by Brad Parks
To which he replied, “Oh.”
“It might have been Justina,” she said. “Was it Justina?”
He immediately shook his head. “Oh no, Momma.”
Alison furrowed her brow. I felt like we had gotten as far as we could on the subject, so I said, “What happened next? After you got picked up?”
“Well, we drove out on the big road”—this was how Sam described Route 17—“but then we turned off on a little road.”
“What little road?” Alison asked.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t our road. I said, ‘Where are we going, Momma?’ but you didn’t answer.”
“Honey, that wasn’t Momma, remember?”
“Oh,” he said again.
Not wanting to belabor the point, I said, “What came after you turned on the little road?”
“The Honda stopped. And two men came and got us and told us to get in the van.”
“Tell me about the men,” I said gently.
Sam squirmed in his seat. There was real fear in his eyes. Up until this point, he had merely been recounting a slightly weird drive home from school. This was where it got scary.
Words had left him again. He was just looking back and forth between his mother and me. Alison pulled him up on her lap and wrapped both arms around him. “Honey, I know you don’t want to talk about this, but it’s really important to Momma and Daddy, okay? Can you please try?”
Wanting to please his mother, and now afforded the protection of her lap, Sam came up with: “They were really mean. I didn’t like them.”
“Did they hurt you in any way?” I asked.
He didn’t reply.
“What is it, honey?” Alison said, encircling her arms tighter. “It’s okay. You can tell us anything, even if it’s really bad. Like Daddy said, you’re not in trouble.”
Then Sam looked me right in the eye: “One of them had a knife. And he showed it to me. It was a big, big knife.”
Now Alison and I were the ones without words.
“He cut my hair,” Sam said. “But he said maybe next time he’d cut my throat. He said he liked to cut people’s throats.”
I was glad Sam couldn’t see his mother. Her face had lost what little color it had.
To keep him from dwelling on the knife, I said, “What did the men look like, buddy?”
“They had scratchy faces”—scratchy faces being how Sam and Emma described beards—“really scratchy. And they talked funny.”
“Funny how?” I asked. “Like a different language?”
“Yeah, it was all gghhh and gaaaa,” he said, making sounds from the back of his mouth.
“Did they talk English at all?” I asked.
“Yeah, but it was funny too.”
“You mean like an accent?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Did it sound like Justina?” Alison asked.
“I don’t know. Not really,” Sam said.
Which didn’t necessarily mean anything. I’m not sure a six-year-old had enough experience of the world to pin down the origin of an accent. The takeaway was that two bearded, knife-wielding foreigners had come and stuffed my children in a van.
As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, they had allowed Sam to see their faces. It was brazen and told of their fearlessness: They knew they weren’t going to get caught. They considered whatever plan they had in place to be perfect.
“Tell me about the van,” I said.
“It was bigger than the Honda. Sort of like a truck. But it wasn’t a truck-truck. They made us get in the back. There weren’t any seats, so we sat on the floor.”
“Could you see out? Did it have windows?” Alison asked.
Sam shook his head.
“It just started driving,” Sam said. “And I’m sorry, Momma, I didn’t put a seat belt on because there weren’t any.”
“It’s okay, Sammy.”
“How long did you drive for?” I asked, hoping we might be able to get at least some sense of the distance they had been taken.
“I don’t know,” Sam said. His general awareness of the passage of time was still somewhat imprecise.
“Was it longer than a TV program or shorter than a TV program?” Alison asked.
“About the same,” Sam replied.
Call it half an hour, which meant they could have been transported anywhere within approximately a thousand square miles in southeastern Virginia. We could spend the rest of our lives driving around, knocking on doors, and still not find where Emma was.
“Then what happened?” Alison asked.
“The van drove and drove. And then the men grabbed us. They just . . . grabbed us. They were rough.”
Sam pantomimed this with his hands, which he curled like a raptor’s talons.
“This was when they took you out of the back of the van?” I said.
“Yeah. And then they took us in the house.”
“What did it look like outside the house?” I asked.
“Well, there were mostly just trees. Like, a lot of trees. Big ones.”
Children being held deep in the middle of a thick forest. It was like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale.
“And then where did they take you?”
“To this room.”
“What was it like?” I asked.
“It was little. And the windows had boxes over them”—I took this to mean they had been covered in cardboard—“and there was a TV with SpongeBob and Dora. I asked them if I could be in the same room as Emma but they said no.”
“Did you ever try opening the door?” I asked.
“It was locked,” Sam said.
“What happened after that?”
“I kept telling the men I was hungry. And they said, ‘Shut up, shut up.’ I’m sorry, Momma. I know ‘shut up’ is a bad word, but that’s what they said.”
“It’s okay, honey,” she said, rubbing his leg.
“And then I started crying. I was really hungry. And then one of them gave me food.”
“What did he give you, Sammy?” Alison asked.
“Peanut butter and jelly,” Sam said.
