Set Free (19 page)

For an electrifying moment, no one in the studio spoke, moved, or even breathed. Katie exchanged a satisfied look with her producer. Only she and Peggy knew what had been coming.

Beyond everything else, Katie also knew that
this
was the moment. This was the grand pay-off. Every camera was focused on Jaspar Wills—guilt-ridden, lips grim, jaw muscles strained, slumped in his chair, looking like a boy caught doing something naughty. Frozen at his side, was the speechless, disoriented, misled wife. This was the splice of film that would play over and over again, on countless newscasts in countless countries the world over, for days and maybe weeks to come, as the story was retold and sensationalized for a public in love with controversy and spectacle. From now on, this would be the centerpiece whenever stories surfaced denouncing author Jaspar Wills…or celebrating investigative journalist Kate Edwards.

Katie knew, in the days to come, viewers would remember this moment for two things: Jaspar Wills admitting his grand deception, and Kate Edwards revealing it. The next seconds were crucial. Of any point in the interview, Katie was now the most vulnerable. Public opinion was at the apex of being swayed. The tipping point was here. Katie did not want to become the newest incarnation of James Frey and Oprah Winfrey: author caught lying in his autobiography, interviewer outraged by the deception. Jaspar wasn’t Frey. Jaspar was beloved, not only for his books but for being a father torn apart by his daughter’s disappearance. And Katie was not Oprah. Oprah hadn’t done the catching. All she’d done was be hoodwinked.

Katie had a rare opportunity. Today she would shape how she’d forever be defined as a journalist.

And that definition was going to be epic.

Her next move was another bold one, another first. With all cameras swiveling to follow her, Katie abandoned her post on set. She walked the short distance to where Jaspar and Jenn were now seated, near the camera line, an area typically out of view to the TV audience. She pulled over a nearby folding chair for herself, positioning it perfectly to allow the cameras unobstructed views of all three faces. This was even better than before, she decided. Without professional lighting and expensive on-set furniture, the look and feel of the interview had been transformed, grown perceptibly less shiny, less produced, more…real. It was just them, three old friends, who’d been through hell together, facing this latest bombshell. In front of millions.

Jenn was the first to break the reverie. “You lied?” she uttered, bloated with tears, looking as if she’d just woken up from a long, fitful sleep. “None of what you wrote in the book was true?”

This was perfect, Katie realized. Let Jenn instigate the blame game, rally the outrage of a public led astray and fooled into paying good money for fiction disguised as truth. Nothing made people angrier than thinking they’d been defrauded of their hard-earned cash.

Katie waited a moment to let the question resonate. She was, after all, still the interviewer here. She couldn’t entirely step out of the picture. She needed to direct the conversation, drive Jaspar to say what everyone wanted—needed—to hear. “Did you lie, Jaspar?” she asked, keeping her voice low, almost reverential.

Ignoring her question, Jaspar had eyes only for his distraught wife. “Jenn, I’m so sorry.”

Not good enough, Katie knew, not by a long shot. First, he needed to own up. Then he could apologize. To everyone. “What are you sorry for, Jaspar?”

It was no use. The couple were intent only on each other, disregarding the suddenly-gone-crazy world vibrating around them like a high tension wire about to snap.

“Why?” Jenn wanted to know. “Why would you do this?”

Now it was Jaspar’s turn to be speechless. He tried to spit out a word or two, but couldn’t, only managing to shrug and shake his heavy head.

Katie was not giving up. “You’ve admitted Asmae never existed. Isn’t it true you also made up the entire time you claimed to have spent in the rectangle?”

From behind the eyes of the camera, Peggy began to move closer, looking worried.

Katie could read the signs too. Jaspar’s hands were quivering. The skin around his usually firm jaw had grown slack and sprouted pinpricks of angry red dots. His breathing had grown shallow and he was continuously licking his lips and swallowing hard. The man was either about to go into a full blown panic attack or keel over. She had to move quickly.

