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July 2014
I love the arrivals section at the airport. It’s a magical place. Hugs, kisses, and screams of happiness abound. I sit, waiting for my family at London’s Heathrow airport, and watch people run to greet their loved ones as they come through the double doors. The cacophony of sound and constant movement is comforting rather than overwhelming.
So far, my favorite has been a couple whose three children and their entire families just arrived. They had been sitting next to me, waiting.
The wife struck up a conversation and told me their children, who all live in Australia, were visiting for the first time in three years with their spouses and children. She was holding a tissue she was twisting to shreds as we spoke.
We’ve only been talking for a few minutes when they arrive. Two huge men, three women and seven children come rushing toward her. She jumps up, our conversation immediately forgotten. I watch as she and her husband are swallowed up in a huge group hug.
The most striking thing about their reunion isn’t the size of the group, but the hush that comes over them as they embrace. I feel like an intruder watching their intimate moment. I look away as sorrow, so keen it steals my breath, washes over me.
My mind drifts back to that fateful day of its own volition, thirteen years ago when my life, as I knew it, changed. The day my future went from one that was clearly mapped out to a complete crapshoot. The day my father chose his ill-gotten gains and freedom over his wife and children is a day branded into my memory, and I feel it like it happened yesterday.
When I got to the principal’s office, a haggard looking woman with a mop of blond, close-cropped, curly hair was standing in front of the desk. She was flanked by two police officers who looked like they would rather be anywhere but in this room.
“Adelaide, I’m Mrs. Salter. These are officers Clarke and Luman. I need to talk to you about your father.”
The world stopped spinning at the end of that sentence. And in some ways, it never started again. My life, everything which occurred before that day, became a blur of time I only referred to as “before.” Before my father, formerly a pillar of our community, became a wanted fugitive. Before my home became a crime scene and everything I thought of as “mine” became evidence. Before I learned I couldn’t count on anyone but myself, and that there was no such thing as happily ever after.
My father was an Enron executive and had been implicated in the massive accounting fraud which caused the downfall of one of the largest energy companies in the world. Tens of thousands of employees lost their livelihoods; their retirement savings, their homes, their children’s futures. The CEO and CFO went to jail, the Board Chairman would have too, but he dropped dead, and my father, the General Counsel, fled with more than 20 million dollars.
My mother, sisters, and I became instant pariahs in our community. People threw bricks through our window, someone set our garage on fire. In less than 72 hours, the FBI moved us to a temporary home in Maryland, we changed our last names to Dennis, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name, and we began new lives. We received new birth certificates, new medical records, new school records, new everything. The Hassan family disappeared in the blink of an eye.
The press began hunting for us, almost more actively than they hunted for my father. The rumors ran rampant saying we absconded as well. The FBI was forced to issue a statement that we were not suspects or persons of interest in the investigation into our father’s disappearance. Which only turned the gossip from “are they criminals?” to “where are they hiding?”
The money my father earned before his employment at Enron, our education funds, and some of my parents’ investments were not subject to seizure. Although our circumstances wer
e greatly reduced, we were not completely destitute. The FBI was able to transfer all of the money into accounts opened under our new names.
My mother had given up her career as a lawyer when Milly was born and never went back to work. We bought a small house in Silver Spring, Maryland, and tried to build our new lives.
On the first night in our new house, my sisters and I lay together in one bed, me between them, and cried together until we fell asleep. We were shell-shocked. There was so much change in such a short period of time.
Our mother carried on with life as if nothing happened. I never saw her cry again after the day he disappeared. She told anyone who bothered to ask that she was a widow. At home, we weren’t allowed to speak ill of our father. My mother kept a picture of him by her bedside, her loyalty to him felt like a total betrayal. It was as if what he had done, leaving us, lying to her, destroying all of those people’s lives didn’t matter.
My sisters both took advantage of their excellent grades from the private all girl’s school they attended “before” and graduated high school early. They fled to the Northeast for college. In less than two years after my life exploded, I was alone. They called me every weekend. They came home for holidays and the year I turned sixteen they both came home for my birthday. They loved me, but they had escaped and moved on with their lives. I was left to live with a mother I didn’t respect, who acted like nothing had changed but our zip code.
* * *
“Auntie Addie!” A child’s loud scream pulls me from my dark daydream just in time to catch my nephew’s little body as he hurls himself at me. My whole family, my sisters and my mother, are here.
I’ve been in London for less than a year, but my sisters couldn’t wait to come and see me after I moved. I’m actually eager to show them the life I’ve built here. London represented new beginnings and the fulfillment of promises I made to myself after my father left.
They were:
1) I would never rely on anyone for anything again.
2) I would find a way to live in a country where no one would care who I had been “before.”
* * *
My college fund has paid for law school and allowed me to focus on studying. I graduated in the top five percent of my class at Harvard Law School and had been co-editor of the Law Review.
I landed my dream job as an Associate in the London office of a U.S. law firm. Even better, my best friend Cara, is also here. She is a dancer in the London Ballet Company, and my anchor.
I look down into my nephew’s big, brown eyes and squeeze his compact body into my chest. It feels so good to hold Anthony. I look up at the rest of my family. Lilly and Milly are standing close, watching our reunion. When my eyes meet theirs, the same hazel gold as my own, I feel my heart constrict.
The three of us share a history few people can even begin to imagine. As our gazes hold, without speaking a single word, we say a thousand things. The trauma we experienced in the weeks, months following our father’s disappearance has given us a bond that transcends definition. They are more than my sisters. They are my comrades in arms, they are my safe harbor, and I’m so glad they are here.
