“I won’t,” he answers. “At least not now.”
“All right, then,” I say, rising from my chair and throwing my napkin angrily on the table from my lap. “I’ve been nothing but an open book with you since we met, and I can’t say the same about you.” The look on his face is pure shock, almost sad, but I can’t seem to stop the venom coming out of my mouth. “You say ‘she’ but won’t tell me who ‘she’ is—obviously an ex or some other girl you don’t want me to know about. I like you, Wesley, a lot, and I know that you feel the same way, but you can’t hide things from me if we’re going to be together.” I’m worked up and hurt, and I turn around with the intention of walking because I really don’t know what else to do. It’s a bad habit of mine.
“Mia, please!” His voice breaks when he yells my name, and I’m taken off guard by how emotional he seems. I stop dead in my tracks. “I’m so sorry; I’m not trying to be secretive. If you let me, I’ll explain.”
“Okay.” I walk back over to him. I’m not really angry, even though that’s how it feels in the moment; I just want to know what’s going on with him. “Look, I’m not trying to be pushy or nosy. I know we don’t know a lot of things about each other yet, that’s why we’re here,” I explain. “But I don’t want to be told that there are topics that are just off the table, especially things that you brought up, originally. That isn’t fair.”
“No, it isn’t, you’re right. I’m going to tell you what you want to know, but please don’t leave. I hope that when I’m done, you’ll at least understand why I didn’t want to talk about it in the first place,” he says, which makes me a little worried. “What I can tell you is that it has absolutely nothing to do with another woman—at least not in the way that you’re thinking.” Now I feel really dumb. I believe him when he says that it’s not another woman he’s interested in, he’s not a liar, and I realize that I let my insecurities run wild for a few days. “The she that I mentioned on our date, the only one who calls me Wes,” he pauses, looking pained in a way that makes completing that sentence seem like the last thing he wants to do, “is my sister, Annabelle. She’s the only one who calls me Wes.” I can see that the sentence took all his energy to get out, and I feel terrible. I feel guilty that I was ever so petty or jealous to assume that any feminine pronoun had to be referring to some girl from his past he was trying to conceal from me.
Wesley looks so sad that it’s breaking my heart, and I don’t want him to have to explain anything more if it’s going to make him feel any worse than he already seems to right now. He’s looking down, the muscles in his face cramped in tension. I don’t need the words, but I need him to know that I’m here for him unconditionally, and that he’s not alone in his sadness. I put my hand gently behind his neck and let my fingers strike the base of his head, massaging him in the most tender way that I know how. “It’s okay,” I whisper, not knowing what else to say, but I mean it. It is okay, or at least it will be. I’m here with him, and all I want to do is make him feel better. I reach my left arm around his chest and nuzzle my head into the crook of his neck. “Is your sister . . .?”
“No,” he answers right away, sensing what I was asking. “I just get sad when I think about her sometimes, especially memories from when we were kids.”
“Why?” I ask, not meaning to pry.
“She’s alive, and she’s mostly well, but it’s more complicated than that.”
“Okay,” I say, still resting on his chest.
“Have you ever wondered why I’m so interested in what you do for a living?” he asks. I have wondered that; not because it isn’t interesting, but because he seems to know things about that world that a lot of people usually don’t.
“If I’m being honest, yeah, I have.”
“My sister, Annabelle, she has special needs.”
It makes sense now. “Is she autistic?” I ask, trying to figure out if that’s why he’s so good with my kids.
“No, she was born with Down’s syndrome, but she spent a lot of time around kids who had all different types of special needs.”
“Why is it so hard for you to talk about her?” I wonder, not getting the connection.
“Some of my strongest memories of us as kids was her calling me ‘Wes’—she used to say it so much that it used to annoy me. But we were about as close as two siblings can be. When you asked about the ‘Wes’ thing it reminded me of when we were young and carefree.” I’m confused.
“But why is that sad? Shouldn’t those be happy memories if you guys were so close?”
“They are happy memories, but that’s also the time when . . .” He stops very deliberately in the middle of his sentence and pauses. “Something happened to Annabelle when we were all kids. Something bad.” He walks over to a large, antique-looking cabinet that sits on the other side of the room from his table. Reaching into the middle drawer he shuffles around what sounds like a pile of papers until he stops at whatever it was he’s searching for. He pulls out a yellow file folder, the kind you’d see piled up on a lawyers desk on a TV show. I can see that it’s labeled with Annabelle’s name in thick black marker, and there seems to be a lot of loose papers peeking their way out of the open side.
“Here, read this, and I’ll fill in the blanks.” On top of the pile of papers is an old, faded newspaper clipping, carefully cut out with perfect edges, and bound inside a protective plastic casing. It looks to be a front-page article, as I can see the date, number, and edition of the print. Across the center of the page, in large bold lettering, a headline reads:
SEARCH FOR GIRL ABDUCTED FROM PUBLIC PARK CONTINUES
Resting just beneath the shocking headline is a small black and white image of a young girl with Downs syndrome, and a caption underneath the headline that reads, “Annabelle Marsden, 10 years old, missing since last Friday.” I read the short article above her picture, and the main points stick in my mind . . . 10 year old special needs girl taken by unknown assailants at upstate New York Greek Festival in broad daylight . . . still missing . . . parents distraught . . . offering large reward for information . . . please contact local authorities if you have any information . . .
