Method 15 33 (23 page)

So I stared back.

I tried to scare him with my glare, but I’m sure had anyone stumbled upon us in the forest, and had Brad not been face-gored by a sharpened bedpost, they might have thought we were in the throes of falling in love, pupils dilated and us virtually holding roses in our teeth by the appearance of our eyes-locked gaze.

They say staring at a wild animal is a sign of aggression and a sure way to invite an attack. But doing the same to a cobra is a way to tame, which is something I’d witnessed only a week before they kidnapped me. On the night Mother discovered my pregnancy and thus the night before she had the doctor evaluate my pregnancy, I hid in her study, watching her watch a video from her law firm. She had no idea I was in the room at the time, nor that I was pregnant. This would be the night of my stark reveal.

Mother, my father, and I had just finished a celebratory dinner of fried pork chops and applesauce to commemorate Mother being home from her four-month trial in New York—which she won, of course. At our four-person kitchen table, it was hard to tell who sat at the head. Nevertheless, I chose the most unlit corner and bulked myself within my dad’s faded navy sweatshirt, which four months prior, before I started showing, used to be huge on me. Since I no longer had a chance of hiding in just the baggy clothes alone, I
draped a pink-and-green quilt around my body, sniffing and fake coughing and claiming my muscles ached.

After dinner, I went to my room, finished some advanced calculus, and inspected my round form in a bedroom mirror. After removing my father’s navy sweatshirt, I tiptoed down the stairs and slid, silently, into Mother’s darkened office, where she was working. The glow of her television cast electric blue on her sitting in one of her Dracula throne chairs. She sat in her bubble of TV light, and I stood beyond that bubble, well hidden in the shadows created by the mahogany bookshelves and matching paneled walls of her study.

In the past, I had wedged myself in the same shadowed corner to study Mother’s inner thoughts and also to gather data on how to react—truly react—to certain social situations, for this was where she sometimes watched movies my father considered “chick flicks.” Whenever Patrick Swayze collapsed into Demi Moore’s all-encompassing kiss in
Ghost
, Mother would clutch her neck, stroke her own skin, and breathe in deep. I figured I should do this whenever Lenny kissed me, so I did. He seemed to appreciate the gesture, so I allowed moments of joy when my physical senses flared upon Lenny’s tighter embrace.

On this particular occasion in which I spied on Mother, she was not watching a movie, but rather the raw footage of a wildlife television show—Mother’s client being a mega-entertainment conglomeration, which owned the rights. The show, the station, the producer, hell, everyone, were being sued by the estate of a somewhat famous wilderness “expert.” This man, the wrongful death complaint alleged, had been “pressured, goaded, and threatened” into approaching a cobra during an ill-fated trip to the deep backwaters of India.

Mother sat in her study watching the footage of the incident. So sets out our wilderness man, perfect wilderness boots and pressed khakis and proper chest patch and all, all of which was filmed and in a raw, unedited state. Mother leaned forward in her chair, stalling her note taking, when the “expert” lay on
his belly in the India high grass to level his eyes with an arched and mesmerized cobra. Their faces were five feet apart. Mother checked her antique cuckoo clock, wrote down the time, and returned to study her client’s on-screen star in the moments before his death. She raised her hand to her mouth, tapping a finger on her teeth as though anxious, and I know, I just know, the edges of her lips were curled in a slight grin, a simple excitement of anticipation. I thought in that moment Mother was resigned to the ultimate power of death. So I too, accepted death as base fact. But I didn’t allow myself the pleasure she seemed to hold in witnessing the finality of life. I smoothed a palm gently over my belly, calming the child within.

The man in the video stared at the snake for a good long hour, which is a calculation I had to guesstimate given the fact that Mother grew bored with waiting and began to fast-forward. Play. Fast-forward. Skid. Rewind. Fast. Stop. Play. A quick twitch of the cobra caused the wilderness star to also twitch, but he did not avert the snake’s gaze. The cobra backed down slow at first, lowering his head, but recoiled quickly, and oddly, in a strange and swift backwards hiss, disappearing beneath his rock. Just then, a tiger leapt from beyond the scope of the camera and into the frame, landing on our man’s back and eating his neck.