“When the kidnappers took you to Asni, it wasn’t to lock you up again. They knew their plot had failed. They’d wanted Qasim Al-Harthi released. But after days of threats and beatings and failed negotiations, they knew the American government would never give them what they wanted. Fortunately, killing you was never in their plan. But they couldn’t just release you in the middle of Marrakech where you’d immediately be recognized or run to the police. Instead they took you into the mountains and dumped you there. They hoped that by the time you found your way back to civilization, they’d be long gone.

“They had no interest in keeping you captive. Why would they? You were no good to them. You were a liability. A liability who needed to be fed and cared for and could potentially put them in jail one day. It wasn’t in their hearts to be murderers, so they let you go. Isn’t that the real truth?”

Jaspar pulled his aggrieved gaze from his wife to behold this brand new torturer. Although Katie appeared just as she always had, he now knew he was looking into the face of a dangerous stranger. “I don’t know what they were thinking, or why they did what they did.”

Katie was impressed with the answer. Despite the tense circumstances, despite his physical symptoms and what must be excessive distress in the face of being caught in a lie, this was still Jaspar Wills. This was a man long used to being in the public eye, familiar with interviewers, and how best to manipulate them to his advantage. She’d do well to remember that, Katie inwardly warned herself. She wasn’t dealing with a helpless, broken man. At least, not yet.

“You’re right, Jaspar. We can only guess at the reasons for the kidnapper’s actions at that point. These men have not been apprehended nor identified, as far as we know. But Jaspar,” she paused dramatically and arched an eyebrow. “Let’s talk about what we
do
know. Let’s talk about the truth. The truth is that after they brought you to Asni, they let you go, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“There was no rectangle?”

“No.”

“There was no pedestal?”

“No.”

“There was no Asmae?”

“No.”

“There were no late night talks with your daughter Mikki?”

Tension crackled like a tumbleweed of thorns in a blender set to ‘destroy.’

Very slowly, Jaspar said, “Keep Mikki out of this.”

“But you’re the one who brought her into this. By writing about her in your book. A book which we now know is less autobiography and more…well, what is it, Jaspar? Creative fiction? Dreamscape reality? Filled with whatever you believe bestsellers have to be filled with these days?”

“Katie!” The shout came from Jenn. “Stop it!”

Katie bit her lip. Had she gone too far? As upset as Jenn must be with her husband, she was still his wife and, at least for the time being, still in love with him. But Katie was representing the people now. It was the people she wanted to please—her viewers, her fans—not Jaspar and Jennifer Wills. It was hard-hitting questions like this that people wanted answered. It was getting those answers that would keep them on her side.

“This is over,” Jenn declared, abruptly standing up.

Cameras scrambled to reposition in order to catch the action.

Jenn held out her hand to Jaspar. He stared at it. He was surprised at the kindness of the act, given the atrocity of his own. So were viewers, watching from all corners of the country, mouths no doubt agape.

“Coming?” she whispered.

He nodded and stood.

Together, Jaspar and Jenn Wills, hand in hand, microphone cords trailing behind them, left the studio.

When they were gone, every camera turned to Katie. The interview had gone on far longer and delved much deeper than she or Peggy had ever dreamt it would.

Not the least bit fazed, Kate Edwards moved on. “What we do know is this,” she reported in a disturbed voice, perfectly matching the expression on her face. “From my recent investigations in Marrakech and Asni, I discovered that after being dropped off in the mountain village by his kidnappers, Jaspar Wills inexplicably decided not to come home. He did not inform officials in either Morocco or the United States, or even his wife, parents, or other loved ones, that he was alive and set free. Instead, he decided to live a lie.

“From where he was abandoned by the side of a road, Jaspar Wills eventually found his way to the village of Asni. There he met a woman named Kwella, who we talked to earlier this evening via satellite. Unaware of who he was or what he’d been through, Kwella took pity on the stranger. He was wounded and bleeding, half starving to death, and in desperate need of help.

“Kwella admitted to me that Jaspar Wills had convinced her that he was a foreign traveler who’d been mugged while hiking in the mountains. He told her that after the muggers had taken all of his belongings, he’d been beaten and left for dead. She agreed to take him in. She fed him, clothed him, and gave him a place to recuperate.

