The Kidnapper's Wife

46. After

                   

It's not until I'm in the mountains of North Carolina, the highway graded so the giant trucks I pass won't need to use the runaway truck ramps positioned along the sides, that I begin to really think about the decision I've just made.

I'm the kind of person that takes a long time to decide something. I'll go back and forth over a trivial detail for hours, trying to determine the best course of action. But once I do decide something, my decision is final. There is no changing my mind. And so, when I made the decision to go talk to Connor, I knew that was that.

But I don't even know if Connor will agree to see me. I have no idea what his frame of mind is after everything he's gone through, everything he's put us through.

When the police told me he was still working, still sending the money to my bank account, I was floored. After everything he had done, taking Anna, all the lies he'd told about his past, I just couldn't comprehend that despite it all, his feelings for me could be real. After all, how could he love Anna, a fourteen-year-old girl, and also me at the same time.

And then I grew angry. If he did love me really, enough to risk being traced by continuing to send me money, then why did he have to go and ruin everything? Why wasn't I enough for him? We had a perfect life: two good jobs, a great house, loving family nearby, an adorable puppy, a great hometown. Why did he need more? Even if he did feel attracted to Anna, why couldn't he just ignore it? I couldn't say that I'd never been attracted to another man while being with Connor. Attraction wasn't something you just turned off, after all. But I just ignored it, choosing to focus my attention on my husband. Why couldn't he have just done the same?

Then I came to another conclusion. Connor wasn't sending me money because he loved me. He was sending me money because he felt sorry for me. Sorry for using me to hide who he really was. Sorry for all the lies. Sorry for ruining my life. He was trying to make up for it all. Make us a little more even. It wasn't about love. It was about payback.

So now, I don't know. I don't know if Connor has feelings for me, hates me, or is completely apathetic towards my existence. I like to think the money shows, at a minimum, some level of remorse, but the truth is, after everything, I'm not sure of anything anymore. 

As I pass a sign for Aruba Road, I think back to one of the most obvious warning signs that I completely missed. Not necessarily a warning sign of what was going down with Anna, at the time I'm not sure Connor even knew Anna, but a sign that something was off.

When we got back from our honeymoon, we were both so in love with Hawaii, and living off the high of travel. We wanted to plan another trip right away. Connor wanted to do Europe, I wanted to do the Caribbean. We agreed to flip for it and let whoever won pick the first place. We flipped and I won. Our trip to Aruba was beautiful, one of my cherished memories of our happy times. But before we left, we had to get passports. Something I assumed was no big deal. In fact, I already had a passport, I'd been traveling internationally with my family for years. But by the tenth time I'd asked Connor, I'd begun to feel exasperated. It wasn't like Connor to put off doing things I wanted or needed him to do, at least not for that long. I couldn't figure it out. But I really wanted to go to Aruba, and we had already booked the hotels. So I booked us a flight to Connecticut, thinking if I could make it fun, he'd be more inclined to get it done.

When I told him, he flipped out. He point blank refused to go to Connecticut, and insisted on going to find some family friend in the Midwest to obtain his original passport. It made zero sense to me. And I spent a long time analyzing his reaction. Why didn't he want to go to Connecticut with me? It would be so much easier to just go get a new passport than to wait for his parents to contact him, which rarely happened, or to find this elusive camper in Montana or wherever the hell he'd ended up. Plus, Connecticut would be a bonus trip. It was like having an excuse to travel somewhere new.

Connor was so aggravated about the subject that I tried to let it drop, but I just couldn't. I kept going over and over in my mind why he didn't want to bring me to his home state. Did he not feel comfortable enough with his wife to show me his past? Were we not as perfectly in sync as I had thought (if only I'd known).

Finally, I brought it up with Connor. There came a night where I was pms-ing, feeling vulnerable after watching an emotional chick flick on the couch while Connor had bro time to video game with one of his work buddies. I broke down in tears and came out with it: Was I not good enough to bring home to his hometown? He wouldn't even let me come with him to meet his family friend.

Connor was shocked, he'd had no idea I'd been obsessing over this. He told me that wasn't it at all. He took a deep breath, and then he told me that the reason he didn't want to bring me to Connecticut was that his relationship with his parents wasn't great. He didn't have good memories of Connecticut, he'd said, and didn't like going back there. It had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with him.

He told me his father, growing up, was extremely hard on him. He wasn't allowed to have friends, or follow his dreams. His father was emotionally abusive, even bordering on physically abusive sometimes when he got too angry. And his mother just stood by and ignored it all.

Connor's father wanted him to be a doctor, which is why he was forced to start his college degree in the chemical engineering field. He changed to computer engineering without his father's knowledge, and when his father found out, he was furious. He refused to pay for Connor's education. Connor had to work three jobs to finish, and was still laden down with student loans. Of course, when he got his job with Amazon, none of that mattered, they were all payed off in no time. And his father had gotten better about accepting Connor's choices. But Connor couldn't forgive him for his childhood. Nor could he look at Connecticut with anything but a bad taste in his mouth.

Since delving into the reality of Connor's childhood, I know that none of what he told me was true. He may have had a bad relationship with his father, but it wasn't because his father was too hard on him...it was the opposite. Connor's father didn't care about what Connor did or what happened to him. That's why he was taken by Child Protective Services. Almost ironically, the father figure Connor described was the one Connor wished he had, not the one he actually did.

But at the time, I felt Connor had just made a huge admission to me, one that made perfect sense as to why he wouldn't want to return to Connecticut. Placated, I vowed never to bring up the state of Connecticut again, never raising another objection to Connor's subsequent trip to find his family friend and obtain his passport.

Of course now I know that Connor went down to Kentucky, where he was actually born, to get his passport from the records office. There was no family friend. But at the time, I was embarrassed enough by pushing Connor to let all his secrets out, and I didn't want to cause him any more emotional trauma.

Thinking about it all now, I feel like I was so naïve. But I also had no reason to question what Connor was telling me. I was suspicious initially, but I had never been one to go behind someone's back to investigate what they were telling me. As a lawyer, I spent all day looking into lies, and (I thought) I had become good at both recognizing falsities and investigating them behind the scenes. But I had always felt guilty pulling out those investigative skills on my friends and family. I wanted to take them at face value and believe them. I also knew, from my work, that people sometimes had good reasons for hiding things. Reasons that, in retrospect, their loved one's would probably rather not have known. For example, if I could have gone through my whole life not knowing Connor was attracted to young girls, I would have been much, much happier.

Regardless, back then I was much more likely to confront someone about misgivings I had, then to try to find out the truth behind their back. It just felt like the right thing to do, to give them an opportunity to explain and justify themselves to me.

A group of volunteers picking up trash along the highway jolts my thoughts from the past to the present. I wonder if Connor gets let out of prison for trash duty now. Could I drive by in Frederick one day and see him on the street. For a second, I feel glad I haven't left the house in months, picturing how jarring the sight of him in a neon vest with the other criminals would be. But then I shake myself, I don't think they let violent criminals out for community service. And that's what Connor is now. A violent criminal.