Remember Mia (26 page)

M
onths pass and Mia is still missing. Jack and I talk about the possibility of having to identify her ravaged and abused body in unimaginable stages of decomposition—we agree we’ll make the identification together—yet we can’t quite agree on how to live our lives until then.

In the meantime, I rent a small studio apartment on 58th Street, and even though it’s just a short walk off Sutton Place, it’s affordable and Jack is surprisingly generous. I enjoy living in walking distance to the 4, 5, 6, N, Q, and R trains, on a quiet, treelined street.

Jack, once his contract in Chicago has ended, finds a position as assistant DA, “entry level, no pay, and long hours.” His furnished apartment, the Tribeca Suites, allows him to remain “in transition.” We don’t mention the word
divorce
quite yet, we allow life, according to Jack, “to play out,” whatever that means.

Even though we both hate to admit yet another failure, we’ve been sitting ducks for a long time. Marriages confronted by tragedy don’t break apart because of that fact per se, but it seems
as if there’s only so much resolve to go around and everything pales in comparison to Mia’s disappearance. And so we live separately and wait for the inevitable burial of our union. We know the demise of our marriage is nearing, like a sure winter storm, its icy breath approaching the hairs on the back of our necks.

Once a week Jack and I meet at a coffee shop in a bookstore. There, we are surrounded by a contrived normalcy among people discussing the books they’ve read, trips they’ve taken, conversing about normal things that normal people do.

During our time at the coffee shop Jack struggles to wrap his mind around the facts of Mia’s disappearance. He makes me recount every minute detail and obsesses over where he was and what he did while it all played out.

“I feel responsible,” he says, raising his voice, causing people to turn around and look at us. “I feel it was my fault. I hired this lunatic, I took the job in Chicago, and I told you to move into the brownstone.”

My sense of guilt for not having protected my child pales in comparison to Jack’s loss of potency. There’s nothing he can do and he’s not equipped to deal. Jack goes on and on about what he would give if he could go back and take a different path, but he knows it’s impossible. He speaks about how guilt eats at him every moment of every day, when he is going to sleep, when he wakes up, during lunch, in the shower, at the gym, watching the news, how these monstrous thoughts pop in his mind and demand to be prioritized, an infinite punishment for a mere momentary oversight. How he is tired of thinking about it, how no amount of analysis is going to turn back the clock.

And during those moments, during those fleeting minutes of remorse, for a split second, I feel something for him that resembles compassion, and I hold his hand. Yet I struggle to find a single word of consolation for him. Since the day he dropped me off at
Creedmoor I haven’t been able to cry in front of him. I don’t know if I’m gaining strength or if I’ve lost my soul, but it’s easier that way and so I don’t analyze it.

As a prosecutor, Jack doesn’t invest in the notion that even behind a most wicked and incomprehensible deed is a human being. His world is not so sunny, doesn’t allow for any such concessions, his world has only a few rainbows and frolicking puppies. He is quick to see the bad and even quicker to judge, and that’s just how Jack is. And Jack judges himself. Because Jack’s a logical man.

While I can “claim”—what a choice of words—while I can
claim
to have suffered from a medical condition, he was inept in his task to protect his family. This lasts for mere minutes, then Jack stiffens himself and clears his throat. Composed again, he enters some sort of twisted stage, holding the curtain for all the others to enter: Lieberman, Anna, the police, an array of guilty parties jointly responsible.

Sometimes I don’t know what to say and so I just sit there and stare down at my empty coffee cup. Jack’s not the man he used to be, he now depends on me for support, and on a certain level I feel annoyed by his emotions. I need him to be strong—not for me, for himself—because I was able to cope, have been coping, but I just can’t add any more weight to my Jenga stack of agony.

But all he wants to do is talk, talk, talk. And I let him go on and on and on, listening for what seems like days on end, sometimes tuning him out for long stretches at a time, hours even, his voice without inflection or variation, monotonous and low. Eventually he gets hoarse and we sit among the scent of coffee, the sound of beans dropping into the mill, the grinding noise drowning him out for a few merciful seconds. Finally his voice turns into a raspy whisper and we both go home.

