Identity Thief (29 page)

Of course, at sixteen I believed that I was a young goddess to match his god. Not that I was stuck-up. But I was financially well-set, and I was pretty and young. And it never occurred to me that I would ever be anything else. I was
that
kind of sixteen-year-old girl. The kind who goes through life getting everything she wants or else nothing she wants. There is no in between. Either way, people hate her as she ages. They hate her for getting wrinkles like an old hag. They hate her for getting fat, and they hate her for staying skinny. They hate her for failing, and they hate her for succeeding. When she succeeds, they want her to fail. When she fails, they want her to fail more. Once I overheard these girls talking on the bus about some young movie star, and one of them said, “I look forward to reading about her fifth divorce.” The girl who said this was wearing a T-shirt that read:
World Peace Now
. I’m sure that there were many who knew the true story of my marriage and gloated from afar.

When we married at eighteen, there were whispers that I was pregnant, which rumors of course were not dignified with a response. But to distract attention away from this possibility, it was decided that there would be a double wedding with my brother, Clement, and his wife-to-be, Gabrielle. My family was relieved that I wouldn’t be going to college. They thought young ladies needed limited education. They gave Jesse and me a starter house while he studied to become a psychologist. (For all the good it did him.)

In truth, I
was
pregnant. One night when Jesse was drunk, I suppose you could say he raped me, though I didn’t think of it that way at the time. He broke into my room where I was sleeping, and next thing I knew, I woke up from a dream with him on top of me. I still remember, it was a dream about being invited to the White House. And that was how I lost my virginity. Jesse was very turned on by this surprise-attack approach and was sorely disappointed when, after we were married, I told him he must never do it again.

Yet while the rest of the world was finally adjusting to the fact that girls got pregnant before they were married, my own family would have none of it. They did not blame me, but they did make it clear that I was to do certain things to preserve the family reputation. Which, of course, I was happy to do. I graduated from prep school before I started to show, and then went traveling as a graduation present. Specifically, I traveled to a private hospital run by nuns in Switzerland.

I gave birth to twin girls. They were fraternal—one was slightly more elongated—but they still looked quite a bit alike. The plan was for the nuns to raise them for about a year, and at which time Jesse and I would “adopt” them. But by the time we were ready to come back for them, Jesse only wanted one girl. He said he didn’t want children at all, and I should be grateful for this compromise. He said children were expensive to raise, and he wanted to be worth a certain sum of money by a certain age. He would not make his goal with even one child, let alone two. I put up as much of a fight as I could, but Jesse said he would walk out on me if I insisted on taking both. I hoped that seeing them would change his mind, but it didn’t. In the end, he literally flipped a coin to decide which one to take. Heads won, which meant we took the baby on the right, while my brother and his wife agreed to adopt the other. Some people might think, “How could a mother let this happen?” With a lifetime of tears, that’s how. Jesse complained about how distant I was, but it was guilt weighing me down all day, every day. It never let up. Guilt and rage. I hated Jesse, but I hated myself more.

What was strange was that Clement and Gabrielle decided not to tell Sequoia she was adopted, while Jesse made sure we told our own Sabrina that she was. As she got older, Sabrina was not happy with the thought that she was adopted, and Jesse couldn’t understand why. Though Sabrina has sworn on a stack of Bibles that her father never did anything inappropriate with her, Jesse surely committed a form of mental incest with her for years. She was his princess, his true love. Their relationship nauseated me at times because they were quite flirtatious with each other until Sabrina got old enough to understand. As Sabrina grew into a beauty, I could see her father getting aroused at the sight of her.

So Jesse’s cheating wasn’t even the worst of it. After a while, all that seemed pathetic. That is, until we had to move away or risk scandal. And he could’ve done more with our nest egg, but he insisted on making namby-pamby investments. My family knew how to make money really happen—how to go out on a limb and land on your feet because you knew how to play the market and you believed in your right to the bigger piece of the pie. Jesse, for all his conceit and bravado, always played it safe. I got used to not being as well-off as we could’ve been. One should not live ostentatiously, anyway.

