Anna spent a few seconds studying the face of her former boyfriend. Then, in slow, evenly paced words, she said, “I did not. In my opinion, Delores Walker is a typical, rebellious teenager. She’s a daughter upset with a father who isn’t giving her the freedoms she believes she is entitled to. I believe Delores is too young to understand the importance and permanence of what is happening in this courtroom. I believe Delores doesn’t know the danger she has put her father in. I believe Delores will come to regret everything she has said about her father. I believe Delores Walker is lying.”
Anna Martens’ final words caused a mini uproar in the courtroom, particularly from the team of lawyers on the prosecutorial side of the room. While everyone was busy yelling at everyone else, I watched the faces of Anna and Scott. Hers, sympathetic; his, heart-wrenchingly sad, and earnestly grateful.
I could feel Jenn trembling next to me. Both of us could feel the same thing: the tide had begun to turn. The problem all along had been the amount of circumstantial evidence being packaged into a cannonball meant to blast Scott Walker into jail for a very long time. Everything the prosecution had presented before resting their case had been persuasive. But where was the irrefutable proof?
When it was revealed that Mikki had been in the Walker house the day she disappeared, that, for me, was the final nail in Scott Walker’s coffin. Until then, we had all believed that Mikki had left school and was walking home alone when she’d been taken. Normally she would have been with Delores, but she’d stayed home sick that day. In court, Delores revealed that Mikki had stopped at the Walker house to bring her homework. Walker, who worked in construction, had stayed home that day to care for his daughter.
The revelation was meant to be damning, but the defense team had done a respectable job of rendering it almost benign. Delores admitted that she never saw Mikki and her father interact during the time Mikki was in the house, and that it was possible he hadn’t even been aware of her presence. The prosecution accepted the admission with little resistance, instead biding their time before delivering the second and more powerful half of what was meant to be a devastating one-two punch.
Chapter 26
“He raped a girl.”
Asmae didn’t understand. As far as she knew, I could have been whispering sweet nothings into her ear, sharing a recipe for crumb cake, or telling her my life story. As always, though, she listened intently, as if to pay respect to my words and communicate her hopeless, yet nonetheless sincere, desire to comprehend.
The first few times we lay together atop the pedestal in my rectangle, nothing happened. She’d slip into the spot next to me as if she’d always been there, and together we’d stare at the star-spangled sky without saying a word. It was as if we’d effortlessly shifted from one level of a predetermined recovery program to the next. She wouldn’t stay long—twenty or thirty minutes at most. Only when it would have become mentally intolerable and physically impossible for me to continue down our chaste path would she leave.
Until the night she didn’t.
Instead of moving away, she moved into me. I almost burst into tears at the invitation, my body so desperately yearning for intimacy that it ached. Lying against me as she was, her back to my front, our eyes did not meet, but the message was clear. I buried my face in her neck. Her hair smelled spicy, her smooth skin sweet and warm in the dying hours of a sweltering day. I could tell, by the puffing out of her cheeks, that she was smiling. Jenn might have let out a teasing laugh; Asmae never would.
Her clothes fell away as if they’d been nothing more than a temporary covering for a body meant to be naked. I ran my hands over every inch of the freshly exposed skin—first her arms and thighs, belly and back, and then moving, tentatively, to explore more intimate areas.
Still in our spooning position, I somehow managed to pull off my shirt, and then my pants. When I was undressed, I was surprised when she pushed against me with a fierce resolve, short, quick breaths escaping her scarlet-tinged lips. Unable to stand it any longer, I maneuvered her body until we were face to face, chest to chest, our skin glistening and wet, aglow in the moonlight. A battle of emotions raged in her deep, brown eyes: uncertainty, lust, fear, desire. She murmured something in her strange tongue—to me, forevermore, the language of love.
