Remember Mia (10 page)

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland

BREAKING NEWS: NO ARRAIGNMENT IMMINENT FOR ESTELLE PARADISE, MOTHER OF MISSING 7-MONTH-OLD MIA CONNOR

Brooklyn, NY—
At this time no formal charges will be brought against Estelle Paradise, mother of missing infant Mia Connor.

On Monday morning the courthouse was abuzz with anticipation of the appearance of Estelle Paradise for a possible arraignment. Legal sources predicted that in the absence of a body charges ranging from second-degree murder to aggravated manslaughter were most likely.

In a staggering turn of events, the statement of the DA caught everyone off guard.

DA Barrymore read the very short statement in front of the media that had gathered hours before. “Estelle Paradise is at an undisclosed location awaiting psychiatric care. No formal charges will be filed at this point. This is an ongoing investigation and we cannot comment any further. I will not be taking any questions.”

When DA Barrymore walked away from the microphone, the media broke out in a frenzy. Phone calls to the DA’s office from multiple news outlets have not been
returned.

A
s we cross into Queens, I catch a glimpse of Creedmoor sitting silently on a hill overlooking the East River. Jack’s subdued, almost as if he’s in a trance. We ride in silence until he jerks the steering wheel to the right and almost sends my stomach over the edge. I dig my heels into the floor mats because there’s only one thing Jack hates more than a woman’s tears, and that’s vomit on his charcoal Corinthian leather seats. The car slides as if suspended on a bed of marbles and comes to an abrupt halt.

I watch him as he hides his face behind his cupped hands. Suddenly he’s slouched over, his shoulders are bobbing, and his hands are rubbing his eyes. When he starts shaking his head, I realize Jack’s crying. He looks up at me and I’m amazed.

I remain removed from his pain, maybe because I’ve been alone with mine for so long that I don’t seem to know how to comfort him. I stare at the tears emerging from his eyes and random facts pop into my head—happy tears emerge from the right eye, the first tear from the left eye signals pain, but I don’t remember if
that’s true or a myth—but either way, Jack doesn’t look right crying. I take deep breaths to calm my stomach, at the same time I try to figure out what’s going on with him. Before I can even think of a reason, Jack’s composure resurfaces and his outburst is over just as quickly as it began. When he finally speaks, his voice is so low I can hardly understand him.

“My entire life I knew how to deal with other people’s problems and then this happens and I’m just fucking lost.”

He goes on to tell me how he hasn’t been sleeping, how he’s just muddling through, and how all of this is tearing him up, and how I’m not the woman he married—
that
woman was dependable and capable—and how he’s been wondering if
that
woman will ever come back, and how it doesn’t really matter because nothing will ever be the same. And how he is torn—he never says just what he is torn about—and he can’t keep wondering about the truth day in and day out. That living like this isn’t a life at all, and that there’s nothing brave about fighting all the time, and he’s no longer got the strength for both of us, and now all he’s got left is the love for his daughter. And that she is so small and fragile and never did anything to harm anyone and everything is just a mess and he can’t cope any longer but he will do everything in his power to bring her home. And then: “I don’t know what it is you did or didn’t do, Estelle, I just can’t wrap my mind around it and that’s why I have to step back.”

Stepping back.
I can’t fathom what stepping back entails, but I feel something taking hold, something sinister and rather final, but I’m behind with my thoughts and I’m not sure what’s going on, and therefore I just sit and listen and look at him, hoping my facial expression is sympathetic and attentive. I want to be supportive and I hope I am but I have no way of knowing. I’m in a peaceful state of not caring about his pain and I want to remain there, if possible.

“I’ve met guilty people, innocent people, people who I didn’t
know if they were guilty or not, and everyone has the right to counsel and a defense, and that’s what being a lawyer’s all about, that’s what this entire legal system is all about. But this is nothing like that at all, this is personal, this is my daughter.”

His words are a constant refrain of tiptoeing around what he really wants to say. His emotional quandary is the love for his daughter—and I give him that, he’s got his priorities straight—but I wish he would just say it, just say
I don’t know if you’re guilty or not.
That’s what it all comes down to.