He hit me a few times over the years, and once when I inquired too deeply into our investments, he said he’d kill me if I kept interfering. Yet, I took that in my stride. I forgave. I prayed he would get help.

No, his true foulness lay elsewhere. With Sequoia, with so many things.

As Fate would have it, Sequoia came back to live with us when the rest of her family died. There we were, with an adopted daughter who was really our blood daughter and an adopted niece who also was really our blood daughter. Twins who didn’t even know they were twins. Clement, Gabrielle, and two of their children were killed in an awful fire. My brother was a doctor who dedicated himself to helping others and had lived a blameless life. I’d gone to boarding school with Gabrielle.

At first, the fire seemed to have been caused by an electrical malfunction, but it turned out to have been arson. I am not saying that Jesse lit the match or even that he paid someone else to do it. Though I must admit these possibilities ran through my mind over the years. After all, I was first in line after Sequoia to inherit Clement’s estate. Jesse knew I wondered about this. He was very good at knowing what people were thinking, though he seldom used this gift in a positive way.

“I didn’t start the fire,” he told me. “Get that foolish idea out of your head.”

I was in the middle of arranging some flowers in a vase, and I pretended to be absorbed in my task. “Did you say something, dear?”

“Christ, you drive me crazy, woman. Why do you shut me out? Hell, you’re not even a woman. You’re an iceberg with a smile carved into it.”

Jesse never ran out of vivid ways of describing how heartless I was. Naturally, I pretended to have no reaction.

Still,
his
reaction to the fire—now, that was heartless. Throughout the ordeal, he offered me no comfort. Zero. Not even a hug. On the first morning we heard about it, he left me alone to go have sex with one of his whores. Jesse laughed out loud when the news story on TV showed a small corpse with a sheet over its head.

“Guess that’s one less Yalie,” he said.

You see, in my family the men went to Yale, while in his family they went to Princeton. There was a silly feud about it for years. My family took it as a joke, Jesse took it seriously. He actually told me to cheer up because fire was a good thing. Surely I was in my brother’s will—which I was—and that in case Gabrielle kept a diary, it was best it was destroyed. Because he hated to think what it would do to my reputation if people found out that he’d had sex with my sister-in-law. Or, as he put it, people would know how unfuckable I was. When I started to cry, he yelled at me. “I’m only thinking of you,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

After that, I could feel myself harden. For the sake of Sabrina, for the sake of appearances, I’d stay married as best I could. And I wasn’t a weakling. I stood up to him many times. I made threats. But in the end, I was my parents’ daughter. I did not divorce. Eventually, I found some measure of happiness in my interior design business, and Sabrina got a great deal of affection from me. Perhaps too much; we did not prepare her for the Colton Coles of this world. Indeed, I find considerable comfort in the notion that Sequoia was the lucky one. She got to live her own life, and she got away from Jesse and me.

Jesse made sure Sequoia’s days with us were heartbreakingly few. Sequoia looked the same as Sabrina and had many of the same personality traits. But she simply could not compete, as far as Jesse was concerned. Not only was Sabrina the apple of her father’s eye, but poor Sequoia had lost what she believed to be her parents and siblings and so naturally did not have the vivacity of her sister. It was a vicious cycle; Sequoia felt under-appreciated. This made her withdraw and act less loving, so she was ignored all the more. I did not want to lose my daughter again, but Jesse insisted we ship her back to Switzerland—this time to a finishing school.

She never forgave Jesse, and I had to send her letters in secret for many years. I secretly visited her twice. The positive side to Jesse’s self-absorption was that sometimes I could do things without his knowing it. I also sent her many gifts, not the least of which were large amounts of cash and some stock options. She’d always lived comfortably anyway, but as she often joked, it was the thought that counted. She had great wit, as many people who know tragedy when they are young do.

