A Kidnapping in New York

CHAPTER ONE

GWENDOLYN

Apartment buildings hold defiantly to their odors, remembering each tenant in the pores of their walls: the Chinese takeout, the burnt toast, the fried fish, the dirty diapers, the litter boxes soiled by cats whose nine lives have long ago been extinguished. The hired help struggle, but fight a hopeless battle. Try as they might to conceal the aroma of each generation with a fresh coat of paint, the walls always win, slowly exhaling the last visceral sensations of their former tenants. Never fully fading from the building’s memory.

As the elevator door creaked open to reveal the dimly lit hallway of the once grand building, I should have been focused on other, more pressing matters. Yet, anticipation contracted the muscles in my head as the immediately familiar odor infiltrated the elevator cab. The sickly sweet, slightly nauseating aroma of my past permeated my nostrils. Bringing back memories as vivid as if they had happened last week, or the week before that, instead of the two-and-a-half years since I had last stepped foot in this building. It required a conscious effort to move myself forward.

The door to apartment 19J stood impersonally amongst the others, a large five-room high-floor overlooking the park. The waiting room wore a new yellow coat of paint, had sloughed its Berber décor for trendy vinyl, and sheathed its old chairs in gray polyester chenille. Perhaps a Botox makeover would be sufficient for me, as well.

I made sure I wasn’t early, so I wouldn’t have to sit around and make an already excruciating ordeal even more so. Waiting rooms, especially shrink waiting rooms, are uncomfortable on so many levels. I tried to settle my butt into the depressions left by the other fuck-ups who had waited here before me. Ditched the iced skinny mocha latte in the trash. I had managed to choke down half for breakfast. I would get another one later. For lunch.

The door to the inner office opened almost immediately. And there she was, as if time had stood still, looking exactly as she had all those many months ago. I, of course, was a completely different person.

Gwendolyn … Gwendolyn …

She whispered my name and put on the same pitiful mask everyone wore lately when speaking to me. I made a point of looking at the floor as I squeezed past her girth and stepped into the office. She turned and made a move toward embracing me. I stiffened just enough to remind her of appropriate professional boundaries. She reached out her hand. I fumbled with my bags.

Gwen, she said again. I was so worried–

"Doctor Moss, please. Please, I said. Has the session already begun? I haven’t even had a chance to sit down."

Her mouth slipped, just a crack, and then she shut it and gestured me to the updated sofa, pretending that’s what she had intended all along.

She sat. It’s just that I was so … so shocked. And appalled. No one ever thinks it will happen to them. Or to someone they know.

I held up my hand to stop her. Wasn’t it enough that I had come back? Why did she have to go rushing into it so soon? Before I was ready. I was the one paying. Wasn’t this my show?

Doctor Moss, can we just slow down for a second? I closed my eyes. I just need a chance to breathe. I feel like I haven’t had a chance to take a breath for two weeks.

She fell silent. I opened my eyes and she nodded.

I rushed two deep breaths. I figured I owed them to her. Thanks for seeing me on such short notice. I know it’s been a while.

She nodded again.

Over two years.

She nodded some more.

Awkward silence.

Over two years, I said again. "And everything was going pretty well until, well, you know … this whole thing happened."

I can imagine. She nodded, as if she could. How are you holding up?

I didn’t want to answer, but found myself answering. I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’m on the verge of being out of control again. I searched the window for some sort of distraction, for something to focus on. But there was nothing but sky. I’m scared and I’m nervous and I can’t sleep. I’m tired all the time. With no new details, the press is finally relenting. Fresh news cycle, I guess. But I sit around all day thinking those thoughts. About the things I shouldn’t do. I’m on the verge of being completely out of control. I can feel it.

I tried to smile, to minimize what I was telling her, but my lips stuck to my teeth. I rooted around in my bag for the emergency Thermos of coffee.

Gwen … Well, yes … I can imagine. Again, as if she could. I’m sure it’s more stress than most people can bear. At times of extreme anxiety, we are always in danger of slipping back into our old tried and true methods of coping. She paused—a self-important pause—so I would know what she was saying was going to be insightful. Sometimes, the most effective methods of self-distraction are the most self-destructive. But of course, you know all that already.

I hated her.

I was too exhausted to talk. I had been answering questions from the cops, from the media, from nosy neighbors, nonstop for days. I was willing to waste the $400 of insurance money just to close my eyes and sit there for the rest of the fifty minutes. As far as therapy goes, it was probably worth it. Unfortunately, she wasn’t as flippant about taking their money as I was about spending it.

