by Lisa Unger
The rest of his childhood was a veritable carnival of abuse. In one home, he was made to sleep in a sleeping bag under another child’s bed. “They called it a bunk bed,” he said with a short, hard laugh. In this home, he ate cheese sandwiches for every meal for about three months. “It wasn’t bad, though. Looking back, it was probably the best of all of them. No one bothered me.” Eventually they turned him back over to the state because he kept wetting his bed and was sick often, coming down with cold after cold. The abuse he endured in subsequent foster homes ranged from neglect to physical violence, and he had the scars all over his body to prove it. There was the foster mother who made him kneel on the broken glass of a window he’d broken while playing ball in the yard. And the man who burned him with a cigarette when he discovered Jake had finished off the last of a carton of milk. There were knife fights and fistfights at school, nearly every week.
“My foster home ‘tour of duty’ ended when I was fourteen,” he said, glancing up at me. I held his eyes for a second and he seemed to find what he needed there. I was riven by what he was telling me, shredded. I wanted to climb inside his skin and comfort him on a cellular level, erase all memory of his suffering. But of course you can never do that for someone, and it’s a folly to imagine you can. Besides, he seemed whole, solid. A man who’d walked through the gauntlet, survived, and healed his own wounds. He was strong.
“My foster father, a man named Ben Wright, shot me. He seemed okay at first. I mean, really like a nice guy. He took me to a couple of baseball games at Yankee Stadium. His wife, Janet, was cool, really pretty. I was their only foster kid. It was a pretty good gig for a while.
“I was really big by then. I mean, ripped. I worked out every day. It served a couple of purposes. I think I was channeling my rage without really knowing it at the time. And it made me look hard. People stayed away from me. I think I looked more like sixteen or seventeen. I had a couple of tattoos by then; some pretty nasty scars. People had stopped fucking with me. I think everything about me said, Stay away. Of course, the flip side of that was that I didn’t have an easy time making friends, either.
“Then Janet got pregnant. I thought, Great, I’m so out of here. But she said no, I could stay as long as I wanted.
“The thing was, Ben, I guess, was sterile. Only Janet didn’t know it. She’d fucked around and got herself pregnant, not realizing. Ben went nuts. Got it in his head that it was me who knocked her up.”
“You were fourteen,” I said.
He laughed without any humor. “Yeah, I know.”
“I was sleeping one night and woke up to see Ben standing over me tapping me on the head with a gun. He goes, ‘You fuck my wife, punk?’ I said, ‘No, Ben. No way.’
“And I remember feeling so sad in that moment, more than scared. Because Ben had been nicer to me than anyone had ever been. And it made me feel bad that he’d think I’d do that to him. I said to him, ‘Don’t send me away. I like it here.’ It just felt so unfair. They’d been kind to me. I’d been better behaved because of it. I was doing all right in high school, getting good grades, and still everything was going to shit.
“Anyway, I tried to sit up and he shot me in the shoulder. He meant to kill me but he missed.”
The rest of his adolescence was spent in an orphanage for boys. And it was there of all places that he found a mentor and a friend. A counselor by the name of Arnie Coel.
“He taught me how to face my demons, express my anger in healthy ways. He made me keep a journal and then discuss the things I wrote with him. He taught me about art, encouraged me to get in touch with the creative part of myself. Paid out of his own pocket for me to take classes in metalwork and sculpture when I expressed an interest. He’d grown up in the system as well. And he used to say, ‘Just because people treat you like shit, just because you may feel like shit sometimes, doesn’t mean you are shit. You can make something out of your life. You can give of yourself in this world to make it a better place.’
“He was the one who suggested I enlist, so that they’d pay for my education. It was a hard road but I think the right one for me. Without that discipline after I left the orphanage, I think I might have headed down some wrong roads. Isn’t that what they say about soldiers, if they weren’t in the armed forces, they’d be in prison? I moved to the city when my time was up, went to John Jay College. I liked the idea of law enforcement, but I didn’t like the NYPD.”
“That’s why you got your PI license?”
He nodded, looked at the floor.
“The police were here. A detective told me everything,” I said. And he nodded again.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t define me. I’m more defined by my art. The more money I made with my sculpture and the furniture, the less PI work I did. I primarily did insurance fraud investigation, checked up on some cheating husbands, did some work for the NYPD following around people on probation for DUI.”
He paused a second, rubbed his eyes. I wasn’t sure how well this answer sat with me. It seemed incomplete, a little vague. But he seemed frayed from the telling of things and I didn’t want to push him for more and better answers. I had a lot of other questions, too, but it didn’t seem like the right time for asking them. There’d be time for that later, I thought.
“I felt like as a private investigator I could right some wrongs and still play by my own rules,” he went on when I didn’t say anything. “So I got my PI license in ninety-seven. But it felt low. You catch somebody cheating on his wife, or some poor slob trying to make ends meet while on worker’s comp, and then you fuck up his life. I don’t know. Maybe I had a fantasy about what it would mean to be a PI. Thought I could use those skills to find out what happened to me, what happened to my parents. But I never got very far with that, either.”