When I finish reading I’m sick to my stomach, and my brain literally can’t process what I’ve read. I’m a person who’s dedicated her life to educating and protecting special needs children. Everything I do and everything I am has been devoted to keeping my kids happy and safe from a world that could take advantage of them. Hearing Annabelle’s story reminds me that there are sick bastards in this world who could hurt a vulnerable ten-year-old girl. I look up at him with tears in my eyes.
“It’s so crazy,” he says solemnly. “The twists of fate in our lives. Do you ever think about that?” he asks.
“You mean like how would my day be different if I had left the house ten minutes earlier? Like that kind of thing?”
“Yeah, exactly that kind of thing. It’s like the little decisions that we never think about that can totally change the course of our lives; only we don’t think about them because most of the time they don’t matter. Ten minutes later or earlier to the office, a left turn instead of a right turn—all of it seems so . . . unimportant. Even you and I,” he says.
“What do you mean, you and I?”
“Or any relationship for that matter, but even how you and I got to this room, to have this discussion is just a series of random decisions that we barely thought about before we made them. And different choices could have changed everything with us.” I start to think about what he’s saying, and I realize that he’s absolutely right. There are so many moments; so many little stupid choices that I didn’t even give that much thought to that completely changed the course of events. What if I had never spoken to Wesley at the bar? What if I had spoken to him, but he turned out to be a serial killer or something? What if I had decided after he first ran off from our date that he was a creep and that I never wanted to see him again? There were thousands of those decisions, and I never really thought
about them in that way before tonight.
“The only time we think about those moments,” he continues, “is when something goes wrong; something like what happened to my sister. I didn’t even want to go to that Greek Festival, and I practically begged my parents to stay home.”
“Too many people?”
“Exactly. But, like I said, my parents were in denial that anything was wrong with me. The way my dad saw it I just needed to toughen up; according to him I had no reason to be nervous. I’ve spent years blaming myself for what happened to her.”
“Blaming yourself?” I ask, shocked by what he’s saying. “But why, you were just a kid, what could you have done?”
He begins to explain, “It was right around then that I started getting nervous all the time, and I had no idea what was happening with me. I didn’t come from the type of family that talked about that kind of thing, so whenever I started to get nervous my mom would get annoyed and just tell me to ‘calm down,’ but she never really addressed it in a real way. You know what they say about problems that get ignored—well it got bad for me.”
“Like how bad?”
“I started missing days of school that turned into weeks of school. My parents had to make up some story about a disease I had contracted—my dad even paid off our family doctor to write a bullshit letter saying that I was sick. Not too long after that I started having trouble going out to places where there were a lot of people, and when you grow up in a family like mine there’s no such thing as a week without social engagements.”
“So how did they handle that?”
“They didn’t, really, they just pretended like nothing was wrong with me—I don’t think their egos would let them believe that they had two kids with issues, but they clearly did.” As he explains it the whole thing sounds terrible, but I’m glad that he’s sharing this part of his life with me.
“You might think that what happened to Annabelle caused my anxiety, but it’s the other way around: my anxiety caused what happened to Annabelle.” He’s speaking slowly, looking right in my eyes the entire time, breaking my heart with every passing word. There are about a million and one questions going through my mind, too many to even keep straight, and I wanted to know more detail.
Carefully choosing my words I look into his eyes and begin, “Wesley, I know that you have this folder, and I appreciate you sharing these documents with me, but can you tell me what happened, I want to understand why you feel responsible.” I was asking him to revisit a traumatic event from his adolescence, and I was worried it might trigger his anxiety to remember like that, but I wanted to help, and I couldn’t do that without knowing how it all happened that day.
“All right, if you want to hear it like that, then I’ll tell you my story.” I’m amazed that he agrees. I see his Adam’s apple bob as he gathers his words. “This is hard.”
“I’m here,” I say, taking his hand in mine and squeezing it in a way that lets him know that tonight, as long as he needs me, I’ll be the strong one for both of us. He’s like a faucet; he needs only a little pressure on my part, and then the whole thing just flows out of him, almost like it’s a relief to finally get it all out.
After a very deep breath he tells me the rest of the details: it was mid-afternoon on a Saturday in August when it happened. Wesley was thirteen at the time, and his family was on vacation at their summer home in upstate New York. Most of that afternoon he and his family spent their time doing all of the normal stuff you do at summer festivals: food, face painting, buying overpriced souvenirs and going on rides—nothing out of the ordinary. It all changed, Wesley said, when his younger brother Kane, Annabelle’s fraternal twin, distracted their parents by throwing a fit. It was when both of his parents were busy dealing with Kane’s tantrum that Wesley, as the oldest, was put in charge of watching Annabelle.
