“Why did you lie?”
“Will you give back the money you earned from book sales?”
“Do you still dream about Asmae?”
“Was Kwella your lover?”
“Do you feel guilty for lying to your fans?”
“Jenn! Are you relieved Jaspar’s affair was a fake?”
Mercifully, a security guard, as surprised by the onslaught as we were, helped shield us as we struggled to reach our car. Through it all, Jenn squeezed my hand with fierce determination, like she’d never let go. I returned the favor. In the crazy, noisy mess that our lives had suddenly become—again—this was our only way to communicate, to say: no matter what, I am here for you.
As soon as we were in the car, I locked the doors. Simultaneously, we exhaled. It felt as if we’d been holding our breaths forever. Talking was still impossible. Reporters were falling on the car like a horde of locusts. I reached for the iPod connected to the car’s stereo system, found a Joni Mitchell song, hit repeat, and blasted it. My brain was a jumble of emotions as I kept asking myself: “What the fuck just happened?” I relied on muscle memory to shift the car into drive and get us the hell out of there.
For the entire ride home, even after there was nothing left of the jilted reporters but bad memories in our wake, we spoke not a single word. Instead, we listened to Joni telling us “…we are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden…” We stared straight ahead, the power or our eyes fastened to the road the only thing keeping the vehicle from veering out of control.
Pulling into our empty driveway, we were relieved to see that our sudden infamy had not beaten us there. We rushed to get inside, knowing the peace wouldn’t keep.
Without consulting one another, we instinctively knew what to do next. We set off on our tasks like well-trained robots. We extinguished all exterior and interior lights, lowered blinds, closed curtains, powered down phones. While I searched for candles, Jenn retrieved spoons, napkins, and two pints of ice cream: Vanilla for her and Rocky Road (how fitting) for me. In pitch dark, we headed upstairs in search of sanctuary.
It was only when we were seated, cross-legged atop our bed, facing one another, surrounded by a nest of thick blankets and pillows, three spoonfuls into our ice cream, that we first spoke.
“Why?” Jenn repeated the same question she’d asked what seemed like eons ago, in that stiflingly claustrophobic, aggressively lit, scorching hot TV studio in the city. “Why did you do it?”
I’d never loved this woman more. After all the world had thrown at us, after all we’d put each other through, after what we’d just experienced at the hands of our supposed friend on live television, with Katie basically telling millions of viewers what a horrible person I was, how I’d lied to them, and betrayed Jenn in countless ways…after all of that, this woman, my wife, was sitting across from me, knees touching, ice cream in hand, asking me “why?” with nothing but compassion written across her beautiful face.
I set aside my ice cream. Who cared if it melted and turned to goop? I wanted Jenn to know she had my full attention as I laid bare my truth. Yet even as I did, even as I prepared to come clean to my wife about what I’d done, I wasn’t one hundred percent certain I understood the reasons myself.
Not until the instant I realized Katie knew the truth, and was about to reveal it to the world, had I allowed myself more than a moment of conscious thought about it. I knew I’d done it. I knew it was wrong. I knew I’d gotten myself in too deep to ever dig myself out. I knew that I wasn’t absolutely sure I even wanted to.
Never in my life had I felt so comfortable in a lie. Which is a huge thing for me. As a writer. As a father and husband. As a person. I’d never been good with lying. I rarely found reason or rationalization to use one. And when I did, I was lousy at it, and gave it up pretty much before it was out of my mouth. But not this time. This time, it felt…right. Like it wasn’t really a lie at all, but something much, much different. Someone better versed in human psyche than I would have to explain to me exactly what that something might be.
“You and me, Jenn,” I tentatively began, “we’re in a unique position. Only we know what we’ve been through since Mikki was taken. I know people sympathize with us: parents, friends, complete strangers too. But they don’t really know how this feels. Only you do. And I do.”
“I know that, Jaspar, I do,” she said with tenderness. “But what does that have to do with any of this?”
“Even with our common bond, even as parents, as two people who have loved each other for a long time, even with all of that, you’re you and I’m me. We’re different people. We can’t help but deal with all of this in our own way.”
As she listened to me, Jenn’s hand had frozen on its way to deliver a lump of Vanilla. Now she lowered it, carefully, but unable to avoid creamy splats landing on the blanket. I pulled the spoon and container away from her. I placed them next to mine, leaving us both free to act and react without the encumbrance of messy props. I dabbed up the drips of vanilla with a napkin, grateful for a respite from having to keep talking. Then it was over.
“In Marrakech…no, before Marrakech, long before Marrakech, ever since Mikki…Jenn, I was so fucking lost. So fucking sad. I hated waking up every day because I was sure something else horrible was going to happen. That was our life. Waiting for horrible shit to happen. And I knew it was my fault. I knew I’d done something wrong. I’d made a mistake I could never fix.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Mikki. The only job I ever had that meant anything to me, was to be Mikki’s father. Do you remember how panicky we were when we first realized that she was coming? That we were going to have to take care of a real, live, human baby? Remember how we read all those books, hoping they’d tell us step-by-step how to do it? But none of them helped. So we asked people’s advice. They all said the same thing: don’t worry about it, you’ll know what to do when it happens. And then we finally had her. She was so tiny, so helpless, so frail-looking. I was afraid to hold her. And everyone said the same thing: don’t worry about it, you’re not going to break her.
