CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Vanessa's Kidnapped Son

Thursday, November 13, 2008

this entry brought to you by minus the bear, "lotus"


I was watching Gone Baby Gone, and it reminded me of a person I knew. Her name was Vanessa, two years older than me, and she worked in the backroom at Target. The rest of us couldn't stand her. She was a gossipy, dimwitted moron, and she had a nasty streak in her that would come out of nowhere. She was also chatty to the point of annoyance, and was one of those girls who couldn't tell an anecdote that didn't have something to do with this one time when she was at a kegger. If you could imagine a catty, gossipy valley girl type, only imagine she was pug ugly. Ordinarily ugly people don't bother me. I'm the kind of guy who finds something attractive in everybody, even if subconciously. There are plenty of women who I wouldn't call attractive, but two months after working with them I can't get over how pretty their eyes are, or whatever particular quality they may have that you have to look deeply to find. But when someone's annoying and shitty, you can't see anything pretty in them. She had a slightly upturned, piggish nose. She had two rabbit-like teeth that would still rest visibly on her lower lip, even if she'd closed her mouth. She had a unibrow. Her hair was this mousey brown wavey mop which would be beautiful if she bought shampoo and conditioner that wasn't bottom-of-the-rack, but she did. Her face was acned, and it was acned like someone who has done drugs. She also had these mosquito bite breasts, and she never seemed to be wearing a shirt that didn't make them look exactly like that, just these lumps underneath her shirt. That sounds mean-spirited, but nobody I knew could stand her, and I certainly couldn't. Yet she had plenty of friends, and, somehow, despite being on the bottom of the rung, working in the backroom like the rest of us, she seemed to be best friends with every single manager in the store, and would be gone on extra long breaks with them.

I disliked her, but she was the type that didn't seem to understand when people didn't like her, and would chat them up and go on and on, to the point where she would drive you to frustration. The way I handle people like this, often, is I engage them. That sounds counter productive, but if you can get a person into an interview-like back-and-forth, where you're always controlling the conversation, then things are much more tolerable. As long as you never give them the chance to volunteer information, and as long as they never take the conversation where you don't want it to go-- say they start digressing to something gossipy, you just interrupt and steer it back to where you want it to go. When you're controlling the conversation with someone obsessed with themselves, you can often fit little snarky asides in and they won't even notice you just insulted them. It's a good way to handle annoying people, and luckily, our schedules didn't coincide very often and I only saw her two or three times a month or so.

Vanessa was the mother of three boys, and she never mentioned them, but that didn't seem unusual because I almost never mention my daughter to people unless they bring her up first or if I'm talking to another parent. One day she came in obviously exhausted, and she kept making these grunting, sighing noises, as if saying "Something is wrong with me. I want somebody to engage me." So eventually I bit. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"Oh," she said, as if this wasn't going to be leading to a big deal. "I've been up all night."

"Why were you up all night?" I asked, no care in my voice whatsoever.

"I was up talking to the cops all night." Don't you hate it when people have conversations like this? Instead of just saying what happened last night, they sit there and drag it out, forcing this sense of suspense and turmoil that isn't really there?

"Why were you talking to the cops all night?" I asked, giving a dog a bone.

"My six year old son was kidnapped last night."

Now, I wish I could convey her tone of voice with mere words on a screen, because she said it in the most cavalier, conversational, matter-of-fact way. She didn't take a long pause before saying it, she didn't take a deep sigh, she didn't hold back tears, she didn't even say it with annoyance. It was if she'd said she'd been up all night talking to her mom on the phone and time just got away with her. She said it with a shrug, practically, as if to say, "My son was kidnapped, but whatevs."

I was taken aback a little bit. "What?"

"Yep," she said.

"What do you mean 'kidnapped?'"

"I mean someone came in the house and took him while we were asleep."

I stammered a bit. I didn't care that much. I mean, if what she was telling me was true, I cared about her son and hoped he'd be alright, but I didn't care about her, and from her matter of fact tone I almost wanted to drop the subject and say "Well, good luck with that," and walk away. But I really had to get to the bottom of this.

"What do you mean 'somebody'? Was this a stranger? Somebody you know?"

"It was someone I know," she said, again not just coming out and telling me the answer to what would inevitably be my follow up. It's as if she'd written a script at home as to how this had to happen, and was going to force me to follow it step by step even though I'd not read it.

"Who kidnapped your son?" I asked, already weary of this game.

"My ex-husband."

"Is this his father?" I asked.

"Yep," she replied. She then told me that she'd gotten custody of the boy and he was upset about that, so when he got out of jail he came and kidnapped their son.

"Why was he in jail?" I asked.

"Aggravated asault. He got in a fight with some guy, and that's why they gave me full custody."