I’ve read the newspapers. And of course, watched the television. Naturally, I’ve been worried about you. Concerned is a better word. I’ve been concerned. I know how very strong a person you are. If anybody can make it through a crisis like this, you can. And I know you will make it through. Even if it all feels overwhelming right now, at this juncture. But of course, needless to say, I was worried sick to hear about the baby. So, when you called—well, I was relieved. I welcome the opportunity to help you through this.

I turned back to the window and remembered what I was searching for. The pigeons. I watched them swoop back and forth across Fifth Avenue whenever I needed a distraction.

It was my fault. Totally my fault.

Your fault. She blinked. How could it have been your fault?

I was there. I should have done something to stop it. I hated myself. I could have stopped it. And I didn’t.

Last night’s dinner rode a wave of acrid bile, slowly bubbling up like lava, burning my esophagus, throat, mouth, and nostrils along the way. How many more times would I have to swallow my words along with my puke? How many more times would an old meal come back to pay a revolting visit before this was all over?

So that makes it all my fault.

Then tell me why it was your fault. Explain it to me. Why you think so, anyway. She shifted her considerable heft forward; psych 101 for ‘I’m interested in what you’re saying.’

I took a long tremulous swig of coffee, and a deep breath, to muster the strength to tell my story. Yet again.

CHAPTER TWO

Where to begin.

How far back is the beginning?

Most of the way, I decided, but not all.

I stopped coming to see you long before I got pregnant. So, you never knew. But obviously now you do. Not only did I get pregnant, but I decided to have the baby. I shrugged with feigned nonchalance. Once it happened, I didn’t put all that much thought into it.

I’d agonized more over that decision than anything else in my life.

"Thirty-four, the old clock ticking, and then, Surprise! You’re pregnant!"

And the father? Has he been supportive?

I stifled something. A laugh? A sob? I … I never told him. We were deeply in love. Wow. It felt good to finally say that aloud. But before I could tell him, he left me. Just like everyone else.

I needed a minute to compose myself, to quiet the quaking within. Eventually, I cleared my throat and continued. It was very challenging. My pregnancy. I was feeling fat and depressed and lethargic. Which made me feel more fat and more depressed and more lethargic. The vicious cycle, paying its usual unwelcome visit.

You were having a baby and the fat cycle was in full swing? She wagged her large head.

My face got hot.

"You must ease up on yourself. You have to give yourself a break, she said in a voice I imagine someone would use if they were your friend. Don’t you ever ease up?"

Don’t you know me at all? I shot back. Do you even understand me? Or have I wasted 7,000 hours of my life on this couch?

Ah. But if you remember, when we stopped seeing each other, you agreed to lighten up on yourself and not be such a perfectionist.

Things change. I’m not going to be penned in by false promises.

I knew I was lashing out, using her as my whipping post, not because of anything she did, but because of everything going on in my life. That was stupid of me. And immature. Of course, I realized that. But I paid good money for the privilege.

"I waited until after I had her. Then I needed to get a handle on my situation. I had to start getting myself back in control. I had to get back to my old routines."

Prudence dictates that new mothers wait six weeks after giving birth to start exercising again. To give their bodies a chance to heal from the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth. But I was in great shape when I got pregnant and even ran through most of the pregnancy.

Cassie. That’s her name. But you know that, since you’ve been following the story. A month old when it happened. And beautiful. Even for such a little kid.

For the first time in a long time, I felt myself smile. Moss smiled back, so I frowned.

I had already been running with her for two weeks when it happened.

The shrink raised her eyebrows. Was she not too small to be doing that?

"No. She was just fine. She slept the whole time, and she loved it. It wasn’t a good thing––and I knew it—putting the need to exercise above all else. But I am who I am, and it always did make me feel superior, in a fucked-up sort of way. I thought we had agreed a long time ago that your job is not to be judgmental, I snapped. Some of the more pathetic detectives have already tried to use the ‘blame the victim’ scenario on me. As I tried to explain to them, I’ll try to explain it to you, too."

This was not the time to mention that, although perfectly healthy, at a birth weight of five and one-half pounds, she really was tiny. Instead, I continued the patronizing tone, to be certain Moss understood that what I was telling her was indisputable common knowledge and that, as a doctor, she should be ashamed to not already know it.

I spoke slowly, deliberately, condescendingly.

The first thing I emphasized was that the thing cost me a thousand bucks. It was the best damn jogging stroller out there. I know, I did the research. Neck support, smooth ride suspension, you name it. If she fussed too much, straight against my chest in the baby carrier she went till she calmed. Then back into the stroller so I could finish my run. But I know she loved that stroller because mostly she slept. I definitely sounded like some idiotic late-night infomercial.

Hmm. Moss pursed her lips. I’ll take this one on faith.

It was a beautiful day, I continued, ignoring her. Magnificent. The morning was clear, the whole city smelled clean and looked razor sharp. No ozone at all. You couldn’t ask for better air to breathe.

