The Interviews

More details of the interviews to come were discussed by phone, and it was agreed that she would be interviewed in the evenings twice a week. A volunteer from the clinic would be by to pick her up since she didn’t drive, and her husband was still missing. Not missing as in gone and left her for some new mystery woman, as others had suggested, but gone as in literally missing. Disappeared due to something going wrong and not of his own free will. She’d done everything one could do when a loved one went missing; she’d reported it to the police and called everyone she could think of who knew her husband. But Jon had simply vanished without a trace. No one would believe her when she’d insist that he wouldn’t simply take off and leave her. Not with warning, and certainly not without warning. You got to know someone pretty well after a decade of marriage, and she knew there was no way Jon would leave her unless someone had forced him to and he’d had no choice. The questions that ate at her every single day during the weeks he’d been missing were: what made him disappear? And was he still alive? Was he hurt and suffering somewhere? Or was he dead? It was also agreed that her counselor, Tracy, would be present during the interviews. Peyton wondered what it was all about but knew she’d be told when the interviews were over in about six weeks from now. She also wondered how many others were being interviewed and if they, too, had counselors who would attend the meetings. The meeting room consisted of a simple rectangular table in a small, windowless room. The table seated up to six. Against the wall by one of its long sides stood a smaller table with a coffeemaker. Next to that was a mini-fridge with cream for coffee as well as bottled water and soft drinks. Doctor Ardeno’s nurse seated Peyton in the room, where she waited for about five minutes, curious about what would soon be asked of her. Both the doctor and Tracy entered the room with file folders in hand and took seats across from her, with the doctor being directly across from her and Tracy being diagonally across from her. “Good morning, Peyton,” said the doctor with a smile. “How are you?” “I’m fine.” She glanced at Tracy, who smiled warmly in her direction. The doctor opened the manila folder that sat on the table before her and began shuffling through some papers. “Ok,” she began, “so today we’re going to begin by asking you a little bit about your childhood. Are you ok with that?” “Yes. That would be ok.” “Would you be ok with our sessions being recorded? It will be strictly confidential.” “Sure. That’s fine, too.” “Do you have any objections to being asked any personal questions?” “No, I don’t.” “Ok, then. Let’s get started. We’ll start with your childhood and slowly work our way up from there to the traumatic event that led you to see Tracy.” “Ok,” said Peyton. Again, she glanced at Tracy, who gave her a reassuring smile. “Now tell me a little about your family. How many members of the family did you grow up with, and what were they like?” That’s easy, thought Peyton. She cleared her throat and said, “I grew up with old-fashioned married parents and a brother and a sister. I felt like an only child once I was around age ten, though.” “Why is that?” “Well, my siblings were much older than me.” “What were their first names, and how much older were they?” “Leo was twelve years older, Marina eight years older. My parents were Donald and Hillary. No joke.” Both health professionals laughed. Then the doctor asked, “Where did you live?” “Longmeadow, Massachusetts.” “What was Longmeadow like?” “It was a small bedroom community. Most people were very comfortable financially. Most were white, and there were many Jewish people there, including us. We lived toward the end of a dead-end, and my maternal grandparents lived next door.” “So you lived in a house?” Peyton nodded, “A white four-bedroom, two-story house with black shutters and a huge backyard.” “Did you like living there?” “Well, it was all I’d ever known till I was around twelve or thirteen. I liked having a playroom in the basement away from the others. It gave me a little privacy that way. I also enjoyed playing in the woods. The property was fenced off in the back. Most of it was grassy, but the land sloped upward a bit to where there was a wooded area. I had a swing set in a little clearing just up this little hill.” Both women scribbled notes, and then the doctor asked her what her mother was like. “Not a very likable person.” “How so?” “She was very domineering and negative.” “And your father?” “Just the opposite. No backbone of his own, though. He may’ve been more passive and had a good sense of humor, but he