Alison and I shot each other worried looks. The first—and last—time Emma had been given peanut butter, her eyes and throat swelled up like a blowfish, necessitating a harrowing trip to the hospital. We now had EpiPens stashed everywhere, a precaution I doubted the kidnappers would have taken.
“Did Emma get a sandwich too?” I asked.
“I don’t know” was all Sam could offer.
Sam said he cried a lot more and that finally one of the scratchy-faced men yelled at him and told him to go to sleep. We asked in a variety of different ways whether the scratchy-faced men had hurt them, touched them inappropriately, or anything else. His answers were consistent nos.
He concluded his story by explaining how the next morning, he and Emma were hauled out of the room and into the van. After driving “for a while,” the vehicle stopped. He was told when the van doors opened, he should run into the courthouse and ask for me. Which was what he did.
We tried to dredge other recollections out of him, but nothing more had stuck in his sweet little head. Alison finished by asking Sam if he had any questions for us.
“Yeah,” he said. “When’s Emma coming back?”
Alison and I exchanged desperate, empty glances.
“We don’t know, buddy,” I said. “We just don’t know.”
Sam has an incredibly expressive forehead. When something upsets him, the whole thing shifts at least a quarter of an inch downward. When he was a baby, I called it his worry brow. He wore it whenever he was feeling gassy, fussy, or colicky or was generally about to throw a fit.
He was wearing it now.
“But,” he started. “But . . .”
Alison swooped i
n with a redirect. “Sammy, honey, why don’t you pick a program on Netflix? Daddy and I need to have some grown-up talk. Then maybe we can all play a game.”
“Okay, hang on,” Sam said, and then dashed upstairs for a moment.
When he came back down, he was clutching his favorite stuffed animal. Kids acquire a lot of plush toys through the first several years of life, and you never know which one is going to be elevated to the level of beloved family member. For my kids it was a pair of teddy bears given to them by my aunt, a latter-day hippie who lived out in Colorado.
There was just something about the bears’ size, shape, and softness that first attracted Sam and Emma when they were maybe six months old. The bears had since become the irreplaceable comfort item for each twin, the one you couldn’t leave on a long trip without, the one that accompanied each of them to bed at night.
They were now ratty and worn, having undergone several emergency surgeries and as much snotty love as the twins could dish out. Emma called hers Sammybear. Sam called his Emmabear.
Sam returned with Emmabear clutched in his hand.
“Okay, I’m ready,” he said.
Alison ran out of the room before Sam could see her burst into tears.
* * *
After I got Sam and Emmabear settled in front of the television, I went into the living room, where we could both keep an eye on him—I don’t think either of us was ready to let him out of our sight—but where he couldn’t hear us. Alison was waiting for me on the couch.
“You okay?” I asked, sitting down next to her.
“Yeah. I wasn’t ready for Emmabear. It just took the wind out of me a little bit. I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay,” I said softly. “So what’s this grown-up talk you want to have?”
She grabbed both my hands. “I want to tell my family what’s happened,” she said.
Alison and her two sisters had spent their childhoods bouncing between army bases, from Korea to Germany to a variety of stateside installations. Their father’s last stop was Fort Eustis, in nearby Newport News. Wade Powell had retired as a full-bird colonel, then died of cancer six months later, before he and Alison’s mom, Gina, had figured out what would come next. Somehow, that translated into Gina deciding to settle here.
The rest of the family slowly drifted down. Jenny, the middle sister, and her husband, Jason, had been the first to move here. Next came Karen, the oldest sister, with her husband, Mark, and their four kids. Our brood was the last to arrive.
I loved Alison’s family, especially since I barely had any of my own left. My parents were dead. I had no siblings. There was a smattering of aunts, uncles, and cousins scattered around the country, all of whom I talked to maybe twice a year. But that was really it. The Powells had become my tribe.
“You want to tell your family,” I said, just to stall for time as I formulated a response that was more articulate than That’s a terrible idea.
“We have no idea how long this is going to last,” she said. “You don’t even know which case this is about. We’re in it for the long haul here. What if it’s one of those cases that goes on for years?”
“We don’t do those,” I said. And that was true: The Eastern District of Virginia was known as the “rocket docket” in legal circles. It was a district-wide point of pride that we moved matters along quickly.
“Well, okay, so not years. Months. And there’s just no way we can hide this from my family for more than, what, a week? We’re supposed to be at Timmy’s birthday party on Saturday. And the weekend after that, my mother had talked about getting the grandchildren together. And on and on. What are we supposed to do? Say that Emma has the flu the whole time? Stop answering the phone and the doorbell? You know they just drop by sometimes.”
She gave my hands a squeeze.
“Listen, we’re still not calling the police,” she continued. “And we can tell Miss Suzanne we’re going to homeschool the kids for a while. She’ll think we’re nuts, but she already thinks that. But we . . . we have to tell my family.”
Her eyes started filling with tears again and she blurted, “I just . . . I need them, okay?”
