Kidnapped.
I've been hesitating writing this entry, but in the same way I felt like I needed to tell those close to me, I feel like I need to send it out into the online ether like all my other dirty secrets and unforgettable traumas. Most of the internal debate was over whether or not it was fair to Jess to write about this in such detail and to essentially out her for what she did. I do not find much joy in writing about others' personal business in this blog. However, when you're a big part of my life, or when you put me through something that affects me, your personal business becomes my personal business; your story becomes also my story. For that reason, I am finally posting this. I originally wrote most of it within days of it happening. I will write about our month together eventually, but this needs to come out first.
Thursday, May 22nd
All of us went for pizza at Little Anthony's, in part to meet Tia's new romance, a boy named Andrew who had stopped being both vegan and straightedge already in his early twenties. She wanted him to meet us and vice versa and I was looking forward to harassing him about his lapse of radicalism. Pizza was great, Jess's son was annoying and spilled root beer everywhere, Andrew was a nice kid who I had hope for.
"I wish I'd had someone like you around when I stopped being vegan and straightedge," he told me.
Outside, waiting for our first bus toward home, Jess was on the verge of a maternal mental breakdown. Her son's incessant, inane questions, bratty attitude, and reckless behavior was only getting worse each day and even she was losing her ability to tolerate it. So I told her, "You can tap out right now; I'll take care of him. Relax." I got to teach him about dandelions, about how those things he blows are dead ones, and that he's blowing seeds everywhere that will then go on to create more dandelions. He thought it was cool and it made me happy to drop that magical bomb on him.
"Why do they die, though? I thought when it rains, plants drink the water?" he still innocently wondered.
Tia left with Andrew to spend the night in Albany, Matt separated from us downtown, and we took the bus back home.
We weren't home for more than a half hour before I looked out my window and noticed a police officer peeking up at me. I walked out before they could even knock and sternly asked them what they wanted at the door. There were two of them, the biggest one fingering the doorway while asking me if Jessica was inside. Without answering, I asked what the problem was.
"There was a call. Child Protective would like to speak with her."
I asked them, "Where are they?"
"They're here."
"Where?"
"They're here. They just want to speak with her."
"Where are they?"
"They're out front."
I went in and got Jess. She looked nervous, but as far as I knew, we'd both expected this inevitability to some extent and had nothing to fear. She came out and talked to the officers for a few minutes. The one in control asked her a bunch of mundane questions. I tried to tell her to stop answering him, but she just kept responding for some reason. Suddenly, we found out Child Protective wasn't there yet. I went back inside to put her son in our bedroom. It was his bedtime and I wanted to make sure he didn't see the cops or got disturbed. Next thing I knew, Jess was coming back in with another man in a suit, being told that we had to go down to Child Protective Services with him. At the time, we both felt like we had no choice in the matter. In retrospect, I'm not sure why we believed that. We got him, grabbed his car seat, and drove downtown with this man. He claimed he was a detective who helped chauffeur people to CPS when he wasn't working youth cases. He too asked a bunch of mundane questions. When he told Jess's son he was a detective, he excitedly responded, "What are you finding?!"
They brought us in through the back of the building and we were guided to a small waiting room littered in toys, children books, and a TV with some Disney movies on VHS underneath it. My heart was shaking and I could see Jess was just as nervous. Eventually, a man and a woman came in. The man took Jess and the woman took her son. I was told I had to stay because I, "wasn't dad." I sat there and waited by myself for almost a half hour. I tried to call Jess's parents on their home and cell phones repeatedly, but there was no answer. It only reinforced my suspicion that they were behind this. We'd already given them my address because they claimed they would mail her son some of the toys and clothes we'd left behind in Olin. Of course, they still hadn't. At one point, I was pretty sure I heard Jess's loud bellow muffled by the walls separating us. My heart clenched tight. When she finally came back, her eyes were red and teary and she was holding some papers.
She told me the shocking bad news: They were taking him from us. He was immediately being transferred to a foster care facility.
The man she'd left with stood against the wall coldly and said in his deep voice, "There are some very serious allegations from multiple agencies in the south."