He sighed, looked up at the ceiling. I saw the tension in his shoulders relax a little.
“I stayed close with Arnie until he died a little over a year ago. Colon cancer. He was the one always pushing me to find out about my parents. But when he died…” He let his voice trail off. He was finished talking; I could see that. He leaned back and looked at me, as if trying to decide what kind of impact he’d had on me. He looked a little uncertain, as if he thought I might ask him to leave. I crawled into his arms and we stayed holding each other like that for a long time. I could hear his heart beating in his chest, and the sound made me feel an overwhelming wash of gratitude. In spite of all the things and all the people that had tried to break it, even stop its rhythm, it was strong.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “I’ve never really told anyone all of that. Except for Arnie. It was too heavy to lay on you. Especially with everything you’re dealing with.”
I sat up. “I’m stronger than I look,” I said with a smile.
“You look pretty strong,” he said, smiling back and looking relieved. He reached out to touch my hair, but I took his hand and placed his palm to my mouth. I kissed him there and he closed his eyes.
“Thank you,” I said to him.
He shook his head and frowned. “For what?”
“For sharing yourself with me, for telling me that.”
“I—” he said, and stopped. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. That’s not why I told you.”
“Believe me, Jake,” I said, looking at him dead in the eye. “That’s the last thing I feel for you. You’re a strong man who was dealt a shitty hand and came out a winner, anyway. I admire you. I respect you. I do not feel sorry for you.”
When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and your body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self,
any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.
Loving my ex-boyfriend Zack was, I think, looking back, a decision. He was handsome, funny, he displayed the characteristics most women found desirable in a mate. I liked him. He was close to my family. I decided to be in love with him, to form a relationship with him. It was a good idea, praised by many. Falling in love with Jake, though, was just that…falling. There was no choice involved. It rushed through me in a white-water current, and if I’d tried to fight it, I might have drowned.
The way he looked at me in that moment, I could tell he was there, too, in the same mighty rush. He saw me, the shimmering essence of me beneath my skin. I felt recognized. And I was so grateful, because I’m not sure I would have even recognized myself at this point. I knew who I was; don’t get me wrong. I just didn’t know what to call her anymore. Maybe that’s all love really is, just seeing each other. Seeing beyond the names and all the external things we use to define and label ourselves. It didn’t matter if he was Harley or Jake, if I was Ridley or Jessie. Maybe it never had.
He stood then and pulled me to him, pressed his mouth to mine. In a minute, we were devouring each other. There was more to say but there were no more words, just this ravenous physical need. I made him take me upstairs to his apartment; I couldn’t relax in mine with all of my ghosts hanging around watching. And in the gray nothing of his apartment we disappeared into an ocean of warmth and pleasure, giving everything and asking for nothing, but finding ourselves sated just the same.
twenty
The next morning, he made me Sunday breakfast, pancakes with strawberry jam since he was out of syrup, and rich, strong cups of coffee. We ate in bed and I filled him in on the day before. It didn’t seem possible that it hadn’t even been forty-eight hours since I’d watched Christian Luna die. I told him about Detective Salvo, Madame Maria, and what I’d found at the library.
“Detective Salvo’s partner came to have a little chat with me and wound up taking me down to the Ninth Precinct,” Jake said. “I wasn’t as cooperative as you were, I guess. But they had to let me go after a couple of hours. I had the feeling they would have liked to hold on to me longer. Anyway, they impounded my car.”
“He told me they’d talked to you.”
“When?”
“I called Salvo to tell him about the missing kids in Hackettstown.”
“Why did you do that?” he asked, and for a second I thought I heard something more than curiosity in his voice. Was it worry?
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, considering the answer. I wasn’t really sure myself. “I felt like I needed an ally.” Then I added, “I wasn’t sure who I could trust.”
He nodded. “I know,” he said quietly. “I’d lied to you. You weren’t sure you could trust me. I’m sorry for that.”
I shook my head dismissively. It didn’t matter anymore.
“What did he say? About the kids?” Jake asked after another minute.
“Nothing. Just told me he’d look into it, I think more to placate me than anything. Told me to give up my new career as private investigator and come home.”
“That’s not bad advice.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Jake,” I said after some more coffee and a few bites of pancake. “What happened when you tried to look for your family?”
I wasn’t sure if this was an okay question to ask, but I was operating under a new policy of saying exactly what I was thinking, and it had been nagging at me since we’d made love the night before. He’d fallen asleep and I’d lain awake thinking about what he’d told me earlier. I remembered what Detective Salvo had said, his exact words that Jake had been “abandoned into the system.” Jake had told me that he remembered his mother, nothing more.
He stopped chewing and didn’t look at me right away. He shrugged. “I looked more or less nonstop from the time I got my PI license up until Arnie died. Like I said, it was one of his big things. He thought I needed to solve the mystery of my past before I could build a future. Maybe, if I’m honest with myself, it’s the whole reason I became a PI.”