My opinion was so firm on this point, I was already shaking my head. “We can’t, Ali. We just can’t. We have to maintain the facade that nothing is wrong. I know that’s not going to be easy, but every time we widen the circle of people who know about this, we increase the chance of this getting out somehow. We increase it exponentially.”
“My family won’t—”
“It’s too great a risk!” I said, then rechecked my volume, which had gotten too loud. I returned to more of a whisper. “Look, if it leaks out in any way—just one careless comment that snowballs into something bigger until it catches the attention of someone at the courthouse—they would force me to stop hearing cases. No one would allow a compromised judge to keep rendering opinions. At that point, I’d stop having any value to the kidnappers . . .”
I let that linger out there for a second before finishing: “. . . and Emma wouldn’t have any value to them either. She’d just be someone who could testify against them if they got caught.”
And they’d kill her without hesitation. But thankfully I didn’t have to say that part. Alison seemed to get it.
“Look, let’s at least give it a few more days,” I said. “I’ll probably get more instructions from the kidnappers tomorrow or the next day. For all we know, this might be a case I’ll hear two weeks from now. We can keep a lid on this for that long, can’t we?”
I thought I saw a nod. It was all I was going to get. Without a word, she slid off the couch. I heard her sniffling as she went up the stairs.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so strident. Maybe I should have considered her emotional needs more. But I had been on the bench long enough to learn at least once crucial distinction between my old job and my new one. A good lawmaker has to be forever willing to change his viewpoint, to consider someone else’s needs, to compromise.
A judge has to learn to make a decision and stick with it.
THIRTEEN
Sam and I had settled on the couch and were finishing up his second offering from Netflix. Alison was upstairs, taking some time to compose herself.
Or at least I thought she was until I heard a rhythmic thwock, thwock, thwock emanating from behind the house.
I didn’t have to rise off the couch to know: Alison was chopping wood.
This was something she started doing not long after we moved to the farm. At first, in typically dense male fashion, I had thought of it as a rustic replacement for her northern Virginia health club, one with eminently practical benefits. We have three fireplaces, and nothing cuts through the chill of a poorly insulated southern farmhouse like a nice fire. I had even stupidly suggested we buy a log splitter.
That’s when I learned it wasn’t really about the wood. Or the workout. This was her therapy. In the years since we had come down here, I had come to recognize that when she had something to work through, it was going to be with an axe in her hands.
Even if, at a time like this, there weren’t enough trees in the world to help her.
Sam had perked up the moment he heard the chopping and was soon slipping out from under my arm.
“Can I do wood with Momma?” he asked.
When Sam asked to “do wood” with his mother, it meant waiting until Alison was taking a break and carrying the split logs to a nearby pile. If it sounds like forced child labor, it shouldn’t. Sam thought stacking wood was fun.
I briefly considered the pros and cons—did I really want Sam outside when we knew the kidnappers were watching? should I just let Alison be alone with her axe?—before I decided an activity that felt normal would be good for him. For however much we might have wanted to, we couldn’t keep the boy sealed in a bubble.
/> “Sure, buddy,” I said. “Just remember to put on your work gloves.”
I followed Sam out to the backyard, where Alison was taking healthy swings at some pine stumps. It was remarkable how proficient she had become over the years. I watched, mesmerized, as she halved, then quartered the logs.
Every time she put the axe down to take a breather, that was Sam’s cue to scurry in, pick up a piece of wood, and run it over to the nearby pile. He usually made two or three trips before his mother was ready to resume.
Ordinarily, this was something Alison and Sam did together, while Emma and I would be inside—playing a game, cooking dinner, reading a book. It was an unspoken thing, but we all understood it. Alison and Sam were about action. Emma and I were more like housecats.
Now? It just felt strange, standing around and watching my wife and son work. Not knowing what else to do with myself, I pitched in. I thought I would help Sam keep up with Alison’s output, though it quickly became clear I was fouling up their usual patterns. Sam and I kept bumping into each other. Alison had to wait longer for me to clear out of the way, because I was so much bigger than Sam.
We kept working all the same, each of us trying to adjust to a family that had so unexpectedly morphed from square to triangle.
Before long, we were all red-faced from exertion. We had gotten in enough of a groove—each of us so intent on the task, trying to figure out this new three-person dance—that I didn’t notice we had a visitor until she had rounded the corner of the house.
It was Karen, Alison’s oldest sister.
“Hey, guys,” she said, “what’s going on?”
She was looking at all of us with bemusement, but at me in particular. I was still wearing my suit pants, wing tips, and a white button-down shirt. Not exactly lumberjack clothes.
We all just stopped what we were doing and stared at her. She was clutching a reusable nylon bag, which she now held up.
“I was just up at Sweet Earth, picking up our share,” she continued. “They had so many apples they gave me extra. I thought you guys would like some.”
Sweet Earth was a nearby organic farm. Karen had a subscription that entitled her to fresh produce every other week—whatever was in season. She often shared the overflow with us.