“Please! Just listen, this is important,” states my husband over the phone. “Do you know where Miranda is?” His voice is urgent, intense and reflects an immediacy that prevents my asking any questions.
“No, not exactly,” I report. “She left to go to a friend’s swim party.”
He continues, “Try to call her and have her call me right away.”
He provides no further information and I am left to deduce whatever I can from such a terse exchange. Knowing he is working at, Shaka Shack Burgers, where we are owners emeritus, I can only conclude it is there he has received information of a grave nature. Is there a warrant for our sweet daughter’s immediate arrest? Has she unbeknown to us dabbled in drug trafficking, shoplifting, prostitution? Has some disaster befallen a friend of hers, does she need to be warned of some urgent matter, and why wouldn’t he tell me?
I call her cell phone but she doesn’t answer. Fortunately before I can begin to really worry, although unsure what to worry about, Miranda calls me back from her friend’s house and I relay the message, ‘call Daddy right away’. We hang up and Michael calls impatiently asking if I was able to get a hold of Miranda and I assure him that she is calling him right now. He hangs up and I am left hanging. A moment later he calls me back and says, with an audible relief that I can feel reach across the phone line, “It was a scam.”
My husband, beleaguered but relieved, reports receiving a call on his cell phone from a man he described as sounding like, ‘a gang member’, speaking in some street tough accent sounding rough, mean, announcing, “I have your daughter.”
Then a girl came on the phone, sounding like Miranda, crying and pleading for help. Michael tried to talk to her, to find out more, to see if she was all right, but she was hysterical and then the phone was snatched away and the man came on saying, “I’ll put a bullet in the back of her head unless you pay me!”
When Michael tried to question him, the man gruffly commanded that he would do the talking. Then the phone hung up. A moment later rang again and it was just the sound of the crying girl and some one yelling, “take her around the back.” Then the line went dead.
That’s when Michael called home, hoping Miranda was here, and unable of course, to even tell me what was going on, for never, ever would he be able to speak the words, ‘Your daughter has been kidnapped.’
When Miranda reached him and he heard her casual, happy voice ask, “Hi ya, what’s up?” he must have felt, just for a moment, standing, panicked in that restaurant parking lot, the cool, and gentle breeze of fluttering angel wings overhead.
When Michael contacted the Santa Monica Police Department he was told it was the third such report they’d received that day. There seemed to be nothing the department could do, no way to trace the calls no recourse. And in this age of technology the fact that the caller knew both Michael’s name and Miranda’s, could be information easily attained. As my husband told me all this I swear I could hear his heart still pounding. “Maybe you better sit down,” I advised.
Then Miranda called me after speaking to her father who had explained what had happened and how happy he was to hear her voice and know she was safe. Although she was ensconced within a group of friends, on a sunny summer day, she couldn’t help but feel vulnerable and somehow violated. We were both in a bit of shock and part of me wanted her to come home immediately or to just drive to her and hold her in my arms. But I didn’t want to alarm her further. I could only say I loved her and offer some vague advise about keeping aware when getting in and out of her car.
I know to be grateful, for another day or in another country it might not have been a scam. Yet the following day I am angry. I call both the Sheriff’s Department and the FBI and although they keep a record of the number from which such calls originate the phones are untraceable usually emanating from out of the country, (Russia and Mexico were mentioned). I research the scam on line and find it’s an increasing menace and often in a state of panic, victims actually follow demands to transfer money. Michael still claims the hysterical crying girl sounded just like Miranda when she’s running late and trying to find the other sock. Then it occurs to me that if we actually believed our daughter in peril and wanted to pay, the only one in the family with any money is Miranda herself, having collected some graduation checks. Such irony does not escape me. I even try to make a joke, Big Lebowski like, about her trying to kidnap herself to extort money from us, but it somehow rings hollow.
The truth is I am just sad. And not because we would be incapable of raising decent ransom money but saddened to see an example of human behavior sunk so low. Sad not only for all victims but also for the soul of the desperate person on the other end of the phone.
Later that week we see a production of Peter Pan, and I long to run away with the fairies, leaving this tattered world behind, as in Yeats’ poem.
Come away O human child, to the water and the wild, with a fairy hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping then you can understand.
And someday, yes, I’ll go there, but for now I’m here in the middle of this swirling uncertain planet, where somehow on a glorious Monday in July, our daughter was not kidnapped.
In the refrigerator is a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne that has been there since Christmas. We have been waiting to open it, saving it for a special occasion, when we had something to celebrate. It’s time to pop the cork.