I held Jess as she sobbed uncontrollably. They wouldn't tell us what the allegations were or even really what was going on. All Jess knew was that they allegedly had irrefutable proof of some "very serious" allegation against her and that she would find out more in the morning when she was scheduled to return. We weren't able to see or say goodbye to him. All I could think about was how scared and confused he had to be. He couldn't even sleep apart from us without the bathroom light left on; I could only imagine how he would take the news that he was suddenly being taken from his parents and the place he knew to be brought to some strange, unfamiliar place full of strangers. The two cops were given the job of escorting us back to the apartment. Jess and I yelled a lot about what was going on, she cried heavily, and the cops eventually turned Evanescence up on their radio to drown her out. I was stunned. At that moment, we knew nothing and were totally powerless. He had basically been kidnapped by CPS, I thought, and there was nothing we could do about it. Jess's parents still weren't answering their phones. Jess cried for well over an hour. I hated not knowing what to do. I guess there really wasn't anything I could do. I loved and cared about her son very deeply, even though he was a lot to handle. I couldn't stop thinking about how hard this was going to be on him; Jess and I were getting off easy in comparison. We were powerless, but not in the same way as a four-year-old in the State's custody was.
I tried to eat. Jess couldn't. It was only just after 9, but we decided to lay in bed. I held her while she cried some more. I started drifting off just from the exhaustion of the stress and heightened emotions. Meanwhile, Jess went out and used my laptop to try and figure out what her rights were and what was probably going to happen as a result of all of this. What she learned was that CPS is actually notorious for exploiting or just disregarding citizens' Fourth Amendment rights. We didn't have to leave with that man to go down there. We felt so stupid and like the whole thing was at least partially avoidable. We also found out that more children die in the hands of CPS than they do at the hands of the families they're taken from. I don't think either of us really ever slept that night.
Friday, May 23rd
The next morning, I got a call from the man at CPS, Jon, telling us to not come until 11. I used the last couple of bucks in my wallet to get us a cab there early.
The driver recognized us and asked, "Didn't you guys have the kid last time?"
When he realized the address we gave him was to CPS, he went out of his way to tell us a story about how his kids were taken from him because of his spiteful parents and his constant partying. It didn't make us feel any better. We sat in a waiting room for what felt like an eternity. Two women who worked there came in and laughed at me, muttering something about my beard to one another. Jess was interviewed by Jon for an hour and a half. The wait for her to return and the uncertainty of what was going on was almost too much for me to endure. The anxiety welling up inside of my chest and gut made me feel like I'd pass out at any second. I was relieved when she came back without tears in her eyes, but she just seemed resigned and hopeless. At the earliest, she was going to have to appear at Family Court the following Tuesday, due to Memorial Day being on Monday. They claimed he was doing just fine, which meant very little to us because we knew it was unlikely that he was and that they wouldn't tell us honestly, anyway. It was my turn to be spoken with.
They brought me back into a big room with lots of long tables. Another guy was there and a female stenographer sat and typed our exchange on a laptop. At the beginning of the conversation, I immediately said, "I know you can't tell us, but we know this is a result of her mother. She's done this to her before."
He got seemingly frustrated with me and sternly told me, "Listen, david, I can't tell you who made these calls due to confidentiality, but I will say one thing: you two are barking up the wrong tree in regards to who's responsible."
I was in there for about a half an hour. They asked me about myself, how Jess and I met, what our relationship was like, how we dealt with her son being bad, what the housing situation was like, and even how we managed having sex with him around. I told them we did it late at night and I would never do it with her son in the same room as us. Truth be told, I actually had to argue with Jess to get her to respect the fact that I didn't feel comfortable having sex with him anywhere in sight.
"Even if he's asleep?" the one man asked.
I told them outright, "I wouldn't be able to maintain erection if her son were around."
He kept hinting that there may be something about Jess that she was keeping from me.
"You might want to ask Jess if there's anything she isn't telling you," he'd say.
It made my stomach sink and immediately struck paranoia into my mind. I went out of my way to emphasize that Jess was stable and capable and that I was willing to do whatever it took to ensure this process went smoothly and that we'd eventually get him back.
At the end of the interview, I said to him, "Ya know, one of the things that makes this seem so intense to me is that CPS was called on my parents several times when I was a kid, and despite evidence of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse, I was never taken from them."
The man looked at me and said, "And david, I want you to take from that, that we wouldn't just take someone's child based off of an angry grandmother or the fact that you guys met over the internet."
I wasn't sure if I could believe that, especially after all I read about CPS online the night before, but it still had me guessing.
Jess and I had to walk back home. As soon as we got out of the building, I came right out and asked, "Is there anything I don't know about you? Anything you haven't told me yet, even something you might not have thought was important?"
She insisted there wasn't.
