The Hand That Feeds You

3

Victims become survivors only after the fact. How is a victim chosen?

Say five schoolgirls are leaving a playground. The predator is sitting in his car across the street. His method of selection in no way resembles a wolf pack choosing a lame elk, or does it?

He studies the gaits of each of the girls, how her dominant personality trait — shy, brazen, alert, dreamy — determines her carriage and stride. He will hold back from choosing his victim until one that meets his needs comes along. The first girl to leave skips as she walks: me as a schoolgirl. She would be an easy choice, but this particular predator doesn’t want a “skipper.” Skippers, it turns out, make troublesome prey. They fight back. The second girl who catches his eye is flanked by laughing friends, and although she is his type, he doesn’t want to work that hard to separate her and risk failing. The third girl is yelling into her smartphone, and the fourth possibility is dressed too mannishly for his taste. The fifth girl is slightly overweight and twists a hank of her bangs as she walks. Most of her face is hidden behind her hair, a reliable sign of low self-esteem and emotional withdrawal. The “twister” never fights back. She already knows she’s a victim; if not now, some other time. He won’t have to bother to charm her. Does the wolf have to charm the lame elk?

The method of approach is a term that refers to the offender’s way of getting close to his victim. It provides clues about the offender, such as his social skills, physical build, and ability to manipulate. The three general methods of approach are the con, the surprise, and the blitz. The con describes someone who deceives a victim into believing he needs help — think Ted Bundy with the cast on his arm, asking young women to help him get something from his windowless van. The surprise is someone who lies in wait, then quickly subdues that person — think slasher under the car waiting for women to finish shopping and unlock their minivan, his target the Achilles tendon so his intended victim cannot run away. The blitz requires rapid and excessive use of force to quickly overcome the victim’s defenses — think home invasion in which anyone unlucky enough to be there is swiftly killed or raped and killed.

Risk assessment refers to the likelihood of a particular person’s becoming a victim. Victim risk is broken into three basic levels: low risk, medium risk, high risk. These ratings are based on their personal, professional, and social lives. The prostitute is the obvious example of a person at high risk: exposed to a large number of strangers, often in contact with drug users, often alone at night, and unlikely to be missed. A low-risk victim has a steady job, lots of friends, and an unpredictable schedule.

But what if there was a different kind of risk factor, the risk of being too trusting, not because of gullibility, but because of compassion. What about the little girl who is lured into the predator’s car because he asks her to help him find a lost kitten?

This is how it works for humans.

I studied under a psychiatrist who allowed his patients to bring their dogs to sessions. He told me about one patient who arrived with her well-behaved shepherd mix who remained in a down-stay at her feet even while she waved her arms to make her agitated points with considerable drama. But another patient, on antipsychotic meds, sat uncommonly still beside his Gordon setter, speaking in a calm monotone, and his dog got up and paced nervously in the office, even growling low and showing flattened ears. The point? That dogs can differentiate between neurotic behavior and behavior that is truly a threat.

Did Bennett threaten the dogs?

• • •

Cilla helped me compose a condolence letter to Bennett’s parents. Bennett had shown me a picture of them. His old father was playing a button accordion in a farm kitchen while his mother danced in her apron. When Cilla asked me what he had told me about them, what I recalled was generic. He offered little and I wished I had asked more about them. Cilla advised me not to make the letter about my loss.

My brother, Steven, asked one of his law firm’s investigators to ferret out an address for them since the police weren’t able to find one: M. Jean-Pierre and Mme. Marie Vaux-Trudeau in Saint-Elzéar, Quebec, a town of less than three thousand.

“The parents don’t exist,” Steven told me when he next came to visit me in Bellevue. I was beginning my second week there and he had been coming almost every night. We sat on plastic chairs in the common room while on television Happily Never After was on the Investigation Discovery channel. Imagine filling an entire season with stories about spouses who killed each other… on their honeymoon. My roommate, Jody, had tagged along, knowing Steven always brought chocolate. She sported her earbuds to give us privacy, but I saw her turn off the sound.

“You mean your investigator couldn’t find them,” I corrected him.

“Next time, Steve,” Jody interrupted, “could you get the kind with bacon bits and salt?”

“Bacon in chocolate?” Steven said.

