See what I can do assholes, you never could.
September
It was their first outing together, at the Croton Falls Nature Preserve. The three of them, as a family.
Of course, Zallman was quick to concede, not an actual family.
For the man and woman were not married. Their status as friends/lovers was yet undefined. And the girl was the woman’s child, alone.
Yet if you saw them, you would think family.
It was a bright warm day in mid-September. Zallman who now measured time in terms of before/after was thinking the date was exactly five months after. But this was a coincidence merely.
From Yonkers, where he now lived, Zallman drove north to Mahopac to pick up Leah Bantry and her daughter Marissa at their new home. Leah and Marissa had prepared a picnic lunch. The Croton Falls Nature Preserve, which Leah had only recently discovered, was just a few miles away.
A beautiful place, Leah had told Zallman. So quiet.
Zallman guessed this was a way of saying Marissa feels safe here.
Leah Bantry was working now as a medical technician at Woman/Space, a clinic in Mahopac, New York. Mikal Zallman was temporarily teaching middle school math at a large public school in Yonkers where he also assisted the soccer/basketball/baseball coach.
Marissa was enrolled in a small private school in Mahopac without grades or a formal curriculum in which students received special tutoring and counseling as needed.
Tuition at the Mahopac Day School was high. Mikal Zallman was helping with it.
No one can know what you and your daughter went through. I feel so drawn to you both, please let me be your friend!
Before Zallman had known Leah Bantry, he had loved her. Knowing her now he was confirmed in his love. He vowed to bear this secret lightly until Leah was prepared to receive it.
She wanted no more emotion in her life, Leah said. Not for a long time.
Zallman wondered: what did that mean? And did it mean what it meant, or was it simply a way of saying Don’t hurt me! Don’t come near.
He liked it that Leah encouraged Marissa to call him Uncle Mikal. This suggested he might be around for a while. So far, in Zallman’s presence at least, Marissa did not call him anything at all.
Zallman saw the girl glance at him, sometimes. Quick covert shy glances he hesitated to acknowledge.
There was a tentative air about them. The three of them.
As if (after the media nightmare, this was quite natural) they were being observed, on camera.
Zallman felt like a tightrope walker. He was crossing a tightrope high above a gawking audience, and there was no safety net beneath. His arms were extended for balance. He was terrified of falling but he must go forward. If at this height your balance is not perfect, it will be lethal.
In the nature preserve in the bright warm autumnal sunshine the adults walked together at the edge of a pond. To circle the pond required approximately thirty minutes. There were other visitors to the preserve on this Sunday afternoon, families and couples.
The girl wandered ahead of the adults, though never far ahead. Her behavior was more that of a younger child than a child of eleven. Her movements were tentative, sometimes she paused as if she were out of breath. Her skin was pale and appeared translucent. Her eyes were deep-socketed, wary. Her pale blond hair shimmered in the sun. It had been cut short, feathery, falling to just below her delicate eggshell ears.
After her ordeal in April, Marissa had lost much of her beautiful long hair. She’d been hospitalized for several weeks. Slowly she had regained most of the weight she’d lost so abruptly. Still she was anemic, Leah was concerned that there had been lasting damage to Marissa’s kidneys and liver. She suffered from occasional bouts of tachycardia, of varying degrees of severity. At such times, her mother held her tight, tight. At such times the child’s runaway heartbeat and uncontrollable shivering seemed to the mother a demonic third presence, a being maddened by terror.
Both mother and daughter had difficulty sleeping. But Leah refused prescription drugs for either of them.
Each was seeing a therapist in Mahopac. And Marissa also saw Leah’s therapist for a joint session with her mother, once a week.
Leah confided in Zallman, “It’s a matter of time. Of healing. I have faith, Marissa will be all right.”
Leah never used such terms as normal, recovered.
Mikal Zallman had been the one to write to Leah Bantry of course. He had felt the desperate need to communicate with her, even if she had not the slightest wish to communicate with him.
I feel that we have shared a nightmare. We will never understand it. I don’t know what I can offer you other than sympathy, commiseration. During the worst of the nightmare I had almost come to think that I was responsible...
After Marissa was discharged from the hospital, Leah took her away from Skatskill. She could not bear living in that apartment another day, she could not bear all that reminded her of the nightmare. She was surrounded by well-intentioned neighbors, and through the ordeal she had made several friends; she had been offered work in the area. If she’d wished to return to work at the Nyack Clinic, very likely Davitt Stoop would have allowed her to return. He had reconciled with his wife, he was in a forgiving mood. But Leah had no wish to see the man again, ever. She had no wish to drive across the Tappan Zee Bridge again, ever.
Out of the ordeal had come an unexpected alliance with her sister Avril. While Marissa was in the hospital, Avril had continued to stay in Skatskill; one or the other of the two sisters was always in Marissa’s hospital room. Avril had taken an unpaid leave from her job in Washington, she helped Leah find another job and to relocate in Mahopac, fifty miles north in hilly Putnam County.
Enough of Westchester County! Leah would never return.
She was so grateful for Avril’s devotion, she found herself at a loss for words.
“Leah, come on! It’s what any sister would do.”
“No. It is not what any sister would do. It’s what my sister would do. God damn I love you, Avril.”
Leah burst into tears. Avril laughed at her. The sisters laughed together, they’d become ridiculous in their emotions. Volatile and unpredictable as ten-year-olds.
Leah vowed to Avril, she would never take anyone for granted again. Never anything. Not a single breath! Never again.
When they’d called her with the news: Marissa is alive.
That moment. Never would she forget that moment.
In their family only Avril knew: police had tracked Marissa’s elusive father to Coos Bay, Oregon. There, he had apparently died in 1999 in a boating mishap. The medical examiner had ruled the cause of death “inconclusive.” There had been speculation that he’d been murdered...
Leah hadn’t been prepared for the shock she’d felt, and the loss.
Now, he would never love her again. He would never love his beautiful daughter again. He would never make things right between them.
She had never spoken his name aloud to Marissa. She would never speak it aloud. As a younger child Marissa used to ask Where is Daddy? When will Daddy come back? But now, never.
The death of Marissa’s father in Coos Bay, Oregon, was a mystery, but it was a mystery Leah Bantry would not pursue. She was sick of mystery. She wanted only clarity, truth. She would surround herself with good decent truthful individuals for the remainder of her life.