HARTFORD — Thursday, 9 April 1998

Angela Martin, sixteen years old, was abducted yesterday afternoon, presumably from the front steps of the local public high school, Greenwich High, where she was a sophomore.  Between 2:15 when classes were released and her parents' late arrival at 4:00, Angela disappeared.

Karen and Robert Martin, parents of the victim, are an accountant and homemaker residing in Greenwich, Connecticut.  Horribly distraught by the loss of their daughter, "We will never forgive ourselves," they said.  "It's hard to believe that a single error can result in such a tragedy."  She was described by the parents as "beautiful, well-behaved… the perfect daughter."  

"I can't imagine what kind of a monster would do this," her mother said in a recent interview.

* * *

In the mirror, his pupils were choked by the amber irises, coughing water from their creases in steady spasms.  Jackson was ashamed of his fading, five-year-old suit and the wrinkles left around the knees and elbows from sitting too long in a chair built for practicality, but crouching before the rear-view mirror of his Honda Accord in the early May heat only added vague wet patches to his shambled appearance.  He slumped against the side of the car.  The press of warm metal would make the wrinkles worse, but he supposed that nothing could be done.  His forehead, when viewed in the mirror, was wrinkled as well.  He had stared at her too long in the room; he had spent sixteen years staring at her and wondering what wonders she kept hidden under the ironed-permed-and-painted exterior, only to find that it was a lie, and she was nothing but an empty, animated costume with no one to fill it.  She had glanced back at him, while she sat with her lawyer and discussed settlements and custody and where they would go for the honeymoon after their wedding in Hartford, and he saw nothing behind the glassy, dark film of her eyes.  A moment.  In that second, he could convince himself that she meant nothing to him; now he sat in the parking lot whimpering and pathetic in the shadow of his pathetic old car.
He grasped the mirror with his left hand and dragged his body to a stand.  Groping for keys, he glimpsed through the window a glint of movement, and paused—it fluttered and twitched frantically from back seat to front, battering its paper wings against the side windows.  It lit without warning on the top of the steering wheel and stared directly at him.  Light and stillness revealed a web of brown-and-gray streaks, in the likeness of feathers, and a single black orb rimmed by a sliver of gold.  The owl stared at him through the window of this creature's wing.  He had seen pictures of these; it was a camouflage mechanism, as far as he knew.  Patches of butterfly's powderscales had been scraped off when it fought to fly against the rough upholstery, leaving minute translucent streaks.  When the wing was angled outward just enough, they looked like holy teardrops falling from the marking of the eye and imbued with a radiant sorrow.  
He heard the familiar creak of the door set in the awning of the building behind him, and jammed his key into the lock.  In the window, he saw the two of them exit together, steps walking in time with one another and arms around waists, around shoulders, and hands threaded through hands.  Mine, they seemed to say, as Jackson saw his two eyes reflected beneath the single, dark eye of the butterfly, and finally succeeded in unlocking the door and climbing into the cabin.  It jumped and raced in a mess of wings, flashing eyes, flashing blank gray, flashing specks of light that tore through both; he lunged.  His hand came up grasping crumpled paper and writhing limbs.  Nothing to be done.  He stared at it, then glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the two of them grasping one another, as if to say thank God that's over; felt his grip tighten around the animal, and felt it break under his fingertips.  He cracked open the door and deposited it outside, started the unwilling, groaning car and slammed the door shut again.  Nothing to be done.
Surging out of the parking lot, the car left small, dark streaks on the pavement.  Inside, his aloneness billowed, bloomed; he felt the empty space in the seat beside him as if it was an entity itself, a laughing, pulsing, fluttering entity.   The more distance existed between himself and her, the more that ghost faded, until five miles later, when nothing was left but the space where she used to be.  It was so full of emptiness.  That was when he saw her.