“Over the next months, Wills did recover. Eventually he was well enough to work in Kwella’s gardens and do odd jobs for her friends and family in the village, in exchange for his remaining in her home. She told me the only time Wills ever asked for money, was to buy paper on which to write. It was while living in Kwella’s home that Wills first began to write the words that would one day become “
Set Free,
” a book which begins with fact—his kidnapping in Marrakech—but quickly devolves into what we now know to be a fictional tale of a fantasized, imagined captivity.”

Katie paused for an uneasy breath. She allowed her gaze to momentarily drift from the camera, her expression communicating sadness, betrayal, pity, disappointment in a friend. “It was only when he was finished with the manuscript,” she kept on, “after six months of hiding—six months of allowing his wife, friends, family, all of us, to believe he was dead—that Jaspar Wills finally came home…and sold us his book of lies.”

Leaving the studio after the Katie Edwards interview was more ambush than media scrum. The crazy scene brought us back to the awful days following Mikki’s abduction. Except now there was a notable difference in how the rampaging newshounds jockeyed for pictures and juicy sound bites. Last time, they’d maintained a respectable distance, kept their enthusiasm in check behind a veil of compassion, shared humanity, and joint dismay over a child gone missing. We were part of a team, undoubtedly on the same side, rallying against an evil, unknown enemy. It was as if Mikki was everyone’s child, a daughter of Boston, a city willing to do whatever it took to bring her home. Now the tone was changed, grown adversarial, jeering, ugly. Our team had fractured, with me, alone, standing against all others. Now I was the enemy.

“Why did you lie?”

“Will you give back the money you earned from book sales?”

“Do you still dream about Asmae?”

“Was Kwella your lover?”

“Do you feel guilty for lying to your fans?”

“Jenn! Are you relieved Jaspar’s affair was a fake?”

Mercifully, a security guard, as surprised by the onslaught as we were, helped shield us as we struggled to reach our car. Through it all, Jenn squeezed my hand with fierce determination, like she’d never let go. I returned the favor. In the crazy, noisy mess that our lives had suddenly become—again—this was our only way to communicate, to say: no matter what, I am here for you.

As soon as we were in the car, I locked the doors. Simultaneously, we exhaled. It felt as if we’d been holding our breaths forever. Talking was still impossible. Reporters were falling on the car like a horde of locusts. I reached for the iPod connected to the car’s stereo system, found a Joni Mitchell song, hit repeat, and blasted it. My brain was a jumble of emotions as I kept asking myself: “What the fuck just happened?” I relied on muscle memory to shift the car into drive and get us the hell out of there.

For the entire ride home, even after there was nothing left of the jilted reporters but bad memories in our wake, we spoke not a single word. Instead, we listened to Joni telling us “…
we are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden
…” We stared straight ahead, the power or our eyes fastened to the road the only thing keeping the vehicle from veering out of control.

Pulling into our empty driveway, we were relieved to see that our sudden infamy had not beaten us there. We rushed to get inside, knowing the peace wouldn’t keep.

Without consulting one another, we instinctively knew what to do next. We set off on our tasks like well-trained robots. We extinguished all exterior and interior lights, lowered blinds, closed curtains, powered down phones. While I searched for candles, Jenn retrieved spoons, napkins, and two pints of ice cream: Vanilla for her and Rocky Road (how fitting) for me. In pitch dark, we headed upstairs in search of sanctuary. 

It was only when we were seated, cross-legged atop our bed, facing one another, surrounded by a nest of thick blankets and pillows, three spoonfuls into our ice cream, that we first spoke.

“Why?” Jenn repeated the same question she’d asked what seemed like eons ago, in that stiflingly claustrophobic, aggressively lit, scorching hot TV studio in the city. “Why did you do it?”

I’d never loved this woman more. After all the world had thrown at us, after all we’d put each other through, after what we’d just experienced at the hands of our supposed friend on live television, with Katie basically telling millions of viewers what a horrible person I was, how I’d lied to them, and betrayed Jenn in countless ways…after all of that, this woman, my wife, was sitting across from me, knees touching, ice cream in hand, asking me “why?” with nothing but compassion written across her beautiful face.

