expressed her sense of betrayal at Bruna's actions. “She called me and asked me to clean out some supplies from her classroom,” Michelle later told me, “but I didn't think anything of it. I was just glad to help. We worked together every school day for two years, and I never saw or heard a thing that gave any indication that she was thinking of running away to Brazil.”

According to her friends, Bruna had seemed happy and content. The only comment she made that expressed any hint of complaint to her friends was simply that we were not rich. When she first moved to New Jersey, she loved the town house I owned. Then when we moved to our new home, she was enthralled with that. But the area in which we lived was known for some fabulous mansions owned by extremely wealthy families, and we were not in one of them. Bruna had told one of her friends, “David will never be able to afford to buy me one of those.”