Only a careless man, an insensitive man, relies solely on the verbal tells of the woman he is with. Even in a debate of which kind of “no” means “no” and which means “yes,” nonverbal cues always provide the most vital information. Asmae and I didn’t need to understand each other’s words to understand each other. As almost any man in my circumstance would be, I was nearly overcome with desire to enter Asmae as quickly as possible. The language of her body, her eyes, her breathing, however, told me to wait, to tease, to make an attempt and then withdraw. The more I did this, the more I fueled her willingness and wantonness. Her body grew slick with sweat, allowing my hands to glide easily across it as I caressed—at first gently, then insistently, and then gently once more.
When she was ready, I knew it.
Every day after that one, she came to me and we made love. Afterwards, we’d talk. Both of us. We’d tell stories the other could never understand. Perhaps that was why they were so easily told. Secrets shared that would never be betrayed.
“He said it happened when both he and the girl were eighteen,” I continued my tale of Scott Walker’s past. “With his girlfriend. He claimed she accused him of rape because he broke up with her—a spurned teenager’s revenge. He was charged, but never convicted.”
I stopped there to let her take a turn. Although I was beginning to recognize the sound of certain words she used regularly, none of them meant anything to me. Still, as she spoke, I listened with patience, and wondered if she was sharing the same kind of confidences and admissions with me as I was with her. I stored the mysterious tales in a hidden pocket deep within my brain, for a day in the future when I might retrieve them, to be translated by a much wiser me.
Ultimately, Scott Walker went free. I got the feeling—undoubtedly the wishful thinking of a grieving father—that the jury really did want to find him guilty. But they’d taken their responsibility seriously. They found themselves unable to convict beyond a reasonable doubt on the evidence provided to them. Soon after, Walker and his daughter left our neighborhood—left Boston—for who knows where, never to be heard from again. Just like Mikki.
The generous, rational side of me hoped, for Delores’ sake, that the man Anna Martens described in the courtroom was the real Scott Walker. That, as Delores grew and matured, she would become sorry for how she had almost destroyed her father’s life with a lie. That Scott continued to be a good father and protect his daughter from harm.
The other side of me—the inconsolable father with a hole so big in his heart that it shouldn’t have been beating—wanted to hunt Scott Walker down, torture him until he admitted what he’d done and where to find our daughter, and then see him rot in jail for the rest of his life.
I don’t make these comments lightly. I am not a violent man—nor a vengeful one. I’ve never had fantasies of ramming my car into the guy who cut me off in traffic, or beating up a former classmate who bullied me in school. I like peace. I respect the rule of law. But then again, I’d never imagined a world where I would be a father who had lost his child. In the blink of an eye. Here today, gone tomorrow. No explanation, aside from a couple of sick ransom notes that really told us nothing. If, by the cruel quirk of some miserable fate, my child had to leave my life, even one last torturous goodbye would have been immeasurably better than this hell. Or so I imagined.
“Who are you?” I asked the woman in my arms one night: a woman who’d gone from stranger to caregiver to lover.
Asmae looked at me, her eyes quizzical. She knew I was asking her something. What she didn’t know was that she had made a grave mistake.
By making me strong again, Asmae had awakened in me the desire, the pull, the insatiable need, to return to my old li
fe—ruined as it was. Now that I was able, now that an opportunity had presented itself when for so long I’d believed there to be none, the question I kept asking myself was: What am I willing to do to regain my freedom?
Was I willing to risk my life? I had no idea what was outside the cement walls of my rectangle. It might be some kind of insurmountable physical barrier, or a line of armed guards ready to mow me down if I so much as stuck a toe outside the door.
If the answer was yes, an even more difficult question arose: was I willing to commit an act of barbarism to have that chance?
It was clear that Asmae was my way out of the rectangle. My only way. What was unclear was whether she would help me or hinder me. What if she was disinclined to let me go? What would I do? What could I do?
I gazed down at her kind, caring face, watching flickering bursts of starlight dance merrily in her eyes. Languidly, I ran a finger across her cheek, something I knew she drew pleasure from. Then, in an act of pitiful cowardice, I leaned down and kissed her. Did she—this sweet, benevolent, angel—know that the silent language of lovers can easily camouflage brutal betrayal...and an irony so horrible that I could barely admit it in my own mind?