I apologized if my asking was insulting to her and told her I believed and trusted her. I found out that they hadn't really asked her any of the questions they'd asked me. Instead, they focused mainly on her history of boyfriends and mental illness. She did tell me, however, that they asked her if her last boyfriend, Larry, ever "took a special interest in her son". She insisted to me that if he had, she would have left him immediately. Still, neither of us had been told what the allegations were. We just knew they were serious and that there was apparently cold, hard proof to substantiate them. Jon told me he'd potentially be visiting us later to check out the apartment we were staying in. I started straightening up as best as I could, but he never came.
To add to things, my landlady was coming up from New Jersey to check out the apartment and talk to me about us bowing out of our lease six months early and moving. She wanted to inspect the house and make sure there weren't any damages. She also needed to check out the floor above us to see what mess the fire had left behind. We'd been living there for half a year, but this was going to be the first and last time I'd ever see her. She butt-dialed me as she walked down the driveway towards the back and I listened to her talk to the guy who was building a fence around our lot, saying, "I need to talk to these guys, put them out of their misery."
She was an older black woman with a shining, bald head and the pattern of speech of a ditzy teenage girl. One of the first things she said to me was that I didn't look the way I sounded on the phone-that she didn't expect me to be as large as I was. Looking at a bag of recyclables on the back porch and noticing Pepsi, she added, "Ya know, if you quit soda, you'd lose ten pounds immediately!"
I could not believe this woman was just meeting me and making comments about my weight instead of having a professional discussion regarding our tenancy.
She came in and very briefly looked at all the rooms, really only glancing at each for a second or two.
"Oh, you can smell the cat!"
No, you couldn't, and I told her that she couldn't. Snuggles did not smell and he hadn't even been using his litter box because he spent 75% of his days outside by that point in the season. When she left, she said we were "messy", which was astounding to me because I had cleaned up and everything. Before she went upstairs to check on the charred remains of the apartment there, she said, "David, I'll be right back down to talk to you some more, I promise!"
Shortly after, I could have sworn I heard her walk to the front and get into a car. As I found out once I texted her, I had been ditched because she was an unprofessional coward...
Me (3:41): Did you leave?
Maritza (3:51): Yes I did. I will try to head back. Yeah my brother is not wavering on agreing to terminate Leavse so I don't know what to tell you
Me (3:52): Evict us for having a cat, then.
Maritza (4:35): I am driving. I will speak to my brother and get back to you. Do you have email
Around 7 that evening, I got a call from another detective down at the youth bureau of the Schenectady Police Department. He asked if we had time to come down to the station and answer a couple more questions. I jumped to the opportunity, even though Jess repeatedly said she didn't want to. In my mind, the more chances we got to find things out or speak, to build documented rapport with the caseworkers, the sooner we would get her son back. I told them to send a car to pick us up. Jess acted angry with me for agreeing to go. One of the cops from the night before was in the car and asked, ”Did you get your son back?”
We waited for a while. Sex offender posters were on the walls. A detective came out and thanked us for coming down. When they finally asked us to come in, Jess immediately and urgently asked if she could see them without me first. It confused and scared me. Little did she know, they were going to interview us separately in different rooms to begin with. It was becoming harder and harder to fend off worries that there really was something about Jess that I didn't know. The first chance I got, I asked the detective to tell us what the allegations were. On the phone, he promised we'd finally be told, and noted that it was weird no one had explained it to us yet.
He came out with the words slowly: "There are some compromising photos of Jess's son floating around the internet."
My eyes bulged out of my head and it felt like the air had been knocked out of me. It hardly felt real. My mind went to a handful of conclusions.
I asked him, "And you've seen these photos?!"
He claimed he had.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I wondered what Jess had to do with it. Even worse, I feared that her son may have gone through something traumatic.
The detective asked me a bunch of questions read off a piece of paper. He asked what fathering Jess's son was like for me; I told him it was positive and exciting. He asked why I thought someone would take pictures of a child, what should happen to someone who took such photos, whether I'd ever be able to forgive someone who took such photos.
Then it hit me: Jess told me about a creepy uncle back in Olin who had, according to her, molested two nieces of hers, but was still allowed in the household and around the nieces like nothing ever happened! I remembered her ranting about him to me over the phone before she moved.
He had to be involved, I thought; there was no way Jess was involved with these photos, I thought; she must be thinking the same thing that I am and is mortified, I thought. I told the detective about it. I could hear Jess screaming and crying from the other room. I couldn't make out what she was lamenting no matter how hard I tried. I texted Tia while I sat alone at the detective's desk, fearing what would come next. I was told CPS was talking to Jess and would be coming to me after.
I took the detective aside and told him, "Listen, man... if Jess was in any way complicit in these photos being taken, I need to know... because if she was, I do not want her back in my house."