let her wrap him around her finger really well. What she said was what he did. This also meant that he sat back and kept his mouth shut when his wife felt like being abusive, be it verbally or physically.” The doctor nodded with both a professional and empathetic look on her face. “How about your brother Leo?” “He was fine when he was young, but the older he got, the more he alienated me from his life. He cut ties with my parents, and I guess he felt he couldn’t handle having me in his life due to the close connection. There were also some other things that complicated our relationship, but that was as adults. Did you want to hear about that now?” “No. Only your relationship as siblings when you were a child.” “He was good to me. I just didn’t see much of him. He left home way before I did.” “How about your sister?” “That relationship was much more strained. We didn’t get along much. I mean, sometimes we did, sometimes we didn’t. Often left to babysit me, she could be as strict and as mean as our mother could be.” “Did you have any pets?” “Yeah, they had poodles and some birds. We kids usually had rodent friends of some kind.” “So Peyton, would you say you had adequate housing, food, and medical attention?” “Yes, we did.” “And how about clothes and toys?” “We had our fair share of them.” “Did you have a bedtime?” Peyton nodded. “It seemed like I was in bed by eight in grade school, but could stay up till around ten in high school if I’m remembering correctly.” “Did you ever take family vacations?” “Yes. We had a summer cottage down in Old Lyme, Connecticut. We spent our summers there. We also went to Texas to visit my sister when she married a guy who lived there. He was a pilot. I was around eleven or twelve when we drove down there.” “Did you enjoy those vacations?” Peyton thought a moment, then said, “I mostly enjoyed the awe of being in other states. It was totally new to me to be in another part of the country. I got more from that than I did out of being with the family because I was always with the family.” “I see,” said Doctor Ardeno, adding to her notes. “Did you have many friends?” “Not a lot of friends, but I had a few.” “How did you do in school academically?” “Not very well. It seemed like I just couldn’t catch on as well when I was young, especially if it was a subject I had no interest in, like math.” “How did you do socially?” “Not well. I was a bit of a bully, you could say. I did better as I got older, though.” “Were you or your siblings ever abused?” “Yes, there was some abuse.” “Could you describe what the abuse was like?” The doctor glanced from her papers to Peyton. “Most of it was verbal and emotional, though some was physical.” “Was there any sexual abuse?” “No.” “Now let’s focus more on your teenage years at home.” Peyton snorted. “I wasn’t home for most of them.” “No?” Peyton shook her head. “Do you want me to walk you through those years in order of events, or do you have specific questions for me to answer?” “Well, I may have some questions along the way, but you can go ahead and describe those years.” “There isn’t much I can say about my first two years as a teenager. I wanted to be a rock star and I started smoking. I felt rejected often, especially if it was someone I really liked or may have had a crush on.” “And after those first two years?” “My mother kept threatening me with institutions. The more negative and downright mean she became, the more suicidal I felt. I began to cut myself and even tried to OD on codeine or something like that once. But this was the 90s, so attitudes were different then. Back then, they convinced me and anyone who would listen that I was crazy. It wouldn’t be until many years later that I would come to understand that I was just a normal teenager reacting as most would react to a mother like mine.” “Were you actually placed in any institutions?” Peyton nodded. “First it was 5 months at a place in a psych ward for adolescents in Vermont. I hated it, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. I’ll get to that in a minute.” The doctor nodded as Tracy studied her intently. “I returned home in December of 1991, I think it was, but instead of returning to the local high school, I was tutored at a school for the deaf – I’m half deaf – and the following April I attended an alternative school in the city. There were only about a dozen of us there. This didn’t last long, though. By June, my mother had given up on me, and I was a ward of the state. I lived in foster homes, one good and one bad, throughout the summer. By the fall, I was placed in a long-term residential school for girls where I lived for two years. It was horrible. Very structured and full of routine. No