The Girl On His Desk

On TV his daughter looked smaller than he remembered her and Senator Demming wondered, without quite meaning to, if people ever thought the same thing about him. Lydia had appeared suddenly on the evening news, jammed between two armed men with dark wool masks over their heads, and that was the first thing he noticed—how small she seemed.

He was used to looking at Lydia in a framed studio photograph that sat on his desk. In it she smiled, her cheeks rounded to just this side of pudgy. She wore her dark hair in a conservative style, chosen by his own image consultant, and was dressed in something simple and pastel, elegant but appropriate for a high school senior.

Back then he had been blissfully unaware of how little he understood her, how angry she was becoming inside. Back then he had assumed that everything was as it should be, that she was properly grateful to have the wealth and social benefits that came with being a senator’s daughter, and that she was well adjusted and reasonably happy. But eventually she informed him, with ever increasing rage, of her deep and consuming misery, and of her shame at being the daughter of a man who promoted the policies he did. And she told him of her disgust at the way he had ignored her mother’s alcoholism, just as she said he had ignored her mother for most of the years they were married until breast cancer mercifully claimed her.

He had not seen his daughter Lydia in person for over two years and now there she was on the television, looking thin and wretched with a gun to her head, each of the two men holding roughly to one of her arms. She was speaking as if under great duress but he wondered about that. Yes, he wondered.

“They say they’re the Earth Liberation Army,” Lydia said into the television camera without blinking. “They say they want to enter into negotiations with my father about the nuclear waste dump.” She continued to stare into the camera with an intensity that frightened him as there was no readable expression in her eyes. One of the guards joggled her arm and she lowered her eyes for a moment, then looked back at the camera. “They say they’ll kill me, Dad,” she said and then the screen went blank before the feed switched back to a blonde reporter in a red skirt suit.

“Christ,” he muttered under his breath as the phone in the study started ringing. “Christ almighty on a cross.”

* * * * *

“Gordon, is she capable of that kind of deception? Is she that radical in her thinking?” Paul West, Demming’s advisor, sat across from the senator in his living room less than half an hour after the news aired the disturbing footage of Lydia Demming and her captors.

“I don’t know,” Demming answered. “She was never sly or deceitful as a kid. She never had that awful temper until after her mother died. I don’t know where it comes from. She told me she was disappointed in my support of the nuclear repository. She even said she was ashamed to call me her father, but I never expected anything like this. What if she’s not in league with them? What if she’s really a victim in this?”

West met his eyes briefly, tried to form a supportive expression and failed. “We’ve been keeping track of Lydia since she started attending UCLA. She’s a registered member of several environmental groups and has actively participated in petition drives and protests against the repository. The local press out there has a field day with it but luckily we’ve been able to keep it from seeping into the national media. We can not assume that she is innocent here.”

“She looked frightened,” Demming said after a brief silence.

“Well if I were in her shoes I’d be scared shitless,” West answered. “What she’s doing is a felony and a conspiracy to commit a terrorist act.”

“You don’t know that yet,” Demming said slowly. “This is all speculation.”

West threw up his hands. “Work with me here, OK?”

Demming bowed his head and focused on the polished surface of his cherrywood desk. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

* * * * *

They arranged a press conference for the best time of day, early morning when the light was not yet harsh enough to wash the senator out, and when he was not yet fatigued from the rigors of the day. He stood on the steps of the federal building, wearing a dark blue suit with an understated burgundy handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket.

“I will not negotiate with terrorists,” he was saying into the bank of microphones on the podium West had set up for the occasion. The photograph of Lydia, the one from his desk, had been blown up nearly life size and leaned on an easel behind him. “I will take the strongest measures to insure my daughter’s safety and to see her rescued from the lawless people who have taken her, but I will not dishonor my family by consorting with terrorists in their name.”

A smallish cheer, more a muttering of approval, went up from the onlookers in the crowd while the reporters jockeyed to get into Demming’s line of sight.

“Is your daughter involved with the Earth Liberation Army?” one reporter shouted. Demming did not respond and instead focused on a television anchor on the other side of the throng.

“What are the strong measures you propose to take?” the anchor asked.

“I can’t divulge that information,” Demming answered, looking serious and important, as if there were a great deal of strategizing and activity going on behind the scenes. In fact, no other contact had been made with either Lydia or the kidnappers in the 12 hours since the broadcast and he was aware of a growing uneasiness under his ribs, at the place where his esophagus regurgitated stomach acid like an artesian well scorching him from the inside out.