All he could say was, "You're gonna have to ask her that."
He wound up coming back and telling me CPS didn't need to talk to me. We were free to go. It was so sudden that it made me worry even more. As soon as we got outside, Jess told me they told her that her son had said I took a photo of him while he peed. I didn't even have room in my head to deal with that nonsense, so I just went ahead and asked her about the photos. That's when she told me everything.
She had taken photos of her son's naked body, including his ass and genitals, for her ex-boyfriend, Larry, who she had apparently just discovered was a pedophile in that moment he requested the photos. She said she didn't want to do it, but he "forced her" into it by "harassing her". She had no control over the situation because she was "in a compulsive, abusive relationship".
I was in complete disbelief. She had blamed every terrible thing she had done and said to me and every mistake she'd made so far in the relationship on mental illness; she always had an explanation and convenient self-diagnosis for her actions that absolved her of responsibility or any actual guilt. But this was too much for me to even comprehend. I interrogated her.
How long ago did this take place?
Three months before she moved in with me, making it one month before we started talking every night.
If this took place in Olin and Larry was from Chattanooga, had Larry stayed with her at her parents' in North Carolina?
No, they weren't in the same state, let alone the same room-he was "harassing" her via nothing more than text message.
She lied right to my face about there being nothing about her I didn't know or needed to know. She took pictures of her own son's naked body while he was unsuspecting and in the bath and texted them to her pedophile ex-boyfriend so he could get off to them. He wasn't there to physically coerce her, he just kept bothering her over text on her mother's phone. They had technically been broken up for three months at that point. He went on to ask her to take pictures of her touching her son, too, but she thankfully refused to go that far. So she had the capacity to say no to him at a certain point... and he wasn't there with a gun to her head... but she was "forced" to do it?
I was trying to be understanding, but I'd reached a boiling point and just didn't have the room to compute everything that was just revealed to me, let alone the room to try and believe her about being victimized into doing something so disgusting. I needed to call Tia. I needed someone else to tell me if I was being crazy for wanting to leave her at that station with nowhere else to go. If nothing else, I needed to know if Tia would even allow her back in our apartment. Once I got on my phone, Jess began going after me, trying to pry it from my hands. Tia answered in time to hear her screaming, "Don't do this to me!"
The detective and the people from CPS came outside and intervened. The one guy told me, "You're both fucked up from things that happened to you growing up. What she did was fucked up. But I've seen abusive partners talk women into letting them kill them."
They convinced me to stop discussing it and into trying to let it ride through the night. I still loved Jess and cared about her. I obviously couldn't let her stay on the streets of Schenectady. But I didn't want to be with her anymore, I knew that much. We got a ride home from a Detective Sherman who asked if he could confiscate my digital camera to make sure no more pictures had been taken of her son by her or me. I reluctantly offered it to him, knowing they had the technology to see every picture ever stored on the memory card and could easily find some other reason to arrest me. In the end, he returned to the station with it.
Was I wrong for having no empathy for her? Was it possible she was actually forced in some way I couldn't understand to do what she did? Was she just using trauma and mental illness as a scapegoat for her own guilt and shame (and maybe even to avoid potential legal ramifications)? I didn't know what the fuck to think. I couldn't even fucking believe that I started dating someone who could do something like that. She was a liar and accomplice to a pedophile. I had voluntarily cooperated with police, betraying myself and something I believe in, to help her get her son back, when she knew the entire time what was going on. She let me find out the hard way instead of being honest with me. Tia tried to be understanding. Matt wasn't as easy to persuade. The tug of war between my heart, which clearly was still in love with her, and my brain, which knew I could probably never forgive her or even look at her the same way ever again, was intense and painful.
That night was full of screaming, arguing, swearing, and her crying. She bounced between saying she didn't deserve me or her son and hated herself, and telling me I owed her more compassion and should forgive her if I truly loved her. As far as I was concerned, the only one who deserved any compassion was her son. Needless to say, I was not very "understanding" that night. No, I was livid. Looking at her tied my insides into confused knots. I felt sickened by the thought. Even if he thankfully would never have any idea that she did what she did, I knew she did it and could never unknow it. CPS told her she'd probably get him back, but I didn't even know how I felt about that. Did she deserve to get her son back? Was it in his best interest? If she was truly under her ex's spell to the point that she'd do something that heinous just to get him to stop texting her (rather than just turning the phone off), then she was obviously too ill to have a child. If she was just using that as an excuse, then she was just too terrible a mother to have a child. Either way, I couldn't rationalize her getting him back. Between her and her crazy parents back in Olin, it seemed like a doomed lose-lose situation for the little guy. I felt so bad for him, but almost envied him and how little he'd ever know about this moment.
