Set Free (9 page)

It’s shocking, the first time you embrace the love of your life and feel them almost-imperceptibly pull away. There is always a message in such a withdrawal. But, instead of focusing on what it might be, I pushed all negative thoughts away. After all, these were not the best of times. We were in the windowless, shabby back room of a police precinct, my wife having been arrested for attempting to murder our neighbor, Scott Walker.

I can’t remember ever looking at Jenn and thinking she was anything but outrageously gorgeous. But that morning, when I stepped into the room they were keeping her in, she appeared as grey and dull and dispirited as the space itself. As soon as our perfunctory embrace was done, the subtle disconnection overlooked, she fell into a folding chair. She introduced her new lawyer, Muriel Cope, who’d stepped in to replace Shelley Brown. Something about Jenn’s law firm being unable or unwilling to represent one of their own partners.

After a brisk handshake and a tense sideways glance at her client, Cope announced, “I’ll leave you two to talk.”

I stopped her. “Wait. What’s this about? What’s going to happen next?”

She and Jenn exchanged another look, then: “Why don’t you and Jenn talk first? Then we can deal with what’s ahead of us.” Briefcase and iPhone in hand, she left the room.

I sat in the chair opposite Jenn and reached across the table. Pretending to ignore the gesture, she quickly pulled her hands away, burying them in her lap. Her eyes were anywhere but on mine. I was already worried and confused, but now an air raid siren was blowing my head apart, warning me of impending disaster. “Jenn,” I pleaded, “I need you to tell me what’s going on. Is it true? Did you try to kill Scott?”

Tear-blurred eyes fell on me, and my heart lurched.

“Yes.”

With that one, simple word, I realized our lives were about to be turned upside down. Again. In the nearly two decades I’d known my wife, no one could have ever convinced me she would be capable of harming another person—or even giving it a try. Yet, for reasons that eluded me, as I sat there looking at the stranger’s face she wore that morning I didn’t doubt her confession for a second. “Why?” I asked. “Why would you do something like that? Why Scott?”

Scott Walker was the father of Mikki’s best friend, Delores, and a neighbor. They lived on the next block over from ours. A few years earlier, based on the strength of our daughters’ friendship, we’d attempted socializing with Scott and his girlfriend Anna, who was not Delores’ mother. It wasn’t a disaster, but the pairing didn’t click, and we’d seen little of the couple since.

“Muriel thinks the charges will be dropped soon.”

My heart leapt, a thrill ran through my chest and, unaccountably, a nervous chuckle erupted from my mouth. “Jenn, oh God, that’s great news!” I enthused, a flicker of hope ignited. “So this
is
some sort of crazy mistake. You can’t imagine all the stuff that’s been going through my head.” I so wanted to touch her, to pull her into my arms, but her body language continued to tell me that any sort of physical intimacy remained unwelcome.

“There’s been no mistake, Jaspar.”

I was becoming exasperated. For someone who relied on fact, logic, and clarity to do her job, Jenn was being stingy with all three.

“I did try to… I did attack Scott,” she said, her voice flat.

I sucked in as much air as I could manage, held it, counted to five, and then expelled it. “Jenn, you have to help me out here. What did you do? Why?”

“I found…” Squeezing her eyes tight, fat tears slipped down her cheeks, leaving damp hoary scars. “I found her pink barrette, Jaspar. Mikki’s pink barrette.”

I shook my head, more confused than ever. “What are you talking about?”

“You know how before…right before she was gone, how she’d been on a kick, always wearing those pink barrettes? They were her latest fashion statement. I think she was trying to see if she could turn something only little girls were expected to wear into a teenage fad.”

I nodded. I did recall hearing something along those lines. But, truth be told, I’d paid little attention, as befits most fads—especially those indulged in by thirteen-year-old girls and their friends.

“I found one,” she repeated. “I knew it was hers because she’d initialed them on the back with a Sharpie. It was her distinctive mark, the right side of the ‘M’ for Mikki becoming the left side of the ‘W’ for Wills.”

Again I nodded. This was something I’d seen her do on her school books, or whenever she left us a message on the notepad in the kitchen. “So you found one of her pink barrettes. I don’t get why that means anything.”

“Think, Jaspar. Think about when we talked to the police that night. Do you remember when they asked us to…”

Suddenly I made the connection. I finished the sentence: “...describe what she was wearing the last time we saw her.”

