Dennis helped Anita with her coat and then, unexpectedly, kissed her on the cheek.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
She thought about it, and then replied truthfully, “I’m not.”
The silence chilled her. No melodic babble, no squeaks and beeps and silly voices from toys, no little feet banging across the floor. The house was lifeless. She kept the television on—tuned to the inoffensive chatter of the Weather Channel—just for voices to stir the air.
Dennis didn’t say much in the days after the funeral. Most of the time, he slept or fussed around the house with long-neglected projects like fixing the leaky toilet. At least he hadn’t returned to drinking, a fear that stayed at the back of her mind.
Eventually, Dennis returned to work. He seemed to find solace in the routine of his job, and it probably did him good. His absence made the presence of her parents all the more crucial. She couldn’t bear the thought of being left alone in the house.
Tim remained in every room, touching every object with memories. He was everywhere and nowhere.
Anita knew she could not find comfort, but hoped to coast on some kind of passive neutrality. She needed to relax her mind. One afternoon, for hours, she sat in a chair in the living room and simply stared at the aquarium. She hypnotized herself with the motion of the fish and the gurgle of the tank. As time passed, she noticed that one of the fish was missing. One of the clown fish. Tim loved the clown fish and had helped pick them out at the pet store.
That night, she asked Dennis about the missing fish, and he muttered that a clown fish had died.
Something snapped when she heard that. Anita broke down in sobs all over again. Certainly Dennis thought she was crazy, but no, she was just terribly, horribly fragile.
“It’s just a fish,” said Dennis.
“You don’t understand,” she responded, and they didn’t discuss it again. She avoided the fish tank. Just another object that stung her with pain.
Soon after, Anita’s father purchased several new fish for the aquarium. New life. Maybe it was meant to be some kind of a symbolic gesture. If so, it didn’t soothe her.
While the days were bad, the nights were worst. Every night was a reminder of The Night that her world fell apart. She frequently awoke with a start, thrown into immediate confusion and fear. Then she would stay awake in the dark, her mind sadistically wondering about his final minutes. Did he suffer? Was it quick? The cold water, the suffocating, the waves, the rocks—she couldn’t chase it out of her head.
Just as bad, however, were the good dreams where she interacted with Tim—and then woke up to rediscover his absence all over again. It caused her to relive the agony of feeling him slip away.
In the mornings, she felt relief when her parents joined her. Her parents provided a steady stream of dialogue—most of it trivial banter to distract and fill the silence. They hung around the house and helped out with cooking and housework. Often it was invaluable—like the time her mother tended to the basket of Tim’s dirty clothes that had remained in the basement ever since he disappeared.
“What are you going to do about his room?” her mother asked carefully one morning over sandwiches in the kitchen.
“I don’t want to change anything,” she replied. The clothes were still neatly folded in the drawers, his toys on shelves, and his pictures on the walls. “I want to keep it as it is. Like a museum or a memorial. I can’t just throw it all away…”
“Not throw it away, but pack it away,” her mother suggested. “Maybe it’s doing more harm than good.”
Anita knew that her mother had caught her crying in Tim’s room on several occasions, sobbing over a small sock or toy truck or book with chew marks.
“I’m just not ready yet,” said Anita.
“I understand.”
“Even though it makes me cry, sometimes the only thing I can do to hold myself together is to remember the good things. It brings him near to me. It’s better than just pushing the memories away, isn’t it?”
Earlier in the week, Anita had even gone to a nearby park, Tim’s favorite place, and soaked in the vivid images of prior visits. She could see his looks of glee as he scrambled on and around the equipment, pausing frequently to seek her out, and beaming when he caught sight of her.
“Have you called the counselor yet?” her mother asked.
The grief counselor recommended by Lieutenant Calcina. The card was still on the dining room table, jumbled with unread mail. “No.”
“It’s worth a try. You know, I’ve been reading about traumatic stress disorder…”
“Mom, I’m okay. I’m not a mental patient.”
“Of course not, but there is help available that goes above and beyond what your father and I can—”
“If it means that much to you, I’ll go,” said Anita. “I’ll call. But if I don’t like it, I’m not going back.”
Anita set up an appointment for the following Tuesday, which turned out to be perfect timing. She had been avoiding the newspapers, but on Tuesday she caught a glimpse of the Oakland Times that her father had brought into the house.
Anita had thought that the media would stop after the funeral, but no, they were still milking it. Today there was a feature on “Can you trust your nanny?” with a sidebar “Signs to watch for,” as if killer nannies were an epidemic. It caught her so off guard, she went to the kitchen sink and threw up.
The media coverage had been sensationalistic ever since Tim disappeared, but she kept thinking it would come to a halt when there was nothing new to report. She and Dennis had granted only a few interviews after the discovery of Pam’s body, and Anita had regretted them. She either broke down in tears or appeared too robotic in an effort to avoid breaking down. Spreading her grief across everyone’s television screen for the nightly news was just another horrible layer of angst that she didn’t need right now.
