The Garden of Betrayal (9 page)

“Great,” I said, impressed, as always, by her tech know-how. “How long will it take you?”

“Forty-five minutes to an hour maybe, depending on how fast the iPod transfers data. Why? You going somewhere?”

Her voice caught as she asked the question. Something was definitely bothering her. If this Phil guy had hurt her, I was going to kick his skinny ass.

“A lunch I can’t get out of, but that’s not for half an hour yet. You want to talk?”

She fidgeted with my mouse, dragging files from the iPod to a new folder on my computer. I waited, giving her time.

“I got an e-mail from Sophie Reyes this morning.”

I struggled with the shift of context for a second. Sophie was the daughter of an old work acquaintance of Claire’s. She and Kate had gone to preschool together, before Sophie and her parents had moved to San Francisco. They still visited New York regularly, though, and the mothers and daughters had lunch together once or twice a year.

“Is everything okay?”

She shook her head, her lower lip quivering.

“What is it?” I asked gently. “What happened?”

Kate cleared her throat and touched a hand to her face. I got to my feet and gathered her into my arms just as the tears began flowing.

“Shh,” I whispered. I waited for Kate to calm down a bit and then guided her back to one of the chairs in front of my desk, handing her a box of tissues and sitting down next to her. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes.

“I spent the whole morning trying to decide how to tell you,” she choked. “I don’t want to make things worse.”

“Just say whatever you feel like saying. You’re not going to make anything worse by telling me. I promise.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, damp tissues bunched in her fist.

“Sophie’s mother got a new job, as the artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet. Sophie wrote to say how excited she was to learn that Mom was going to audition for the orchestra.”

“The ballet’s coming to New York on tour?” I asked, confused.

“No. I checked. But their resident pianist is retiring at the end of this season. They’re looking for someone new to start in September.”

An old joke came to mind for some reason, about a woman who won the lottery and rushed home to tell her husband to pack his bags. “What should I pack? Warm stuff or cold stuff?” he asked excitedly. “Who cares?” the woman replied. “Just get the hell out.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I stammered. “You’re telling me that your mother’s planning to leave me.”

Kate shook her head forcefully, seeming more composed with her secret out.

“No. That’s why I was worried about telling you, because I knew
you’d jump to the wrong conclusion. I’m betting Sophie’s mother asked Mom if she was interested, and Mom said yes without really giving it much thought. It’s a good thing, in a way. It means Mom’s interested in her career again. You always told me how important her career was to her, when you first met.”

Kate was trying to twist the facts, to make the blow less painful. A surge of anger gave way to a feeling of panic. I’d told Claire the truth the previous evening. I was scared, too. And the thing I was most scared of was another loss. Kate or Claire. They were all I had.

“She said yes to an audition for a job in San Francisco, and she hasn’t mentioned it to me. That has to mean something.”

“But not that she wants to leave you. I think she’s scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of spending so much time alone in our apartment next year, after I go to college.” Kate reached out for my hand. “Everything there reminds her of Kyle. She needs to let go. To really let go. To leave New York and put all the bad associations behind her.”

“She told you that?”

“Not in so many words. Sophie’s note was what pulled it together for me.” Kate squeezed my hand. “You need to talk to her, Dad.”

“And say what? That I have a sudden urge to move to San Francisco?”

“Maybe.” Kate ventured a smile. “There’s less snow.”

I disentangled myself gently and stood up, moving to the window.

“What was the line from that eighties flick we watched a few weekends ago?
Buckaroo Banzai
? ‘No matter where you go, there you are.’ Moving to San Francisco isn’t going to change anything.”

“It might if you let it.”

I stared down at the street below, my chest aching.

“I’m not the one stuck in the past, Kate.”

“For Christ’s sake, Dad,” she shouted. “Are you fucking kidding me? You treat Mom like an invalid, you have this conspiracy with the doorman to hide Kyle’s mail, and every time we ride up or down the elevator, you moon about the dent in the paneling. It’s not just the apartment she needs to get away from.”

