Method 15 33 (3 page)

“Don’t ask for any more shit,” he said, yanking my tray from the bed and causing the empty plate and cups to topple and clatter. On his departure, he slammed the door. Noises. Uncomfortable noises with him.

Tempering my expectations, I slid the zipper on the pink case, anticipating one dull and stubbed pencil.

No way. Not only two new pencils, but a twelve-inch ruler, and a pencil sharpener too
. The black sharpener had the number “15” on the side. I took immediate stock of this valuable asset, which I labeled, Asset #15, specifically the razor within.
Asset #15 presents with its own label
. I smiled at the whimsical thought that the sharpener purposefully joined my plot, a faithful soldier reporting for duty, and determined “15” would form at least a portion of the name of my escape plan.

So as to make my captor feel appreciated for his effort, I plugged in Asset #14, the TV, and pretended to watch. Obviously, I didn’t really care about his precious ego, but these ruses we
engineer to trick our enemies, lull and rock them safely in their weak insecurities, until the time comes to spring the trap, pull the cord, and strike with the swift hand of death. Well, maybe not
so
swift, perhaps a tinge prolonged.
He needs to suffer, just a little bit
. I unhinged the bucket and used the sharp ends of the handle as a screwdriver.

Not one creature in the house or in the fields beyond surpassed my consciousness that night. Even the moon shrunk to a sliver of dawn while I worked the whole of Night 4.

He did not notice the subtle difference in my jail cell upon delivering my breakfast on Day 5, again on the offensive china plate. At lunch, I fought back a giggle when he asked if I wanted more water.

“Yes, please.”

He had no idea what lay ahead for him, nor the lengths I would go to impose my brand of justice.

I don’t care what the news said at the time, I did not run away. Obviously. Why would I have run away? Sure, they were mad. They were furious, but they would support me. They were my parents, and I their only child.

“But you are an honor student? What are you going to do about school?” My father had asked.

They were even more baffled during the clinic visit when they learned I had hidden my condition for seven months.

“How can she be seven months pregnant?” Mother said to the obstetrician, even though her voice did not match the way her eyes accepted the undeniable sight of me.

In reality, I had not merely “gained some weight,” but had grown a perfectly round globe beneath my then swelling breasts. Embarrassed with her own self-delusion, Mother hung her head and sobbed. My father put a tenuous hand on her back, not sure what to do with the woman who rarely shed a tear. The doctor looked at me and pursed his lips, kindly though, and he changed
the subject to the near future. “We’ll need to see her again next week. I want to run some tests. Please stop at the receptionist for an appointment.”

If only I knew then what I know now, I would have been more perceptive and caught the clue in real time. Instead, I was too wrapped in my parents’ disappointment to realize the duplicity behind the receptionist’s glare or the chlorophyll fog surrounding her misplaced presence. But I remember now; I had subconsciously logged this information at the time. As we approached her, the white-haired, tight-bunned woman with green eyes and false pink cheeks addressed only my mother.

“When did the doctor say she should return?” the receptionist asked.

“He said next week,” my mother answered.

My father hovered over the scene, sticking his head into my mother’s space; his legs dovetailed hers—they appeared a two-headed dragon.

Mother fidgeted with her purse with one hand and opened and closed her other around a non-existent stress ball by her thigh. The receptionist studied her appointment book.

“How about next Tuesday at two? Oh, wait, she’ll be in school, right? Prospect High?”

Mother hates unnecessary dialogue. Normally, she would have ignored, even sneered, at the irrelevant question about my high school. Normally, she might answer such a superfluous question with her own biting query, “Does it really matter where she goes?” She is volatile and has no patience for stupidity or people wasting her time. Ill-tempered, highly efficient, particular, methodical, and full of disdain, these are her qualities: she is a trial lawyer. But on that day, she was just a distressed mother, and she hastily answered the question as she fumbled through her date book.

“Yes, yes, Prospect High. How about three-thirty?”

“Sure. Let’s put her at three-thirty, next Tuesday.”