The press continually displayed a lack of tact, like the time a photographer camped out on the front lawn waiting for them to come out the front door to acknowledge the garish heaps of sympathy that total strangers had dumped on their doorstep: cards, flowers, toys and balloons, as if there was a birthday party inside. Worse yet, people were leaving teddy bears similar to the one discovered in the ocean. Sure, it was well meaning, but it was creepy beyond belief. And now a photographer wanted them framed in a shot with all this junk. Dennis had gone out through the back door and circled around to the photographer, threatening to smash his camera. The photographer scampered away, promising, “I’ll be back. The sidewalk is public property.”
The media became her first topic of conversation with the counselor, Dr. Andrew. She had barely sat down in his office when she began to rant. “I’m going through the worst, most horrible thing anyone can imagine, and I can’t suffer in peace. It has to be in the newspapers and on TV and in People for the whole world to stare at, like my misery is some kind of entertainment or freak show. I feel like I’m in a cage at the zoo.”
Before long, her sessions with Dr. Andrew became the only thing she looked forward to. They actually made her feel good. And it wasn’t anything he said, really. It was her own words.
She realized that with Dennis, with her parents, with Maggie, with all of them, she was censored, she was behaving the way she was expected to behave, playing a role. But with Dr. Andrew—in his sterile office, with the door closed, staring into his dull, fat face—she could unleash. Everything spilled out. Her rage, her sorrow, her incomplete thoughts, her confusion.
She upped the visits to three times a week. Dennis groaned at the expense, but she begged him to let her do it.
She spent hours and hours with Dr. Andrew, often addressing one simple question:
Why?
Over and over, she tried to fathom what was going on in Pam’s head. What would cause a woman to love a child so much that she would steal him from his family and then kill him—and herself?
Dr. Andrew talked about how an emotionally vulnerable pe
rson could be driven to irrational acts by intense rage or sorrow. They talked about much publicized cases where a loving parent—in the throes of a divorce—murders the children, much to the disbelief of everyone who knew the family.
“It’s my belief that when Pam took off with Tim, it was an impulsive action, without much planning or forethought,” said Dr. Andrew. “And then, eventually, the sun comes up, things become clearer and it dawns on her that she can never carry off such a crime. She reaches a dead-end. She realizes that the police will catch up with her and take Tim back to his parents and put her away in jail. The only solution, in her mind, is to jump. She takes Tim with her. It’s the only action left. The only option to keep from losing him.”
Understanding Pam’s psychosis did not erase Anita’s escalating feelings of rage toward her. And Pam’s death did not satisfy her as punishment. Instead, it felt like Pam’s escape.
Anita scrubbed every remnant of Pam from her house. She destroyed every photo, every document relating to her employment, and everything Pam had ever given to Tim.
Still, it didn’t make her feel better. Sometimes, it only heightened the intensity of her anger.
One afternoon, after her parents had returned home to Nevada, Anita saw Roy at the local pharmacy. She was filling a small basket with various medicines to relieve the punishing effects of stress on her head and stomach. Roy was dressed sloppily and flipping through a sports magazine. There was something so casual, so unaffected about his appearance that she couldn’t stop staring. She felt her veins fill with anger. Involuntarily, she stepped toward him.
Roy glanced up. Their eyes met for a moment. Then he quickly returned his attention to the magazine. Wordlessly. As if she was a stranger. Or a phantom. A nothing.
That set her off.
Anita lost control, screaming at him. It could have been gibberish, she didn’t care, as long as he got the full blast of her fury. In front of the whole store, she hollered in his face, at his ugly crooked nose, as if he was the guilty one.
He absorbed the profanity silently—to a point—and then his face turned deep red. He threw down the magazine and rushed toward her.
Oh my God, he’s going to kill me, thought Anita.
Roy grabbed Anita by the wrists and shoved her backward, into a shelf, spilling items to the floor.
He was yelling, his eyes ablaze, staring into her so hard that she thought her head would explode.
“You think it doesn’t hurt me?” he screamed. “You think I don’t care? I lost my sister. I lost my sister and my entire family is ruined by what happened. This is a lot bigger than just what happened to you.”
He let go of her, tossing her arms away. Her wrists hurt. Her back hurt from hitting the shelf.
She watched him storm off, past the silent store manager, out of the aisle, gone from sight.
Anita started shaking uncontrollably. Her basket of medicine was on the floor.
“Are you…OK?” asked the store manager, and she could see that he was probably twenty-five years old, tops. And terrified.
“Yes,” she nodded. She started to cry. She stood there for a few minutes, wanted to make sure Roy was long gone, and then she left the store, the basket remaining on the floor.
She nearly hit a pedestrian on the drive home, her mind was racing off in so many different directions. Her heart was pounding out of her chest, her breathing so rapid that she was gagging.
At home, she stripped out of her clothes and climbed into bed, head throbbing. Like a little girl, she wanted to go under the sheets for protection.
She couldn’t sleep, so she simply held herself, waiting for Dennis to get home so she could tell him about the encounter with Roy. What would Dennis do? Go beat him up? She probably deserved the response Roy gave her. What did Roy ever do wrong? Other than grow up with a piece of trash sister.
Anita waited and waited. Dennis didn’t come home on time. And he didn’t call. Something was not right. Then again, the world was no longer right.