I asked if he'd had much of a rap sheet, and she said a few violent crimes, but mostly just for fighting, nothing too serious. I asked if she was worried that he would hurt her son. She told me she wasn't worried about that, not really.

And that was about the end of it. I told her good luck and went about my business.

Days passed. Her son was still missing. The FBI got involved. Yet she never seemed any more perturbed than she was that first day, in fact, she always seemed to be sufficiently rested in the following days. I'd see her with her friends joking around while on break. She still chatted about her inane bullshit with anyone who would listen. I would ask how things were doing and she'd say, oh, they know he's in Michigan now, they got photographs of him from some surveillance video. I'd ask how she was doing. "I'm doing okay," she said, without the slightest sense of struggle to say it.

This flabberghasted me. It absolutely floored me. It seemed to me, and to everyone I asked, that she just didn't care that her son was gone. And as much as I disliked her, I hated thinking that. That wasn't fair. Just because I disliked her didn't mean she was a bad mother. Eventually I asked a friend, "Have you heard about Vanessa's missing child?" and they would respond saying, "Yeah, I know! She doesn't seem to miss him at all!" I was glad that I wasn't the only one thinking this. Still, people react to things in different ways, I kept telling myself. You've seen stories where someone's loved one dies and they don't react at all. Maybe she's in denial.

But denial didn't seem to be it. The only time I ever saw any sort of reaction to this whole thing was on the first day when she didn't sleep well. She said she'd been sleeping mostly fine as the days passed. I asked if she was worried. She said that she was getting a little more worried, but mostly she knew they'd catch him and that would be that. But, again, a week passed.

On the seventh day she told me America's Most Wanted was going to be doing a story on her, and sure enough, later that day they shot her story and they aired it the next day. But even in the interview she didn't seem especially distressed. She seemed a little more distressed than when I'd last seen her, but again, only a little more distressed. It was a half point more distressed than I'd seen her that first day. She seemed more earnest than anything, not neccesarily like a mother pleading for her son to come back.

I couldn't help but think, Vanessa knows something she's not telling the cops and the Feds. I didn't like that I was thinking that, but I couldn't help it. If Vanessa was on the stand giving testimony against her ex-husband, and I was a juror, and the prosecution accused her of knowing something that she wasn't telling the court, I would agree with the lawyer. It seemed to me like she was someone who should at least be acting more concerned. Like she should at least pretend to be overwhelmed with emotion. She seemed like somebody who should've called out sick the whole week, just so she could pretend that she was a mother too shook up to go to work. But she didn't. She came to work every day nearly as chipper and chatty as always, laughing and joking and making references to getting drunk, and hanging out with her best friends the managers of the store, as if nothing world shattering was going on.

The day after the America's Most Wanted episode aired, they got her son. She took that day off. She was scheduled the following day off, so she got two days off in a row. And on the third day, she was back to work. She seemed happier, but it wasn't as if there was any sort of weight on her back two days prior. She just seemed happier in general, the way somebody might if they simply woke up in a good mood or had just heard a hilarious joke a few minutes prior. She said they caught him in West Virginia. She said he hadn't hurt him, and he was well fed, just as she thought he would be. I told her I was happy for her. But really, that wasn't the truth. I was happy for her son, but not her. Going an entire week without mommy is definitely something that can shake a child up.

I saw her two or three years later, shopping. Her cart was overflowing with food, her three sons were around her like three yipping puppy dogs, which isn't really that big a deal, because thats how boys are. I wondered which one was the one that had been kidnapped. He should've been 9 or even 10 by now, but all three boys seemed the same age; the tallest was probably the oldest, but his face didn't really seem any more mature than the other two, as if he wasn't the oldest, just unusually tall. But the point of me mentioning this is that she looked awful. She'd gained a lot of weight, which surprised me, because Vanessa was pretty thin when I knew her. Her hair was a mess, but I tried to excuse it-- she was just shopping after all, no reason to dress up. But more than just being uglier, I mean, afterall, she was ugly to begin with, she seemed defeated. Her shoulders slumped, he face tired, puffy, more pock-marked than before, although not especially so. When I saw her it took me a moment to realize who this hideous woman was, and when it clicked, I remember thinking, well, I don't know why I should be surprised that this is how Vanessa turned out three years later. I don't know if there's a lesson or any real poetic point to this particular turn out to the story. But I remember thinking, she is a sad person. Maybe not emotionally so, but in a general sense. Just sad. Pathetic. I felt bad for thinking that, but looking at her, I couldn't come across with any other feeling.

And I wondered, exactly what was she protecting three years prior, with her complete lacadasial response to her son missing for eight days? Herself? Or someone else, by keeping some kind of information away from the authorities? I can only guess.
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with love from CRS @ 8:55 AM 

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