It was one of the worst nights of my entire life. My heart was totally broken and I had no idea what the right thing to do was.
Thursday, May 22nd
All of us went for pizza at Little Anthony's, in part to meet Tia's new romance, a boy named Andrew who had stopped being both vegan and straightedge already in his early twenties. She wanted him to meet us and vice versa and I was looking forward to harassing him about his lapse of radicalism. Pizza was great, Jess's son was annoying and spilled root beer everywhere, Andrew was a nice kid who I had hope for.
"I wish I'd had someone like you around when I stopped being vegan and straightedge," he told me.
Outside, waiting for our first bus toward home, Jess was on the verge of a maternal mental breakdown. Her son's incessant, inane questions, bratty attitude, and reckless behavior was only getting worse each day and even she was losing her ability to tolerate it. So I told her, "You can tap out right now; I'll take care of him. Relax." I got to teach him about dandelions, about how those things he blows are dead ones, and that he's blowing seeds everywhere that will then go on to create more dandelions. He thought it was cool and it made me happy to drop that magical bomb on him.
"Why do they die, though? I thought when it rains, plants drink the water?" he still innocently wondered.
Tia left with Andrew to spend the night in Albany, Matt separated from us downtown, and we took the bus back home.
We weren't home for more than a half hour before I looked out my window and noticed a police officer peeking up at me. I walked out before they could even knock and sternly asked them what they wanted at the door. There were two of them, the biggest one fingering the doorway while asking me if Jessica was inside. Without answering, I asked what the problem was.
"There was a call. Child Protective would like to speak with her."
I asked them, "Where are they?"
"They're here."
"Where?"
"They're here. They just want to speak with her."
"Where are they?"
"They're out front."
I went in and got Jess. She looked nervous, but as far as I knew, we'd both expected this inevitability to some extent and had nothing to fear. She came out and talked to the officers for a few minutes. The one in control asked her a bunch of mundane questions. I tried to tell her to stop answering him, but she just kept responding for some reason. Suddenly, we found out Child Protective wasn't there yet. I went back inside to put her son in our bedroom. It was his bedtime and I wanted to make sure he didn't see the cops or got disturbed. Next thing I knew, Jess was coming back in with another man in a suit, being told that we had to go down to Child Protective Services with him. At the time, we both felt like we had no choice in the matter. In retrospect, I'm not sure why we believed that. We got him, grabbed his car seat, and drove downtown with this man. He claimed he was a detective who helped chauffeur people to CPS when he wasn't working youth cases. He too asked a bunch of mundane questions. When he told Jess's son he was a detective, he excitedly responded, "What are you finding?!"
They brought us in through the back of the building and we were guided to a small waiting room littered in toys, children books, and a TV with some Disney movies on VHS underneath it. My heart was shaking and I could see Jess was just as nervous. Eventually, a man and a woman came in. The man took Jess and the woman took her son. I was told I had to stay because I, "wasn't dad." I sat there and waited by myself for almost a half hour. I tried to call Jess's parents on their home and cell phones repeatedly, but there was no answer. It only reinforced my suspicion that they were behind this. We'd already given them my address because they claimed they would mail her son some of the toys and clothes we'd left behind in Olin. Of course, they still hadn't. At one point, I was pretty sure I heard Jess's loud bellow muffled by the walls separating us. My heart clenched tight. When she finally came back, her eyes were red and teary and she was holding some papers.
She told me the shocking bad news: They were taking him from us. He was immediately being transferred to a foster care facility.
The man she'd left with stood against the wall coldly and said in his deep voice, "There are some very serious allegations from multiple agencies in the south."
I held Jess as she sobbed uncontrollably. They wouldn't tell us what the allegations were or even really what was going on. All Jess knew was that they allegedly had irrefutable proof of some "very serious" allegation against her and that she would find out more in the morning when she was scheduled to return. We weren't able to see or say goodbye to him. All I could think about was how scared and confused he had to be. He couldn't even sleep apart from us without the bathroom light left on; I could only imagine how he would take the news that he was suddenly being taken from his parents and the place he knew to be brought to some strange, unfamiliar place full of strangers. The two cops were given the job of escorting us back to the apartment. Jess and I yelled a lot about what was going on, she cried heavily, and the cops eventually turned Evanescence up on their radio to drown her out. I was stunned. At that moment, we knew nothing and were totally powerless. He had basically been kidnapped by CPS, I thought, and there was nothing we could do about it. Jess's parents still weren't answering their phones. Jess cried for well over an hour. I hated not knowing what to do. I guess there really wasn't anything I could do. I loved and cared about her son very deeply, even though he was a lot to handle. I couldn't stop thinking about how hard this was going to be on him; Jess and I were getting off easy in comparison. We were powerless, but not in the same way as a four-year-old in the State's custody was.