“Yes.”

“That morning, when she left for school, she was wearing her pink barrettes.”

“Yes.”

“My God, Jenn, you found one? Where?”

She looked away. The tears had stopped. She busied herself looking for a Kleenex to blow her nose.

“Where, Jenn? Where did you find the barrette? And what does this have to do with Scott Walker?” Was she telling one story to divert me from another she didn’t want to tell?

Our eyes caught and held. She said nothing, as if silently willing me to come up with the answer on my own. For a full moment we sat like that, in that grimy room, staring at each other. Then as dreadful realization dawned in my eyes, fear bloomed in hers.

“D-did Scott find it?” I finally uttered, desperate for an alternative to the inconceivable scenario slowly forming in my mind.

“No,” she whispered. “I found it.”

“Where?”

“In Scott’s house.”

I could feel blood racing through every vein, triple time, to match the beating of my heart. “Where?”

“In his bedroom.” As she began to recite the facts I had every right to know, her voice grew leaden, her eyes dead. “In the bed. It was wedged between the mattress and the headboard.”

I thought I might be sick. “Mikki was in Scott Walker’s bed?”

She nodded.

I pulled in a ragged, tortured breath, and begged my stomach not to betray me. A starburst of pain radiated outwards from the base of my skull. My head began to pound. My mouth grew impossibly dry. “With Scott?”

Her shoulders moved in an indeterminate way. I didn’t know if she was saying, “Of course, you idiot, how else would the barrette get there?” or, “I don’t know.”

And as if these thoughts weren’t disturbing enough, ugly enough, heartbreaking enough, one more came crashing through my brain like a runaway train flying off a bridge into a depthless, dark ravine: “Jenn, how did
you
find the barrette in Scott Walker’s bed?”

“Jaspar, I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry. Two words that, put together, convey so much...or pitifully little. They can be all you’ll ever need to hear, or hopelessly insufficient.

It was Jenn’s turn to reach across the table, her trembling, red-splotched hands searching for mine. It was my turn to withhold. The situation was one of those idiotic scenarios where she knows I know, I know she knows I know, and I think I know what I know, but I need her to say it. Otherwise, I simply could never believe it.

I waited.

She took a few moments to stare into space, sniff back a few more tears—of sadness? regret?—and, like a lawyer preparing for opening statements, choose her words carefully.

“I’d been stopping by the house—the Walker house—to see Delores,” she started out. “I…I don’t exactly know why. I guess it made me feel better, you know? To talk to Mikki’s best friend. They were so close. It made me feel close to her again. I know it sounds crazy now that I say it out loud, but it’s how I felt.” A quick sigh, then: “One day, Delores showed me a picture of them together, one I’d never seen before. I thought I was going to fall apart when I saw it, Jaspar. The pictures we have, the ones we’ve looked at a million times since that night, they feel like…memories, something that’s long gone, Mikki in the past, Mikki
before
. But this picture, the one Delores showed me, it wasn’t a memory. It was something new. It was like I was sharing a new experience with Mikki, seeing her in a way I hadn’t before, with her doing something new, being in a new place. I…I just so needed that. Being with Delores gave me that.”

“I get it, Jenn.” I did. But she was stalling. Focusing on the innocent act, delaying the guilty. “Then what happened?”

“Sometimes, Scott would be there.”

My breathing grew shallow. My gut constricted, growing taut in anticipation of a blow.

“We would talk. He and Anna…do you remember her? She was the girlfriend we met. Well, anyway, they broke up a while ago.”

I wanted to yell out how very much I couldn’t give a fucking, flying rat’s ass about that. Instead I held my tongue, staring at the woman sitting across from me, watching my wife slowly disappear and someone unfamiliar take her place.

“He could see how much I was getting out of spending time with Delores. He told me I could drop by anytime.”

I’m sure he did.

“You can figure out the rest.”

Oh, no you don’t
. I wasn’t about to let her get off so easily, sloughing off the dirty details as if they meant nothing. I was broiling in hell and wanted her in the fire with me. “Tell me.”

The lawyer in her rose to the surface. She faced me dead on and unequivocally stated, “We slept together.”

The torture I would eventually suffer at the hands of Hun was nothing compared to this.

