Mikal Zallman agreed. No more mysteries!
You become exhausted, you simply don’t care. You care about surviving. You care about the banalities of life: closure, moving on. Before the nightmare he’d have laughed at such TV talk-show jargon but now, no.
Of Leah Bantry and Mikal Zallman, an unlikely couple, Zallman was the more verbal, the more edgy. He was from a tribe of talkers, he told Leah. Lawyers, financiers, high-powered salesmen. A rabbi or two. For Zallman, just to wake up in the morning in Yonkers, and not in Skatskill, was a relief. And not in April, during that siege of nightmare. To lift his head from the pillow and not wince with pain as if broken glass were shifting inside his skull. To be able to open a newspaper, switch on TV news, without seeing his own craven likeness. To breathe freely, not-in-police-custody. Not the object of a mad girl’s vengeance.
Mad girl was the term Zallman and Leah used, jointly. Never would they utter the name Jude Trahern.
Why had the mad girl abducted Marissa? Why, of all younger children she might have preyed upon, had she chosen Marissa? And why had she killed herself, why in such a gruesome way, self-immolation like a martyr? These questions would never be answered. The cowed girls who’d conspired with her in the abduction had not the slightest clue. Something about an Onigara Indian sacrifice! They could only repeat brainlessly that they hadn’t thought the mad girl was serious. They had only just followed her direction, they had wanted to be her friend.
To say that the girl had been mad was only a word. But the word would suffice.
Zallman said in disgust, “To know all isn’t to forgive all. To know all is to be sickened by what you know.” He was thinking of the Holocaust, too: a cataclysm in history that defied all explanation.
Leah said, wiping at her eyes, “I would not forgive her, under any circumstances. She wasn’t ‘mad,’ she was evil. She took pleasure in hurting others. She almost killed my daughter. I’m glad that she’s dead, she’s removed herself from us. But I don’t want to talk about her, Mikal. Promise me.”
Zallman was deeply moved. He kissed Leah Bantry then, for the first time. As if to seal an understanding.
Like Leah, Zallman could not bear to live in the Skatskill area any longer. Couldn’t breathe!
Without exactly reinstating Zallman, the principal and board of trustees of Skatskill Day had invited him back to teach. Not immediately, but in the fall.
A substitute was taking his place at the school. It was believed to be most practical for the substitute to finish the spring term.
Zallman’s presence, so soon after the ugly publicity, would be “distracting to students.” Such young, impressionable students. And their anxious parents.
Zallman was offered a two-year renewable contract at his old salary. It was not a very tempting contract. His lawyer told him that the school feared a lawsuit, with justification. But Zallman said the hell with it. He’d lost interest in combat.
And he’d lost interest in computers, overnight.
Where he’d been fascinated by the technology, now he was bored. He craved something more substantial, of the earth and time. Computers were merely technique, like bodiless brains. He would take a temporary job teaching math in a public school, and he would apply to graduate schools to study history. A Ph.D. program in American studies. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton.
Zallman didn’t tell Leah what revulsion he sometimes felt, waking before dawn and unable to return to sleep. Not for computers but for the Zallman who’d so adored them.
How arrogant he’d been, how self-absorbed! The lone wolf who had so prided himself on aloneness.
He’d had enough of that now. He yearned for companionship, someone to talk with, make love with. Someone to share certain memories that would otherwise fester in him like poison.
In late May, after Leah Bantry and her daughter Marissa had moved away from Skatskill — a departure excitedly noted in the local media — Zallman began to write to her. He’d learned that Leah had taken a position at a medical clinic in Mahopoc. He knew the area, to a degree: an hour’s drive away. He wrote single-page, thoughtfully composed letter to her not expecting her to reply, though hoping that she might. I feel so close to you! This ordeal that has so changed our lives. He’d studied her photographs in the papers, the grieving mother’s drawn, exhausted face. He knew that Leah Bantry was a few years older than he, that she was no longer in contact with Marissa’s father. He sent her postcards of works of art: Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Monet’s water lilies, haunted landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and gorgeous autumnal forests of Wolf Kahn. In this way Zallman courted Leah Bantry. He allowed this woman whom he had never met to know that he revered her. He would put no pressure on her to see him, not even to respond to him.
In time, Leah Bantry did respond.
They spoke on the phone. They made arrangements to meet. Zallman was nervously talkative, endearingly awkward. He seemed overwhelmed by Leah’s physical presence. Leah was more wary, reticent. She was a beautiful woman who looked her age, she wore no makeup, no jewelry except a watch; her fair blond hair was threaded with silver. She smiled, but she did not speak much. She liked it that this man would do the talking, as men usually did not. Mikal Zallman was a personality of a type Leah knew, but at a distance. Very New York, very intense. Brainy, but naive. She guessed that his family had money, naturally Zallman scorned money. (But he’d been reconciled with his family, Zallman said, at the time of the ordeal. They had been outraged on his behalf and had insisted upon paying his lawyer’s exorbitant fees.) During their conversation, Leah recalled how they’d first met at the Skatskill school, and how Zallman the computer expert had walked away from her. So arrogant! Leah would tease him about that, one day. When they became lovers perhaps.
Zallman’s hair was thinning at the temples, there was a dented look to his cheeks. His eyes were those of a man older than thirty-one or — two. He’d begun to grow a beard, a goatee, to disguise his appearance, but you could see that it was a temporary experiment, it would not last. Yet Leah thought Mikal Zallman handsome, in his way rather romantic. A narrow hawkish face, brooding eyes. Quick to laugh at himself. She would allow him to adore her, possibly one day she would adore him. She was not prepared to be hurt by him.
Eventually she would tell him the not-quite-true I never believed you were the one to take Marissa, Mikal. Never!
The little family, as Zallman wished to think them, ate their picnic lunch, and what a delicious lunch it was, on a wooden table on the bank of a pond, beneath a willow tree so exquisitely proportioned it looked like a work of art in a children’s storybook. He noted that Marissa still had trouble with food, ate slowly and with an air of caution, as if, with each mouthful, she was expecting to encounter broken glass. But she ate most of a sandwich, and half an apple Leah peeled for her, since “skins” made her queasy. And afterward tramping about the pond admiring snowy egrets and great blue herons and wild swans. Everywhere were lushly growing cattails, rushes, flaming sumac. There was a smell of moist damp earth and sunlight on water and in the underbrush red-winged blackbirds were flocking in a festive cacophony. Leah lamented, “But it’s too soon! We’re not ready for winter.” She sounded genuinely hurt, aggrieved.
Zallman said, “But Leah, snow can be nice, too.”