I tried to eat. Jess couldn't. It was only just after 9, but we decided to lay in bed. I held her while she cried some more. I started drifting off just from the exhaustion of the stress and heightened emotions. Meanwhile, Jess went out and used my laptop to try and figure out what her rights were and what was probably going to happen as a result of all of this. What she learned was that CPS is actually notorious for exploiting or just disregarding citizens' Fourth Amendment rights. We didn't have to leave with that man to go down there. We felt so stupid and like the whole thing was at least partially avoidable. We also found out that more children die in the hands of CPS than they do at the hands of the families they're taken from. I don't think either of us really ever slept that night.
Friday, May 23rd
The next morning, I got a call from the man at CPS, Jon, telling us to not come until 11. I used the last couple of bucks in my wallet to get us a cab there early.
The driver recognized us and asked, "Didn't you guys have the kid last time?"
When he realized the address we gave him was to CPS, he went out of his way to tell us a story about how his kids were taken from him because of his spiteful parents and his constant partying. It didn't make us feel any better. We sat in a waiting room for what felt like an eternity. Two women who worked there came in and laughed at me, muttering something about my beard to one another. Jess was interviewed by Jon for an hour and a half. The wait for her to return and the uncertainty of what was going on was almost too much for me to endure. The anxiety welling up inside of my chest and gut made me feel like I'd pass out at any second. I was relieved when she came back without tears in her eyes, but she just seemed resigned and hopeless. At the earliest, she was going to have to appear at Family Court the following Tuesday, due to Memorial Day being on Monday. They claimed he was doing just fine, which meant very little to us because we knew it was unlikely that he was and that they wouldn't tell us honestly, anyway. It was my turn to be spoken with.
They brought me back into a big room with lots of long tables. Another guy was there and a female stenographer sat and typed our exchange on a laptop. At the beginning of the conversation, I immediately said, "I know you can't tell us, but we know this is a result of her mother. She's done this to her before."
He got seemingly frustrated with me and sternly told me, "Listen, david, I can't tell you who made these calls due to confidentiality, but I will say one thing: you two are barking up the wrong tree in regards to who's responsible."
I was in there for about a half an hour. They asked me about myself, how Jess and I met, what our relationship was like, how we dealt with her son being bad, what the housing situation was like, and even how we managed having sex with him around. I told them we did it late at night and I would never do it with her son in the same room as us. Truth be told, I actually had to argue with Jess to get her to respect the fact that I didn't feel comfortable having sex with him anywhere in sight.
"Even if he's asleep?" the one man asked.
I told them outright, "I wouldn't be able to maintain erection if her son were around."
He kept hinting that there may be something about Jess that she was keeping from me.
"You might want to ask Jess if there's anything she isn't telling you," he'd say.
It made my stomach sink and immediately struck paranoia into my mind. I went out of my way to emphasize that Jess was stable and capable and that I was willing to do whatever it took to ensure this process went smoothly and that we'd eventually get him back.
At the end of the interview, I said to him, "Ya know, one of the things that makes this seem so intense to me is that CPS was called on my parents several times when I was a kid, and despite evidence of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse, I was never taken from them."
The man looked at me and said, "And david, I want you to take from that, that we wouldn't just take someone's child based off of an angry grandmother or the fact that you guys met over the internet."
I wasn't sure if I could believe that, especially after all I read about CPS online the night before, but it still had me guessing.
Jess and I had to walk back home. As soon as we got out of the building, I came right out and asked, "Is there anything I don't know about you? Anything you haven't told me yet, even something you might not have thought was important?"
She insisted there wasn't.
I apologized if my asking was insulting to her and told her I believed and trusted her. I found out that they hadn't really asked her any of the questions they'd asked me. Instead, they focused mainly on her history of boyfriends and mental illness. She did tell me, however, that they asked her if her last boyfriend, Larry, ever "took a special interest in her son". She insisted to me that if he had, she would have left him immediately. Still, neither of us had been told what the allegations were. We just knew they were serious and that there was apparently cold, hard proof to substantiate them. Jon told me he'd potentially be visiting us later to check out the apartment we were staying in. I started straightening up as best as I could, but he never came.
