taking four days of sick leave, buying a car seat, finding a temporary babysitter, contacting Child Protective Services, calling his mother in Houston with the news, asking her to take a few days off work to come stay with him to help get Sammy settled in, filling up his refrigerator with food Sammy liked, and buying clothes and a mattress for Sammy to sleep on, Tyler remembered the name of one of Melissa’s close friends. It was one he thought lived in California. With a little online searching, he found a telephone number and a picture online that matched what he recalled the woman to look like.
“Ashley, I’m not sure if you remember me but this is Tyler Nielsen. I was Melissa’s boyfriend for a while. I don’t know if you’ve seen her recently but she has a son, I mean we have a son …”
“Yeah, I know about that.”
“Listen, Ashley, Melissa left Sammy with me and then just disappeared. I live in Bastrop, near Austin. I don’t know if this was something she planned, or if something happened to her, or if she’s been in touch with you. I’d never even met him. I didn’t even know about him and she just left him here with me. Sammy says she told him that she was going to leave him to live with me, which seems to me about the craziest …”
She cut him off: “Tyler, I can’t tell you anything more. She made me swear that I wouldn’t. You’re a cop, aren’t you? I mean, couldn’t you find her if you really wanted to? Don’t you have ways of tracking people down? Credit cards, phone numbers? Doesn’t sound very smart to leave your kid with his father who is a cop and think you can disappear without being found.”
“I guess not,” he finally said. “Unless you figure the guy is smart enough to know that you can’t make a woman be a mother to a child if there’s some reason she doesn’t want to.”
“You know, Tyler, she always said one of the reasons she liked you was because of your—what did she call it? —your ‘simple, decent common sense.’ So glad I could be of help. Good luck. I really mean that.”
“Yeah, ok,” he said, slowly taking this in.
He was about to hang up when Ashley spoke again.
“Tyler, hold on a second. Look, we tried to talk her out of it. I think it’s a stupid idea. But she thinks you can do this. She has her reasons. That’s all I can say.”
He waited, thinking she might offer more information, a motive, something to go on.
“Take good care of Sammy,” Ashley said.
Tyler thought it sounded like a threat. She hung up before he could respond.
About a week later Tyler received a registered letter. Inside was Sammy’s birth certificate, listing Tyler as the father, a notarized letter signed by Melissa saying that she relinquished sole custody of Sammy to him, and Sammy’s vaccination records. Tyler knew there would be more paperwork, meetings with social workers, and a court hearing to make it all permanent. The therapy was his own choice.
-
MUSEUM SUBMISSION 71-2005
She was working as a volunteer at an NGO in Rio de Janeiro. We were together for nearly a year. She moved into my apartment and got her visa renewed so she could spend more time in Brazil. Marriage really never came up, but we knew it was one way for her to get a permanent visa.
It was the first time we had spent Carnaval together in Rio. I tried to explain to her that crazy things happen. Like why do you think the government distributes condoms by the tens of thousands every Carnaval? There’s the heat and the drums and beer and caipirinhas and bodies and we know what’s on everybody’s mind. It’s not a normal time. When I told her this she looked at me in one of those lost-in-translation moments.
So this girl came up to me when we were at the Sambodromo and started dancing right next to me. Then she put her mouth to my ear and said she had been in a class with me at university. I didn’t remember her, but maybe she was. She kind of looked familiar. When I turned to respond, she started kissing me. And then I found that I was kissing her back and she pulled me to her and grabbed my ass and maybe I grabbed hers. For a minute I forgot about my American girlfriend standing right beside me.
That’s Carnaval. That’s what I’d tried to tell her.
I don’t know how much time passed. When I turned I saw my girlfriend take off through the crowd. I went after her but I couldn’t find her. It’s like thousands of people. I tried calling her mobile but she didn’t answer. I went back to where we were sitting and waited but she didn’t return.
She came back to my apartment two days later.
I asked if she was okay and she started kissing me and told me she was sorry and it didn’t matter and would I forgive her no matter what she did and pretty soon we were on the floor taking each other’s clothes off.
Later that same night, she packed and left. She wouldn’t tell me anything else. Where she was going, anything.
This is the condom package and the flyer they handed out that year at the Sambodromo. It was the health ministry’s way of getting back at the Catholic Church, which said that condoms promoted infidelity and promiscuity. The condoms came with this drawing of a friar, a nun, and a devil, that says: “Beyond good or evil, use condoms.”
I wrote her emails: two or three a day for weeks. Short ones: Write me, please. Please, I want to talk. Or: I miss you. Or, some days: I love you.
Sometimes I wrote longer ones. She never wrote back.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2005
-
Goran
The transit camp was set up in a primary school about two kilometers outside the center of the small town. Teachers had been replaced by guards. Or maybe, Goran thought, the male teachers and staff had simply become the guards. The men in charge were standing in small groups, smoking, rifles hanging on their shoulders. Mostly they laughed. Until someone approached the gate from inside or outside. Then they immediately turned serious. And the rifles came off their shoulders and into their hands.
Goran’s mother was inside, in what had been the school’s office, waiting to show their papers. A line of adults, backpacks on their shoulders and suitcases at their feet, extended outside and part way around the building.
On their first day in the camp, Goran and his younger brother Srdjan played football with other boys their age. There were Bosnian Serbs, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Catholic Croatians, as there always had been in Yugoslavia. Later that same day, Goran joined the group that was playing basketball on the outdoor court. They asked around where each was trying to go.
Germany, the US, Croatia for the Croats, Slovenia would do, Austria, the UK, Canada. One said Russia. The others laughed.
“That’s just trading one mafia state for another,” one of them said.
The rest of the time, Goran sat on a table outside reading and listening to his CD player, hoping his batteries would last.
His mother had no news at the end of the day.
“They just need to check a few things. The people inside are nice. We should