Turning, I saw Kate was leaning across my desk, her cheeks blazing.

“So, you think she should leave me?” I asked, overwhelmed at this onslaught.

“No. Don’t you get it? It’s not you she needs to get away from. It’s your never-ending obsession with what happened to Kyle.”

I felt like my chest was going to burst.

“How can I not be obsessed? I’m the one who flew off that night to give some stupid, goddamned speech. I should’ve been there.…”

“That’s right. You should have been there. And if you were, you probably would have walked to the video store with Kyle, and nothing bad ever would have happened. But don’t forget that I was the one who wanted to watch the movie, and Yolanda was the one who taped over it, and Mom was the one who let Kyle go out by himself, and Kyle was the one who insisted on running the errand. It was everybody’s fault. We’re all guilty, and we all have to get over it.”

I turned back to the window, trying to calm myself.

“None of us are ever going to forget what happened,” Kate continued softly. “That’s a given. But if you can’t at least try to put the past behind you—to move beyond your guilt and help Mom move beyond hers—then I think you’re right. I think Mom’s going to leave you.”

I was running late by the time I finally left for lunch, Kate’s words ringing in my ears. Walking north on Park Avenue, I pressed the heel of one hand hard against my breastbone, fighting the pain the way a runner fights a cramp. There was another mantra I’d picked up in family therapy—you can do only as much as you can do. I’d always interpreted it to mean that I couldn’t completely protect my loved ones, no matter how hard I tried. For the first time ever, it occurred to me that maybe the limitation was within myself, and that the thing I couldn’t do was to ease my wife’s pain by letting go of my missing child.

An Asian girl who looked to be about Kate’s age approached me on the corner of Forty-seventh Street, offering me a leaflet about Tibet and asking politely if I’d be willing to send an e-mail to my congressperson. She looked apologetic when I met her eye, perhaps recognizing how upset I was, but I made an effort to smile and took the leaflet from her hand. I know how difficult it is to be ignored when you’re trying to attract attention to an issue that’s desperately important to you.

In the immediate aftermath of Kyle’s disappearance, I’d spent feverish hours devouring books and articles about missing children, trying to learn everything I could about who took them, and what happened to them, and—most important—how they were found. There’s an entire fraught literature on the subject, and innumerable sad organizations and support groups. The cardinal rule is to publicize the disappearance as widely as possible and to reach out to the community for help. The police had hung posters throughout our neighborhood,
appealing for information, and the local news led with the story the morning after Kyle’s disappearance, following up with smaller stories and articles in the paper over the next couple of days. But bad things happen all the time in a city the size of New York. A few media cycles later and Kyle was lost in the clutter. I bought a series of prohibitively expensive ads in the
Times
and the
Post
and the
Daily News
, desperate to keep my son’s face in front of as many people as possible. Riding the subway home from One Police Plaza on day seven, though, I noticed that only a handful of riders were reading newspapers, and that at least a third of those were papers in languages other than English. It occurred to me that there were millions of people only a short train ride away who would never have any idea what my son looked like—or even that he was missing—regardless of how many quarter-page ads I purchased.

The next morning, I had the employment office at Columbia University post a notice offering top dollar to students with language skills who were willing to hang posters and hand out leaflets. I hired twenty-five teams of two, insisting that the students work in pairs for safety. Most of the kids tried to refuse the money when I explained what I wanted, but I made them take it. It was only fair. We produced dual-language versions of the police posters in Spanish, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Bengali, Arabic, Urdu, Portuguese, and half a dozen other languages, and then they—and I—hit the subways, guided by an ethnological map of the city that I’d found online.

Claire and Kate and I were already in family therapy. I talked about my work with the Columbia students—about how much better it made me feel to be actively doing something, and to be meeting strangers every day who cried for our loss and promised to do whatever they could on our behalf. Claire was in bad shape at the time, cycling between uncontrollable weeping and prolonged periods of near catatonia. Kate spoke up, saying she wanted to come with me. I was hesitant because she was so young, but the therapist sided with her, pointing out that she felt the same need to do something for Kyle that I did, regardless of her age. I started taking her with me on short jaunts after school, and then on slightly longer trips on weekend mornings. Pretty soon I was taking her with me as often as I could.