I inhaled the stale air of her office.

I had already set up a great schedule. Cassie woke at about five. I’m breastfeeding, regaining my figure being top priority, so I was fully awake then, too. The kid was napping again by six, until about eleven, which was perfect. It gave me enough time to get in a good run with her, come back and shower. It was especially great because the early morning joggers had already finished and were on their way to work and the stay at home joggers weren’t out quite yet. Compared to the craziness later in the day, the park always seemed calm during those hours. I never felt as if I was in the middle of the city.

It was perfect.

It seemed that the whole country knew what happened next. And even though only two weeks had passed, I felt like I had gone over the story a million times already.

But I understood why they wanted it that way. If years of tedious hard work in the city’s Legal Aid Office had taught me anything, it was the importance of repetition. Each new telling could unearth some heretofore buried detail. Some little nugget that had fallen through the cracks might reveal itself as the missing gem. But the story was becoming increasingly confusing to me. It was becoming harder to keep the details straight. That horrific replay button was on a continuous twenty-four-seven loop. Any time I closed my eyes I would rejoin my nightmare somewhere in progress.

I attempted to focus, made a conscious effort to speak slowly, and tried not to make any mistakes.

We left the building and entered the park the same as always, directly across the street, at 90th and Central Park West. We turned left and headed north, up those monster hills until we got to 107th, then took the path over to the East Side.

I thought back to that run, the same one I had done for over ten years, five times a week, rain or shine, sweltering hot or freezing cold. It never, ever mattered. Strangers would gawk at me with a mixture of disbelief and horror—although I liked to think of it as awe—for my audacity at thumbing my nose at the extremes in the weather. Despite everything that had happened, I couldn’t help but wonder how soon it would be appropriate for me to be seen running in the park again.

I closed my eyes and I was there.

CHAPTER THREE

We went all the way down the East Side, past The Reservoir, down the hills behind the museum, past the skating rink. We turned right along Central Park South to get back to the West Side, then finally back up north to complete the loop.

Now, not only could I see myself running, but I could feel it too. Legs aching, the weight of the jogging stroller getting heavier and heavier as I pushed it up the increasingly steep slope of the hills by the Delacorte Theater.

The whole way north is uphill. I always get tired in that final stretch back on the West Side, in the eighties. Especially now, with the jogging stroller, because you lose your arms.

I opened my eyes a crack to look at her because I figured, obviously correctly, that a person of a certain heft would have no idea what I was talking about.

You lose your arms, I repeated, and grasped at imaginary handlebars in the air in front of me.

She swung her face from side to side.

I’ll explain. An efficient runner uses their arms to get momentum by pumping them up and down. I realized that I had unconsciously dropped the timbre of my voice an octave and slipped into the slow, overly solicitous tone I used when I needed to convince a jury they knew everything there is to know about some obscure topic they knew nothing about.

But when you hold on to the handles of a jogging stroller, you no longer have your arms to help pump. You lose the use of your arms as jogging tools. To keep the stroller rolling straight, you slip the tether around your wrist and hold the handlebar with both hands, suck it up, and get the whole run from your legs. That makes it a lot harder. A much more intense leg workout.

And––yes, there it was. The momentary pupil contraction, that almost imperceptible flicker of understanding that told me, like suckers on a jury, she was on board.

Finally, there’s that last big hill right before I come up to the Great Lawn. It’s always been my point of exhaustion. I guess I must be switching from aerobic to anaerobic or something. So of course, that’s where it happened. One of the detectives thinks whoever planned it had watched me more than once before. That they knew that’s the spot where I’d have nothing left, where my strength would have all tapped out.

The white-hot tears slowly burned their way forward, percolated beneath my eyelids, and spilled like corrosive acid along the raw troughs they had previously etched down my cheeks.

It’s okay. Take your time.

She offered up the box of tissues.

I took them. Then issued a long, slow, stalling sigh. "Me, of all people. Me, who knows better than anyone what can happen in this city when you don’t pay attention to your surroundings. How I let my guard down and let this happen. How that made it all my fault."

I took another deep breath.

I explained to her that you can’t see it from the street, there are too many trees, but when the amps are set up you can hear everything. It’s one of my favorite things in the world. Running by the Great Lawn when they’re setting up for the concerts. Sound checks always happen, and occasionally the real, actual artists will even show up. It’s like an unadvertised concert. And it’s always the biggest names in the business. I mean, they are the only ones who can justify Central Park as a venue.

I was an inappropriate idiot, getting a charge from an ill-timed running story. It was one thing to know it. Another to care.