Mother rocketed from her chair, her notes and pen tumbling to the floor. “Holy shit!”

Watching her watch the mauling, I blinked a few times, as is usual to keep one’s eyes moist when watching a television show. I checked the time, thinking I had another twenty minutes before I’d have to select my clothes for school and crawl into bed.

The tiger, taking his jowel-licking time, disemboweled our man—such gory nature all being caught on video because the cameraman dropped the camera, still rolling, and had obviously fled the scene.

“What a damn beautiful beast,” Mother said, plunking into her leather seat.

I stepped out of the shadow.

“What, Mother?” I said.

She pushed into the chair, locking her elbows when she pressed her hands on the armrests to pin herself into a deeper safety.

“Lisa! Holy hell. What the hell?! You scared the shit out of me. Have you been standing there the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Son of a bitch, Lisa. You can’t be hiding on me. Son of a damn bitch. You gave me a heart attack.”

“Oh, um, well, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just wondering what you said.”

“I don’t know…what?”

Flustered, she scanned the floor and bent to gather her papers and pen, stopping after picking up each object to shake her head confused-bewildered-angry at me.

“Did you say ‘beautiful beast’?”

“Oh, Lisa, I guess so,” she said in an exasperated but stunned voice. She huffed back down to the edge of her seat, taking me in head to toe.

“What does it matter?” She asked, looking more closely at my body.

“Well, I wondered what or who is the beautiful beast in the video, is all. The man, the cobra, or the tiger?”

“The tig, the tig…er,” her voice wavered on drawn-out words. She squinted, zeroing in on my waist, which bulged in a tight white t-shirt. I stiffened my posture like a flat-foot ballerina awaiting the
Premier Maitre de ballet’s
inspection. While pinching my shoulders for a more perfect stance, I lifted my chin as though pride would trump judgment.

“But the tiger killed the man. He is beautiful to you?”

“He did kill the man, but the man trespassed on his territory.”

Mother fixed on the rise of my torso and the descent to my pelvis. I moved closer and into the bubble of blue. A beam shot sideways as a spotlight, and realization ruled the room. Denial could live no more.

Hesitant and with an unsure voice, yet still continuing her precision answer—because Mother was loath to abandon her stream of thought, she continued, “He is beautiful for his cunning strategy and ability to strike fear in the cobra.”

I straightened as she palmed my swelled belly.

I felt like a tiger as she fell to her knees.

Was she the cobra and the safe distance between us the mauled man?

Perhaps the analogy is too strained. Or too true. Nevertheless, I didn’t mean to tame her, and I didn’t mean to hurt her. I didn’t mean any harm at all to my mother. I suppose the nature of me is just that though: her weakness, her blindspot, and thus, my own.

Not until I was trapped in the VW with staring Brad, did I realize how hurtful I’d been to Mother. Sure, she was distant—she too suffered a cold demeanor. We were similar, I believe. Although, as far as I know, Mother had never been evaluated as a psychological oddity like me, and she does cry and curl her fist in fits of anger. So I do not believe she is emotionally challenged/gifted in a medical sense, like me. All I know of her past is, she has some past, and we are never to talk about her parents. I have one Nana is all: Nana, my literary rainbow ghost.

Despite Mother’s tall walls and her thick boundaries, she did try with respect to me.

I didn’t.

In staring at Brad, I resolved to try harder with Mother. She was not the cause of our distance. I was. I should have told her sooner. I should have shared the pregnancy, not to reveal a vulnerability, but to connect.

As Mother allowed the feel of her hand on my pulsing bump to soak in the reality of her impending grandmotherhood, she likely concluded yelling would lead to nothing. She’d tried a couple of times when I was a toddler; each time I hadn’t understood what a raised voice meant, so I had simply started laughing because that’s what people did when things got loud on the television shows my father enjoyed. So the night of
her discovery, Mother pointed to the door as an indication I should leave her be. When I woke the next morning, rested and hair mussed, I found her in her study with her clothes from the previous evening still on, one leg slung up over an armrest of her chair, and a stiletto dangling from her big toe. Two bottles of my parents’ best vintage were scattered on her Persian rug. My father sat cross-legged on the floor opposite her, his head cradled in his muscular hands.