I allow months of these meetings to pass and watch layer after layer of guilt pile on top of him like shovels of soil on a coffin. I tell him about a legacy,
his legacy
, something constructive he can
do with the monsters trapped in his head—those were his words,
monsters trapped in his head
—but Jack is Jack and that’s all there is to it.

“You could start a foundation in Mia’s name. You could speak in front of people, to groups of parents, you could assist in searches for missing children. Jack, there’s so much you can do. I think it’d be good for you.”

“You know I’m not comfortable around people. That whole speaking thing is just nerve-racking for me. Trust me, if I thought it made any kind of a difference, I would, but . . . once the brownstone sells, I’ll put up a reward. Rewards have solved cases before, it’s probably the most effective action I can take. That’s helpful, right?”

I wonder if Jack has it worse because he was taught to be stoic, to “act like a man.” At some point maybe Jack realized he just cannot survive this kind of despair, cannot allow himself to be dragged down, and so he focuses instead on walking away. Maybe his trick is to keep the suffering at a distance.

“I can go for days feeling normal,” he says, “and then I think of nothing else and I feel like I’m going crazy.”

One day, at the coffee shop, I feel his judging eyes on me while I search through missing children’s databases on my laptop. Like a hawk watching a sparrow, he scrutinizes me as I keep track of body parts washing up on shorelines. He frowns, and when I hand him a list of private detectives, he looks away.

And I start getting angry at him. Angry at his inability to fight the monsters, angry at the fact that money is what his solution is, angry that he expected me to grow beyond my limitations, told me to just “snap out of it”—those were his words—yet he’s unwilling to do the same.

Eventually everything about Jack strikes me as silly. Those fanged rippers, those elusive little shits he can’t get under control when the real monster lived in the same house with me while he was working on foreign exchanges and equity deals.

Fuck you, Jack. Fuck. You.

Eventually the monsters have mercy on Jack and disappear. They seem to just vanish because one day he appears to have gained his strength back, his step is quicker, less restrained, and the bags under his eyes have faded. He even has a tan, as if he’s spent the weekend in the sun. And I watch him, after the obligatory display of grief, mentally severing himself from the uncomfortable fact that this crisis will never come to an end. We’ve held on until there is nothing to hold on to anymore. And then we agree to sign divorce papers.

Jack will go on with his life, someplace else, with hardly a backward glance, no call, no text, no e-mail. He hates complicated relationships and I have no doubt that his emotions, once again, run like a train on steel rails. He’s a DA last time I heard, in Boston, I think, I don’t remember.

And eventually I realize I’m the only one looking. I request a copy of all documents, of all police files. I read through them, study them, and make mental notes of anything that could possibly shed light on Anna’s whereabouts. And when I’m through, I start all over again.

And then there is the media. The amount of time the media spends on a case, any infamous reputation assigned, is directly related to the details they can dig up about your life, neighbors they can interview, and relatives who speak out on
20/20
. I have none of that to offer. At the most there’ll eventually be a
Cold Case Files
edition or a
Dateline
legal show. After I decline all interviews, there is nothing else to be had.

Pictures of Mia as an infant were subject to intense media coverage but photos of me were scarce, to say the least. By the time I rent the studio apartment, phone calls from reporters prompt me to change my number for the first time. There are calls regarding book deals and movie opportunities. I hang up the phone and again change my number. Then it quiets down. After all, there is no trial, no
gavel-to-gavel coverage dedicated to bringing legal proceedings to the public. There is only so much media fodder and then the primary elections come up, and eventually other headlines take priority.

Anthony now works for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Anchorage, Alaska, and heads an Evidence Response Team. The division also runs a Kidnapping and Missing Persons office at the same Alaska office.

Anthony’s called me almost every week since I left Creedmoor. I visited him and his wife a year ago. Abby had just given birth to a baby boy and I could only make excuses for so long. The baby’s name is William Hadley Paradise and he was two months old when I met him. I never held him, and Anthony didn’t ask me to. We rarely speak of our childhood, as if our foundation is shaky, and our conversations mainly revolve around what he calls Mia’s
recovery
.