Annabelle asked to walk around, tugging at Wesley’s shirt and extending a hand to hold. Wesley took Annabelle’s hand and did his big brother duty, walking her around the festival like she wanted, but they were moving farther and farther away from their parents. The day was coming to an end, and as more of the vendors packed up their tents and booths, and families gathered together to exit, the park seemed flooded with even more people than had been there when they first arrived. It was there that Wesley had his first real episode with his anxiety disorder.
The more people that surrounded him, moving in and out of cars and tents, and making a lot of noise, the more nervous he got. As his heart raced faster and faster in the park, he started to get dizzy, and the world around him started spinning. His breath became quick and shallow, which only increased his fear and dizziness. He didn’t realize that he had passed out until he heard cries of, “are you okay, kid?” coming from the crowd that had formed around him.
Eventually he heard the yelling of his parents, who ran over to their fainted boy who was still lying on the ground, disoriented. Before he could even gain back his bearings he heard his mother’s voice cut through the noise around him and his own bewildered head. “Wesley, where’s Anna?” she screamed, over and over with tears in her eyes. He remembers Kane saying that she couldn’t be far—after all, she wandered sometimes, but never too far off to be found—and that he would go get her, before running off yelling his sister’s name.
Thirty minutes later the police had been called. Annabelle was gone, and no one could find her. She had wandered away, most likely when Wesley released her hand as his panic grew more intense, and no one could find her. It was a frightening story.
“I spent years resenting everyone after it happened; my brother for being a distraction; my parents for taking us there in the first place, and most of all myself, for allowing it to happen when I was in charge of watching her,” he added, sounding exhausted as he speaks. “The demon that lives inside of me and makes me nervous won that day, because it robbed me of the ability to do the only thing I was supposed to do as a big brother—protect my little sister.”
“What happened after that evening?”
“The slow, methodical dismantling of the Marsden family,” he says matter-of-factly. “Annabelle was kidnapped by two men.” He pauses. “At least we think it was two. That’s the problem; most of what we think we know comes from Annabelle herself. The men who took her were never caught.” He continues his story, his cadence and tone switch styles to a more factual, almost reporter-like manner, as if he needs to disconnect from the emotion of it all just to finish telling me.
“Anna was missing for a week, and honestly there are more questions than answers about what went on when she was missing. I don’t know where she was taken, or exactly what they did to her, but I know she wasn’t hurt . . . in any way,” he states. “And we certainly don’t know the most important question—why did two men decide to kidnap a young girl with Down’s syndrome in broad daylight, a few yards away from her entire family?” His voice trails off. “My dad always assumed it was because of who we were, whose daughter she was, but there was never a ransom demand. The whole thing ate our family alive, and my father became absolutely obsessed with catching the men who hurt Annabelle; it consumed his every waking minute.”
“She wasn’t assaulted in any way?” I inquire.
“No, nothing physical happened to her, but psychologically it messed her up for a long time. She’s still dealing with the trauma. Even when I ask her how she got away, she just remembers running when no one was looking, and she was lucky enough to run into a crowd of people who helped get her back to us after seeing the newspaper story in all the local papers.
“I’m so sorry, Wesley, that’s a terrible story.”
“The greatest crime wasn’t just whatever those monsters did to our Annabelle, but really the damage it caused to our entire family. The guilt alone almost destroyed each of us individually. Kane will never admit it, but he holds himself responsible. We all took turns blaming ourselves.”
“But it wasn’t any of your faults.” I remind him. I’m frustrated fo
r him, and someone has to point out the obvious to him. “Your parents were dealing with your brother, he was just being an annoying little kid who wanted ice cream, and you . . . you were sick, Wesley, and had anyone recognized that and helped you cope, then they never would have left you with your vulnerable sister.”
“That’s a very rational assessment of what happened, Mia, but unfortunately rationality doesn’t apply when it’s your sister who’s abducted and held captive, while your entire family falls to pieces waiting to discover if she’s dead or alive.” He sounds angry. I know that it isn’t directed at me, and that he knows in his heart that I’m only trying to reassure him.
“How did everyone react to what happened after she was found?”
“My father became a man possessed. After he got Annabelle the best medical and psychological help that money could buy, he took a passive role in Marsden, Inc., the company he founded, and basically poured every minute of his life into tracking down the men who took his little girl.”
“That’s understandable,” I say, trying to be supportive.
“Understandable, sure,” he agrees. “But it was like my father had died. I know that may sound dramatic but he was the father of three children, not just one, and my brother and I needed him just as much as Annabelle did. He stopped spending time with us, and devoted all of his time to hiring private detectives, and paying off the police to get access to databases and police reports that civilians aren’t allowed to see. He used his money and his influence to become a makeshift detective, and died a broken man having realized that all of his vast power couldn’t buy him the one thing he most wanted: justice for his little girl. If I could’ve just been stronger and held it together, none of that would have ever happened.”
“Wesley, you were sick. What happened to your sister wasn’t your fault. And the fact that no one noticed what was going on isn’t your fault either; they still had the responsibility to look out for their children, that’s what parenting is.” I can see the damage the unnecessary guilt has done to Wesley. “You’ve dealt with a lot, and you seem to be doing very well, considering.” He laughs when I say this, in an almost self-mocking way.
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