May sixth. I was sitting with the other parents in the lobby of Flytz Gym in Cuyahoga Falls, waiting for Casey to finish tumbling class, when I got the first text:
Amanda and Gina just walked out of a house on the West Side, was all it said.
“Holy shit,” I said, out loud. Some of the other parents looked at me with concern. I ignored them. A miracle had happened in Cleveland, and soon they would hear it for themselves. A collective “Holy shit!” was about to echo out from Northeast Ohio and travel across the world. Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus had just returned from the dead. They were alive! Together. After all this time.
Then another text: There’s a third woman here.
“Holy shit,” I said again.
A woman crinkled her nose at me.
As soon as practice ended, I drove Casey home. I dropped him off and explained to Julie what was happening. The news channels didn’t have it yet, but they would soon. I wanted to be in Cleveland when it broke. I had to be up there for this. I took the Vibe and jetted north up 77. By the time I was out of Akron, the first radio bulletins were coming in.
Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus are alive. Another woman, Michelle Knight, was rescued, too, missing for over ten years. Suspect in custody. Nobody dead.
It’s one of those stories that’s too good to be true. Something so good and full of grace it causes you to reevaluate how you see the world, the reverse of that feeling we felt in our hearts the morning of 9/11. It was Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, made real. Only, in this story, instead of eagles the deus ex machina was a black man named Charles Ramsey, who pulled Amanda out of that evil house, and who spoke in earnest bon mots: “I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl runs into a black man’s arms.”
As I drove for Cleveland, I wondered who the suspect could be. Could he be the boogeyman responsible for all the other unsolved abductions in the area? Was it the man who took Amy Mihaljevic? How much closure could this one day bring?
Instead of driving to the crime scene on Seymour Avenue, I chose to head to MetroHealth Medical Center, where the victims had been transported. I parked my car out front by the media trucks. Every local station was there. Reporters milled about the front portico, waiting for the first official press conference. I jogged past them like I knew what I was doing. A guard let me in the door without questioning me. I was wearing a suit. He probably thought I was a lawyer.
I sat in the reception area, leaned against a wall, and busied myself on my laptop, watching people come and go. About forty-five minutes after I arrived, Gina’s mother came in the back. She recognized me from when I worked on her daughter’s story and gave me a hug.
“I’m so happy for you,” I said.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I … I just can’t believe it.”
A large woman in uniform stepped between us, a liaison with the Cleveland Police Department. “How’d you get in?” she asked.
“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “Not anymore, anyway.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Someone needs to tell the family how bad this is about to get,” I said. I pointed at the glass doors, at the circus setting up outside. “That’s just the local media. In an hour, you’ll have CNN out there. Fox News. NBC. Probably Nancy Grace. Everyone will want this, and you have to take control of it and set the terms before it gets crazy. The families need a media liaison. But they should do it together.”
I gave her my number and asked her to pass it along. My brief intervention probably didn’t change anything—the crisis management firms were already reaching out to the families by then, I’m sure. But the women did what I proposed. They united behind a local firm, Hennes Paynter, and successfully weathered the storm of the media onslaught. Of course, after surviving Ariel Castro, the stalker reporters were nothing to fear.
That name: Ariel Castro. Soon as I heard it, I felt my stomach tumble out of my body. I knew that name: Castro. I knew I knew it.
At home, I went through my old notes and e-mails from the months I spent researching Amanda and Gina’s disappearance. There it was. Castro. Gina’s father had given me the name of Ariel’s daughter, Arlene Castro. I’d meant to interview her, but because she was a juvenile, my editor and I had agreed to leave her alone.
What if I had spoken to her? Would she have said something to cast suspicion on her father?
It was exactly two weeks later that I got the call from my mother. I could tell by her tone that something was wrong, really wrong. “Jimmy,” she said. “A man is stalking your sister.” I listened, and as she talked, I felt that quiet rage turn my blood to ice.