And then he goes on about how he didn’t do anything to deserve this, all he ever did was protect her and care for her and provide for her, and he needs to concentrate on what’s important and he can’t do that when he’s around me. I space out, not on purpose, it’s just something that happens, and once I jerk back into reality, I’m not sure if I missed anything significant. He uses words like
doubt
and
responsibility
, they roll off his tongue, and
apprehension
and
contempt,
and my mind shrieks yet I can’t interpret any of the words buzzing around in my head, can’t get them in the right order to make sense of them. I try to focus, come up with a coherent statement, anything that reassures him that I’m worthy of his trust. I want to scream at him that all
I
ever wanted was to protect her, and that
I’m
no different than he is, that
I
don’t deserve this, either, and for fuck’s sake, what does
stepping back
even mean?

And for a split second I have a moment of clarity and I understand that he’s failed me, that he’s to blame for this, that he didn’t live up to his responsibilities, that I at least tried while he just . . . just gave up on me. That Mia wasn’t safe because I wasn’t well, and that he abandoned me and therefore he abandoned both of us a long time ago.

But I don’t tell him any of this because we’ve talked too much about how I feel, and I know he’s done talking about my pain. It’s all about him now and why he’s come to the conclusion to . . . what was it again? To
step back
.

“I’m sorry,” he says and his voice cracks. “I can’t think about what happened to my daughter and love you at the same time.”

I look at myself in the side-view mirror. He’s right, as always, Jack is right, there’s no telling what I did. I can’t be trusted. I want to come up with some sort of consolation for him, I want to tell him that I understand and that he needs to concentrate on finding our daughter, I want to say something coherent, something supportive, and I think I can get there, I trust myself enough that I can console him somehow. The right words must be in my vocabulary.

“Sometimes I imagine her dead,” I say and stare straight ahead. I hear my own voice, so small and meek, and I know I have failed him, yet again.

—

Later, after Jack drops me off at the Creedmoor intake office, as the nurse bends over to pick up my suitcase, I realize Jack’s left without my noticing. It isn’t until that moment that I wonder how many things in Jack’s life are failures and I can’t think of a single one, except me. Jack cannot connect with failure, it’s that simple. And I decide to abandon hope and just let it be. Jack’s out there and I’m in here and we both have to cope. Apart from each other. It’s easy for me to imagine him gone, I know what it means when someone is gone, comes up missing, stolen, kidnapped, whatever. Whatever.

I remember feeling those feelings and thinking those thoughts yet they tell me another story. I later hear that I screamed, that I scratched orderlies, my nails digging deep into their arms, leaving bloody trails. That’s when I remember the photograph in my father’s study, the Riverside Church, built about the same time as Creedmoor. I imagine how Riverside, Lego-like, ascended brick by brick toward the heavens while Creedmoor’s castle, wrought of brick and stone, slithered its way across the meadows on this magnificent estate. Creedmoor is my life now and I’m going to live it, for what else am I to do?

Later, a nurse stabs a needle in my arm and then I just lie in
bed and stare at the clock above the door. The nurse hurries out of the room as if something is chasing her and she doesn’t want it to catch her. I don’t blame her. I feel the same way.

—

One hour later, I sit on a leather couch opposite a large glass window. From the couch, I can see the smokestacks of an old factory assembled of bricks the color of coagulated blood.

I swear that one of the stacks—the one located slightly off to the left—is leaning, like the Tower of Pisa. Even though it does not draw any tourists—no one takes family photographs in front of it, and no one sips coffee in a nearby café—it is my favorite smokestack.

The crooked stack seems like an intruder in a landscape of otherwise right angles and man-made harmony. Its wretchedness is familiar to me and I imagine myself extending a hand through the window, up the hill, tilting the warped stack back to its precise vertical existence. I want to make everything all right for the stack; I want to save it from its troubled life, want to deliver it from its outcast status among the other stacks pointing straight into the sky.

A man enters the office and introduces himself as Dr. Solska Ari. A balding man in his fifties, with rosy cheeks and perfectly capped teeth, impeccably groomed, smelling of starch and shoe polish. His glasses sit low on the bridge of his nose. It’s not until we shake hands that I realize he’s a man of average height yet he has the aura of a giant.

Our first session is filled with small talk and educational memory lessons. He doesn’t take notes, but runs a digital recorder.

“Let me tell you about my first case as a psychiatrist,” he says and stares off into the distance. “A woman ate an egg and suddenly, out of the blue, her memory was erased. I couldn’t get what happened to her out of my mind. What caused her memory to not function properly?