I need to make one thing clear. That identity thief disgusted me, and he deserved much worse than he got. No one deserves to have their identity stolen, not to mention their money and their sanity. Inexcusable. Unforgivable. When I met the man, I found him off-putting, to say the least. He was like a fly that wouldn’t go away. He wanted and he wanted and he wanted. I could see why he and Jesse got along so well. And yet good always comes from bad, don’t you agree? That awful thief produced a marvelous child, Scotty, who has brought such sunshine into my life.

And yet . . . and yet I was thrilled to watch Jesse finally suffer. Had it been a movie, I would’ve stood up and cheered. I thought that at last, Jesse might develop some compassion. He would need me again, like he did when we first met. As it turned out, Jesse was incapable of suffering and therefore could not develop compassion. He was only capable of self-pity. And there is a world of difference between the two. At times, it almost did seem like he was learning something from it all. But he’d go and do something else behind my back that was awful, like that poor Goldstein woman.

When Sequoia and Sabrina turned eighteen, I arranged for all three of us to meet. I told them the truth. God, how we all cried. And how we all hated Jesse. Sequoia looked
slightly
different from her sister. I was reminded of those beauty pageants where, unless you looked carefully, one contestant looked pretty much like another. But Sabrina’s features were slightly softer, while Sequoia’s were slightly sharper. They had the same glorious manes of hair, and both had beautiful faces and figures. If I may brag a little, I come from a damn good gene pool. They also were both talented artists, who—independent of each other—developed a fascination for black and white instead of colors. (I’ve read that in studies of separated twins, these kinds of similarities happen.) But black and white took on a special significance when I told them that they were seeking each other through these opposite colors. It was a proof they always knew the truth in their hearts about being sisters, each seeking her complement in the other.

“It’s a sign of your love for each other,” I said. “For all three of us.”

“Let’s keep it our secret,” Sequoia said.

“All I have to do is paint in black and white, and we’re together like we are now,” said Sabrina.

We toasted with champagne, and oh how we laughed. I thought,
I will
get back at you, Jesse. Something will come along, and
I will crush you with it
.

Sequoia was at the bank robbery. She called me as soon as it was over and told me not only about the robbers but about the man who said he was Dr. Jesse Falcon. Was that an odd coincidence, or did it mean something else? Then, in the meantime, Jesse and I learned about the identity thief. I didn’t trust how he would take the news about the thief probably being at the bank robbery, so I asked Sequoia if she’d find out if this guy survived the bank robbery and to let me know. I must say, she did me one better—she met him and pretended to fall in love with him. I worried for her. Sequoia assured me that he was just a computer geek and posed no threat. I also expressed alarm when she told me she bedded down with a man she loathed. I knew all too well about those emotional scars. Sequoia was such a good sport. She laughed and said that he was a lame lover, and she composed art projects in her head while he got his business over with.

Still feeling terrible about the way Sequoia’s father abandoned her, I told her in that case she should help herself to her father’s money, which she did. I think it enabled Sequoia to feel better about herself. Sometimes all you can do with a man is get back at him. She really did care about Scotty—which is not at all hard to do—and she skimmed a great deal off the top for herself when the supposed love of her life struck gold as McShrink. He was an utter fool who found good luck here, bad luck there, and never grew any the wiser. Obviously, Sequoia never believed his bull about working for the government, and she found his mother to be intolerable. What Jesse didn’t know was that he really wasn’t losing as much money as he thought. Most of it was getting recycled through Sequoia. I think she wanted to prove to her father she was worthy of his love. Children can’t help but want approval from their parents, even when they are as dreadful at the job as Jesse.

Yet I was torn. In all fairness, Jesse did deserve to know something. So I arranged for Sabrina to come out to visit us. Sabrina told her father that
she
was at the bank robbery, to give him a piece of the puzzle. Given how he reacted, it may have been a mistake.

You see, Sabrina had her own burden to bear. She had a boyfriend named Colton Cole who neglected to tell her he was HIV positive. He convinced her to have unprotected sex. And now she was HIV positive herself, or POZ, as the young people say. Fortunately, she was doing well, though her life would never be the same. It was a terrible, terrible thing to do to someone against her will. I knew her father could not handle knowing this. But as we dug further into things, we found a way to deal with Colton Cole.