privacy. I wanted out so bad. I threw myself out of a second-story window a year later and broke my arm. After this incident, some of the staff and students smothered me while others ostracized me. It was a really lousy experience.” Doctor Ardeno appeared sympathetic but kept her professionalism. “Where did you go after this school? Did you graduate there?” Peyton nodded. “Yes. I went to live with my parents for a little over a year. My sister and her one-year-old daughter also came to live with our parents after a failed relationship down in Texas. We had a big four-bedroom house, so there was plenty of room for all of us. I lived in the cellar, and the rest of the family lived upstairs.” “So you were now 18?” “Yes. My mother helped me get my first apartment when I was 19, almost 20. This was in the city. I lived there from 1985 to 1991, but not in the same apartment. I had a couple of other apartments along the way.” “How about intimate relationships?” “I fooled around with a few guys and a few women, but only a couple of the guys and a couple of the women lasted a few months. I was still young and so I really wasn’t ready for anything serious. I was still in the experimental phase, you could say.” “Ok. What happened in 1991? Did you leave the area?” “I did. I left Springfield and headed for S. Deerfield, but was rather lonely and isolated out there, so less than a year later, I moved down to Southern Connecticut to be near my sister and nieces. That ended up being a four-month disaster.” “Oh,” said the doctor dubiously. “Family didn’t get along?” “It wasn’t so much that as it was the projects I was living in. I was broke and on disability. I still smoked at the time, and it was making my asthma a real nightmare. I was sick, and the place was totally chaotic. The walls were paper-thin, and there were tons of unruly kids. I couldn’t get much sleep, and I couldn’t get much peace when I was awake. I ended up having a psychotic break and spent a few weeks in a psych ward. It was then that my father came up from Florida and surprised me with tickets to Arizona, where my best friend at the time, a gay guy named Ned, was living.” “So you went to live out there?” Peyton nodded and chuckled. “And nothing was ever the same again. Oh, things started off the same… the poverty, the loneliness… but I would eventually experience quite a few adventures, some good, some bad.” “What year was it?” “1992.” “Did you get your own apartment?” “Not right away. I stayed with Ned in his studio, and then I eventually got an identical one nearby. Although I loved that I had swimming pools and didn’t have to worry about snow, I hated the place much for the same reasons I hated the projects… too many people, too much noise. A year later, I moved to another apartment complex, this time being a two-bedroom, as I was working as an exotic dancer and had a little more money, but I found the same thing. Next door to me was where I met my future husband. In the fall of 1993, I moved into the house he just moved into that had belonged to his brother. His brother had moved into his new wife’s home.” “And then?” “We lived there from 1993 to 1999, when we moved from Phoenix to Maricopa. We stayed there till 2004. After then we spent 3 years in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Finally, we ended up in Cali in 2007.” Doctor Ardeno smiled. “So here you are. Are you glad about your decision to move here?” “Yes and no. Had we not moved here, I’d always be curious about living here, but on the other hand, I kind of regret moving here because it’s such an expensive state.” “Yes, it is,” the doctor agreed. “The economy collapsed shortly afterward, and we struggled the first five years here.” “Oh,” the doctor said knowingly, “yeah, a lot of people had a hard time back then.” “And just when things are finally going great, my husband goes missing, and I fall apart.” Both women looked at her with a forlorn expression. “There hasn’t been any word since?” the doctor asked softly. Peyton shook her head. “What do you think happened?” “Well, there’s no way he would just walk off on his own and leave me or the house we just got last year, so that only leaves one possibility.” They waited for her to go on. “Something bad happened.” Peyton felt tears well up in her eyes. “I just don’t understand why he hasn’t been found, dead or alive.” Doctor Ardeno offered a weak smile and said, “This has been a good start, but why don’t we stop for today and have you come back later in the week as planned?” “Ok,” said Peyton. “Actually,” said Tracy, “I won’t be able to make it that day. Is that ok?” “That’s fine,” the doctor told her. “We can always bring you up to date when you’re available.”