(6/8) “Vicky completely disappeared from my life. Along with my...

(6/8) “Vicky completely disappeared from my life. Along with my daughter. And the mystery of the whole thing nearly drove me crazy. I racked my brain for anything I could have said, or anything I could have done, that might have caused Vicky to turn on me. But I couldn’t figure it out. Over the years I invented all kinds of theories. At one point I decided it must have been Vicky’s grandmother, that damn stuck up WASP who never tasted a slice of pizza. Maybe she pulled Vicky aside one night, and told her: ‘If you marry this Jew actor, you’ll be cut off from the family.’ There was no other explanation. So for the longest time that’s what I believed. But what about Blanche? Why would she participate? That’s what really kept me awake at night. But I had to give up. I had to move on with my life. I found a good therapist. I fell in love with a wonderful woman named Nancy, and we got married. Five years later we were pregnant with twins. I still thought about my daughter all the time, but things were going good for me. Then one day I heard through the grapevine that Blanche had passed away. By this time I’m in my early thirties. Twelve years have passed since my daughter’s birth. I’m working in the city selling advertisements for the teen version of Elle Magazine. It’s just another Friday afternoon. I’m about to log off my computer for the weekend, when I come across one of those internet advertisements: ‘Find anyone for $9.99.’ So I decide to go for it. I enter my credit card number. I type in Vicky’s name, and it comes back with a phone number. I write it down on a sticky note and tape it to the top of my computer. That night I go home and say to my wife: ‘I’m not scared anymore, I’m a grown man. I’m calling that number first thing Monday morning.’ Then we packed all our stuff in the car, and headed to our country house in The Catskills. We’d been planning this trip for weeks. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It was the same trip we’d taken a million times before. Only this time we decided to stop for lunch at a place off the interstate. Just a random, greasy spoon diner called Twiggy’s. On some random mountain. In the middle of fucking nowhere.”