by Wendy Walker
No one sought treatment without some kind of threat—divorce, detachment from a loved one, unemployment. The thought of giving up the alter ego was too terrifying and, in many cases, had become so much a part of the fabric of that person, it was impossible to even disentangle it from the rest. It was almost always missed by marriage counselors and court shrinks. It could be hidden on a routine psychological profile. Even experienced therapists could miss it and be lured in by the often charismatic personalities of their patients. Some thought it was entirely untreatable.
“Don’t you see!” Abby had pleaded with Leo. “All the signs are there … the way she slept all day, expected Owen to take care of them … how she forced Cass to call her Mrs. Martin after the custody fight … and the story of that necklace…”
Leo had not seen any of this and had begged her not to push the issue. The Bureau had listened to her arguments, but there was nothing to suggest the Tanner girls had been impacted by some rare personality disorder their mother may or may not have.
“They would have ruined you, Abigail. They have money and lawyers, and you have what, a story about a necklace? What does that story even mean?”
Abby had tried to explain what was so obvious to her. “It’s classic behavior for a narcissistic parent. She has to keep all the children loyal and devoted solely to her, so she drives a wedge between the siblings, favors the stronger one, who’s more likely to turn on her. She is ruthless about this because her alter ego is fed primarily by the complete submission of her children.”
Leo had argued back and forth about how these distinctions would label every parent a “narcissist” or a “borderline” or something equally onerous. Maybe Judy Martin was just a shitty mother, or a selfish bitch. That was how they managed to hide from the world. Exactly like that. But he would not be swayed. And without the backup from the lead investigator, the theory had been dismissed.
But she was not wrong.
She heard the echoes now as she entered the Martin house. She was certain of it. A story had unfolded here—a story about Cass, a story about Emma. Judy Martin had a starring role. And maybe Jonathan Martin. Maybe his son, Hunter. And it was more than a little troubling that this story was not among those being told—not by Cass or Judy or even Owen. Cass kept insisting that her mother be present for her interviews. It was as if she didn’t want to talk about the past, to tell the one story that most needed to be told.
Yes. Abby was certain.
The only question that remained in her mind—what did this mean for finding Emma?
SEVEN
Cass
I have always liked the expression “rude awakening.” It’s one of those perfect expressions that says everything about something in very few words.
The first time I heard it was during my parents’ divorce. The woman who talked to us about where we should live said it to me during one of our meetings. I had already told her that I thought we should live with my father, and why I thought that, and she kind of smiled and leaned back in her chair.
She asked me if my father had told me to say those things about Mr. Martin and his son, about how I felt weird around them and about how Hunter looked at Emma. And she asked whether he told me to say things about my mother that were unmotherly. I told her no, and that I had not said these things to my father, ever, so how could he have told me to repeat them? But I could see she didn’t believe me. She told me how it was very common for parents to coach their children during a custody fight and how she sees it all the time. She said it was hard for her to believe me because Mr. Martin was very genuine in his desires to make a nice family for us and because my mother had devoted her entire life to raising us, giving up her career and her life in New York to be a stay-at-home mother.
Mrs. Martin cleaned up very well for the custody fight. She stopped sleeping late and napping and began driving us to school every day. She made us hot food for breakfast and sometimes even did our laundry herself. She came to every event at the school, cheering like a crazy fan, and she made us do our homework the minute we walked in the door. Our house was spotless and orderly. And she and Mr. Martin stopped drinking before five o’clock and going into their bedroom during the day.
I suppose I should have been grateful for this. Our mother was finally acting like the kind of mother we saw when we went to our friends’ houses and the kind of mother our half brother, Witt, had, which is why Witt is one of those people who does not have a scream inside him.
It was hard to imagine Witt having this other, normal life because we never saw him in that life. Before our father and mother got divorced, we saw Witt those ninety-six hours a month when he came to stay with our father for his visitation, and after the divorce, we saw him for ninety-six hours at our father’s new house when we went to visit him. The rest of the time, he was with his mother and we were not a part of that life. But he described it in a way that made sense of things, and it was that sense of things that made it impossible for me to be grateful for our mother’s sudden turnabout during the divorce.
This isn’t normal, Cass, Witt said to me one night when he had come for a weekend visit. It was before the divorce, and our mother had dragged our father out to the club for dinner. The way you and Emma take care of yourselves—it’s not normal. Most kids wake up to breakfast and a ride to school. They come home to dinner and clean clothes and someone hassling them about their homework and turning off the TV or getting off their video games. It’s not like it makes you happy all the time. But here, I always have one eye open. When I go home, I close both eyes at night.
I used to have to imagine what that would be like, to have someone watching over me. To close both eyes at night. When the custody battle happened, and our mother did start doing all those things for us, I still kept one eye open. And that was when I understood what Witt was trying to tell me. It wasn’t about the things he described. I know there are a lot of kids whose parents work all the time and have to do the things Emma and I did for ourselves. But they still close both eyes. It’s not the many things. It’s the one thing that’s behind the many things. I don’t even know what to call it. It didn’t matter that Mrs. Martin started doing our laundry and checking our homework, because she was only doing it for herself, for the case. It was not for us—that was the one thing that was still missing.