To add to things, my landlady was coming up from New Jersey to check out the apartment and talk to me about us bowing out of our lease six months early and moving. She wanted to inspect the house and make sure there weren't any damages. She also needed to check out the floor above us to see what mess the fire had left behind. We'd been living there for half a year, but this was going to be the first and last time I'd ever see her. She butt-dialed me as she walked down the driveway towards the back and I listened to her talk to the guy who was building a fence around our lot, saying, "I need to talk to these guys, put them out of their misery."
She was an older black woman with a shining, bald head and the pattern of speech of a ditzy teenage girl. One of the first things she said to me was that I didn't look the way I sounded on the phone-that she didn't expect me to be as large as I was. Looking at a bag of recyclables on the back porch and noticing Pepsi, she added, "Ya know, if you quit soda, you'd lose ten pounds immediately!"
I could not believe this woman was just meeting me and making comments about my weight instead of having a professional discussion regarding our tenancy.
She came in and very briefly looked at all the rooms, really only glancing at each for a second or two.
"Oh, you can smell the cat!"
No, you couldn't, and I told her that she couldn't. Snuggles did not smell and he hadn't even been using his litter box because he spent 75% of his days outside by that point in the season. When she left, she said we were "messy", which was astounding to me because I had cleaned up and everything. Before she went upstairs to check on the charred remains of the apartment there, she said, "David, I'll be right back down to talk to you some more, I promise!"
Shortly after, I could have sworn I heard her walk to the front and get into a car. As I found out once I texted her, I had been ditched because she was an unprofessional coward...
Me (3:41): Did you leave?
Maritza (3:51): Yes I did. I will try to head back. Yeah my brother is not wavering on agreing to terminate Leavse so I don't know what to tell you
Me (3:52): Evict us for having a cat, then.
Maritza (4:35): I am driving. I will speak to my brother and get back to you. Do you have email
Around 7 that evening, I got a call from another detective down at the youth bureau of the Schenectady Police Department. He asked if we had time to come down to the station and answer a couple more questions. I jumped to the opportunity, even though Jess repeatedly said she didn't want to. In my mind, the more chances we got to find things out or speak, to build documented rapport with the caseworkers, the sooner we would get her son back. I told them to send a car to pick us up. Jess acted angry with me for agreeing to go. One of the cops from the night before was in the car and asked, ”Did you get your son back?”
We waited for a while. Sex offender posters were on the walls. A detective came out and thanked us for coming down. When they finally asked us to come in, Jess immediately and urgently asked if she could see them without me first. It confused and scared me. Little did she know, they were going to interview us separately in different rooms to begin with. It was becoming harder and harder to fend off worries that there really was something about Jess that I didn't know. The first chance I got, I asked the detective to tell us what the allegations were. On the phone, he promised we'd finally be told, and noted that it was weird no one had explained it to us yet.
He came out with the words slowly: "There are some compromising photos of Jess's son floating around the internet."
My eyes bulged out of my head and it felt like the air had been knocked out of me. It hardly felt real. My mind went to a handful of conclusions.
I asked him, "And you've seen these photos?!"
He claimed he had.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I wondered what Jess had to do with it. Even worse, I feared that her son may have gone through something traumatic.
The detective asked me a bunch of questions read off a piece of paper. He asked what fathering Jess's son was like for me; I told him it was positive and exciting. He asked why I thought someone would take pictures of a child, what should happen to someone who took such photos, whether I'd ever be able to forgive someone who took such photos.
Then it hit me: Jess told me about a creepy uncle back in Olin who had, according to her, molested two nieces of hers, but was still allowed in the household and around the nieces like nothing ever happened! I remembered her ranting about him to me over the phone before she moved.
He had to be involved, I thought; there was no way Jess was involved with these photos, I thought; she must be thinking the same thing that I am and is mortified, I thought. I told the detective about it. I could hear Jess screaming and crying from the other room. I couldn't make out what she was lamenting no matter how hard I tried. I texted Tia while I sat alone at the detective's desk, fearing what would come next. I was told CPS was talking to Jess and would be coming to me after.
I took the detective aside and told him, "Listen, man... if Jess was in any way complicit in these photos being taken, I need to know... because if she was, I do not want her back in my house."
All he could say was, "You're gonna have to ask her that."
He wound up coming back and telling me CPS didn't need to talk to me. We were free to go. It was so sudden that it made me worry even more. As soon as we got outside, Jess told me they told her that her son had said I took a photo of him while he peed. I didn't even have room in my head to deal with that nonsense, so I just went ahead and asked her about the photos. That's when she told me everything.