Did she know that, by the act of saving my life, she had risked her own?
Chapter 27
“Will you leave me?”
It was all over. Everything. The trial. Our time as Mikki’s parents. Our marriage?
Any couples counsellor will tell you that the key to a strong relationship is communication. Sometimes that’s bullshit.
Particularly throughout the trial, talking to each other—rehashing, arguing, pointing fingers, building suspicions, tearing them down, second guessing—would have destroyed us. As it was, we had more than enough communication coming at us from other sources: lawyers, friends, family, workmates, neighbors, media, media, media. The quiet world we shared when we were finally home alone at night was a refuge, a silent bubble where we could convalesce.
It wasn’t as if we were completely ignoring each other. We spoke enough to make life happen. “What do you want for dinner?” “Red or white?” “I’ll pick up the dry-cleaning.” “You shower first.” We weren’t sexually intimate, but we sat next to each other on the couch when we watched TV, we slept in the same bed, we walked into court hand in hand. Ironically, we were probably kinder to each other the deeper we got into the house of horrors. We’d do small things for each other, like holding open a car door, fetching the other one a sweater if it was chilly, preparing a favorite dessert after a particularly brutal day, running interference with phone calls from well-meaning but nosy relatives.
Somehow, we made it through.
Then, when it was finished, a new struggle began.
The respite of silence was over.
“Do you want me to leave?” I replied to Jenn’s question.
We were together in our living room—we used to call it the family room. Jenn was on the couch, laptop on thigh, glass of wine at the ready. I was in the adjoining chair, attempting to read a book—the same one I had been trying to read for six months but had never made it past the first chapter. It was Friday night; another weekend loomed. They were the worst. Without the structure of a workday, endless hours yawned before us like a chasm. Inevitably, Jenn would head into the office anyway, and I’d sit in front of my computer accomplishing nothing.
“God, no, Jaspar. I love you. I’m just afraid that after all of this, after…what I did…that you don’t love me anymore.”
As usual, we’d allowed the room to grow much too dim as afternoon slid into evening, the only light coming from a fish tank—home to Mikki’s favorite pet goldfish, who seemed intent on outliving all of us. Normally I’d get up and switch on a few lamps, but not this time. This time I preferred the indistinct, blurred figures we’d become. For this conversation, low visibility was preferable.
“I love you, Jenn,” I told her with certainty. “I’m just not sure how to forgive you.”
Her breath caught. A lone tear, reflecting the fish tank’s somber light, slid down her gaunt face like a silver bullet. “I know,” she whispered.
“It’s just going to take some time, you know? If I could pull myself away from the emotions of it, if I could pretend I’m the writer and you’re my heroine, I can almost figure it out, draw you as an empathetic character. But sitting here, as your husband, as Mikki’s dad, I just can’t. Not yet. You have to understand that.”
A single nod. “I do.”
“But if we can get past this somehow, Jenn, if I can get past it, there’s nothing I want more than to get back to us.”
“Jaspar,” her tone was contrite, her voice a raspy wisp, “I don’t think that can ever happen. There is no us anymore. What we were—you, me, Mikki—it’s gone, dead, there’s no going back. And we can’t go back to the two of us before Mikki. We have to figure out if we can be the two of us after her. That’s going to be really hard to do.”
She was right. That was going to be fucking hard to do. Maybe impossible.
In the end, it was easier to pretend to stay together than to actually pull apart.
A month later, I was packing for Morocco.
Chapter 28
After what one or both must have decided was a respectful period of time following the trial, my agent and publisher invited me to an expensive downtown lunch under the guise of “just wanting to know how you and Jenn are doing.” In reality, it was a pitch meeting. They were impatient for me to deliver a follow-up to In The Middle. I was being encouraged to “put my pain on paper.” Aside from my agent and publisher being shit-eating, money-grubbing, insensitive assholes, it wasn’t such a bad idea.
