As Lucy’s husband, Remy, who lived in Green Bay, waited anxiously for news from California, Ryan received tidings in the form of a long-distance phone call 2,500 miles away that Lucy Vasquez needed his services. Lucy’s mom, having found Ryan on the Internet, hired him five minutes into their conversation. She begged him to break Lucy free from jail as soon as possible, and to quash the warrant that authorized her arrest, as it had been initiated in Brown County, fifty miles north of Oshkosh. As always, Ryan promised to do his best.
The idiomatic expression spirited away, which actually means to be killed, evokes a magnificent spirit bird, delicate beak and wings of pearl, hoisting babies through stratus-streaked skies, not unlike the stork I imagined when the Stark Collection Agency came calling after Leo’s uninsured birth. Long ago, in the Eastern world, children who disappeared mysteriously were said to be “spirited away” by deities and then deposited, according to mythology, alive and well, in shrines or temples. Every mother I know fears her children might be snatched or seized and then killed. Many of Maurice Sendak’s stories for children were inspired, in fact, by the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. “When the news came that the baby was dead, it was just not to be believed,” Sendak said in a talk at the New York Public Library. “I rejected the information because I so badly wanted him to come home alive.” Outside over There taps into this most innate fear, among parents, of child abduction.
Much as Sendak was forever plagued by the Lindbergh kidnapping, modern parents remember other child abductions hitting the headlines. In 1996, my freshman year of college, I attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, and early on I declared my journalism major. When I returned home to Wisconsin for Christmas break, I was shocked by news from the CU campus. A six-year-old girl named JonBenét Ramsey was found missing and reported to have been kidnapped by “a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction,” according to the ransom note. Boulder quickly became the eye of a media tornado. When I returned to my post at the Campus Press and journalism classes after Christmas break, we had already learned that JonBenét was dead, discovered in her basement. A ransom note accompanying the deceased is highly anomalous in criminal history. Every journalist in Boulder fixated on the Ramsey family. One night, a fellow journalism student and I parked near the scene of the crime, nestled into a neighborhood between campus and the foothills. We traipsed past police tape and peered in the family’s windows. I vividly recall monochromatic tiles on a hallway floor.
I marvel still about my close proximity to the site of JonBenét’s murder, how I managed to touch her first-floor window with the tip of my nose. Where were the police at this time, and how many other nosy students would trespass there, drawn to her home like fanatics to celebrity graves? Over the years, I’ve felt relieved by updates on the case. If her pretend kidnapping and real murder were inside jobs, we parents had less to worry about, right?
With four children now to protect, I tried to remind myself that abduction by strangers is anomalous, living, as we were, in an age of paranoia perpetuated by twenty-four-hour television news and social media. Mothers today are being arrested for failure to hover like helicopters, as a mother in South Carolina found out when she was arrested for allowing her nine-year-old to play at a park while she worked. One summer, a couple of Amber Alerts beamed through our iPhones with a shattering frequency and pitch, and we needed to explain them to our children. Of course, when we used the word kidnapping, they immediately fretted.
“Am I going to be kidnapped?” Fern wanted to know.
“The most likely scenario is that a parent or family member took the child without permission,” I said, and in both Amber Alerts, this turned out to be true, but other news stories ended more gruesomely, as I ended up explaining to Leo.
When he advanced beyond early elementary school, he noticed and lamented the trick-or-treat schedule in Oshkosh.
“Halloween is supposed to be scary,” he said. “Trick-or-treating when it’s light out is for babies.” Indeed the city of Oshkosh had long ago decided that door-to-door candy collecting should be completed by dark, thwarting Leo’s designs on fear. He chose increasingly frightening costumes, evolving from year to year in this order: zombie hockey player, wounded Civil War soldier, zombie mummy, scarecrow serial killer. Not only did he want to be scared, but he wanted to scare little kids, not realizing he still was one. Leo was developing a jaded attitude at the age of nine, and finally, after a dozen expressions of “This is stupid,” I said, “Well, do you want to know why we trick-or-treat during daylight hours?”
“Sure?” he said, the question mark his favorite kind of punctuation to verbalize.
“Because in 1973, a girl named Lisa French was abducted and murdered by her neighbor while trick-or-treating, and nobody saw it happen.” This truth marked the end of his complaints, a cautionary tale not unlike my father would spin, except that Lisa French really was kidnapped and murdered, whereas mole people were science fiction.
The word kidnap was first used to describe the action whereby children in American colonies were stolen away from their families to serve on farms and plantations. Today, kidnapping suggests that children are mere bargaining chips, often held hostage for ransom or extortion purposes. Abduction is used interchangeably but legally means to take away a child without the consent of the child’s legal guardian. We might also use other terms loosely—interference with custody, child theft, and trafficking of a child.
I was beginning to wonder, what was so wonderful about motherhood, anyway? Hadn’t it replaced my melancholy with anxiety and fear? At least