“I don’t even know why I did it,” she said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t feel anything. He didn’t give me anything I was looking for, or needed. But I just kept doing it.”

The knife plunged deeper.

“Last night, he left the bed to go to the bathroom…”

I could see it in my head. A moment so simple, a moment any couple can relate to. Having just made love, the man gets up, naked, pads his way to the bathroom…
Stop it!
Self-flagellation had never been my style.

Jenn kept on. “My hand happened to move into the crack between the headboard and the mattress. That’s when I found it. I thought I was going crazy, seeing something that wasn’t really there because I was so desperate to see or touch anything that belonged to her.

“I’d dreamt about those barrettes so many times since we lost her, and now I had one in my hand. Once I knew it was real, I couldn’t believe it. I was so confused. I turned it over and over, I saw her initials…and that was it…I didn’t think about it anymore. I knew…I knew how it got there. I knew what must have happened in that bed. I made up my mind and I did what I had to do, Jaspar.”

“What did you do?”

“I found a pair of scissors in the bedside table.” Her eyes were growing unfocused as she recalled the sequence of events. “I walked to the bathroom. He was washing up. He must have heard me behind him. I caught his eye in the mirror. I could see him smile at me. I stabbed him in the back. Then again and again and again.”

Jenn had recited her actions in an even, emotionless tone. Despite what was happening to us, I still knew my wife. Or thought I did. She was keeping her outside calm, to get through what she needed to get through—but inside, her guts were being ripped into bloody shreds.

A merciless part of me was glad.

“At first he was stunned, of course,” she kept on. “Then he tried to stop me. He kept yelling: ‘What’s wrong with you? Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ The sound of his voice, pleading like he didn’t deserve to die for what he’d done, just made me angrier. I screamed at him. I wanted him to admit what he’d done to Mikki. I wanted him to tell me where she is. He acted like he had no idea what I was talking about.”

She hesitated, chewed her bottom lip, and then said, “I remember arms flailing. His. Mine. And blood. Everywhere. Mostly his. I kept hacking at him. The tap was still running and the sink was overflowing. He staggered. Fell against the wall. Slid down. Towards the floor. Into the pink water.”

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“Then more screams. But they weren’t mine. Or his.”

What?
“Who…?”

“Delores. In all the panic and craziness, I totally forgot she was in the house. I lowered the scissors. Scott was quiet now. So was I. But, oh Christ, Jaspar, she never stopped. I can still hear her. ‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’”

Aside from our parents, who can we indisputably claim has changed our life? Parents do it by first giving us life, and then molding and influencing it through lessons taught and examples set. They provide the basics: food, shelter, protection from harm. They lead us to spirituality, or away from it. They educate us. Teach us who to respect, who to fear, who to emulate, who to love, who to hate. They teach kindness, rudeness, empathy, carelessness. Then they send us on our way, setting us free to explore and open ourselves up to new influences.

When first breaching adulthood, we tend to resist the impact of others, more interested in self-discovery and being our own person. The smartest of us strike a balance between learning from others and finding ourselves. We stand on our own two feet, but know the graciousness and courage of seeking and accepting help when it’s needed.

Throughout life, friends, spouses, teachers, mentors, employers, even children, affect our lives, affect decisions, turn a moral compass—sometimes profoundly. Occasionally, when these influencers present themselves, we ignore them, or actively push them away. From fear, uncertainty, cowardice. Sometimes, opportunities arise in places so foreign, situations so unfamiliar, from sources so unlikely, for reasons so obscure, that we risk missing them all together.

Asmae’s presence in my rectangle grew with each passing day, although not in a physical way. She rarely stayed longer than a few minutes, if at all. Days would sometimes pass without my seeing her face.

In the beginning, I suspect she feared for my life and kind-heartedly took it upon herself to heal me, should I be healable.

Within three weeks of her first visit, I was returning to the man I’d once been. Not the pre-Mikki man, but certainly the pre-Morocco man. Although still thin and unable to eat more than a pittance, I was once again beginning to experience a desire for food, and hunger when it didn’t appear when I expected it to. Bouts of fever and stomach ailments and blinding headaches troubled me less and less often. My mind grew clearer. I was able to focus on my surroundings and my situation, as meager and hopeless as they were.