“Thank you.” Mother was only barely listening at this point, and she quickly shuffled me and my father out of the clinic. The
receptionist, however, continued to eye us, and I eyed her eyeing us. At the time, I thought she was collecting town gossip about an “unfortunate” teen pregnancy from a “prominent family.”

She had our address from my records, of course, and just learned that I did not attend any of the local private schools, which meant she knew I lived a block from the public school, which, in turn, meant she could correctly conclude that I walked to school, down a heavily wooded and rural country road. Like a wrapped gift, I presented as the perfect target for this scout. Behind her squinting eyes of cold calculation and her curled hooked nose, she must have set things in motion the second we left the clinic. Perhaps my memory betrays me and makes me imagine this, but in the pictures in my mind, I see her pick up a phone and cover her pink-stained lips to speak. In this picture, her green eyes never lose sight of my return stare.

Mother most definitely would have noticed my developing condition much sooner, but for the fact that she’d been gone for most of the prior three months, on trial, in the Southern District of New York. She came home one weekend, and I made sure to be “skiing with a friend in Vermont.” My father took the Amtrak once to visit her. I stayed at home, unattended but trusted, to do homework and complete lab experiments in the basement.

Don’t get this wrong, my mother loves us. We knew, however, my father and I, we’d be better off leaving her be when she was in “trial mode,” a state of war where she became consumed with tunnel vision in her one mission, winning the verdict, which she did 99.8 percent of the time. Good odds. Corporations loved her. Plaintiffs hated her. Investigative units of the DOJ, SEC, FTC, and the United States Attorney General’s Office considered her “the devil incarnate.” The liberal press routinely vilified her, which only served to increase her book of business and solidify her status as a rainmaker. “Wicked,” “unrelenting,” “indefatigable,” “ruthless schemer,” these were the words they used and which she blew up and framed as art for her office walls. Is she wicked? Personally, I find her rather soft.

My father would not have questioned my developing weight because he sees details only in miniscule and undetectable things, such as quarks and protons. A former Navy Seal-turned-physicist, he has a specialty in medical radiation. At that time in our lives, he worked feverishly on a book he was commissioned to write about the use of radiated balloons to treat breast cancer. As I recall, he, too, became consumed with tunnel vision. My mother in trial mode, my father with a publishing deadline. With this perfect storm of parental absence, my condition remained inconspicuous to their hurried lives. But, this is not about blame. It is about reality. I got myself into my situation. I and another, of course, created my state. And I have never regretted what some might call a “mistake.” I never would, but some might.

In the car ride home from the clinic, I sat silent in the backseat as long as I could. My parents held hands and consoled each other, without pointing fingers, in the front seat. I assumed Mother ached in her maternal guilt, and I tried to tell her that her career had nothing to do with my predicament. “Mom, I didn’t plan this, but trust me, it would have happened even if you stayed home and baked brownies every day. There is, on average, a .02 percent failure rate with the latex condom, and, well…” I paused because my father audibly cringed, but I continued nonetheless; after all, science is objective. “Biology will find a way, even with the smallest of odds. I’m still getting straight A’s. I don’t take drugs. I’m going to finish school. I just need your help.”

As expected, I received a litany of predictable lectures about disappointment, how unprepared I was for this responsibility, and how I had made my own life difficult at a time when I should be enjoying my childhood and focusing on finding a college.

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t come to me sooner—and how you chose to reveal yourself. I, I don’t understand,” Mother said, her eyes weak and dark with a depression I’d never seen in her. It was true, the manner in which I showed her my pregnancy was a bit, well, stark. But let me not get ahead of myself here.

I didn’t answer her anytime she asked why I hadn’t told
her sooner because, frankly, I didn’t know how to answer in a way that would please her. When you often neglect to turn on emotions, you act on facts alone, on practicalities. And the bare truth was, I was factually pregnant and I did not think it practical to disrupt Mother’s trial. I understand this may be hard to understand. Perhaps my story will help to explain, even to myself, my thoughts. My actions and inactions.