It was after nine o’clock when Dennis entered the house and climbed the stairs. When he entered the bedroom, she knew immediately. It felt like a punch in the face.
For the first time in years, Dennis was stinking drunk.
VIII
“You do everything you can to protect your child,” said Anita, staring into the blackness of her coffee. “You babyproof the house. You cover the electric sockets, you tie up the cords to the blinds. You take away toys that could make them choke. You put up fences at the top of the stairs. You spend all night listening to them through the baby monitor. You check on them when they make a noise, you check when they don’t make a noise. You keep them out of the street. But you never think to protect them from the nanny. The nanny is supposed to protect them.”
She sat with Maggie in a coffeehouse on College Avenue. After repeated tries, Maggie had successfully lured her out of the house. For many weeks, Anita resisted social interaction. Her answering machine recorded a lot of sympathy, but she just couldn’t call anyone back. After a while, every message sounded the same, offerings of food or conversation “if you just want to talk.”
She didn’t just want to talk. She hoped no one would take offense. But they really didn’t want to enter her world. It would drag down their day, and it wouldn’t improve hers.
Maggie’s legendary pushiness, however, finally broke through. “C’mon, I know you’re there!” she would announce when the machine kicked in. “If you don’t pick up, I’m going to come over. I’ll bring meatloaf!”
The humor helped. Mainly because no one else dared with wisecracks.
And sitting here now with Maggie in downtown Rockridge wasn’t nearly as frightful or painful as she expected. No one stared, although sunglasses and a baseball cap helped. The coffee was doing a nice job of propping her awake, countering the steady diet of sleeping pills that got her through the night. The caffeine didn’t infuse her with energy by any means. But it did bring her to a pleasing, floating state of neutrality.
“You never could have anticipated this,” said Maggie gently. “She didn’t have a criminal record. No history of mental illness. There’s no nanny agency in the world that would have caught it. The bitch just snapped.”
“I know. But I still feel responsible in so many ways. I’m the one who hired her. I’m the one who brought a stranger into my house. She really didn’t have many references. And I always thought she was a little odd. Shouldn’t that have been a warning sign? She was so awkward around me and Dennis…and obsessed with Tim. You could see it in her eyes. If only—”
“If only if only!” retorted Maggie. “You can write a whole book of if onlys. The simple fact of the matter is none of this was your fault.”
She was practically shouting now, and Anita didn’t want the attention, so she nodded and waved a hand at Maggie to lower her voice.
Anita spared Maggie her biggest if only: If only I hadn’t chosen to return to work.
That was the one that haunted her the most. If only I had chosen my child over my career.
Instead, Anita murmured, “Peas.”
Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“It’s all because of peas.”
Maggie nodded with a smirk that said yes, go on.
“No, really,” said Anita, and this was actually something she had thought about a few hundred times. “When I ran into Barbara Roeber at the grocery store, I was looking for frozen peas. If I had picked up the peas earlier, or later, or not bought peas at all, it’s very possible I wouldn’t have run into her and asked about her nanny. The store was crowded, I had Tim, I was trying to hurry. If Barbara wasn’t in that aisle at the exact same time that I was, none of this would have happened. I probably would have started with the nanny agency, found someone decent, and never had a reason to contact her. It was peas. It was the goddamned peas. And I don’t even like peas that much. They were on sale.”
Maggie gave her a no-holds-barred “you’re crazy” look
.
“Let me tell you something,” Maggie said. “Whether we like it or not, life is a game of inches. A little movement one way or another, and the whole ballgame changes. There’s no way we can control it. You bump into Barbara at the grocery store and a whole chain of events unfolds. That’s the way it is every second of your life, you just never think about it. You wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the chance encounter between your parents, and then their parents and their parents…an inch here, an inch there, and the whole world is different. There’s no script to follow. We’re at the mercy of random chaos.”
Anita almost laughed. “Since when did you get so philosophical?”
Maggie flicked away crumbs from the muffin she had finished an hour ago. “When I was seven years old, living in L.A., my parents took me to a dollhouse museum. We parked, it was across the road, and I was so excited, I pulled away from my father. I just broke free. And I ran straight into the path of a car. It was a big red Cadillac and it was going really fast. It would have creamed me, Anita. That car missed me by maybe two inches. I could feel it go past, the breeze, the exhaust, I could practically taste the chrome on the bumper. Two inches closer, two seconds earlier, and there would be no more Maggie Marks.”
An uncharacteristic look of vulnerability crossed her face. “Growing up, I used to obsess on that. For years, if I thought about it at night, I couldn’t sleep. Then you realize that you can’t obsess. It’ll paralyze you. Because every day brings more moments like that. Most of them aren’t life and death. But everything is a game of inches. Even now, your decision to come out. Maybe it’s the nudge that puts you on the path to recovery.”
“God, I hope so,” said Anita. Maggie, bless her, was making her feel better. “I need something in front of me; all I can do is look back on what’s happened. I don’t see a future.”
Maggie looked for Anita’s eyes behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses.
“Come back to work,” she said.
Anita looked away.
“It’ll cleanse your mind,” said Maggie.
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