“They were wrong, Jenn. There was plenty to worry about. I thought I knew what I was doing with her, but I didn’t. I did break her, Jenn. I broke Mikki. I let her down. I allowed someone to take her from us.”
I felt Jenn’s hand land on my knee. “Jaspar, you can’t do this. We’ve talked about this. It wasn’t your fault. Or mine. It happened. It’s the most terrible thing in the world. But it wasn’t our fault.”
My head nodded a slow lie. “I can tell you I agree with the words coming out of your mouth all night long, but I don’t believe them. At the end of the day, Jenn, we’re two parents without a child. Nothing is right about that. If you’re a parent, you should have a child. If you don’t, then, what are you? There isn’t even a word for it. At least when you lose a parent, you become an orphan. If you lose a spouse, you become a divorcée or a widow. But we…we’re nothing.
“I couldn’t stand it. I felt so horrible. I literally thought I might explode. So when what happened to me in Marrakech happened, do you know the first thing I thought?”
“What?” She sounded afraid to ask.
“I thought: good. Take me. Beat me. Kill me. Punish me.”
Tears popped out of Jenn’s eyes so suddenly it was almost cartoonish. “God, no, Jaspar,” she pleaded, “don’t say that.”
“And then the assholes didn’t kill me!” My rage reverberated through the room like an earthquake’s tremor.
Jenn readjusted to bring her body closer to mine. She wanted to comfort me, but all it did was give me a better view of the pain and grief living on her dampened face, having settled there long ago for—I feared—forever.
But there was no stopping now. I powered on like a locomotive fresh out of brakes. “There was a moment,” I shuddered, the memory disarmingly fresh and raw in my mind, “right after the van stopped and they pulled
me out, still blindfolded. I was certain: this is it, I’m going to die. I was ready. I wanted it. I was finally going to stop hurting all the time. But when it didn’t happen, when all I heard was the squeal of tires as they left me there on the side of the road, I think…I think that was the moment I finally broke.”
Jenn made snuffling noises, but said nothing. I kept on.
“I have no way of knowing if it’s true, but what I felt at that moment, it must be how people feel when they’ve leapt off of a building or taken pills, ready to end it all, then they wake up and realize they didn’t die. Somehow they’re still alive, and they hate it. They hate that they failed. All they can think about is how and when to try again.
“When I first met Kwella in the village and asked for her help, it wasn’t because I thought: hey, I’m going to pretend I’m dead, write a book about what I wished happened, then pop up alive and become Jaspar Wills, bestselling author, all over again. I didn’t tell anyone I was alive because I didn’t plan to stay that way much longer. I was going to stay with Kwella long enough to say my goodbyes through letters—to you, my parents, to Mikki for when you found her—then figure out how to end myself.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Jenn struggled to speak. She’d stopped trying to resist my story; even the tears had dried up. She was worn out, limp, with only enough strength left in her body to keep upright. But her eyes, ears, mind, and heart were open.
“So why didn’t I?” I shouted the accusation, the sudden intensity surprising neither of us. Then, quieter: “Why didn’t I kill myself? Instead I got better. Before I knew it, I started writing. But not the letters. I started writing this other thing, this other reality. One where I could be a father again. One where I could take care of my daughter, warn her of all the danger I knew was coming her way. I created Asmae in desperation, I think. I wanted to believe that even though we had no idea where Mikki was, who had taken her or what happened to her, there was a chance she was being cared for and looked after and even loved by someone as wonderful as Asmae.”
“I get it,” Jenn said very quietly.
“What?” I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. How could she “get it” when I barely could?
“Knowing the worst is better than knowing nothing,” she said, her voice growing in strength with every syllable. “They all say it. I’ve been reading these books, about people who’ve gone through what we did, losing a child. When parents know their child has died, or been killed, or whatever, of course it’s devastating. But at least they can deal with it, begin to heal. But it’s parents like us, the ones who don’t know what happened, who can’t move on. They can’t get past it. They can’t figure out how to live again. Without the truth, their imaginations take over. They come up with all kinds of possibilities. And it ruins them, Jaspar, the not knowing. It slowly destroys them.
“So I get it. In order to survive, we have to replace the not knowing with something else. So why not make it something good? It’s like all those people who suddenly come to believe in God when they’ve sunk to the lowest point in their lives.
“I suppose, in a way, it’s selfish,” she kept on. “Without knowing what really happened to Mikki, it makes me feel better to let myself believe that maybe, just maybe, it’s not something horrible. When I heard what happened to you, about the rectangle, the pedestal, the visits from Mikki, even everything about Asmae, I went there too. I wanted to believe that someone like Asmae might be with our child, watching out for her. If I didn’t, I don’t know how I could have made it through another day. So, yes, I get it, Jaspar. I get it.”
