The Garden of Betrayal by Lee Vance Page B

to change anything.”
    “It might if you let it.”
    I stared down at the street below, my chest aching.
    “I’m not the one stuck in the past, Kate.”
    “For Christ’s sake, Dad,” she shouted. “Are you fucking kidding me? You treat Mom like an invalid, you have this conspiracy with the doorman to hide Kyle’s mail, and every time we ride up or down the elevator, you moon about the dent in the paneling. It’s not just the apartment she needs to get away from.”
    Turning, I saw Kate was leaning across my desk, her cheeks blazing.
    “So, you think she should leave me?” I asked, overwhelmed at this onslaught.
    “No. Don’t you get it? It’s not you she needs to get away from. It’s your never-ending obsession with what happened to Kyle.”
    I felt like my chest was going to burst.
    “How can I not be obsessed? I’m the one who flew off that night to give some stupid, goddamned speech. I should’ve been there.…”
    “That’s right. You should have been there. And if you were, you probably would have walked to the video store with Kyle, and nothing bad ever would have happened. But don’t forget that I was the one who wanted to watch the movie, and Yolanda was the one who taped over it, and Mom was the one who let Kyle go out by himself, and Kyle was the one who insisted on running the errand. It was everybody’s fault. We’re all guilty, and we all have to get over it.”
    I turned back to the window, trying to calm myself.
    “None of us are ever going to forget what happened,” Kate continued softly. “That’s a given. But if you can’t at least try to put the past behind you—to move beyond your guilt and help Mom move beyond hers—then I think you’re right. I think Mom’s going to leave you.”

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,