* * *

Concrete burned through the pale khakis of a sixteen-year-old girl, seated awkwardly on a curb that was too close to the ground for her legs to be properly bent or folded.  She curled her hands around her shins, resting her head sideways, feeling strangely childish as she did so and watching the trees brush their leaves together in a bewildering sideways dance.  She waited.
Cars had been swooping past for the past forty minutes, but none had stopped at the curb for at least half an hour.  She was left with the concrete patio and concrete benches and the silence.  It was strange that she felt more comfortable here than at dinner parties or yacht club outings or tennis matches, places where she smiled softly and shone and adjusted her hair and laughed appropriately, where she spoke with young boys but where no one ever touched anyone.  Here with her handful of paintings, she waited.
She flitted through them, portraits that never came out right.  Portraits that her parents never saw.  Alissa with her hair down, Sarah playing with the rings on her fingers, Meredith laughing so hard her head was thrown back.  They were looking at something else, all of them; whenever she glanced back through these pictures, it was as if she had never existed in the moment she had created.  She never was allowed to see what lay behind them.  The sheets fluttered as her thumb pushed one past the other, flashes of color and blankness, and all of them looked the same.
The car that stopped was not her any belonging to her family.  The driver was not one that she recognized.  It was a screeching halt, and she could see him leaning over the stick-shift to reach the manual crank for the window, which slid down in shudders.  
"Do you want a ride somewhere?" he hollered out the window.  He looked about fifty or fifty-five, disheveled, slightly balding, and possibly drunk.  Every instinct told her to walk away from the car, but she felt herself floating, flitting closer to the passenger battered side door and leaning in, portfolio in hand.
"Where to?" she asked.
The man blinked.  "You tell me," he said.  
She pulled open the door and sat down, resting the portfolio on her knees.  "Wherever you're going," she said, shutting the door behind her.
He gave a shy smile and pulled gently away from the curb.  The leaves of the fenced sidewalk-trees made strange, fluttering patterns on the blank backs of the paintings, and for a moment, she felt as if she were flying on slow and rhythmically beating wings away from that concrete silence.

* * *

Her kidnapper was a white male, Frank H. Jackson Jr., also residing in Greenwich Connecticut.  Reliable sources have described the incident of her abduction as "violent; forceful," and Jackson's recent experience in a divorce case is suspected to have had a strong influence on his erratic behavior of late.  He has a history of depression, and has been denied custody of his eleven-year-old girl through the case.  His wife declined to comment, but the violent behavior exhibited in this instance supports her lawyer's comment that "it's better she stay away from him.  That marriage was a dangerous situation, he was a danger to her, and it would be far better if she could find someone more suited to support her and her child."

* * *

Sunlight tumbled freely over the dirty tiles, illuminating unwashed dishes, half-finished meals, and a familiarly empty table with three chairs, two on one side and one on the other.  He regretted not having cleaned before bringing a guest, but he had become so accustomed to his own presence that he had not expected another so soon.  It wasn't that she seemed intrusive, more that she filled an empty niche.  
"I live here alone," he said, walking towards the stove.  He glanced back, as she stared at the three chairs around the table, and she looked up at him a little uncomfortable.  "Would you like tea?  Or coffee?"
His hands wavered softly as he filled the belly of the kettle with water from the tap.  The gas under the burner ignited, sending jets of flame flickering up at its underside, and he saw her sit down at his table.  From the back, her tumbling hair resembled that of his wife; a moment of memory surfaced in which they sat there together, drinking Earl Gray and laughing while she fingered a necklace he had given her two Christmases ago.  He stood behind her, breathing.
He found his hands resting on her shoulders, but she remained facing forward.  The both of his hands began creeping down to her upper arms, her elbows; they slithered around to her front, her waist, the buttons of her shirt.  She began to quiver.  In the silence, he picked at them, pulling them apart, separating one side from the shirt from the other.  He pulled her up from the chair, peeling back the layers of cloth that coated the soft skin of her stomach, imagining how it sheathed every inch of her body, delicate and perfect.  Staring at her eyes, which in turn stared at some point near his Adam's apple, pulled apart the final clasp and stopped as their eyes met.  
As if watching her through a window, he pulled back his hands, finding himself unable to touch her or meet her gaze.  The perfect, pale skin of her abdomen, which he now stared at, was broken and scratched in thin lines, leaving dark, dried beads of blood—holy teardrops, he thought.  Her stomach fluttered back and forth with every sharp intake of breath.  The sorrow was radiant; it surrounded her in a halo of light, like wings, and she continued to stare into his face.  He met the gaze.  Her pupils had grown enormous in the darkness, the bright gold irises boring into him.  She knew what he had meant to do; she was ashamed at how she had repulsed him.  All resemblance of his wife had disappeared.
He lunged.  Without thinking, one hand drove against her stomach; he felt her crumple over it, collapsing in a mess of limbs and wrinkled paper-thin cloth on the tile.  He hadn't thought she would be so fragile.