Emma didn’t seem bothered by this the way I was. She started wearing three outfits a day and throwing them on the floor of the laundry room. She wasted food so we ran out of things before the housekeeper was coming. One time she even poured out an entire gallon of milk, right down the drain. And she created stuff to do that required rides and waiting around. She joined the cast of a school play. She started playing field hockey again. She started a study group that met at the library.
She came to me one night the way she used to do, after our mother was asleep. She crawled into my bed, under the covers, and pressed her cheek against my cheek. I could feel her heart beating fast like she was excited, and I could feel her face smiling against my skin.
Did you see the look on her face when I told her I needed a ride to rehearsal at six and then a ride home at eight? Wait until she has to come to the show on both a Friday and Saturday night. She’ll miss the whole weekend at the club. And I signed her up to help with costumes!
Emma was making her pay, and it made her happy.
When it stops and she stops taking care of you, Cass, I’ll do it. You know that, right? I’ll always take care of you.
I felt my own heart beating faster then because even though I didn’t know if she actually would take care of me, if she would be able to even if she tried, she meant it with her whole heart.
I closed both my eyes that night.
Our father was not happy. He nearly went insane watching all this unfold. He would pace back and forth, his face bright red, talking to his lawyer on the phone, trying to explain that everything our mother was doing was a charade. He had driven us to school every morning. He had gone to the ev
ents, and gone alone. He had supervised our homework, coached our sports teams, watched movies with us on Saturday nights. He had moved out only to prevent fighting in front of us, and now he never got to see us. This woman from the court was coming into our lives, looking at one picture, a snapshot, and deciding our fate based on a façade, a lie. She couldn’t, or didn’t want to, see all the other pictures taken on all the other days when Mrs. Martin hadn’t prettied us all up for the lens.
My mother used to hire a professional photographer every fall to take our portraits. He came all the way in from the city and charged not only for his time, but also for the black-and-white prints that would come to hang in white wooden frames on the walls of our hallway upstairs.
The hallway has a balcony on the other side, which opens to the foyer below. My mother liked that people could see from the foyer to the wooden railing that lined the balcony and then just above it to the wall of portraits. There were over thirty of them by the time Emma and I disappeared, starting from when we were born to that last fall when Emma was seventeen and I was fifteen.
I used to wonder what people thought when they saw those photos from the foyer, people who didn’t know us well enough to come upstairs, but could see our photos from the foyer as they were greeted by Mrs. Martin at the front door. The photos were so expensive and so beautiful—our faces always looked peaceful and angelic. Some of the worst fights between Emma and our mother came on the days of the photos. Every time the photographer came, Emma would refuse to wear what she was told or to put her hair back or to smile. You could not know that from just looking at them from below. And you would think that the person who went to all this trouble to pay for these pictures and frame them just right and hang them just so must cherish their subjects more than life itself.
That’s how I felt about the woman from the court. How she was seeing only the pictures that my mother had hung on the wall and drawing conclusions from them that were not even close to the truth. Just like the guests who caught glimpses of us from the foyer.
My father eventually conceded, settling the case and making us live with Mr. Martin and Hunter. The woman had recommended this to the court, and fighting her would mean another year in a legal battle, making me and Emma talk to more people and take all kinds of psychological tests. Our father said he would have to call witnesses at a trial, including friends and relatives, and try to get them to say bad things about Mrs. Martin and how the woman had told him that all of that would be very harmful to me and Emma. He said he was settling to save us from more pain. When he told me this, I wanted to scream at him, No! I want to fight! Lead me into battle and let me get bloody! He was our general and we were his soldiers and I, for one, was willing to die for the cause.
I would not learn until years later, after combing through my past with Witt, that what my father was really afraid of had nothing to do with me and Emma. He had become so upset about the affair and the divorce that he had started smoking pot again the way he did in high school. My mother had no proof, but she knew my father very well and she was very clever. Her lawyer threatened to file a motion to force my father to take a drug test. He surrendered the next week. Looking back, I think it would have led me to the same conclusion about my father, and that is that as much as I loved him, he was a weak man. I don’t think it matters that his weakness made him smoke pot to ease his pain rather than the fact that he was just weak. The result was the same for me and Emma.
The woman said to me, It can be a rude awakening to see the truth about your parents during a divorce. People will stoop to low levels just to punish their spouse for leaving them. I knew what she was implying—that our father was making up all these bad things about Mrs. Martin and these good things about himself because he wanted her to pay for cheating on him and leaving him. But because I knew the truth, because I knew what all the other pictures looked like—the ones that didn’t make it to the wall in our hallway, the ones that were never even taken at all—the rude awakening was not what she had said, but instead the realization that grown-ups can be wrong, they can be stupid and inept and lazy at their jobs, and that they won’t always believe you even when you are telling the truth. And when they have power over you, these stupid, inept people who can’t see what’s right in front of them, when they don’t believe you when you tell them, bad things can happen.
