ONE HEARS STORIES

ONE HEARS STORIES

One hears stories.  One reads stories, too, but those are the kind that are pondered and carefully constructed.  It’s the stories one hears, told by someone who either experienced the events of the tale or was told them by the person who did, that have the ring of life, that can unsettle one like nothing one reads, say in the newspaper or news magazine, or in a collection of tales one picks up in the library.  It is always the voice of the teller that gets to one, especially if one is close and has an intimate connection with the teller, and can see the teller’s face and match the expression with the words.  That’s what makes the hair on the arms stand up, or that makes the ringing in the ears aroused emotions can cause.    

     I’ll tell you one such story.  This one came to me just the other day.  I was shopping in the supermarket.  This woman I know named Marsha, wife of an old high school buddy who lives in my neighborhood, sees me in the aisle reading the nutrition stats on this cereal box and suddenly veers straight at me, so that I notice her and nearly drop the box.  She tells me the story right there, in the aisle, her tone urgent, looking over my shoulder and turning to see who was coming behind her.  She had to get it off her chest, and so she passed it on to me, and having no one to tell it to myself, I decided to write it and then maybe send it on to everyone in my address book.  So, you all will get it.  Good luck to you.  Here’s the story.

A girl gets her first car.  She’s 15 and her name is, let’s say, Vicky.  At her age, she can drive alone only in the daytime.  Her father has to pay her insurance because she has no source of income yet.  But she works now and has begun to save a few dollars.  Suddenly, her taste in clothes matures.  Fewer jeans and shorts and tank tops, lollipop colors are gone, and her clogs collect dust in her closet.  She has begun to wear blouses and skirts, has bought herself a few summer dresses, and now wears pumps, white ones.  No more ponytails.  She has begun to style her hair and looks more and more like a working woman, which she has been trying to become.  Her parents have been observing these changes and liking them, though they have wisely refrained from saying so.  But they do talk about her and what they see happening among themselves. 

     Vicky has also begun talking to her mother.  Only a few weeks ago, she was notorious for ignoring her mother, doing the opposite of what her mother either asked of her or just naturally expected of her, and now she talks to her mother as though they have so much in common, as though they are best of friends.  It is as though turning 15 and getting a car and a job so altered her that she seems like a different person.  But the most surprising change has come about in her behavior.  Her parents do not have to tell her to keep her cell phone off when she drives.  They don’t have to tell her to follow the speed limit.  They don’t have to tell her not to leave her car unlocked.  Or that she should be home before dark.  Or that she should not go carousing with friends on Main Street.  Or that she should never go to parties where the kids are drinking alcohol, especially if she is driving.  She watches herself and takes responsibility for herself so sensibly that her parents have begun to suspect that something is actually wrong with her.  Vicky, her parents worry, seems like a different person, and even though this new person is someone they approve of, they worry that their daughter seems to have disappeared.

     This is, of course, exactly what happens.  Vicky goes to work at her summer job.  She’s wearing a light floral-print dress and her white pumps.  Her hair is nicely styled with a curl at both temples and brushed down in the back, cut just above her shoulders.  She is wearing a fake pearl necklace, but it looks good on her, so she doesn’t care that it’s fake.  She leaves her car locked up tight in the parking lot behind the office building where she works.  Her job is to tend to the phone and do errands for an attorney, which keeps her busy, but which also keeps her interests up, for she hears about problems she never dreamed of in her short life.  On this day she expects to work late, so she calls home and tells her mother that she doesn’t know when she will be able to get home.  No, she says, she won’t be home after dark, not to worry about that.  But when it does get dark and she has not come home, her parents become fearful.  What should they do?

     The first thing they think of is to jump in the car and drive to her office building, expecting to find her still there working late with the attorney.  But when they get there, the building is dark and the parking lot behind is empty.  Her father says that she might be just getting home and that they probably will find her there when they return.  But she is not there.  Vicky’s mother then digs out the phone book and looks up the home number of the attorney.  He says that they did work late, but that they left together about 6 p.m.  And no, he has no idea where she might have gone or whom she might have met.  He says he is sorry and hopes she turns up soon.  That’s when she calls the police.  She gives them year and model of Vicky’s car and the license plate number.  They hear no more that night.

     Before Vicky’s father leaves for work the next morning, a policeman rings the bell.  He tells them that her car had been found during the night in the long-term parking at the airport, and have they heard from her?  They now become distraught.  This is the worst news they could hear.  Vicky, her mother tells the policeman, has no money.  After the new clothes and the haircut she paid for, she doesn’t have enough money to buy a sandwich at the airport, no less a ticket to anywhere.  The policeman asks for a recent photo of her, and this is supplied.  The next day they are told by someone from the FBI that Vicky had purchased a ticket to Florida the evening before and boarded a plane in the company of an older man.  They are given a description of this man, but it is someone they don’t recognize. 

     Now the trauma begins for Vicky’s parents.  They each envision horrible things happening to her in some place far from home, but they don’t say anything for fear of panicking the other.  They learned that Vicky had bought a ticket to the Miami International Airport and boarded in the company of a man at least as old as her father.  She did not seem to be coerced, the FBI man told them.  But this news is even more unsettling to them.  What could make their daughter agree to go to Miami with a strange man her father’s age, having just turned 15, and having virtually no experience of the world outside school and home, except what she experienced at the attorney’s office over  those few short weeks she worked there?

