Cynthia, watching this from around the corner of one of the show’s trucks, shouted, “Excuse me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
One of the crew whirled around, said, “Shush,” but Cynthia would have none of it. “Don’t you fucking shush me,” she said. To the husband, she called out, “What are you implying?”
The man looked over, startled. He must have had no idea that the person he was talking about was actually present. The ponytail producer took Cynthia by the elbow and ushered her gently, but firmly, around the back of the truck.
“What kind of horseshit is that?” Cynthia asked. “What’s he trying to say? That I had something to do with my family’s disappearance? I’ve put up with that shit for so-”
“Don’t worry about him,” the producer said.
“You said the whole point of doing this was to help me,” Cynthia said. “To help me find out what happened to them. That’s the only reason I agreed to do this. Are you going to run that? What he said? What are people going to think when they hear him saying that?”
“Don’t worry about it,” the producer assured her. “We’re not going to use that.”
They must have been scared Cynthia was going to walk at that point, before they had even a minute of her on film, so there were plenty of reassurances, cajoling, promises that once this piece went on TV, for sure someone who knew something would see it. Happened all the time, they said. They’d closed cold cases for the cops all over the country, they said.
Once they had again persuaded Cynthia that their intentions were honorable, and the old farts who lived in the house had been whisked away, the show went on.
I followed two cameramen into the house, then got out of the way as they positioned themselves to catch Cynthia’s expressions of apprehension and deja vu from different angles. I figured that once this was on TV, there’d be lots of fast editing, maybe they’d turn the image all grainy, dig around in their bag of tricks to bring more drama to an event that TV producers in decades past would have found plenty dramatic on its own.
They led Cynthia upstairs to her old bedroom. She looked numb. They wanted footage of her walking into it, but Cynthia had to do it twice. The first time, the cameraman was waiting inside her bedroom, the door closed, to get a shot of Cynthia entering the room, ever so tentatively. Then they did it again, this time from the hall, the camera looking over her shoulder as she went into the room. When it aired, you could see they’d used some fish- eye lens or something to make the scene spookier, like maybe we were going to find Jason in a goalie mask hiding behind the door.
Paula Malloy, who’d started out as a weather girl, got her makeup retouched and her blond hair repouffed. Then she and Cynthia had those little microphone packs attached to the backs of their skirts, the wires run up and under their blouses and clipped just below their collars. Paula let her shoulder rub up against Cynthia’s, like they were old friends reminiscing, reluctantly, about the bad times instead of the good.
As they came into the kitchen, cameras rolling, Paula asked, “What must you have been thinking?” Cynthia appeared to be walking through a dream. “You hadn’t heard a sound in the house so far, your brother’s not upstairs, you come down here into the kitchen and there’s no sign of life at all.”
“I didn’t know what was happening,” Cynthia said quietly. “I thought everyone had left early. That my dad was gone to work, that my mother must have taken my brother to school. I thought they must be mad at me, for misbehaving the night before.”
“You were a difficult teen?” Paula asked.
“I had…my moments. I’d been out the night before, with a boy my parents didn’t approve of, I’d had something to drink. But I wasn’t like some kids. I mean, I loved my parents, and I think”-her voice breaking a bit here-“they loved me.”
“We read in the police reports from the time, from the statements that you’d made, that you’d had an argument with your parents.”
“Yes,” Cynthia said. “About not being home when I promised, lying to them. I said some awful things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh,” Cynthia hesitated, “you know. Kids can say pretty hateful things to their parents that they don’t really mean.”
“And where do you think they are, today, two and a half decades later?”
Cynthia shook her head sadly. “It’s all I ask myself. There’s not a day goes by I don’t wonder.”
“If you could say something to them, right now, here on
Cynthia, nonplussed, looked somewhat hopelessly out the kitchen window.
“Look into the camera there,” Paula Malloy said, putting her hand around Cynthia’s shoulder. I was off to the side, and it was all I could do not to step into the frame and peel Paula’s artificial face off. “Just ask them what you’ve been waiting all these years to ask them.”
Cynthia, her eyes shiny, did as she was told, looked to the camera, and managed, at first, to say nothing more than “Why?”
Paula allowed for a dramatic pause, then asked, “Why what, Cynthia?”
“Why,” she repeated, trying to compose herself, “did you have to leave me? If you’re able to, if you’re alive, why haven’t you gotten in touch? Why couldn’t you have left just a simple note? Why couldn’t you have at least said goodbye?”
I could feel the electricity among the crew, the producers. No one was breathing. I knew what they were thinking. This was their money shot. This was going to be fucking awesome TV. I hated them for exploiting Cynthia’s misery, for milking her suffering for entertainment purposes. Because that’s what this was, ultimately. Entertainment. But I held my tongue, because I knew Cynthia probably understood all this, too, that they were taking advantage of her, that she was just another story to them, a way to fill up another half-hour show. She was willing to be exploited if it meant someone watching would step forward with the key to unlock her past.
At the show’s request, Cynthia had brought with her two dented cardboard shoeboxes of memories. Newspaper clippings, faded Polaroid photos, class pictures, report cards, all the bits and pieces that she’d managed to take from her house before she moved from it and went to live with her aunt, her mother’s sister, a woman named Tess Berman.
They had Cynthia sit at the kitchen table, the boxes open in front of her, taking out one memory and then another, laying them out as if starting to begin a jigsaw puzzle, looking for all the pieces with straight edges, trying to assemble the border, then work toward the middle.
But there were no border pieces in Cynthia’s shoeboxes. No way to work toward the center. Instead of having a thousand pieces to a single puzzle, it was like she had a single piece from a thousand different puzzles.
“This is us,” she said, showing off a Polaroid, “on a camping trip we took up in Vermont.” The camera zoomed in on a disheveled-looking Todd and Cynthia standing on either side of their mother, a tent in the background. Cynthia looked about five, her brother seven, their faces smudged with earth, their mother smiling proudly, her hair wrapped in a red-and-white-checked kerchief.
“I don’t have any pictures of my father,” she said mournfully. “He always took the pictures of the rest of us, so now I just have to remember how he looked. And I still see him, standing tall, always in his hat, that fedora, that little hint of a mustache. A handsome man. Todd took after him.”
She reached for a yellowed piece of newsprint. “Here’s a clipping,” Cynthia said, unfolding it gingerly, “from some things I found in my father’s drawer, what little was there.” The camera moved in again, scanned the square of newspaper. It was a faded, grainy black-and-white picture of a school basketball team. A dozen boys faced the camera, some smiling, some making stupid faces. “Dad must have saved it because Todd was in it, when he was littler, although they left his name out of the caption. He was proud of us, Dad was. He told us all the time. He liked to joke that we were the best family that he’d ever had.”
They interviewed my principal, Rolly Carruthers.
“It’s a mystery,” he said. “I knew Clayton Bigge. We went fishing together a couple of times. He was a good man. I can’t imagine what happened to them. Maybe there was some kind of Manson family, you know, heading across country, and Cynthia’s family, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
They interviewed Aunt Tess.
“I lost a sister, a brother-in-law, a nephew,” she said. “But Cynthia, her loss was so much greater. She managed to beat the odds, to still turn out to be a great kid, a great person.”