“Short of brain damage, nothing is lost, the brain doesn’t
forget. Your memories are tucked away in drawers, and sometimes those drawers are locked. Locked by emotional distress, stress hormones. Historically people who suffered from amnesia were believed to not want to remember. Brain researchers hung up on the hardware portion believe they can’t remember. I’m somewhere in between; I believe it’s a combination of both.”

As I listen, I realize that his most striking characteristic is his placid nature. Tireless in patience and attention, he’s a reverse gravedigger of some sort, unearthing what is underground. I want to believe he can help me find my daughter, I want to one day look back on this moment and remember him as the man who gave me back my memory, my child, my life.

At the end of the session, he asks me what went through my mind when I was told I had amnesia.

“Confused,” I say, “a lot of confusion. The implications were endless.”

“I understand your daughter’s life is potentially at stake. Time is of the essence and I need you to understand that there’s a lot of work ahead of us,” he says and adds, “and I have to ask you for your trust.”

I raise my eyebrows. Trust. Just trust me and everything is going to be all right, is that what he’s asking me? Is it as simple and as complicated as that?

“Did the egg lady ever remember? It couldn’t have been about the egg, right?” I ask and offer an ironical smile.

“Of course it wasn’t,” he says and adjusts his impeccably knotted tie. “Nothing is that simple and it was never about the egg. I’ll make you a deal: we find out what happened to your daughter and I’ll tell you all about the lady who ate the egg.”

—

The next day, at the beginning of our second session, Dr. Ari asks me about the most peaceful place I can imagine. “Like a refuge, a hiding place, where you feel safe.”

“I’m not sure . . .” I say and look at him, puzzled.

“Have you ever paid attention to your breathing when you feel relaxed?”

His question seems silly to me. “Can’t say I have,” I answer and wonder if imagining myself on a beach is what he’s looking for.

“In the middle of a very stressful situation we usually wish for a safe place,” he says. “Have you ever wished to be somewhere else during such a moment?”

Every day I want to be somewhere else
, I think but don’t say anything.

“Imagine a safe place. Give it a try.”

I know what he wants to hear and immediately I come up with several options; “A beach, a park bench, beside a waterfall, something like that?”

“No good,” he says and bounces a pen on his desk. “Those are no good.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “You asked. That’s what I came up with. Why’s it no good?”

“Stereotypes, nothing but stereotypes. Like wanting to travel around the world. Who wants to travel and never belong? Always on the move. That’s just something people say. No one really means that. I want you to think about this.” He pauses and throws the pen on the desk. “You’ve never been to a safe place, you say?”

I shrug my shoulders.

His eyes light up. “How about getting there? Think of a mode of transportation that takes you to a safe and peaceful place. You don’t need to know the specific place, let’s imagine your journey there. Nothing you anticipated, something that just happened, a voyage of sorts. Let me give you an example.” He takes off his glasses and leans back in his chair. “Long time ago, in a country far from here, as a young boy, I used to spend the weekends at my grandmother’s house. I remember her bed being high above the ground, I seemed to sleep almost in the clouds. Of course, I was young and
short and Daadi’s bed was just high, but it seemed that way to me then. I had a lot of nightmares as a young boy, but whenever I slept at Daadi’s house, I didn’t wake up at night, there were no monsters. Her bed was magic, in a kid sort of way, but magic nevertheless.”

“I thought you said a mode of transportation. I don’t get it.”

“It transported me to my good dreams. I don’t remember the dreams anymore, but I had a lot of them in her bed. It seemed nothing on earth could touch me there, nothing could hold me back. And every morning I woke up to the smell of
nashta
. And she was singing while preparing it.” His eyes turn glassy, as if he’s far away. But just as quickly he snaps out of it, furrows his brows, and his eyes now demand my own little memory of childhood peace.

“Your peaceful place is your grandmother’s bed, I get it. Unfortunately I can’t compete with that,” I say. “No grandma and no
nashta
in my past.” I think about his story and try to remember all the places I’d been as a child. But all I remember is getting sick in cars, on boats, even in buses.

“I love to ride elevators.” I’m surprised when I hear the words coming out of my mouth. I realize it’s actually true, there’s something about the humming, the feeling in my stomach, the door opening and closing, and then I am where I wanted to be. Just by the push of a button.

Dr. Ari’s eyebrows relax; he looks pleased.

“An elevator it is. Describe your favorite elevator. Then enter.”