Just five weeks before Vince picked up Manny to go back to North Carolina. With Jessica going to Qatar for a few months Manny was required, by law, to live with me while she was gone.
“How have you been?" I was carrying him through the airport. People turned and looked at the man carrying the little boy, smiling.
“Good,” he answered. “I’m hungry." He was back, and even if was only going to be for a few months, he was back. Even though I suggested to Jessica she just leave Manny with me so he could start school in Utah only, she was adamant Manny be returned to her for five weeks. While in North Carolina he started kindergarten, something I was upset I did not get to witness myself. Luckily, at least for the next three months,his school was close to our house.
The next morning, before I could get Manny fully registered for school, I brought him in to work. He toured the radio station and met some of the people I saw every day. He was also able to meet Krystal, the woman I had started seeing while Manny was away for that long five weeks. She worked at the radio station with me.
“Oh my gosh! You’re so cute!” Krystal said upon meeting Manny.
“Thanks?” Manny’s face turned bright red and he placed half of his body behind my leg.
“Give me a hug!” Krystal put her arms out. Manny reluctantly walked into her arms and hugged her back. He held on tight.
What Krystal and I had was different. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even a defined relationship. I wasn’t ready for anything close to a relationship yet. We were seeing where things were going, what could happen. Before Manny came for the summer I was seeing someone else and told her to stop coming over so it would not confuse Manny. I never asked this of Krystal, so she was either better than the previous girl, or I had changed in that time period.
Manny’s enrollment in kindergarten was easy and we were back on our way to a normal routine. While taking Manny to school one morning we walked up to the door of his classroom and he stood like a thousand pound statue in the doorway. He did not want to go into class. I pushed and he held onto the door frame, pulling himself out. I removed his hand and a leg would appear out of nowhere also preventing his admittance. Slowly all of the children in the class started looking at Manny, one at a time. He was reduced to a pile of crying child on the floor.
“Don’t worry about it,” his teacher said. “This happens all of the time." The look on my face must have been an indicator to her I was worried. I had never raised a kid before. Was this normal? According to Manny’s blonde twenty-something teacher, it was normal. Considering within six months Manny had moved from Utah to North Carolina to Utah to North Carolina and back to Utah, not wanting to let go of me made perfect sense. All of his detachment issues were amplified by his foster background.
Nothing was working out the way it was supposed to. I was supposed to have a family and a child we could raise and help together. Instead Manny was bouncing all over the country with no real idea of where his home was. He had no concept of stability. If anything we took him out of an unstable foster system and introduced him into an even more unstable world.
I had no preparation for being a single parent of a school-aged child. I had completely forgotten about “non-student days,” which I loved when I was a kid. Any day without school was a good day as a child. As an adult, days without school meant finding a babysitter or leaving work. It meant that my normal twelve dollar per hour job would be put on hold for a day while I sat in the house while Manny played with the neighborhood kids. Luckily Krystal was there. Her work schedule allowed for her to watch Manny most of the time.
I came home from work on one such occasion. Halloween was approaching, and I saw two pumpkins on my dining room table. In the kitchen were Manny and Krystal making cupcakes. They had spent all day together. They ate, picked out pumpkins, played. It was like a real woman was around. It was great for Manny. My emotional walls were still too tall for anyone to scale them, even if Krystal had so quickly stolen Manny’s heart.
It was Halloween of 2008. “Dad, where are we going?" It was easily the fifth time Manny asked me that question within the last hour.
“We’re going to your aunt and uncle’s house." When Jessica invited me over to her family’s house months before she had sent an unspoken message to them I was okay to be around. Knowing Manny was in town they gladly asked us to go trick-or-treating with them.
“Dad, is my aunt and uncle’s house far away? I’m bored." He had only been in the car for five minutes with another forty minutes to go.
“No, it’s not too far, just be patient." A little lie wouldn’t hurt, would it?
With Manny’s face painted white and fake blood dripping from his mouth we toured the neighborhood. With us were Manny’s three cousins, one of whom was also adopted. His adopted cousin stood out with her dark native Mexican skin while the rest of us were pale in comparison. The adults stood back and watched the children run from house to house, always excited for their next possible sugary jackpot. We finished the night and ended up again at Jessica’s brother’s house.
“I want to go home,” Manny told me. His normal smile was gone, and he looked at the ground. It was a little difficult to take a three foot tall Dracula seriously when he was pouting.
“What’s wrong?" I was enjoying the time with Jessica’s family.
“I want to go home." Manny had enough interaction that evening and no amount of coaxing him to stay was going to change his mind.
“We need to leave,” I told Robert, Jessica’s brother.
“Oh, that’s too bad." He stood up and we shook hands, like men do. Manny didn’t want to shake hands or give them hugs goodbye. He just wanted to leave. “Why don’t you plan on coming over for Thanksgiving?”
“We would really like that." Not having any family in Salt Lake City meant most holidays were spent alone unless we were willing to drive hours to see my family. Thanksgiving at Robert’s house sounded perfect.