Staring at a cobra can tame him, if done right, so I kept staring at creepy Brad in the front seat of that damn VW, in the middle of the Indiana woods, stalled on our way to Brad’s demented plan to butcher me and steal my child. On and on we stared, on and on clicked the clock, on and on the one-tap, two-tap, rain pinged the windshield, the roof.

And then Brad got even creepier.

“Panthertown.”

This again
.

“Oh deary-o, you are a clawed and wild panther. You got me,” Brad chuckled, as he pressed a white handkerchief he’d extracted from his frumpled shirt pocket to the blood dripping off his chin. With his free hand, he picked lint from his jacket.

“Panzy, woops, I mean Panthy, look at my outfit. Such a mess,” he said in a debutante, sing-song voice, which lowered one hundred octaves when he swiftly leaned across to growl, “You fucking cunt. My jacket is a fucking mess.” He leaned back on a tittering, “Ahem.”

You will never enjoy another second of your life for calling me the C word
.

Lola hastened instructions to the paramedics about the chief and his deputy, flashed her badge, and pantomimed for me to do the same. My ears were still whooshing, whirring out everyone’s voices. The woman in the housecoat and with the shopping cart who had fetched my phone, toddled to the other end of the strip mall and bent into a trashcan, oblivious to the sirens and the screaming and the fire and the smoke around her. How wonderful to not exist in this dimension, I thought.

Lola guided my missteps, like I was a drunk done with his last shot of the night, to the Viking woman’s F-150. As she jammed the shift to first, second, third, and fourth, I watched how she poked her nose out the driver’s window as if smelling her way. However odd, this vision of Lola prompted a vast nothingness, a near-complete absence of sound, which replaced the wind in my ears. I didn’t panic. I allowed the relief, and in so doing, realized the sharpening of my vision once again—even sharper than before.

Did I mention how I trained to be a sharpshooter early in my career? Did I mention my better-than-20/20 vision? Lola and I combined made for a virtual Superhero of sight and smell. This is probably why the Bureau paired us together in the first place. So without the distraction of sound, I could have seen to Texas if hills and buildings weren’t in the way.

Lola hunched her shoulders and scrunched her nose as though truly bothered to be alive. I tried to focus on anything other than the silence, reading the signs on whatever lonely stores
and restaurants we passed along the straight way on the straight road. The rain was the annoying, cold kind, the kind that won’t decide to stop or fall. A melancholic rain. Although mid-day, the sky was as dark as dusk.

A wide-mouth bass mailbox made me think of my childhood neighborhood, but then again, any of the cases I worked made me think of childhood. Given my possible hyperthymesia, which I usually controlled pretty well—unlike others with true hyperthymesia—my “exceptional memory” took over, and I once again fell slave to scenes I hated to remember. The replay of one day in particular invaded my thinking, a cyclical spiral I’d entered so often in life. Here it is, cat’s out of the bag, I guess I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve held back from you until now. I told you earlier that I decided to join the FBI to “please my parents” or support my college girlfriend-cum-fiancée, but we didn’t know each other well in the beginning of this dual memoir.

When I turned thirteen, my father got a job planning power plants for a big construction outfit in Chicago. We moved from the lap of luxury in Buffalo to a brick bungalow in a suburb about twenty minutes west of downtown Chicago, called Riverside. Riverside is filled with Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces, peaceful birds and towering trees, quiet streets, and an addictive ice-cream shop, appropriately named Grumpies.

The same gentleman who designed Central Park, Frederick Law Olmstead, designed Riverside. Olmstead had this vision to create a town where each house had a view of a park. Thus, you will find that Riverside streets are circular, looping knots, interrupted by wedges of tiny plots of grass and full-blown parks, such as Turtle Park—which features a green-painted cement turtle.

Way back when I was a boy, because of Riverside’s design, real estate agents claimed crime was low: the rat’s nest of streets making easy getaways for robbers, well, not so easy. If you were a criminal in Riverside, you best know the lay of the land, the twist of the pretzel streets, and the misdirection of curving parks. You best be an insider.