When Lucy Vasquez was charged with kidnapping—or in legal parlance, interference with custody beyond visitation, in the state of Wisconsin a Class F felony—she had a good explanation. According to Lucy, her husband, Remy, was an abusive father. Once he choked Callum, who was strapped into his car seat, until the baby’s lips turned blue. Another time, he taught Callum to grab a man’s balls in self-defense, but when Callum grabbed Remy’s family jewels in the midst of a father-son wrestling match, Remy slapped him across the head. And when Lucy found porn on her husband’s cell phone, Remy blamed his two-year-old son for hacking into his account.
Lucy and Remy had met and married a few years earlier in California, where Remy, a Wisconsin native, was serving in the US Marine Corps, but upon his discharge he convinced her to move with him to Wisconsin, under the guise of landing a plum job. When Lucy, Remy, and Callum arrived here, the employment opportunity turned out not to be lucrative, at which point Remy declared he would collect unemployment benefits for a year and catch up with old friends instead. This was the first of many red flags. As Ryan put it, “Lucy had buyer’s remorse.” She wondered how to be reimbursed for this bad mistake of marrying an ill-equipped father.
The worst of her co-parenting experiences happened not long before she left for California. When Lucy returned home from work one day to find Remy asleep on the sofa, she nearly gagged on her own galloping heart. Why wasn’t he watching Callum, or better yet, where was Callum? The wide-open refrigerator glowed, a fluorescent rectangle in the kitchen, like an exit to another territory. Mayonnaise and jelly jars had been tipped from the shelves; a loaf of bread without a twist tie had been shaken loose into a mound on the linoleum. Velveeta slices had been crumpled into cheese-and-cellophane balls.
“Callum,” she called. “Come out wherever you are!”
She followed Mickey Mouse boxcars and Hot Wheels into Callum’s bedroom, only to find he’d yanked the mini blinds from the window and bent the slats. A bottle of nail polish remover was empty next to a wet spot of ethyl acetate. This was not a cheerful game of hide-and-seek. Callum was not in his closet. He was not hiding in his dirty laundry pile or behind the shower curtain in the bathroom.
“Remy!” Lucy screamed at her husband. “Wake up, God dammit! Callum is missing!”
“No he’s not,” Remy said. “He’s not fucking gone.”
“He’s not inside,” she hissed.
She ran out into the communal play yard at their apartment complex and began screaming demands at six-year-olds kicking a ball. Had they seen Callum? Were they playing with him earlier? They stared at Lucy blankly, baffled by her hysterics, and when a squad car pulled into the parking lot, Lucy was just as confused because she intended to call 911 but hadn’t yet. The officer parked in front of the maintenance office, and Lucy immediately chased after him, crying now and muttering her son’s name. Remy never bothered to join in the search, arguing the little shit was probably hiding out behind the trash heap or something.
When Lucy entered the maintenance office, she barely recognized the boy sitting on the desk in just his diaper. It was like a scene from a movie—barrel-chested little boy flexes his muscles and giggles for the audience. Lucy’s tongue had gone numb; she could hardly pronounce his name. “He was found about a half mile from here, just wandering on the side of the road,” the maintenance guy said. “We didn’t know whose kid he was.”
“My husband was supposed to be watching him,” she whimpered.
Callum hugged his mother, heaving his bare chest against her lips. She kissed his belly button, and he squealed with delight. His diaper was soiled and beginning to shred but he was otherwise unscathed. The police officer ended up talking sternly to Remy, who was assigned to write and sign a statement of events for the police department, but the incident was never referred to the district attorney’s office.
Another time, against Lucy’s demands, Remy planned to take Callum fishing. “I’ll just leave him to sleep in the truck while I fish,” Remy said.
“You can’t just leave him on the side of the road!” Lucy shrieked.
“Watch me!” he shouted, then loaded Callum into his vehicle and sped off for an entire day, unreachable by phone.
“He could have been kidnapped,” Lucy said to Remy over and over in the wake of these scares, no doubt imagining the worst of America’s notorious abduction cases, as her husband slouched on the sofa, the click-toggle of the video game controller his only response. Maybe kidnapping became such a concrete reality in Lucy’s mind that she began to fantasize about absconding with her own child. She couldn’t be arrested for that, could she? And couldn’t she improve the circumstances of their lives if she were to leave behind Remy and all of his inadequacies—his short fuse, his vulgarity, and his laziness?
Lucy’s favorite ritual in Wisconsin was hunting season, when Remy would disappear into his Northwoods deer stand for a full week. During Lucy’s first year as “a deer hunter’s widow,” our local way of describing women temporarily abandoned by their sportsman husbands, she had invited her family to Wisconsin, but this second time around, she planned to visit them in sunny California, with Remy thousands of miles away, not just a hundred, and Callum right by her side. Lucy Vasquez’s homeland was calling her name.
On the plane trip to California, she held Callum in her lap, and together they peered out the