That morning, they were setting up. It was all I was focused on. I hadn’t heard anything about it, and was wondering who it was. They were playing, back there, hidden by the trees. I couldn’t place the band. As I got closer, I listened more intently. My first mistake. I became so intent on listening that I stopped using my eyes. I was seeing, but wasn’t focusing. Wasn’t paying attention to what was happening around me.

I was infuriated, even then, sitting there, recounting how it had all transpired. Those stupid equipment trucks hogging up the entire right side of the road. Surely, she knew the ones I was talking about. That insidious industrial caravan whenever there’s a movie shoot or concert. They really are a monumental danger.

I glared at her.

"Those trucks force you to run way out into the middle of the street to get around them. They idle their stupid, smutty engines all day, spewing their profane, climate-destroying air pollution. Try running for a quarter of a mile past those things while holding your breath. I’m sure they must violate every clean air regulation on the books.

The odd thing was … and I never thought about it before that day … They seem to never use trucks with hydraulic lifts. Instead, the roadies lay planks of wood between the road and the back of the truck to make a ramp and push their crap from inside the truck down the ramp and then use the same ramps to haul it back up again. Wire, cables, cameras, lighting, tables, chairs, whatever. In and out. Up and down. Then they’re over by the stage listening to the music. None of them hang back at the trucks to keep an eye on the junk they’ve left strewn all over the road.

I pulled a few tissues from the box just in case. She leaned in even further. I guess she knew what was coming.

Take a minute, she offered. If this is too difficult.

But I was going to finish what I started.

"I remember thinking that either the band really sucked, or I was too old to appreciate the new music, when two runners materialized out of nowhere, one on either side of me. Actually, they didn’t really materialize—they had been about twenty paces behind me since I passed Tavern on the Green, three quarters of a mile earlier.

"Inexplicably, I thought I was pacing them because they stayed the same distance behind me no matter how much I sped up or slowed down to take the hills. Only now, looking back, I realize that they were in great shape and were really good runners. It wouldn’t make any sense that they would have the same pace as a one-month postpartum woman pushing a jogging stroller. They probably could walk about as fast as I was running." Blinded, I now saw, by my own hubris.

I looked out. My pigeons were doing figure eights.

"Before I knew what was happening, these two hulks had come up behind me and were boxing me in. In two seconds, two split seconds, they were so close, one on either side of me, that our feet were getting all jumbled up. I was tripping, stumbling over my sneakers, or their sneakers, I couldn’t even tell, and my knees were buckling. I felt myself starting to actually lose my balance, to fall down. It was ridiculous, really. Something like that had never, ever happened to me before, and I was like, What the hell?—but I only thought it, I didn’t have the words to say it, because now I really was falling and there was nothing I could do to catch my balance, because on top of everything else now I was totally freaking out because I realized that they were sticking their legs out and tripping me on purpose and I was panicking because there were two of them and only one of me and they were both so much bigger and stronger than I was and right then it dawned on me what an idiot I was, that I really was still too weak from just having the baby and I could barely breathe because I was scared and I was out of shape and I probably should never have been out running all those miles after all. And then one of them put his hand over mine and started prying it off the handlebar and I looked down and I realized … I mean, I saw that they were wearing latex gloves, and that was a bad sign, a very bad sign, because that meant they had put some thought into what they were doing … and whatever it was, whatever the hell it was, they didn’t want to get caught doing it."

I looked down. The tissues were shredded in my hands.

That’s when it became surreal, like it wasn’t happening to me at all, like it was happening to someone else, and I was just watching.

I was talking to myself now. It hardly mattered if Moss was there or not.

"Everything seemed to be moving so fast, but at the same time in slow motion. The guy closest to the curb. He was big, ugly. Shaved head. Stubble beard. Pockmarks on his cheek. Gang initiation scar on his forehead. His sweat smelled of garlic and cumin. I was concentrating on my feet, still trying to keep my balance, when he did it. I didn’t see it coming. I was totally blindsided. He grabbed my head with his arms, wrapped them both around my head and face so tight I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t scream and I could barely breathe. He dragged me over the curb and away from the street, by my head. I was sure he was going to break my neck, pull my head right off my body. I didn’t even have time to fight him. Then he threw me, threw me in the air, threw me across to this small patch of grass. I landed on my stomach down a little hill under the bushes. I opened my eyes. Couldn’t see a damn thing, but dirt and rocks, and those prickle bushes. My head was spinning; I couldn’t figure out which way was up. I was on my hands and knees, and they stung like hell. They had already begun to bleed.

"I smelled his revolting odor before I saw him. Almost blacked out when he dove into me. Knocked the air right out of my body. He flung me over onto my back like I was a rag doll. God, he was ugly. After that, I couldn’t see his face anymore because he had stopped to pull a pair of pantyhose over his head. I remember those empty pantyhose legs hanging down and his big flat nose