I couldn’t blame them for bringing it up. Their jobs were to advise me, to look after my best interests, to make me money so that they could make money. I balked at the idea and told them to forget it. I lied and promised I was working on something else that was going to blow their socks off. I went home and began writing the story they wanted.
Almost immediately, I knew it wasn’t going to work. There were too many gaping holes. Mikki was never found; the man we believed kidnapped her had escaped prosecution and left town; our lives were in shambles; the end. I’m not a writer who necessarily believes every story has to have a happy ending, but this one had no ending. It was an impossible book to write.
In the end, I concluded that I would simply do what I had promised to do: I’d write something that was going to blow everyone’s socks off.
Suddenly I was the Amazing Fucking Kreskin. Once again, a very clear message came to me. I could not do it.
I finally had to admit it: I’d lost it. I’d lost the passion to write. Words flowed, but when I read them back, I was stunned to find them less than mediocre, exceedingly melodramatic, and ultimately good for only one thing: a shredder. A generous reviewer had once cleverly anointed me the Rumpelstiltskin of literature, claiming my prose to be “as captivating and alluring as spun gold.” But now, every word I wrote immediately tarnished like tacky brass.
I needed inspiration. I needed escape—from Boston, from my life, and although I’d never say the words out loud, from Jenn. In the past, travel had always proven itself a reliable antidote for whatever ailed me, and ultimately drove me to excel. I began to research possibilities—privately at first. When I was ready, I brought the idea up with Jenn. Before I knew it, tickets were booked, bags were packed, and I was gone. Then, in a quirk of fate, so was my life. Everyone outside of the rectangle believed I was dead.
Only one person knew the truth. Asmae.
On the day of my great escape, I waited patiently for her. Unlike countless times before—when I’d hover by the door anticipating her arrival like a lovesick puppy, anxious for her company—I was now a predator, and she my unsuspecting prey. I planned as best I could. I’d been stockpiling non-perishable foodstuffs, a few days’ supply of bread, and a canteen of water. I’d packed my meagre collection of personal belongings—toothbrush, soap—and a
treasured souvenir: a chip off the stone pedestal on top of which I’d spent countless hours with Mikki, and then Asmae.
For several days I argued with myself about whether to make my big move during her morning visit or evening. Evening offered the protection of darkness as I made my getaway. If there were guards watching the rectangle, they were less likely to be vigilant late at night.
A morning escape had the potential advantage of giving me a greater head start. A young Berber woman living in the Atlas Mountains likely lived with family—maybe even a husband—or friends who looked after her wellbeing. If Asmae was to disappear, the alarm would be raised—but not until her routine was broken. Since she’d been staying with me, sometimes far into the night, to make love, anyone Asmae had in her life was used to her evening absences.
I could reasonably assume that Asmae’s accepted daily schedule typically kept her from home until late. It wouldn’t be until she failed to come home to sleep that someone would eventually notice.
I had no idea who Asmae really was. Although we’d become intimate and I’d grown fond of her, without the benefit of exchanging words we could only get so far in getting to know one another. For all I knew, Asmae could be Mrs. Hun, in on the whole thing. I hadn’t seen either Hun since they’d dropped me off here. But that didn’t mean they weren’t out there somewhere, still pulling the strings that ran my life and ensured my imprisonment.
On the other hand, Asmae could be an innocent village girl who had inadvertently discovered me abandoned in my rectangle prison and decided to save me.
The truth was something I’d likely never know.
Like pretty much every one before it, the day I chose to liberate myself was stiflingly hot, the sky searing blue, the air as still as pond water. The sole access point into or out of the rectangle was the door through which Asmae arrived and departed. It locked on the outside. The only time the door was left unlocked was when Asmae was with me. During one of our first sexual encounters, I’d found the key hidden in a pocket, deep in the folds of her colorful kaftan, and stored the information away for later use.
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