There was a garbage can on the corner of Forty-eighth and Park a
hundred yards beyond the Asian girl. I glanced in out of habit and saw a mound of crumpled leaflets. It didn’t surprise me. Ninety percent of the leaflets I’d handed out had ended up in the nearest garbage can as well. I knew, because I used to check. It made me despair sometimes. But when you really care about something, it’s impossible not to do whatever you can, if only to keep your own sense of hope alive. I folded her handout and put it my pocket. An e-mail wasn’t much to ask.

The Columbia kids fell away as summer approached. I didn’t blame them. We’d already hit every neighborhood in the city twice. Kate and I kept going. The leafleting had become an act of solidarity, with each other and with Kyle. We ranged increasingly far afield, hanging posters and distributing handbills throughout Westchester, Connecticut, and New Jersey. We even went to Boston and Washington. We talked in the car on our travels—about serious things and not-serious things. And when we weren’t talking, we listened to audiobooks, and we followed the New York sports teams on the radio, and we worked on crossword puzzles, Kate reading the clues aloud. The time together was a gift, the only thing that kept me sane.

Eighteen months passed somehow. Alex took me to lunch, learned I was verging on money difficulties, and arranged for Walter to offer me work. Shortly thereafter, Yolanda—who’d been acting as the other functioning adult in our household—announced that she had to move home to the Dominican Republic to care for her sister. I’d been able to balance the time spent leafleting and the time with Claire, but the new job made it difficult. I curtailed the leafleting but refused to give up entirely. Giving up meant acceptance. Claire had begun volunteering at Sloan-Kettering, and Kate and I used the time when she was at the hospital to resume canvassing locally. And then Kate began making excuses not to accompany me, and I realized one day that she’d had enough. It was understandable. She was thirteen, with interests of her own. My choices were to continue alone, spending less time with Claire and Kate, or to stop. I stopped. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. Stopping felt like a breach of faith and deepened my sense of shame.

A liveried doorman greeted me as I entered the Palace hotel. There was a round red sofa in the center of the ornate lobby, and I sat down to rest for a moment before heading toward the dining room. I abandoned
the leafleting because it had been the right thing for the family I had left. It was time to abandon my denials as well. I’d put a halt to Kyle’s mail, and give up my vigil at the office window, and move to San Francisco, if Claire wanted me to go with her. And I’d hide my shame. I closed my eyes, trying to steady my breathing. My son was dead. Claire and Kate were alive. I had to be strong for them.

I checked in for lunch with a somber plainclothes security agent who examined my ID carefully before finally admitting me to the private room where Senator Simpson was scheduled to hold forth. It was a long, narrow, high-ceilinged chamber, paneled in dark mahogany and illuminated by lead crystal chandeliers—an old New York setting, like something from an Edith Wharton novel. A number of the people already seated around the enormous oval table in the middle glanced toward me as I entered. Apart from the room, the only thing reminiscent of a turn-of-the-century power lunch was the fact that everyone was male. Other than that, the attendees were too young, too casually dressed, and too ethnically diverse. It was a typical hedge-fund group, hyperkinetic forty-year-olds in blue blazers and open collared shirts, wearing ten-thousand-dollar watches and compulsively checking BlackBerrys held in their laps. The crowd was a fair bit smaller than it had been at my last lunch with this group. The survivors looked aged but unbowed.

I nodded to the room and then spied Alex. He was sitting at the far end of the room, an empty chair to his left. I sat down next to him just as Walter rose to his feet and began tapping a glass with his butter knife. Walter, as always, was impeccably turned out in a pin-striped Savile Row suit and a discreet club tie.

“You okay?” I whispered to Alex.

He touched a finger to his lips and pointed toward his father, not making eye contact. He reeked of stale alcohol. I made an effort to set aside my problems with Claire and focus on Alex.