During the visit he suggests I add Mia’s case to the nationwide Crime Stoppers website where people can phone in tips, anonymously if they so desire. “More exposure is what you need. Add a reward to it and the chances increase.” After I return to New York, he calls me.

“You can stay with us anytime, I mean long-term, not just a visit,” he says and I’m not sure how to respond. I’ve never thought about leaving New York and I just can’t imagine turning my back on the city. Something wisp thin has slipped between us, something new, unrelated to the past. We both long to establish a new kind of relationship, a bond that will endure from here on out. He leaves messages on my phone. “Knock knock,” he always says, “call me back.”

And I catch myself smiling when I hear his voice.

—

Mia’s recovery
, Anthony calls it. I try not to think about the fact that Mia knows another woman as her mother and with every passing day I become more disillusioned that a recovery is even possible. I’ll never get back what I’ve lost. There’s this hole I feel inside of me
that isn’t of this world, a sadness that sticks to me like an old faithful dog, stirring when I stir, opening its eyes when I open mine. Never far away, always loyal, steadfast. To be counted on.

Jack offers a twenty-thousand-dollar reward
for tips leading to the whereabouts of Anna Lieberman and the recovery of Mia Connor
as part of the Crime Stoppers website campaign. The statistics are promising; the website has yielded hundreds of thousands of arrests, almost a million cases cleared, and over a hundred million dollars paid out in rewards. The twenty thousand dollars highlight the dark side of the operation; the number of incoming tips is enormous, and while some are obviously phoned in as a joke, others take up valuable resources. The supposed “sightings” of Anna Lieberman are a sculptor in Santa Fe, a Siamese cat breeder in Las Vegas, and a middle school teacher in Oklahoma. There’s no attempt to enroll Mia in school, no attempt to access medical coverage, no passport application. It’s as if Anna’s found the perfect hiding place.

What am I to do? Post flyers all over New York City? What’s the point of that? A website makes more sense and so I hire a designer but after a month I realize that for every kind word there are ten comments about my incompetence, my lack of “mother DNA,” and those are the kind ones. Some people want to kill me. They don’t know they’d be doing me a favor. Regardless of how many nights I stare at the ceiling as I lay in the darkness, I always come to the same conclusion: I can’t live like this. And I’m ready to do more.

I call Detective Wilczek daily and he tells me finding Anna will be “a matter of time.” A month later I start calling him weekly, and words like
hiding
,
unsuspecting
, and
ingenuity
snake their way into our conversations.

“But we’re on it. We’re not giving up. We’ll have to wait for her to make a mistake, and she will, they all do.”

Six months later he tells me he’ll call me when something new comes up.

On the one-year anniversary he refers to Anna’s trail as having “gone cold.” In a matter of months they’ll refer to Mia as a “cold case.”

Two months after the divorce is final, I return to North Dandry. I’m curious if the place still holds bondage over me. The renovations have been completed, the building has been sold. Hence the reward money Jack put up.

As I get out of the taxi, I deliberately avoid glancing at the building. I pay the cab driver and I finally look up, standing perfectly still. I expect a violent reaction—blacking out, fainting, or even vomiting—yet none of that happens. It lies dormant and spiritless, almost sad. Even the building looks as if it’s moved on.

Daily I wonder how Mia looks—she is almost four now—and I know she’s changed and has become unrecognizable to me. The fact that I wouldn’t recognize my own child if I saw her makes me sick to my stomach.

And so I create her, fill out every inch of her body, stretch her limbs, and elongate her face to fit me just right. I believe she has my fine, wavy hair, Jack’s brown eyes, and my love for citrus fruits. Mia’s face—the one I have created—lurks everywhere, ready to manifest itself at any given time; in the park, at a store, in the subway, on TV. Blond hair, pale skin, dark eyes. Pink lips, curved like Jack’s, full like mine. I reconstruct her features and fill in the blanks as I see fit.