I set aside my ice cream. Who cared if it melted and turned to goop? I wanted Jenn to know she had my full attention as I laid bare my truth. Yet even as I did, even as I prepared to come clean to my wife about what I’d done, I wasn’t one hundred percent certain I understood the reasons myself.

Not until the instant I realized Katie knew the truth, and was about to reveal it to the world, had I allowed myself more than a moment of conscious thought about it. I knew I’d done it. I knew it was wrong. I knew I’d gotten myself in too deep to ever dig myself out. I knew that I wasn’t absolutely sure I even wanted to.

Never in my life had I felt so comfortable in a lie. Which is a huge thing for me. As a writer. As a father and husband. As a person. I’d never been good with lying. I rarely found reason or rationalization to use one. And when I did, I was lousy at it, and gave it up pretty much before it was out of my mouth. But not this time. This time, it felt…right. Like it wasn’t really a lie at all, but something much, much different. Someone better versed in human psyche than I would have to explain to me exactly what that something might be.

“You and me, Jenn,” I tentatively began, “we’re in a unique position. Only we know what we’ve been through since Mikki was taken. I know people sympathize with us: parents, friends, complete strangers too. But they don’t really know how this feels. Only you do. And I do.”

“I know that, Jaspar, I do,” she said with tenderness. “But what does that have to do with any of this?”

“Even with our common bond, even as parents, as two people who have loved each other for a long time, even with all of that, you’re you and I’m me. We’re different people. We can’t help but deal with all of this in our own way.”

As she listened to me, Jenn’s hand had frozen on its way to deliver a lump of Vanilla. Now she lowered it, carefully, but unable to avoid creamy splats landing on the blanket. I pulled the spoon and container away from her. I placed them next to mine, leaving us both free to act and react without the encumbrance of messy props. I dabbed up the drips of vanilla with a napkin, grateful for a respite from having to keep talking. Then it was over.

“In Marrakech…no, before Marrakech, long before Marrakech, ever since Mikki…Jenn, I was so fucking lost. So fucking sad. I hated waking up every day because I was sure something else horrible was going to happen. That was our life. Waiting for horrible shit to happen. And I knew it was my fault. I knew I’d done something wrong. I’d made a mistake I could never fix.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Mikki. The only job I ever had that meant anything to me, was to be Mikki’s father. Do you remember how panicky we were when we first realized that she was coming? That we were going to have to take care of a real, live, human baby? Remember how we read all those books, hoping they’d tell us step-by-step how to do it? But none of them helped. So we asked people’s advice. They all said the same thing: don’t worry about it, you’ll know what to do when it happens. And then we finally had her. She was so tiny, so helpless, so frail-looking. I was afraid to hold her. And everyone said the same thing: don’t worry about it, you’re not going to break her.

“They were wrong, Jenn. There was plenty to worry about. I thought I knew what I was doing with her, but I didn’t. I
did
break her, Jenn. I broke Mikki. I let her down.
I allowed someone to take her from us
.”

I felt Jenn’s hand land on my knee. “Jaspar, you can’t do this. We’ve talked about this. It wasn’t your fault. Or mine. It happened. It’s the most terrible thing in the world. But it wasn’t our fault.”

My head nodded a slow lie. “I can tell you I agree with the words coming out of your mouth all night long, but I don’t believe them. At the end of the day, Jenn, we’re two parents without a child. Nothing is right about that. If you’re a parent, you should have a child. If you don’t, then, what are you? There isn’t even a word for it. At least when you lose a parent, you become an orphan. If you lose a spouse, you become a divorcée or a widow. But we…we’re nothing.

“I couldn’t stand it. I felt so horrible. I literally thought I might explode. So when what happened to me in Marrakech happened, do you know the first thing I thought?”

“What?” She sounded afraid to ask.

“I thought: good. Take me. Beat me. Kill me. Punish me.”