“Good, my sister will be here, and my brother too from Denver."
Jessica and I talked regularly, and she was glad Manny enjoyed himself at her brother’s house. Since Manny’s communication skills were still lacking at best, I usually told Jessica what Manny did on any given day.
One night the phone rang and I saw it was her. She normally called much earlier than ten o’clock at night. Usually she would try to call and talk to Manny before bed. She could have only been calling to talk to me. Her voice did not have it’s normal pep behind it, as if someone had put her candle under a bushel.
“I don’t want you to freak out, but I was raped last night.”
“What?" My mono-syllable retorts to her returned. Despite everything she had told me in the past, being a CIA agent, being an assassin, and receiving a black eye from her CIA handler, nothing could have prepared me for being told she was raped.
“A bunch of us at work were celebrating for the upcoming deployment to Qatar. Someone put something in my drink and took me into another room and raped me.”
I felt the blood gather in my face. My jaw clenched. I saw only red. Despite our differences and our failed marriage, no one rapes the mother of my child. I wanted to fly out to North Carolina and be Trigger’s sidekick, taking out the monster who could do this to her, the woman I still loved.
“Oh, I know who did it. I called my dad and he said it is going to be taken care of. Her father did have connections, after all.
“What do you mean taken care of?" It was an ambiguous statement. I hoped she was saying what I hoped she meant.
“You know what I mean." Her voice had a slight hint of laughter as she said it. Her dad was going to kill the guy, or at least arrange for someone else to do it. Good. He’ll get what he deserves, I thought.
A few days later Jessica left the country. Once she landed we chatted online.
“What is the progress with the guy from the party?" I didn’t want to say “the guy who raped you." Jessica had spent a few months being a rape crisis counselor while we were stil
l married. Because of her training, and my own failed experience at graduate school to become a therapist, I knew never to ask the wrong question. I didn’t want to invoke some sort of flashback or horrific spectacle for her in front of hundreds of military strangers.
“They took my blood when I landed here. I am told I tested positive for Ruffies.”
“So what is next?”
“That motherfucker is already in jail for what he did. My dad is going to ensure he ends up in prison. Military prison. It’s worse than any other kind of prison you can imagine." I knew what happened to rapists in prison. Karma had a way of coming back at them over and over again, delivered by multiple messengers. I was okay with the possible world where that man would get what he had coming to him.
After all, he raped the woman I loved, even if she no longer loved me.
| TWENTY SEVEN |
And I am Thankful
Thanksgiving 2008
Jessica had recently begun telling me about all of the hot guys on the military base in Qatar. “It’s like being a fat kid in a candy store,” she said. I am unsure why I was the appropriate person to tell about her romantic endeavors, but I was. She sent me pictures of someone she only described as, “the guy” a few times. She said her rape sent Vince over the edge, and he wanted nothing to do with her. She was moving on.
I read her most recent description of how she could have any man she wanted on the military base, and I closed my laptop.
Manny and I drove to Robert’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice to be invited to spend the holiday with Jessica’s brother. I refused to impose myself on anyone that holiday weekend, so an actual invitation, by family nonetheless, was perfect. I knew the special significance this holiday represented. Despite our failed marriage I was still a part of Jessica’s family. I was still welcomed. To say I was grateful for being taken in would have been an understatement.
“Hi Jessica,” her brother said while I held the video camera. “We miss you and hope everything is going well."
“Hi Jessica!” her sister said next. “Be safe.”
Videotaping her family and sending it to her was the least I could do. After all, regardless of our living apart, our families were combined.
My family never had a big Thanksgiving tradition. We never sat around a giant oak table telling everyone for what we were thankful. At the very most we ate food and watched television. Even that tradition had not happened in years. I was glad to be a part of a real family gathering for once in what seemed like forever. Had we gone around the table and proclaimed what we were thankful for I would have said, “I am just thankful to be here." I was.
Manny and his cousins were in rare form that night. Having just watched Madagascar for the one hundredth time, Manny taught his cousins one of the songs. He taught them one verse of the song, which they sang over and over again. “Oh, I need to record this,” I told Jessica’s family. “She’ll love this." They all smiled at me, not saying a word. I liked to send videos of Manny to Jessica, partially for moral support and partially because I wanted her to know I was a great father. I was someone she could rely on.
The kids kept singing and singing. Their little voices became background noise as the adults went into the dining room to sit down and prepare for dessert. We sat around the table, making small talk. I am sure my presence was awkward for them, but they did invite me after all.
All of her family was Mormon. I was an outsider, so that meant we couldn’t talk about church or service. We couldn’t talk about the most recent speech the Mormon Prophet gave and how it was so inspiring. We had to find something to talk about. Talking about Jessica became the only common ground we had.
Jessica was an elusive member of their family. Just like she had done with our ex-Mormon friends, she would occasionally cut her family out of her life for months at a time. All it took was one misstated remark, or a misinterpreted gesture, and Jessica would be gone. Because of this her family only spoke kindly to her. They had to walk on eggshells in order to keep her around. She was just as much of an enigma to them as they were to me. Maybe they thought my presence would shed some light on their sister, who they barely knew.
