Zip Ties, Jumper Cables and Pruning Shears 

S.E. Schaible

One sunny morning in the fall of her 5th grade year, my daughter Linden left the house bound for school on her Razor scooter. She was wearing new 7 for All Mankind jeans I had picked for her at Nordstrom Rack, a turquoise Ed Hardy T-shirt, and Chuck Taylor low-tops. Leaving with her scooter before 8:00am meant her friend Erin would be waiting for her on the corner and they would ride along the circle to 4th Avenue, crossing at the light onto the Bromwell School grounds. Linden and her friends were now the seniors of their elementary school, splintering off to various public and private middle schools after that year. Our shorthand for the route the girls took to school was taking the “safe route.” They normally spoke before bedtime and knew their plan when they awoke.

I walked my younger girls to school on the neighborhood walking school bus, a collection of about a dozen kids following a different route across 7th Avenue that went regardless of the weather. Instead of turning around at the curb and walking home with Don, Woodrow and the other dads, on this day I dropped into the school. It was 25 minutes after I had said goodbye to Linden, her strawberry blonde hair bouncing across her back, growing more independent by the day. I reminded her we had soccer practice that afternoon, and a scrimmage against the boys’ team. I opened the front door to the school, surprised to see Erin’s mother. I said, “I trust the girls had a fun ride to school,” and she seemed confused and said no, that she and her daughter came early for a parent-teacher conference, and she was heading to work.

My curiosity piqued, I walked toward Linden’s classroom to get a quick visual and ran into the principal, who said something unexpected: “Oh good, you’re here. I was hoping you heard my message. She’s okay. Let’s go see her.” I followed in her vapor trail of hairspray and fabric softener, and she turned her head back toward me as her heels clacked a cadence like castanets across the linoleum. “The police

are on their way.”

There is a scene in Ghostbusters where the nerdy Harold Ramis character – Dr. Egon Spengler – says, “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.” This approximates the way I suddenly felt. I followed the principal without realizing my legs were moving, 50 or 60 steps through the office, where I found my daughter in the nurse’s lounge with both knees bleeding through ripped jeans. Her cheeks were a color I had never seen before, like raspberry sorbet covered in tears.

There were no words. My daughter was shaking and scared, but apart from the road rash she seemed unharmed. We shared a long embrace, and I felt her deep shuddering breath, and then the principal spoke. “It sounds like a man tried to coax her into a white van. She did everything right. She ignored him and kept moving, and he began yelling at her. The police are coming now to investigate and they’re already combing the neighborhood looking for the vehicle.”

“Did he touch you, Little Peep?” I asked, wiping her face with my sleeve.

“No, Dad. I rode away as fast as I could. I raced across Josephine without even checking for cars and I wiped out next to the gardens.” I held her tight as her tears soaked into my shoulder like the flash Colorado thunderstorms that hit out of the blue in May and June. A sergeant from the Denver Police Department arrived just then and he was amazing. All my accumulated 40 years of cop disdain and skepticism drained from me in an instant.

We spent the next five hours under fluorescent lights at the precinct flipping through mug shots, presumably the known pedophiles and child molesters. Some of the photos reminded me of the haunting collection, “In the American West,” from famed photographer Richard Avedon, page after page of blank stares, hardship, pain and bad luck. Linden said the guy was wearing mirrored wrap-style sunglasses that hid his eyes, but she took the task seriously and kept turning the pages. Funyuns and Cokes from the vending machines got her through the day. Finally, we headed home.

That night I tucked my eldest into bed and I calmly told her the same thing I would tell her sisters when they were a little older: if someone ever does something and threatens that you can’t tell anyone about what they did – that they will hurt your sisters or your mother if you tell – that it’s just a bluff, something that cowards say to scare children. I explained that, on the remote chance something like this should happen, she must convincingly agree – really sell it – and then come straight to me and I would take care of it.

I didn’t explain to her what I meant by “take care of it,” and she had no reason to ask. My daughter was exhausted from a long day that ended with a 5-1 win over the boys’ team, where she scored 3 goals. I fell asleep and dreamed about white vans, zip ties, jumper cables and pruning shears.