This never left me. In the three years I was away and as I walked back through my mother’s door, this fact about stupid people not believing the truth was as much a part of me as my lungs and my heart.
Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss stayed until the late morning, when my mother asked them all to leave so I could rest for a while. I was an adult woman and I had committed no crime, so they could not make me go to the hospital or the police station or do anything I didn’t want to do. I told them more things about the island that might help them find it. I gave them descriptions of the people they thought they might be able to find in their systems, like Bill and Lucy and the boatman. They asked a lot of questions about why Emma had not come with me, and I told them over and over it was because of the baby. I told them how the Pratts looked after her like their own child and how she slept in their room. It was one thing for me to slip out undetected and get to the boat. But a two-year-old? Who was sleeping in the same room with our captors?
I had thought about killing them. I did not say this to Dr. Winter or Agent Strauss. I had thought about how I could kill one without waking the other. I did not have a gun. It seemed like the simple thing—if you set aside the fact that killing is a sin. Just go in at night and kill them in their sleep. Take the baby and leave. Burn the house down. What would the boatman do then? Would he make us stay on that island? I did not make a plan to do this. But it is only natural when you are imprisoned to think about how to escape, and killing them was an obvious way to do that. It was more difficult than you might think. Without a gun, there was a risk of killing just one, and they were both equally capable of killing me right back.
I had to cut myself off then, as they pressed for details about these two people I had lived with for three years. I could detect their concerns about Emma from the questions they were asking me. There could be no ambiguity about my imprisonment there, no wondering whether or not there should be a furious search for my sister. And yet, I had not been in a cage or locked in a room. I had not been chained to a radiator or bound in any way. I sat with them at dinner every night. I let them teach me things. I smiled and laughed and talked about my observations, my childhood, my life as it was evolving. Anyone looking in from the outside would never know how desperate I was to leave after the confusion about what was happening cleared, or how many times I thought about leaving after that and about doing terrible things to make that possible. What they would see would be two kind people taking care of me, loving me, believing in what they were doing. They would see what they wanted to see, like that woman from the court. Even like my father.
People could be stupid and not believe the truth.
Agent Strauss was a good man. He was old like my father and he wore a gold wedding ring. He was not very tall, but he seemed strong because his shoulders were broad and he had a thick gray beard that started to show by the early afternoon.
Something about that, about all of him made me think of him as strong and manly. I did not know anything about him that could justify my holding this opinion about him also being a good man. But I just knew. It was in his eyes and the expression his face held when he watched Dr. Winter speak. And it was in the concern he held for me and for finding Emma even when some of the other agents seemed skeptical. I decided I would like Agent Strauss.
He returned with Dr. Winter two hours and thirty-nine minutes later. The sketch artist was not available until the following morning, which seemed very strange to me, and which again raised alarms inside my head that the search for Emma was not going to be given top priority. We agreed I would see a doctor in the morning and let Dr. Winter conduct a psychological exam. Thi
s would satisfy my mother. She said I didn’t seem right in my head. I heard her say it to Mr. Martin when he finally came back upstairs. And I’m sure she said it to anyone else who would listen. She had stopped crying and started making the calls to friends and relatives, and the publicist she had used three years ago. The shock of my return was transforming into her new reality.
The focus when they came back in was on my final escape. They wanted every detail because, as Agent Strauss said, there could be something in the details that I didn’t even realize was important. I doubted that was true because I had given so much thought to them.
“Just tell us from start to finish,” he said.
So I did.
“The boatman, Rick, waited for me on the west side of the island, not on the dock. The west side was all rocks, like huge slabs of gray rock, not stones, and they just disappeared into the waves. In high tide, you couldn’t really see the rocks at all. The water came and crashed right up to the tree line. But in low tide, you could walk a long way out on the rocks. Bill liked to walk out there and fish. He would wear high rubber boots and take nothing with him but a box of fishing stuff, a rod and a six-pack of beer. They were cans of beer. They had blue writing on them. Is that helpful?… One time I followed him. This was before Emma had her baby. It was when I still looked at Bill and Lucy like they were good people who loved us.
“I started to walk on the rocks to catch up to him. I had this stupid idea that he would teach me how to fish and that we would be, I don’t know, maybe like father and daughter because I was missing my father so much. I remember wanting that so badly as I walked on the rocks, you know, like that feeling when you get an idea to do something that might make someone love you? I used to get that same feeling when we made Mother’s Day cards in school and I would always write on mine ‘Number One Mom!’ or ‘Best Mom in the World’ and I would get that feeling, thinking that it might make you happy, Mom … do you remember?”