I reached over, my hands enveloping hers, surprised by how cold they were. Then, as couples sometimes do, we did each other a great kindness by telling a necessary lie, followed by an indisputable truth.
“Maybe there is someone like Asmae with her,” I said.
“Maybe there is,” she repeated, managing a feeble smile.
“Jenn?”
“Yeah?”
“I hate Katie.”
Her smile dissolved. “So do I.”
Chapter 46
The days and weeks that followed the Katie Edwards interview were unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Back when In The Middle first hit bestseller lists and movie screens, I was catapulted into a rarified stratosphere of literary stardom. Overnight, I was on everyone’s nightstand, e-Reader, and favorite talk show. The world knew who I was. Of course there were critics, mostly contrarians, who claimed to hate the book. But no one hated me. They did now.
Writers—especially writers who’ve been fortunate enough to experience even a taste of success—can find it difficult to grasp that not everyone is infatuated by every word they write. Going a step further is even harder. To realize that people hate you as a person—so much so that they call for boycotts of bookstores that sell your books, demonize you on social media, and egg your house—is about as devastating as it gets. It’s like having a statue erected in your honor, then pulled down, pulverized, and pissed on, all to the ravaging cheers of rejoicing detractors.
Jenn had an escape route all worked out. Whenever she went to work, she handily avoided media scrutiny by moving directly from our house, to her car in the garage, to the garage at work, to her office—all without having to step one foot outdoors. I, on the other hand, was a prisoner inside my own home.
On day three, I shut down my Twitter and Facebook accounts. On day four I stopped reading newspapers, watching TV, or listening to the radio. I only turned on my phone to make outgoing calls. Anything else was simply too damaging to my psyche. I was being painted a monster and—maybe worst of all—I wasn’t entirely convinced the description was inaccurate. I’d done something bad, inexcusable even. To me, my actions had been unconscious, unplanned, non-self-serving, delusional, foolish, perhaps bordering on insane. But in the mind of the public, what I’d done was evil, calculated, and narcissistic.
I needed to re-focus, to find a way to think about or do something else—anything else—or risk combustion. I concluded the best thing was to retreat to my comfort zone: writing.
If you’re reading this and haven’t spent the last few months living on a different planet, you already know how it all turned out. You know how my decision changed everything. How it rocked the world—certainly mine. How by saving one life, it ended another.
What I chose to do next might not have been the healthiest thing to do. But from the outset, it felt damn good. And the feeling only got better the farther along I went.
I think of myself as a good man. A responsible adult. A person who lives his life by a defined set of moral and ethical codes. I cannot—even for a second—recommend, celebrate, or defend what I did to Katie Edwards. But as a father, husband, and someone who values justice and rule-of-law by a fair, policed system of reward and punishment, I admit this one thing: revenge tastes good.
Chapter 47
In the beginning, the best thing about my plan was that it got me out of Dodge. The storied rise and fall of Jaspar Wills was sensational and scandalous, but not quite big enough news to rationalize reporters chasing me beyond city limits. Which was why, after a pleasurable night of tender lovemaking with my wife—who wholeheartedly supported me, if not my purpose—I found myself on a Greyhound bus, fisherman’s hat lowered over sunglasses, with a ten-day-old beard, rumbling cross country to Lake County, Indiana.
I hadn’t bothered to contact my agent or publisher about the idea. They were busy enough, pulling books from shelves, battling lawsuits and demands for refunds on previous sales of Set Free. Our relationship, if not yet adversarial, had grown awkward to say the least. With absolutely no proof or even mild indication there was anything to expose, to tell them I wanted to write an exposé on the woman who, in one fell swoop, had taken my life, shit-kicked it, and ripped it to shreds on national TV, seemed foolhardy and pointless. Besides, I was going to do it with or without their support.
With no rumors to investigate, mysteries to debunk, theories
to flesh out, and nothing but gut instinct propelling me, the only reasonable course of action was to start at the beginning. I was on my way to Katie Edwards’ hometown of Hobart, Indiana. The strategy was to begin there and dig my way back to Boston, barehanded, nails cracked and bleeding from the effort if necessary, until I found something—anything—to use to my advantage. I’d gotten a peek behind Katie’s bright and sparkly exterior, where lay menacing, dark shadow. I was going to prove to the world that the slick reporter with the upmarket-salon hair and chic designer suits—a woman they’d come to trust—was actually someone quite different.
My suppositions were weak, my purpose bordering on absurd. No agent, publisher, or editor would have a single sane reason to support my mission. So why undertake it? I knew what I was doing was irrational and most likely futile. But it fed me, fueled me, kept me alive. It kept me from contemplating worse alternatives for how to get away from a life that lay splattered on the ground around me.
Although I didn’t admit it to myself at the time, if at the end of this road I found nothing to write about, nothing to justify my vendetta against Katie Edwards, then at the very least time would have passed. I would have gotten through the first days, weeks, months of what had become the next worst part of my ruined life. I’d have survived a little longer. Maybe by then I could think of something better to do. Because right now, there was nothing—nothing—I could think of that I wanted to do more than this.
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