* * *

Monster, she thought, eyes shut tight.  She understood why her parents had warned her against strangers, against middle-aged men offering rides to young girls.  They had been right all along; she should have noticed how poor he looked, how crazy.  He was crazy.  She clutched her shirt about her body.  
Her stomach ached, the scars burned, she felt alive with sensation.  Behind every scar was that need to feel, and as the skin creased when she sat up from the dusty floor, she remembered why she had walked towards that car door in the first place.  Masochist, she cursed herself.
It was an attic.  The heat that had soaked the room all day was climaxing in a moment of direct sunlight through a single window at the peak of the roof, and she felt herself reeling in an attempt to regain a grip on her consciousness.  With that slippery hold, she gazed around the exposed rafters, sealed boxes, and sheath of dust on every surface.  A lonely dollhouse cowered next to a stack of shoeboxes.
She pulled herself toward it, blearily gazing at each of the rooms.  The furniture was arranged perfectly, and although there were no inhabitants, the blooming flowerboxes and patterned wallpaper and miniature food looked as if it had been frozen, as if the family had left but intended to return in time for dinner.  She picked up a single chair from the dining room table, examining it, and suddenly remembering the very real table downstairs.  Remembering the scene in the kitchen, remembering him.
Strange that he lived alone and kept a dollhouse in his attic.  Just as strange that he kept three chairs in his kitchen, and still seemed to eat there, without even a television for company.  She felt the emptiness left in the house, felt his loneliness.  It was a familiar feeling.  In country clubs, at expensive dinners, at the sound of her parents' laughter; while she was watching those girls, painting them, knowing that they couldn't understand why she thought they were beautiful.  Knowing they would never watch her the way the stared at them.  At the understanding that they grew up to marry investment bankers and accountants and stockbrokers, the upstanding young men from their high schools and colleges; while she sat every day on that concrete curb and waited for her parents to stop forgetting that she was there, staring at the fluttering trees and burning with heat or snow.  Every time she curled in her bed, dragging the glass over her stomach, it seemed as if the scratches she made would do nothing but leave a place for the light to shine through.  She gently put the chair back at its place in the kitchen.  Taking a deep breath, she blew the powder away from the roof, the floors, the furniture, and it spread its wings.
It surrounded her, beating its appendages against the steaming air.  A cloud of brown-gray wings, streaks, amber circles, and flashes of flat gray buried her; she felt safe.  Already warmed, she felt the delicate powder of their wings cover her in a dusty blanket, and slept.

* * *

Jackson was gentle with the door at the top of the stairs, making sure it didn't creak and startle her.  He watched her sleep in the fading light, covered in the slow flux of butterfly wings that flashed their wide eyes at him, and stepped through the door.  He shook out the army blanket he was carrying.  The cloud rose slowly, beating and fluttering its way around the attic, multiplying in number and covering both of them in painted, paper-thin wings.  He spread the blanket over her, watching the slow movement of her breath, watching the butterflies pulse, staring at the sun as it dipped under the sill of the window before slipping back downstairs.

* *               *

She was found early this morning sitting on the curb outside of his residence.  Signs of violence appeared on examination, cuts and bruises along the area of her abdomen, and although both parties deny any serious confrontation, the charges are expected to go as far as accusations of rape.
"We're just glad to have her back," the parents said through their tears of joy.  "She's so young, so innocent… it's just fortunate that we won't have men like Mr. Jackson on our streets for much longer, if justice is served as well as it has been today."
  
*                *               *

Angela walked downstairs, like a child from a long sleep, the dark brown blanket wrapped around her shoulders and dragging along the floor behind her.  It thumped quietly on each step.  Jackson to looked up from the tea he was sipping quietly at the table, and she noticed a mug across the table from him, steam twining above its rim, waiting for her.  She hesitated, but crossed the worn wooden floors and sat, legs folded, in the other chair.  The steam fluttered quietly across both of their faces.
"I like your paintings," he said softly, with the same smile he had shown in the car.  He pushed the stack of papers across the table to her.  "My name is Jackson."
                "Angela," she whispered.  
Outside, the sun was edging over the horizon, like a great eye opening for the first time.