To the Accomplice in the Crime Against Me
You live in Ohio, and we’re connected by a crime. The police told me you are older and lonely, so I wonder about the pictures hanging on your wall. Do you like the color mauve, do you eat your pizza cold in the mornings, do you collect shells or comb garage sales for needlepoints?
Funny, I am making you into my mother. I am making you human.
I did this almost immediately, the humanizing, though I also turned you into a caricature, a kind of cartoon of midwestern naiveté, because I was angry. And you were the only one the police said I could prosecute. The cops told me the man who hurt us both first found you through Facebook. He told you he worked in jewelry and sent you flowers, and eventually asked you to marry him.
This was all they told me; everything else I’ve had to make up. And so I picture you, trading recipes and quotes and pictures of grandchildren on Facebook until, one day, someone broke through the static and requested your attention. Only yours. Did you notice he had no other friends? I imagine you didn’t suspect; it’s not in your nature. And besides, his photo, which was fake, was so genuine.
At first there were just the questions, so many questions, about your life, and it felt so good to answer this man whose name was Dave or Mike or Jeff—an American name, though Jeff lived abroad—and he wanted to know what you felt about losing your husband too young, about the ways you missed your daughter who moved to the coast. Jeff understood loneliness, he said, and soon he started the fantasies. What if you began to build a new kind of world together? What if you compressed your mutual losses into a tiny box and shipped it far away?
There were crazier things than two people in their sixties finding love online, you told yourself. Jeff would come to you, he said, move into the bedroom where you’d been sleeping alone, wrap himself around you like a prayer. I imagine this because I’d been lured this way as well, lulled into a romantic promise too good to be true.
While Jeff was courting you, I want you to know, I was running—running from a marriage that had turned sour and violent, the bruises fading slowly from my face. You were looking for love, and I was looking for safety from its fallout.
You arranged the flowers he sent you and waited. There were roses and peonies brightening your kitchen, reminding you that he was real. You didn’t know that Jeff had another job while he was wooing you. Jeff’s real job was more like I.T., in a way. Jeff wrote to you to say good morning, he wrote at night with promises of forever, but in the day he was doing reconnaissance on me.
I didn’t know it, of course. I was busy buying my first apartment in New York City. My consolation prize from the violent marriage: the divorce had granted me enough money for a down payment on a one-bedroom uptown. I would be free, I thought. Safe. But Jeff, our mutual betrayer, was hacking into my communications. Watching. Jeff knew I was supposed to wire my down payment to the apartment’s owner in June. Jeff got ready.
“And I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t cause more pain. I too had chosen the wrong person to love. Despite the warnings and the flags, I too had believed.”
You knew Jeff didn’t live in this country, but that didn’t bother you. Soon, your trust was absolute. I imagine it felt so good to trust again, after years of talking to the blowy shadow where your husband used to be. I know this feeling—talking to walls—and the deep longing for response. Jeff always answered, even to the littlest questions. He liked chicken dishes and taking walks, and you promised you would make him your famous cordon bleu when he came.
But then there was a problem. Jeff was brokering a jewelry deal that required he pass some money through an American bank account. He wouldn’t need anything from you, just an account number that he could access. You could open it with a dollar, and he’d close it in a day. It sounded simple enough; it felt, strangely, like your favor would bring Jeff closer to Ohio, even if it would only be his money passing through.
So you did it. On a day in June, when the summer air was thick and the asphalt shimmered in the heat. Jeff knew that this day had been designated months before as the time for me to wire money, and so he hacked the emails of both my broker and lawyer and wrote in their voices. He was looking forward to the closing, and to the walk-through the following day. Would I like to have lunch, somewhere nearby, in midtown? Here, he said, was the routing number for the wire transfer. Please send the final deposit.
$38,000.
I sent it. I sent it to you.
I know you never saw the money; the police told me that much. As soon as the cash hit the bank, Jeff had it routed to one country and then the next, knowing that international coordination between law enforcement agencies would be futile. The money trail eventually stopped in Nigeria, which is how we know Jeff, your Jeff, lives there.
But neither of us knew that yet. After I paid you, I got a call from my real lawyer. I was in a taxi, on my way to teach a class. “It’s time,” he said, “to wire the money for the down payment.” And in one sickening moment, I understood. I had been robbed of all I had.
When did you recognize that Jeff was a fraud? The police told me that after he took the money from your account he never contacted you again. Did you first try and write to him in your regular way, with pet names and inside humor? Did your heart sink when he didn’t write back? Did you wait by your email, starting to worry that maybe something had happened, and you didn’t know his friends or his family? Then the slow dawning that Jeff had played you coming on like a flu, tightening your scalp, turning your stomach.
The police found you in August, told you the account you had opened for Jeff had been used to rob someone in New York. And you, bitter, told them all you knew. I don’t know how you felt about me, but I know you talked to the cops for a long time, unburdening.
And then they called me, the detectives assigned to my case. They told me your story, as you told it to them, and I was so angry with you—for your innocence to the most obvious of online scams.
The cops said Jeff was long gone; I would have to garner interest from international or Nigerian police. But you, they said, I had a chance with you. If I wanted, I could get you tried for opening the account in the first place. There wouldn’t be money in it, but there could be justice.
Of course I wanted you to pay—if not monetarily, then symbolically. I wanted someone to stand up in court and say that I mattered.
But then, over the weeks, I imagined you alone again with your cordon bleu recipe pinned to a corkboard by a landline phone. And I thought this is the way it always goes: the men wreak their damage—they have their affairs, lie their lies, commit their crimes—and the women are left behind to fight between each other. And I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t cause more pain. I too had chosen the wrong person to love. Despite the warnings and the flags, I too had believed.
It’s now been almost four years since Jeff slipped into both of our lives. I want you to know that, thanks to friends who rallied and raised the money I had lost, I moved into the apartment I was trying to buy. And after some healing, I found a new and deeper relationship without the flags and flares. Maybe you too have recouped your dignity or the promises you whispered to Jeff in your late-night missives. Maybe you’ve rerouted them to yourself. I hope, at the end of it all, you haven’t hardened your heart, let Jeff become the guardrails between you and a kind of faith. Even though you made a mistake in trusting the wrong man, I still respect that you leapt at least one time in your life. Leapt toward love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cris Beam is the author of four books, the most recent of which is I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018. Cris' work has also been featured in the New York Times, The Awl, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and on This American Life. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at William Paterson University and lives in New York City.
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Header photo by Michael Dziedzic.