“And…”
“I’m not much closer than I was five years ago,” he said with a shrug. He cleared our empty plates off the bed and took them into the kitchen. I let him go and didn’t follow, in case he was looking for some space from the question. He came back and sat beside me and continued.
“They say she left me without any documents, no birth certificate, no vaccination records. If I told you I didn’t believe that, that I remembered being loved by the woman whose face I still see in my mind, that I don’t believe I was abandoned like that, would you think it was just a little kid’s fantasy?”
I shook my head. His eyes were bright and he was looking at me hard. I could see that it was important to him that I give him my faith. And I could do that honestly. “I wouldn’t think that, no. I’d tell you to follow your gut. Sometimes it’s the only thing we can trust.”
He nodded and looked away from me. “Arnie did a lot for me on the sly. That’s how I got access to my juvenile record, could see how they labeled me early on in the system that made me undesirable to couples looking to adopt. Not that the odds were good, anyway. I was too old; people want infants.”
“Where were you found?” I asked, thinking that would be a logical place to start the search.
“There’s no record of that,” he said. “My intake file was lost.”
It seemed pretty grim—no parent names, no birth records. I thought of his password, “quidam.” It made sense to me now.
“Anyway,” he said, slapping his hands down on his legs as he stood. “This is my ongoing crusade and we have more pressing things to worry about right now, mainly your ongoing crusade.” He was working hard at lightening the mood. It wasn’t really working, sorry to say.
“Our crusades are eerily similar,” I noted, trying and failing to keep the sadness out of my voice.
“Indeed they are,” he agreed. “Except people I talk to aren’t being assassinated and I’m not being menaced by a skinhead.”
We laughed then. Like people laugh at funerals, letting off some steam, aware that there’s nothing to laugh about at all.
Jake and I spent the rest of the day trying to locate the parents of the missing children in Hackettstown, using the same story I’d used to get Madame Maria to talk to me. I sat on Jake’s couch with a Morris County phone book, one in a collection of phone books he had in his closet for his work as a PI, and his telephone. He sat at his computer and used the Internet, called on some of his police contacts using his cell phone. By the end of the day, we’d learned through family members and newspaper and police reports that except for one, they were all dead.
Jake was able to find much of the information we sought on the Internet archives of a couple of different Jersey papers, the Record and the Star-Ledger.
Sheila Murray, mother of Pamela, who was nine months old when she was abducted, died in 1975 in a DUI wreck for which she was responsible. Three years after the unsolved abduction of her only child, she ran a red light and collided with another vehicle carrying three teenage girls, all of whom also died at the scene. According to articles written after Pamela was snatched from her crib while Sheila slept, Sheila apparently hadn’t been sure of Pamela’s paternity and was raising the child alone.
“Dead end,” said Jake after we’d exhausted both papers of their articles on Sheila and Pamela Murray.
“Literally,” I said.
Michael Reynolds, father of Charlie, who was three when he went missing, had been left to raise his son alone when his wife, Adele, died from injuries incurred in a fight at a local bar. The article we found in the Record reported that the family was survived by Adele’s mother, Linda McNaughton. When there was no listing in the phone book, a quick search in the online phone directory located a telephone number for the woman, who still lived in the same town.
In a terse, uncomfortable conversation with Linda McNaughton,
I learned that Michael Reynolds was a heroin addict who died less than a year after Charlie was kidnapped from their one-bedroom apartment.
Ms. McNaughton said something chilling during my conversation with her, something that stayed with me for the rest of the day, long after our conversation had ended. “She was my daughter, may she rest in peace, and I loved her,” she said. “But she never wanted that boy. Tried to give him up a couple days after he was born, but she went back for him. Couldn’t take the guilt. And Michael, he never wanted anything but the needle. You ask me, alive or dead, the kid’s probably better off.”
Jake was staring at the computer screen as I ended my call with her.
“Anything?” he asked absently, not taking his eyes off the screen.
I told him what she’d said. He didn’t respond, just kept tapping his right finger on the mouse, scrolling through an article I couldn’t see from my place on the couch.
“Doesn’t it seem odd that all these people are dead?” I asked.
“It’s very odd,” he agreed, seeming distracted by his computer screen.
“Look at this,” he said. I walked over to him to read over his shoulder.
Marjorie Mathers, mother of Brian, age three when he disappeared from his bed in the middle of the night, was currently serving a life sentence for the murder of her husband. She’d killed him three weeks after Brian had gone missing. They’d been entrenched in a vicious custody battle over their child, and she claimed that he’d hired men to abduct him. Her lawyers claimed that she was half-mad over her missing boy and that, in combination with suffering years of abuse from her husband, was teetering on the edge of sanity. They said that she hadn’t meant to kill him but had gone to accuse him of abducting Brian to punish her for leaving him. The gun, she claimed, had accidentally discharged in the struggle. But evidence supported the prosecutors’ claim that she’d shot him in the back while he slept. She would be eligible for parole in the year 2020.