“We love you though, very much. We’ll get through this. We’ll get through this together,” she said. She repeated this mantra, “We’ll get through this,” in mumbles as she coached herself to action over the remainder of the week. And, as she calmed, she went to her safe harbor: scrupulous strategy. At some point, she called her office and said she wouldn’t be back until the following Monday. She collected the appropriate prenatal vitamins and turned the library into a nursery. I did whatever she told me to, relieved and grateful for her support and, in spare moments when I released and tested my fear switch, scared out of my mind.

On the Monday following the clinic visit, the day before my scheduled follow-up OB/Gyn appointment, I slipped into my lined, black raincoat and grabbed an umbrella before leaving for school. My backpack was stuffed with books, a pair of stretch pants, sports bra, socks, and change of underwear—all needed for an after-school yoga class I had not signed up for. It was a tiny detail remaining from my months of unintentional deception, one I had neglected to tell my parents, for I was taking yoga on advice from a maternity book I had stolen from the library. Bottom line, to anyone else who didn’t know, it appeared as though I’d left with a change of clothes.

Nevertheless, I slung my backpack over my shoulders and hunched out the front door, where I stopped.
Damn, I forgot the flat tacks and hair dye for art class. Lunch too. I better bring two lunches, so I don’t pass out from exercising
. Without closing the front door, I went back to our butcher-block kitchen counter, grabbed the tacks—a mega-pack from my mother’s law firm supply room—and dye and dropped them in my backpack,
which I’d thrown on the counter. I then made four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, threw them in too, and, because I didn’t have time to parse everything, I also stuffed a whole canister of peanuts, a bunch of bananas, and a two-liter bottle of water. Look, you try being sixteen and pregnant. You get hungry, okay?

With the strained parcel on my back and my belly out in front, I looked like a terribly drawn circle with stick legs. I continued on my way, with poor balance given the weight on top, and stepped to our gravel driveway. At the mailbox, for some unknown reason, I was compelled to pause and look back at my house, a brown gambrel, shaded in a pine forest. Red front door. I believe I wanted to see if my parents’ cars were both gone and to confirm they had returned to work—to their regular lives. Perhaps I found security in believing they’d continued their routines despite our familial upheaval.

At the end of the driveway, I had an equidistant choice of turning left or right: the back entrance of the school to my left and the front entrance to my right. I timed the distance once, going to the left took 3.5 minutes, and going right took 3.8 minutes, door to door. Really, the decision of going left or right landed upon my daily whim. My whim got it wrong on that Monday.

I turned right and continued under the canopy of my black umbrella in the direction of traffic. Fat raindrops pelted my cover and the ground around me, as though an airstrike began or the gunman had returned. Whenever I hear firing pounding like this, I think of first grade, so naturally, I thought of alarm bells and the blessed sight of policemen pig-piling a gunman. Distracted in this way and lost in macabre memory, I failed to notice the wet, hard, gray clay morning was a prelude, a herald of bad fortune.

Had I gone left, he would not have been able to pull the van alongside me to take me by surprise. He would have caused too much of a scene, for he had only about five seconds of roadway to haul me in, undetected. They had planned this out. Practiced, I believe. At first, I supposed they thought me worth their time. A healthy, young, blond girl with a healthy baby boy in her belly.
An American girl with high honors, from a wealthy family, and the prospect of a startling career in science. I had received awards for my advanced experiments, demonstrations, models, and reports. Every summer since the age of six, I went to science camps, and all year I entered private contests. With the help of my parents, I built a lab in the basement with state-of-the-art equipment. A store-bought microscope had no place in my world. My equipment came from the same catalogs used by major universities and international pharma corporations. I studied, I measured, I counted, I calculated, everything. Be it physics, chemistry, medicine, microbiology, I loved all pursuits requiring order and comparison, calculations, and provable theories. I was coddled in this hobby of science and indulged by busy parents with a surplus of money. MIT was a foregone conclusion.
My baby and I are very valuable
, I thought as the abduction occurred. To my great dismay, however, I soon learned a hard lesson: we were not wanted for brains or ransom.