She had taken photos of her son's naked body, including his ass and genitals, for her ex-boyfriend, Larry, who she had apparently just discovered was a pedophile in that moment he requested the photos. She said she didn't want to do it, but he "forced her" into it by "harassing her". She had no control over the situation because she was "in a compulsive, abusive relationship".
I was in complete disbelief. She had blamed every terrible thing she had done and said to me and every mistake she'd made so far in the relationship on mental illness; she always had an explanation and convenient self-diagnosis for her actions that absolved her of responsibility or any actual guilt. But this was too much for me to even comprehend. I interrogated her.
How long ago did this take place?
Three months before she moved in with me, making it one month before we started talking every night.
If this took place in Olin and Larry was from Chattanooga, had Larry stayed with her at her parents' in North Carolina?
No, they weren't in the same state, let alone the same room-he was "harassing" her via nothing more than text message.
She lied right to my face about there being nothing about her I didn't know or needed to know. She took pictures of her own son's naked body while he was unsuspecting and in the bath and texted them to her pedophile ex-boyfriend so he could get off to them. He wasn't there to physically coerce her, he just kept bothering her over text on her mother's phone. They had technically been broken up for three months at that point. He went on to ask her to take pictures of her touching her son, too, but she thankfully refused to go that far. So she had the capacity to say no to him at a certain point... and he wasn't there with a gun to her head... but she was "forced" to do it?
I was trying to be understanding, but I'd reached a boiling point and just didn't have the room to compute everything that was just revealed to me, let alone the room to try and believe her about being victimized into doing something so disgusting. I needed to call Tia. I needed someone else to tell me if I was being crazy for wanting to leave her at that station with nowhere else to go. If nothing else, I needed to know if Tia would even allow her back in our apartment. Once I got on my phone, Jess began going after me, trying to pry it from my hands. Tia answered in time to hear her screaming, "Don't do this to me!"
The detective and the people from CPS came outside and intervened. The one guy told me, "You're both fucked up from things that happened to you growing up. What she did was fucked up. But I've seen abusive partners talk women into letting them kill them."
They convinced me to stop discussing it and into trying to let it ride through the night. I still loved Jess and cared about her. I obviously couldn't let her stay on the streets of Schenectady. But I didn't want to be with her anymore, I knew that much. We got a ride home from a Detective Sherman who asked if he could confiscate my digital camera to make sure no more pictures had been taken of her son by her or me. I reluctantly offered it to him, knowing they had the technology to see every picture ever stored on the memory card and could easily find some other reason to arrest me. In the end, he returned to the station with it.
Was I wrong for having no empathy for her? Was it possible she was actually forced in some way I couldn't understand to do what she did? Was she just using trauma and mental illness as a scapegoat for her own guilt and shame (and maybe even to avoid potential legal ramifications)? I didn't know what the fuck to think. I couldn't even fucking believe that I started dating someone who could do something like that. She was a liar and accomplice to a pedophile. I had voluntarily cooperated with police, betraying myself and something I believe in, to help her get her son back, when she knew the entire time what was going on. She let me find out the hard way instead of being honest with me. Tia tried to be understanding. Matt wasn't as easy to persuade. The tug of war between my heart, which clearly was still in love with her, and my brain, which knew I could probably never forgive her or even look at her the same way ever again, was intense and painful.
That night was full of screaming, arguing, swearing, and her crying. She bounced between saying she didn't deserve me or her son and hated herself, and telling me I owed her more compassion and should forgive her if I truly loved her. As far as I was concerned, the only one who deserved any compassion was her son. Needless to say, I was not very "understanding" that night. No, I was livid. Looking at her tied my insides into confused knots. I felt sickened by the thought. Even if he thankfully would never have any idea that she did what she did, I knew she did it and could never unknow it. CPS told her she'd probably get him back, but I didn't even know how I felt about that. Did she deserve to get her son back? Was it in his best interest? If she was truly under her ex's spell to the point that she'd do something that heinous just to get him to stop texting her (rather than just turning the phone off), then she was obviously too ill to have a child. If she was just using that as an excuse, then she was just too terrible a mother to have a child. Either way, I couldn't rationalize her getting him back. Between her and her crazy parents back in Olin, it seemed like a doomed lose-lose situation for the little guy. I felt so bad for him, but almost envied him and how little he'd ever know about this moment.
It was one of the worst nights of my entire life. My heart was totally broken and I had no idea what the right thing to do was.