     Weeks have passed.  The FBI in Florida reports that she was seen leaving the airport with the same man she departed with.  She did not seem coerced.  Speculation cannot be suppressed.  Vicky’s parents barely eat anymore.  Meals go unprepared.  Her father has taken an emergency leave from work, proposing to go to Florida himself and try to find her.  But the FBI tells him they are working the case as an abduction.  He would only get in the way.  Stay home.  But sitting is beyond enduring for both of them.  What to do? 

At this point, Marsha became unsettled herself.  She kept turning around, looking up the aisle from which she came, like she expected someone to be following her.  And she also kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see I don’t know what.  It’s what she knew happened next that so unsettled her.  Who could have imagined it?  Not me.

A year passes.  Vicky’s parents have not reconciled to their daughter’s disappearance, but they have begun to get on with their lives.  This is when they get a call from the FBI.  The agent tells them that someone fitting their daughter’s description and resembling the photo that they were given has been identified and is now awaiting identification by them.  They are overjoyed.  They want to go to Florida, but the agent tells them he will send photos of the girl and they can make a preliminary determination from them.  They must do this first.  Later in the afternoon, an agent arrives and shows them six photos of the girl they think is Vicky.  Her parents are sure this is her.  They are overjoyed, but the agent tells them that they need to prepare themselves for the unexpected when they see her.  They do not know what he might be implying by this, so evasive it seems to them, but it starts them worrying.

     When they arrive at the Miami International Airport, they are met by an FBI agent who leads them out and into a gov’t car.  They are driven away and taken to the FBI Field Office in North Miami.  They are ushered into a room where an agent and a  psychologist are awaiting them.  They are told that the person whom they believe is Vicky has no memory of living in Sioux  Falls, does not answer to the name of Vicky, and believes herself to be the wife of the man she is living with.  And yes, that man is old enough to be her father. 

     Vicky’s parents are stunned by this news.  They are told she either won’t recognize them or will fake not recognizing them.  The psychologist tells them that it is likely she really won’t recognize them, that such brainwashing in fact happens, and that in time, with proper therapy, she can recover.  This helps to settle them, but they are still trembling with anxiety.  They are brought into the room where she has been waiting, accompanied by a woman agent.  They approach her cautiously, but she shows no sign of recognition, and their hearts fall.  It is like they were told.  They try to talk to her, but she says,

     “Go to hell and damn you!  Tell them to let me go home, now!” 

     She has a look of desperation in her eyes.  She also glares at them with obvious loathing. 

     “Who are you?” her mother asks gently.

     “Go to hell,” she responds. 

     Her mother repeats, just as gently,

     “Who are you?” 

     When she hears her daughter say, “I am Amanda Peltier, who the hell are you?” she swoons into her husband’s arms, nearly unconscious.  The voice of this person they know to be their daughter is not their daughter’s voice.  Nothing about her reflects their daughter before she disappeared.  Her manner, her voice, her hairstyle, her clothing are those of a different person.  They are ushered out of the room by the agent who led them in.  They are rejoined by the psychologist.  They do positively identify her as Vicky.  At least, the body is their daughter’s, who lives inside it now they don’t know.

     Vicky’s mother wants a second chance to speak with her daughter, and her father wants to know what will happen next.  The agent with them tells them that the man Vicky has been living with has been apprehended and charged with abduction and forcible holding through fraudulent persuasion.  Since Vicky is a minor, he will likely get a long prison sentence.  The mother is now returned to the room where Vicky is being watched by the woman agent.  She is alone with her daughter now, who looks at her with a sneer and with an air of contempt. 

     Mother says, “Vicky, you were taken from us, your father and me, a year ago.  You had a good life at home, and you were working for Mr. Yardley, the lawyer.  Do you remember?  He remembers you.  He would like to have you back.  And you need to go back to school and. . . .” 

     “I don’t know you,” Vicky snarls, leaving her mother with her mouth open.  “I don’t want to know you!  I want to go home, that’s all.  Can’t all you freaks just get out of my life?”

     “I am your mother.”

     “Screw you, screw you, screw you,” Vicky yells with her hands to her temples, “get this bitch out of here!”

     Her screaming is so loud her mother is stunned and puts her hands over her ears, her face red and horrified.  She gets up while her daughter is still screaming and as she steps to the door, the woman agent opens it and takes her arm and gently escorts her out of the room.  Mortified, she rejoins her husband, who is talking with the agent and who has heard the screaming and rises from his chair, expecting to rescue his wife from that child who is no longer their child.  She collapses again into his arms.

     “What do we do now?” he asks the agent.

     “We put her in a community shelter where she will receive regular visits from a therapist until she is ready to go home,” the agent says, shrugging his shoulders.  Vicky’s father asks what the likelihood is that she can be returned to herself.  The agent says he doesn’t know, he is not a psychologist, and this case is a first for him. 

     It has been a year now since Vicky was found.  She is still living at the shelter, still being visited by the therapist, and still refusing to have anything to do with the people she has been told are her parents.  She hates them, she says, and she means it. 

Marsha finishes the story and looks at me, waiting for a response.  I have been standing in the aisle, holding a Cheerios box, listening to her for twenty minutes.  “Well,” she says, “I know that family.  I know that girl or used to know her.  What does one say to those people?  I don’t know.  Oh, Lord, I don’t know.”

     She looks at me almost like she expects me to tell her what to say.  But I don’t know.  One says nothing.  One can offer an ear, I guess.  But what can one say?  The ironies force one to keep one’s own council.  I have nothing to say.  Except, maybe, Unsettling.  Unsettling.