Tears popped out of Jenn’s eyes so suddenly it was almost cartoonish. “God, no, Jaspar,” she pleaded, “don’t say that.”

“And then the assholes didn’t kill me!” My rage reverberated through the room like an earthquake’s tremor.

Jenn readjusted to bring her body closer to mine. She wanted to comfort me, but all it did was give me a better view of the pain and grief living on her dampened face, having settled there long ago for—I feared—forever.

But there was no stopping now. I powered on like a locomotive fresh out of brakes. “There was a moment,” I shuddered, the memory disarmingly fresh and raw in my mind, “right after the van stopped and they pulled me out, still blindfolded. I was certain: this is it, I’m going to die. I was ready. I wanted it. I was finally going to stop hurting all the time. But when it didn’t happen, when all I heard was the squeal of tires as they left me there on the side of the road, I think…I think that was the moment I finally broke.”

Jenn made snuffling noises, but said nothing. I kept on.

“I have no way of knowing if it’s true, but what I felt at that moment, it must be how people feel when they’ve leapt off of a building or taken pills, ready to end it all, then they wake up and realize they didn’t die. Somehow they’re still alive, and they hate it. They hate that they failed. All they can think about is how and when to try again.

“When I first met Kwella in the village and asked for her help, it wasn’t because I thought: hey, I’m going to pretend I’m dead, write a book about what I
wished
happened, then pop up alive and become Jaspar Wills, bestselling author, all over again. I didn’t tell anyone I was alive because I didn’t plan to stay that way much longer. I was going to stay with Kwella long enough to say my goodbyes through letters
—
to you, my parents, to Mikki for when you found her
—
then figure out how to end myself.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Jenn struggled to speak. She’d stopped trying to resist my story; even the tears had dried up. She was worn out, limp, with only enough strength left in her body to keep upright. But her eyes, ears, mind, and heart were open.

“So why didn’t I?” I shouted the accusation, the sudden intensity surprising neither of us. Then, quieter: “Why didn’t I kill myself? Instead I got better. Before I knew it, I started writing. But not the letters. I started writing this other thing, this other reality. One where I could be a father again. One where I could take care of my daughter, warn her of all the danger I knew was coming her way. I created Asmae in desperation, I think. I wanted to believe that even though we had no idea where Mikki was, who had taken her or what happened to her, there was a chance she was being cared for and looked after and even loved by someone as wonderful as Asmae.”

“I get it,” Jenn said very quietly.

“What?” I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. How could she “get it” when I barely could?

“Knowing the worst is better than knowing nothing,” she said, her voice growing in strength with every syllable. “They all say it. I’ve been reading these books, about people who’ve gone through what we did, losing a child. When parents know their child has died, or been killed, or whatever, of course it’s devastating. But at least they can deal with it, begin to heal. But it’s parents like us, the ones who don’t know what happened, who can’t move on. They can’t get past it. They can’t figure out how to live again. Without the truth, their imaginations take over. They come up with all kinds of possibilities. And it ruins them, Jaspar, the not knowing. It slowly destroys them.

“So I get it. In order to survive, we have to replace the not knowing with something else. So why not make it something good? It’s like all those people who suddenly come to believe in God when they’ve sunk to the lowest point in their lives.

“I suppose, in a way, it’s selfish,” she kept on. “Without knowing what really happened to Mikki, it makes me feel better to let myself believe that maybe, just maybe, it’s not something horrible. When I heard what happened to you, about the rectangle, the pedestal, the visits from Mikki, even everything about Asmae, I went there too. I wanted to believe that someone like Asmae might be with our child, watching out for her. If I didn’t, I don’t know how I could have made it through another day. So, yes, I get it, Jaspar. I get it.”

I reached over, my hands enveloping hers, surprised by how cold they were. Then, as couples sometimes do, we did each other a great kindness by telling a necessary lie, followed by an indisputable truth.

“Maybe there is someone like Asmae with her,” I said.

“Maybe there is,” she repeated, managing a feeble smile.

“Jenn?”

“Yeah?”

“I hate Katie.”

Her smile dissolved. “So do I.”