What came next happened so quickly that in later days Demming could never explain how his daughter and the two masked figures from the video footage were standing near him on the steps of the federal building—those innocuous gray granite steps that he climbed each day on the way to work, that he trod upon without thinking, that evaded his consciousness while they had worn away the soles of several pairs of his Italian leather shoes. There was Lydia, in a soiled white t-shirt that hung on her and baggy pants, the kind with large pockets all over them, held up by a rope tied around her thin waist. She was flanked by the same men, threatened with the same gun. Gone was the pudgy all-American girl who had grown up eating popsicles in his kitchen, who had accompanied him to the children’s hospital and played with the sick kids, who had seemed so well adjusted in every way.

The terrorists and his daughter stood perhaps five yards away. He and they had been surrounded quickly by armed police while camera shutters clicked constantly in the background. He looked at his daughter, trying to peer into her face and find something there that he recognized, some remnant of himself. She looked back at him with the same, unreadable expression she had worn on the news.

“Senator Gordon Demming,” one of the masked men called in a loud, unaccented voice meant to carry out over the sea of reporters. “Are you ready to negotiate?”

Demming stood still. Too many thoughts attempted to enter his mind at once, jamming his neocortex and leaving him blank. He could think of no answer, could not formulate a reply. He simply stared at his daughter, who stared back waiting for him to speak. As they looked at one another it seemed that at last her expression began to soften. He saw in her a flicker of the girl on his desk and a brief moment in which she pled with her eyes the way she had done that spring, when she wanted to go on the class trip to Paris like all the other girls but his advisors had cautioned against it.

“Yes,” he said at last, but the words came out too soft to be heard over the voice of Paul West, who spoke at exactly the same time.

“The senator will not negotiate with terrorists,” West said, stepping up to the microphone and leaning slightly over the senator’s shoulder.

“If you do not negotiate your daughter will die,” said the man in the mask, looking only at the senator. “Will you place your political interests above the life of your child?”

Again that numbing blankness pervaded his mind and prevented him from speaking but in his desperation he moved a step away from the podium, a step toward his daughter. The gunman pressed the barrel of the pistol harder against her head and he could see it digging into the pale skin at her temple.

Paul West hove into the podium and took control of the microphones. “You can’t win this standoff,” he was saying. “There are guns on you from all sides. You will not walk away from this alive unless you put your weapons down and release Lydia Demming now.”

“We want to speak with the senator,” the gunman said. Again Demming moved forward toward his daughter. He saw her expression soften a bit more, saw there the same kind of fear as when she was six and had broken her ankle falling from a tree in the back yard. Then the pain and the visit to the hospital had terrified her, in the same way he realized that this thing she was in the middle of terrified her now.

“Let her go,” the senator said. “Take me instead.” But the last of his words were again drowned by the man at the microphone.

“Let her go,” West echoed the senator.

The gunman, the one who did all the speaking, took a paper from the front pocket of his flack vest and began to read. “If the government of the United States is not willing to negotiate a reasonable future for its children, if Senator Demming is not willing to save the lives of countless American children by putting an end to the production of nuclear energy and eliminating the need for a waste repository to poison the heart of the American wilderness, then the senator will be the first to feel the loss of a child to a painful and unnecessary death.”

The gunman straightened the arm with which he held the pistol to Lydia’s head and she continued to stare at her father with the hardness in her eyes melting.

“I will negotiate,” her father cried, but once again his voice was drowned by a louder noise, the sound of the pistol report as the gunman sent a bullet into Lydia Demming’s brain.

* * * * *

After the funeral Senator Demming retired from politics and public life. He did not dedicate his days to the eradication of nuclear energy nor to the fight against terrorism. It was enough for him that Lydia and her two captors had all died, in a freakish bloodbath on those grim granite steps that lasted only moments but replayed endlessly in his mind, while he had been powerless to stop it.

In that moment he understood that despite whatever power the offices of man might bestow upon him there was little he could do to stem the tide of human emotion. Lydia Demming’s body had been formed of his own DNA, she had lived in his home for 18 years and her perceptions of the world, like raw clay, had been molded by him and by his wife. And yet he had known so little about her. She, a warm hearted child who gave freely of her hugs, had drifted away from him and he let her go. Then her clay hardened in the kiln of the outside world until he knew her not at all—if he ever had.

It was never proven, or disproven, that Lydia was working with the Earth Liberation Army and to Demming it didn’t matter any more. What he knew now was that it had taken the threat of life or death to soften his daughter’s eyes when she looked at him, and he had realized too late that he would have sacrificed everything he held dear in order to save her life.

With that realization it occurred to him that if he knew so little about himself or his own child, it was surely not for him to pretend that he knew what was best for an entire country.

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