Capturing Angels Read online

  I would never say that John returned to the way he had been before Mary’s abduction, but he was much stronger, and he could function at almost the same levels of competency at work that he was so well known for having. On the other hand, I thought that for me, time didn’t heal; it hardened over wounds and tragedies so that they were not right in my face all the time. That was about all the relief I could enjoy, and I still wasn’t willing to find any more with a new, perhaps more sympathetic professional therapist.

  However, I realized that the hardness was beginning to change who I was, who I had been. The complete failure of the FBI to produce even a single hopeful lead began the massacre of all my faith and hope about anything and everything. I often wondered during those five months how anyone was able to cope with me, even my husband, John, the unflappable constant gardener of eternal promises.

  Couples who lose a child through accident or illness often have trouble with their marriages. It wasn’t too dramatic to say that our love for each other had been crippled. Since Mary’s disappearance, romance between us had become a kite well launched into the wind but one that had broken free of the string that anchored it to any earthly hold. It was carried off and disappearing in the clouds or the darker sky closing off the twilight. The feeling was palpable. What could either of us do to change it?

  I longed for him to come home because he was unable to work. I needed him to rage and be almost as hysterical as I was.

  When would we both break down and cry in each other’s arms?

  Perhaps worst of all, when would he stop pretending that our lives would ever be the same? Everything we were doing now was really more like window dressing. Although he did his best to hide it, he didn’t have the heart for any distractions except his hobby.

  As much as I feared it, I couldn’t help but wonder when I would give up all hope.

  When would we accept that Mary was gone, buried under distance and time?

  When would John and I accept that she was dead to us and we were left without even a grave to visit, a place to put flowers and shed tears?

  6

  Falling

  During this long, dreary, and hopeless passage of time, days had a way of surprising me with how quickly they turned into night. Most things that were happening surprised me. I realized that whether I was on medication or not, I was living like someone constantly drugged, jolted by the ringing of the phone, the bonging of our miniature grandfather clock, or the buzzer on the stove telling me something I had put in was ready to come out. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw emptiness in my eyes and felt as if my soul had vacated. It had gone on to find another vessel to inhabit. A shell had been left behind. Whether I lived or died was gradually becoming beside the point. The only thing that gave my heart any reason to keep beating was that word policemen used: yet. Nothing is new yet. I lived and breathed yet.

  Eventually, even though I refused to accept the fact that Mary might never be returned, I tried to get back to being the perfect little housewife, cooking and baking again, cleaning the house well enough to dismiss the maid, and I even went out with John to an occasional dinner. I tried, but I couldn’t do it well enough to satisfy anyone, much less myself. I think I could actually feel my skin crust over, my eyes darken and turn steely, and my voice deepen. I was with people again, but I rarely laughed and never started a conversation. My answers were almost always monosyllabic. I suppose to others, I resembled someone who had just been released from a mental clinic. Some even thought that I had taken John’s advice and secretly been in some therapy. More thought that I was on some medication.

  It was impossible not to see the difference in the way my girlfriends and other people spoke to me, even the way they touched me. It was as if they thought I was now composed of thin china. Press yourself against me too hard, embrace me too tightly, even kiss my cheek a split second too long, and I would shatter before your eyes. Everything that was said to me was said more softly than it was said to anyone else, and certain words had become blasphemous, such as missing, gone, lost, even just the word daughter. How guilty my girlfriends with children looked when they talked about them. No matter how I smiled or what I said, they seemed to want to swallow back their words, unring every bell sounding motherly joy.

  There was only one possibility that gave them any escape from the heavy layer of tension hovering over us. Would John and I have another child?

  As soon as two months after Mary’s abduction, I had no doubt that John wanted us to have another child. It was, after all, what we had planned to do since Mary had turned five, but now there seemed to be a new urgency about it. Whenever he turned to me in bed and began to make love, I wasn’t receptive, but he pushed on and in as if he was a doctor carrying out a treatment that he knew was unpleasant but necessary. Although he never came right out and said it, I could hear him thinking it. If God wanted our Mary or had planned another destiny for her, he would not deny us another beautiful child, perhaps the boy we want.

  But if God wouldn’t deny us, my body apparently would. I still didn’t get pregnant. Maybe, as trivial as the analogy might seem, I was like someone who had fallen off her bike and suffered injuries that were so bad she couldn’t see herself riding that bike anymore.

  I was sure that my closer girlfriends thought my not getting pregnant was by choice. Without hearing me say it, they knew I wasn’t looking to have another child to replace Mary. Especially those with young children themselves knew I couldn’t live with the possibility that I would never set eyes on her again. No one openly said or did anything to reveal her belief that I wouldn’t. Ostensibly, at least, they kept Mary at the forefront. Whenever I met any one of them, her eyes were always full of the question: Anything new? I realized that it was almost as painful for them to ask as it was for me to answer. They weren’t anticipating anything more than a shake of my head or a simple “Not yet.”