We discussed Jessica’s apparent inability to communicate properly and how her reactions could be caused by something else. Her brothers and sister verbally threw their hands in the air, expressing, “I don’t get it!” I, however, understood why she acted that way. She had to learn English at the age of ten. The rest of her siblings were already fluent in English when they moved to America. Perhaps how Jessica communicated was different than how the rest of us did. I held on to this notion for so long, if only to comfort myself. I felt the need to defend Jessica to her family.
“It’s understandable she has communication issues, considering she moved to America and learned English when she was ten." From my own personal experience in the Philippines, despite speaking the language very well, properly expressing something emotional was terribly difficult.
“What do you mean Matt?” Robert spoke up. I scanned the table to see every adult looking at me like I had just told them the best use of toothpaste was as hair gel, or that peanut butter was a great underarm deodorant.
“She didn’t learn English until she was ten. She probably has a difficult time still conveying her feelings properly." I thought perhaps I misspoke the first time, or maybe the sound of the children in the background somehow muffled my previous statement.
“Jessica was four when she moved to America. I was ten, not her,” Jessica’s sister told me. She looked annoyed, like I had taken her science project and tried to pass it off as my own in the fair. We stared at each other. I was waiting for them to say, “Gotcha!” I waited. There was no surprise joke in her statement. Her siblings all looked at me waiting for my response.
“But,” I paused, unsure of what to say next. “But, she speaks Spanish, right?" Her family laughed like I had just told a dirty joke during church. It was subdued laughter, implying something secret or dirty. Jessica’s sister-in-law sat at the table unmoved, breastfeeding her newborn baby.
“What?” Her brother Stewart, from Denver, spoke up. “She can barely speak Spanish. We all make fun of her for how horrible her Spanish is. That’s why we never speak it around her." It was true. I never saw them speaking Spanish to each other. Jessica even refused to speak it when we were at Latino markets by our house.
None of what they just told me made any sense. Someone wouldn’t lie about that, would they? Why? It seemed like such a silly thing to lie about. Besides, I knew she spoke Spanish. She used it for her other job, which I knew at least one of the people at the table knew about.
“She told me she was a professional mixed martial arts fighter for a while." Their laughter persisted, but this time it was if I had said something actually funny.
“Her first husband was really into mixed martial arts, and even trained for a while. Jessica never fought." I told them the story about her professional fights and how her father refused to support her in her hobby after she had received a broken nose. I recalled Jessica telling me about a time a woman in a bar was being upfront with her, so Jessica broke her arm. Her family didn’t know how to respond.
“She trained in martial arts, right? She said she had her third degree black belt in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu.”
“No." The game was no longer funny to them. Their faces had turned serious.
Either Jessica had lied to me, or her three siblings were lying to me. It was difficult to decide which was true. Reading people had always been something I was good at, and they appeared to all be telling the truth. Then again, I always believed everything Jessica said too. My people reading skills could not be correct in both situations.
I had to find something, anything, that was the truth. I started grasping for straws. “At least tell me your mother died of breast cancer,” I blurted out.
“Oh yes, that happened,” Stewart said. Robert had stood up to take their newborn to bed, reminding th
e children to be quiet while the baby slept. Jessica’s sister sat back and didn’t contribute much to the conversation at that point. She was just as interested in the outcome as I was. What else could be a lie? I needed to know more.
I took a chance and asked about the CIA. “Jessica says that all of you are in the CIA and your father has money and influence in Washington, D.C.”
Stewart laughed. “Our dad is completely broke. He has no money.”
Robert chimed in from the other room. “I was approached once to be in the CIA." Finally, there was some truth to the stories. Robert quickly told the story of his interview for the CIA, which he ultimately decided he could not pursue. The reason he did not want to be in the CIA was simple: sometimes they are required to do whatever is needed to get information. Robert, a faithful married Mormon man, refused to even entertain the idea of using sex as a weapon. He had standards.
His story mirrored Jessica’s story almost exactly. Jessica had used her own brother’s story as her own. I realized that nothing was sacred any more. I had to ask a very personal question.
“Okay, this sounds ridiculous,” I pushed on, “and I’ve been told to never discuss this with anyone, but Jessica told me she had two stillborn babies in her first marriage.”
Robert was back at the table by that point. He and his wife looked at each other for only a second. They seemed to have had an entire conversation with each other with that look. He slowly turned his head toward me amidst the silence of the room. Robert’s wife spoke up. “She had a miscarriage when she was five weeks along. She told us later she was happy the pregnancy ended because she didn’t want a baby.”
“Wait,” I paused. The story of her miscarriages had been something I had known for years. It was one of our first bonding moments when we first started dating, sharing each other’s pain. “She told me she had a stillborn at nine months and another at six months." Maybe if I stated it another way they would suddenly remember.
Leaving Salt Lake City Page 14