Asmae did not come to this unexpected arrangement as someone experienced in caring for a prisoner. But she was watchful and thoughtful and must have spent significant amounts of time considering my needs, although I asked for nothing. Every so often, along with my meal, something more would appear with the tray of food. Towels for cleaning myself. A hairbrush. Nail clippers. A mirror. A clean shirt. A collection of small ceramic bottles containing oils and lotions. If I left one untouched, Asmae knew it was because I was uncertain about its use. The very next day she would find a way to instruct me. A lock of her own hair, tied with a silk ribbon and laid next to one vessel, told me it held shampoo. A slight impression of her hand left in the dirt floor next to another told me that the contents were meant as a lotion for my hands and body. The most cherished of my new possessions were a shabby notebook, a nub of pencil, and a small blade with which to sharpen it.

Of the many things my body and mind ached for, the ability to express myself in writing was near the top of the list. It was something I’d done nearly all my life. Not unlike eating and breathing, without it I would eventually perish.

The day I received the magnificent gift of pencil and paper was a day of rebirth. I finally had a purpose. I could finally tell my story. Silent and hiding in the deepest coves of my mind was a faint hope—a wish, a dream, a nugget of optimism—that one day my daughter would read my words. She’d know I had lived her pain, shared her loneliness, understood the feelings of betrayal and abandonment, and knew how the fear of death could turn into unspeakable attraction. I was coming to believe that in my struggles to persevere—and by way of an inexplicable, mystical connection between a guilt-ridden, self-loathing, piteous father and his lost daughter—I would somehow reach her, touch her, pull her along with me...so that someday, somehow, we might be reunited. And she would forgive me.

By night, I still lay atop my stone pedestal, my version of Mikki nestled next to me. But in all other ways, my days in the rectangle had changed. Mornings, and early evenings after the sun fell below the berm of my enclosure, were set aside for my new cleaning rituals. Now, with a dented tin basin, argan soaps and body lotions, a toothbrush and comb, and a collection of rags—little more than scraps of old clothing—I was able to maintain a reasonable grooming regime. After breakfast, I would retreat to the shade of the lean-to. But instead of falling into my usual somnambulistic state, I used the time to write in my new notebook, words interspersed with rudimentary sketches of the things I’d written about, or things I’d seen or dreamed of since being held captive.

After lunch, the temperature would soar. Even in the lean-to, it was too hot for any activity other than sipping water from the cracked jug Asmae had brought me. During these hours I did a lot of thinking. I thought about Mikki—wondering where she might be at that very moment, wondering if hers was a similar environment to mine. I thought about the stories I would tell her that night—some of them newly made up, perhaps taken from the notes I’d written that morning or to be written the following day. I thought about food. I thought about Asmae. I thought a lot about Asmae.

Who was she? Who was this woman who’d suddenly appeared in my life, and saved it? Was she a wife? A daughter? A mother? Did the Huns know what she was doing? Had they left me here to die—but she, having discovered me, covertly decided to do what needed to be done to keep me alive? Was that why all the gifts she brought me were used or slightly damaged? Was she bringing me things that others had thrown out, and therefore would never notice missing?

I made a guessing game of predicting Asmae’s daily routine, if there was such a thing. On the days I forecast a visit, I would wait by the door of the rectangle in anticipation of her arrival. The worst were the days when the door would inch open, but instead of Asmae only a platter of food would arrive.

I was tortured by the question of why she came inside the rectangle on some days but not others. Were some days more dangerous, the risk of discovery too great?

I missed Asmae when she didn’t visit. I missed her smell, how her eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled, how unintelligible words—strange coming from anyone else’s mouth—spilled forth from hers sounding like a summer day’s sonnet. I attempted to sketch her once, so I’d have something to look at on the days when she didn’t come to me. I quickly learned that drawing the human face is one of the most difficult things to do, the results of my efforts childish and cartoonish.

Each day when the sun disappeared from sight, and prior to my evening grooming and the arrival of supper, I would exercise. Now that I was being fed regularly and my health was slowly returning, I decided a light daily workout would benefit me. In my previous life I’d been a staunch believer in “strong body, strong mind.” If I was going to get through this—if I was going to do what needed to be done—I’d need both.

Like Asmae, I had assessed the situation and identified what needed to be done. For her, whatever the risk, whatever the danger, she’d found a way to save my life. I, on the other hand, whatever the risk, whatever the danger, would have to find a way to end hers.