  Yet was the key word again. It implied that an answer was coming, was out there waiting to be pulled in like some fish. It was only a matter of time. Eventually, factors would come together in that magical way that brought a smile to an angler. He knew that all his hours of patience and determination were going to pay off when he felt the pull on his line and saw his sinker bobbing.

  How could I live any other way but barren? After all, how would I hold the hand of my new child, boy or girl, whenever I left the house? Would I squeeze his or her hand so tightly that he or she would scream? Would I hover over my new child as if I were his or her shadow? Would I give the child a chance to breathe? Would I become terrified if a stranger merely looked our way or, God forbid, tried to talk to him or to her? I could see myself screaming bloody murder if a stranger tried to touch my new child.

  And when John took our new child somewhere without me, would I sit trembling until they returned? Would I make it impossible for John to enjoy this child, especially if we had a son and he wanted to take him to football or baseball games or just someplace to play?

  And what about the guilt I would feel for loving my new child? Would it be as if I had buried Mary? Would every kiss I gave my new baby be the acceptance of our loss of Mary? Would thinking that way prevent me from loving my new child as much as he or she needed to be loved, and would that make for new and difficult social and psychological problems for all of us? Would I hate filling Mary’s chair at the dinner table with my new child, redoing her room for him or her, and buying him or her new clothes? Could I let a new daughter wear Mary’s clothes?

  How does a mother who’s lost her child live with these questions and go on to make her marriage live?

  Months after my coming out, as John liked to refer to it, my now private mourning over the loss of our daughter was temporarily overtaken by the death of his mother. I was surprised to learn that she had been treated for a leak in a heart valve during the past eighteen months. Her doctors had just been considering a valve replacement when she simpl
y didn’t wake up one morning. Even John hadn’t known the full extent of it and how serious it had come to be.

  However, I wasn’t all that surprised at being surprised. Keeping things from one another that other families might share was John’s family’s MO. (Yes, I was beginning to think in police terms now and use their jargon. After all, there was still an APB out on Mary, and I had begun to read as much as I could about child abductions, combing through police reports and newspaper stories as if I expected to learn that one important detail that would solve our tragedy.)

  Not sharing bad news or problems among themselves was a family value for John’s parents and him. Some people kept their illnesses secret because they didn’t want to be constantly reminded of them through the sympathetic looks they would get or the questions about themselves they would be constantly asked. But I always felt it was more a question of self-pride and even embarrassment for the Clarks. It occurred to me that maybe they were more like Puritans, people who believed that we were punished on earth for the things we did on earth. If you had a serious illness, God was getting back at you for some serious sin. Maybe they believed, contrary to what I believed or what other people thought, that they wouldn’t receive sympathy when people heard about their misfortune but would receive suspicion and derision instead.

  It was ideas like these that battered the fortress of my own faith. More and more, I was viewing not only our religion but all religion as more of an obstacle to good feelings about yourself and also to good relations with others. Either we were born with original sin discoloring our souls, as John and Margaret believed, or we were weak and very susceptible to it. How imperfect we were, and how often our religions reminded us. I wasn’t coming to these conclusions because God let my little girl be taken from me. I was coming to these conclusions because religion was trying to tell me that it was all right. There was a greater destiny awaiting us. Get over it. Go back to church.

  By now, my bitterness was spilling over. John was beginning to keep his distance, stepping back like someone who was afraid of being scalded. For nearly eight months, even with John keeping close track of my periods, I failed to get pregnant. I wondered if our failure to produce another child was damaging his faith and if that could only be my fault.

  One night, after one of our usual almost rehearsed dinners, I sat back and stared at him so coldly he had to say, “What?”

  “I was just wondering if you believe God is punishing us for something that I might have done.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “He can’t be rewarding us by taking away our little girl,” I said.

  “We’ve been through this, Grace. We are to God what ants are to man. Just like ants can’t understand us, we can’t understand God’s decisions.”

  “Good,” I said dryly. “I was worried I was doomed to go to hell because someone abducted our daughter.”

  He folded his napkin neatly. Whenever he became annoyed with me—or with anyone, for that matter—John closed himself up and directed his attention and energy to something he could do meticulously. I laughed to myself, thinking he might have made a great brain surgeon if he could be kept angry at the time of surgery.

  “Do you have any interest in our going on holiday this year?” he asked.

  “Provincetown, maybe?” I said sarcastically, thinking of our honeymoon and our plans to take Mary to the dunes.

  He looked at me with a lightning flash of anger in his eyes.

  “I think it was a mistake for you to avoid this new therapist. In fact, I think you should consider it even more seriously now.”

  “I’ll wait for God to tell me,” I said.

  “If you listen, you can hear Him telling you now,” he replied, and rose to leave the table and go to his ships in a bottle.

  Maybe that is where he has put me now, I thought, in one of his bottles. With his meticulous efforts, he’s taken me apart and put me together in a tiny way so he can lock me up under glass and put me on a shelf.

  How do I get out?

