The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [29]
8
I was running late by the time I finally left for lunch, Kate’s words ringing in my ears. Walking north on Park Avenue, I pressed the heel of one hand hard against my breastbone, fighting the pain the way a runner fights a cramp. There was another mantra I’d picked up in family therapy—you can do only as much as you can do. I’d always interpreted it to mean that I couldn’t completely protect my loved ones, no matter how hard I tried. For the first time ever, it occurred to me that maybe the limitation was within myself, and that the thing I couldn’t do was to ease my wife’s pain by letting go of my missing child.
An Asian girl who looked to be about Kate’s age approached me on the corner of Forty-seventh Street, offering me a leaflet about Tibet and asking politely if I’d be willing to send an e-mail to my congressperson. She looked apologetic when I met her eye, perhaps recognizing how upset I was, but I made an effort to smile and took the leaflet from her hand. I know how difficult it is to be ignored when you’re trying to attract attention to an issue that’s desperately important to you.
In the immediate aftermath of Kyle’s disappearance, I’d spent feverish hours devouring books and articles about missing children, trying to learn everything I could about who took them, and what happened to them, and—most important—how they were found. There’s an entire fraught literature on the subject, and innumerable sad organizations and support groups. The cardinal rule is to publicize the disappearance as widely as possible and to reach out to the community for help. The police had hung posters throughout our neighborhood, appealing for information, and the local news led with the story the morning after Kyle’s disappearance, following up with smaller stories and articles in the paper over the next couple of days. But bad things happen all the time in a city the size of New York. A few media cycles later and Kyle was lost in the clutter. I bought a series of prohibitively expensive ads in the Times and the Post and the Daily News, desperate to keep my son’s face in front of as many people as possible. Riding the subway home from One Police Plaza on day seven, though, I noticed that only a handful of riders were reading newspapers, and that at least a third of those were papers in languages other than English. It occurred to me that there were millions of people only a short train ride away who would never have any idea what my son looked like—or even that he was missing—regardless of how many quarter-page ads I purchased.
The next morning, I had the employment office at Columbia University post a notice offering top dollar to students with language skills who were willing to hang posters and hand out leaflets. I hired twenty-five teams of two, insisting that the students work in pairs for safety. Most of the kids tried to refuse the money when I explained what I wanted, but I made them take it. It was only fair. We produced dual-language versions of the police posters in Spanish, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Bengali, Arabic, Urdu, Portuguese, and half a dozen other languages, and then they—and I—hit the subways, guided by an ethnological map of the city that I’d found online.
Claire and Kate and I were already in family therapy. I talked about my work with the Columbia students—about how much better it made me feel to be actively doing something, and to be meeting strangers every day who cried for our loss and promised to do whatever they could on our behalf. Claire was in bad shape at the time, cycling between uncontrollable weeping and prolonged periods of near catatonia. Kate spoke up, saying she wanted to come with me. I was hesitant because she was so young, but the therapist sided with her, pointing out that she felt the same need to do something for Kyle that I did, regardless of her age. I started taking her with me on short jaunts after school, and then on slightly longer trips on weekend mornings. Pretty soon