“Maybe I spelled their last name wrong,” I said.

“My guy checked every derivation. There is no one by that name in Saint-Elzéar.”

“Maybe I got the town wrong.”

“He checked all over.”

“They have to be somewhere. Someone has to tell them their son is dead.”

“I had my guy check the town’s records for Bennett’s birth certificate. No one by his name ever lived there.”

“I didn’t ask you to check on Bennett.”

“I wasn’t checking on Bennett, I was trying to find his parents for you.”

I knew my brother better than anyone else. We’d been inseparable as kids, and fiercely protective of each other, a pattern often found in the children of a manic-depressive. When our father was depressed, he ignored Steven, and when our father was manic, he attacked him. Bipolar disease is one of the rare instances where a predator and a victim can occupy the same body at the same time. It makes for an unfair fight.

“Do you want my guy to keep looking for Bennett’s parents?” Steven asked.

“Of course I do.”

• • •

After Steven left, Jody worked on her chocolate. “My creative-writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence had the same thing happen to her. She met this English guy online and fell in love.”

“Why would your professor tell you about her love life?” I asked, though I could barely concentrate on Jody. I was stuck back at the moment when Steven had said that Bennett wasn’t born where he told me he was.

“We’re required to meet privately for a half hour a week to discuss my writing. There’s nothing to say. We both know it. Turns out the guy was really twelve years old.”

“That must happen all the time.” I reached for the bedside lamp to turn it off.

“Wait. I finally figured it out. You’re the bad version of that actress, Charlotte Rampling — the sexy-lidded eyes that change from hazel to green depending on the light, the cheekbones. It’s been driving me nuts.”

“The bad version.”

“Also the short version,” Jody said. “My sister and I say we are the bad versions of Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland. We watch a lot of old movies. Your brother, on the other hand, is sort of the good version of Nic Cage.”

“I think he could go with that. I don’t know your sister, but I don’t think you’re the bad version of anyone,” I added, making nice. This time I turned off the light on my nightstand. “Sleep well.” I even turned away from Jody to underline my intention to end any conversation. But the light from the window in our door illuminated the room, enough that I could not pretend I was the only one there.

Why would you say you were born somewhere you weren’t?

Of all the lies men have told women, this one was baffling. It didn’t seem to serve a purpose I could identify. Unless he had changed his name. But the reasons people change their name — short of marriage when a woman sometimes changes her last name — are to sever ties to the past and to start over. And if he had changed his name, what else might he have changed — the story of his childhood? But he talked about his parents with such love. Was that the childhood he wished he’d had? Who were the people in the photograph? Bennett looked like the man in the photo.

I rolled over until I was facing the other bed. Jody was, if not asleep, then at least lying still. I could not get her silly game out of my head. Who was Bennett the bad version of? I thought of all the actors of yesteryear that I had watched on late-night TV, and I landed on the iconic Montgomery Clift. He had been in a serious car accident — he drove into a tree — while filming Raintree County, and though the facial plastic surgery he had required was pretty good for the fifties, his looks had a definite before and after. Bennett, I thought, was the bad version of the bad version of Montgomery Clift. As soon as I landed on this, I was ashamed — why the snarky take? All he had done was lie about where he was from.

Still no sound from Jody. The roommate I wished I had was Kathy. I would not have turned off my light and turned my back to her. We would have dissected the possibilities of this odd situation, escalating into wilder scenarios until we were both laughing. Ultimately, she would have made a case for duality — that I needed to do recon and take the risk that faith presents.

Faith had served her well. An adventurous, indomitable, and wise spirit had guided her through a life many would envy — up to a point. At twenty-eight, in her third year of med school at NYU, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it had already gone to the bone. She continued to attend classes and do rounds during her initial chemo and appeared on the ward with her head uncovered — no wig, no wrapped scarf. Her patients saw her bravery daily, her showing up for them when another would have capitulated.

She lived for eight years after the diagnosis. For four of those years, we shared an apartment in Vinegar Hill near the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. She died just before I met Bennett.

And now I was in a loony bin with a Sarah Lawrence student.

What would Kathy have done?

I would make a plane reservation for Montreal in the morning, use the key Bennett had given me, and find out what I could.