  I tried not to think about it. For the next few days, we were like two shadows moving around the house. Back-to-back we slept. The house that we had once loved and cherished like a garden growing love and hope was closing in on me. All of the rooms began to look smaller, with furniture crowding more and more space. Clocks ticked louder, water gushed out of our faucets instead of streaming, and lights were blinding. Whenever I saw Margaret coming to the front door and ringing the doorbell, I didn’t answer. Later, when she called to see why, I pretended I had been asleep.

  “You should get out more,” she said. “Fresh air will do you some good. Do you want to go shopping with me?”

  “No. I don’t need anything right now. Thanks for calling, Margaret,” I said, and hung up before she could string along some other sentences to keep me talking.

  In fact, I went through a torturous debate whenever the phone did ring. Should I answer? Do I hope it’s some miraculous news, and when I discover immediately that the call has nothing to do with Mary, do I continue to hold on to the receiver? Do I speak?

  Margaret’s mention of shopping reminded me that I had yet to return to the mall where Mary was abducted.

  A number of times, I set out to do so, harboring the hope that I would see something, remember something, that would lead to her safe return, but every time I started out for it, I turned around because I would start to tremble and cry.

  How many times had I dreamed of returning and finding her myself? I told myself I should have gone back that first night. In my dreams, I always heard her voice and turned to see her come running to me, her arms out, her face full of joy. I covered that face in kisses, embraced her, and lifted her.

  “Where were you?”

  “Just over there looking at something pretty,” she would say, and point off to the right, but off to the right everything was in darkness.

  That didn’t matter. She was back in my arms, and I was taking her home. She was hungry and eager to help me prepare dinner. Daddy was going to be proud of her. There would be choruses of laughter around our table. The glow would return. Every minute would be more precious than the previous one. Once again, our home would be a womb of contentment giving birth to happiness beyond compare. Our windows would brighten as if they were filled with hundreds of candles building a fortress of light to stave off the darkness. Our neighbors would once again look upon us with reverence and envy.

  John’s rendition of the Twenty-third Psalm would resonate and echo into the homes beside ours, giving hope and faith away generously. “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” Later, we would tuck Mary into bed, join her in evening prayers, and then find ourselves settling comfortably into our own beds to sleep and greet a new day.

  My dream was my prayer now. I couldn’t ask God for anything in church. I had exhausted the words, the promises, like Hemingway’s old man in The Old Man and the Sea, who vowed he would say all the Hail Marys if only God would let him have his big fish.

  “You cannot bargain with God,” John would tell me. “God can’t be made to owe you anything. He’s not a storekeeper who will give you what you ask for if you just pay Him the price. That’s why these people who attend church services only when they feel like it or only on holidays are even more despised than those who don’t attend at all. You can’t give God five days a year and expect something in return, a little good fortune, a little health and happiness. It doesn’t work that way.”

  He quoted more scripture, tried to read passages to me from the Bible or relate some words of religious wisdom that Father McDermott had offered. In fact, it seemed to me that the more time that passed since Mary’s abduction, the more religious John became. It was almost as if he wanted to show me more than he wanted to show his God how strong his faith was.

  I stopped mentioning the subject entirely.

  Finally, one morning, I rose when Joh
n did, and after he had left for work, I decided I would return to the mall and even to the department store and the very place I had stood when I had first realized that Mary wasn’t beside me. I even located the very clothes I had worn that day and put them on. I struggled to remember every detail about what Mary and I had done before we had left to go shopping, and I repeated each and every action I could recall. Then I got into my car and started away. Looking into my rearview mirror, I saw that Margaret had just come out of her house. She looked after me and stood there until I had made the turn and left our street.

  Maybe I should have taken her along, I thought. Maybe I could have used her strength. Besides, it wasn’t right to keep rejecting her kindness. She had cried with us and prayed with us, and she knew, as we did, that Mary’s birthday was approaching.

  Yes, I would have benefited from her company. I could feel the trembling in my hands as I clutched the steering wheel. When I came to that cross street where I had turned away every time before, I slowed, and then, holding my breath, I jerked into the turning lane, nearly cutting off another vehicle. The driver let me know it with a blaring of his horn as he shot past me.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, “but you’ll just have to endure it.” I kept driving.

  It was eerie, but I was able to park in the exact same spot in the underground garage. I sat with the engine off, practically hyperventilating. Finally, I got out and made my way to the escalator. When I reached the store level, I felt as if I had truly come up from the dark depth of the nightmare I was living and could breathe clean, fresh air. Maybe if I did this, I would suddenly be brought back to that very day, and I wouldn’t lose Mary after all. Everything since would have been a nightmare destroyed by the morning sun.

  I turned toward the department store just the way I had turned that fateful day. Retracing my steps as precisely as I could, I reached the entrance and tried to recall how it was possible that I had not realized that Mary was lingering too long behind me and had not entered the store right alongside me. Where had I let go of her hand? I must have taken it when we were on the escalator. I had to have let go immediately afterward.