The Summer of Adam

Some people are fated to stay together and live happily ever after. Sometimes, the flame of romance extinguishes itself before it ever has the chance to grow into a roaring blaze. In some cases two people fall in love, start a family and then start to resent one another, and sometimes those people for the sake of their children will stay together past the boiling point. When that happens, everyone gets hurt.

The summer of 1981, my parents had a condo in the South Miami suburb of Kendall Lakes. We lived at The Sovereigns which mostly catered to retirees. There were only a handful of children living there and we would, for fun, cross Kendall Drive to go play hide and seek under the giant boulders that created a perimeter around the Kendall Lakes Country Club. I had just turned six, and my parents were on the verge of divorce. At that age I couldn’t grasp the depth of issues that both my parents were dealing with, nor could I clearly see and comprehend the deterioration of their relationship. They tried to hide the truth from my younger crib-bound brother and me, but I was aware that something was amiss.

My father had taken me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Miller Square Cineplex, the same shopping plaza where, eight years earlier, he had been working as a store manager for Fayva Shoes, when a young attractive woman had come walking in looking for work. My father was immediately taken with this woman, so much in fact, that he walked next door to the local jewelry store and asked that they hire her. He then explained he would rather her work next door, that way he would be able to date her. That was father’s way of asking mom out to dinner, a sly tactic, but it worked.

While dad and I were at the movies, mom had stayed home with my baby brother, and as soon as we walked through the door, it sounded as if a bomb had gone off. Both mom and dad ripped into each other, continuing to yell at one another while Evan cried in his crib. I hid in my safe place, the place where I would go to hide from thunder during a storm, my parent’s bathroom. I curled up in the tub and cried myself to sleep.

The next morning I awoke in my bed. I remember opening my eyes and seeing both my parents standing there looking at me. My brother cradled in my mother’s arms. Tears were fresh in her eyes and my father seemed to have been crying as well. They took turns hugging me tightly. I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what. Part of me I’m sure thought it was leftovers from the previous night. Later, at breakfast we were sitting in our kitchen nook, my mother poured me a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and prepared my brother’s formula while my father studied the newspaper with one eye while the other was glued to our one television set. The story on both the TV and the front page were the same. A half hour north in Hollywood, Florida, a young boy my age had been abducted. He had been shopping with his mother at Sears when she had left him in the company of an Atari 2600, the same gaming console my father would later purchase for my brother and me when we would visit him on the weekends.

In the days following Adam’s abduction, my parents seemed to be getting along better. If my parents had still been arguing, they had become better at keeping it out of earshot. We gathered around the Zenith to watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island and though my parents were smiling, I was able to sense a brisk chill even if it was the middle of summer.

The boogieman had become real and had stolen a boy my age, and parents all over were frightened that their children were next. My mother took my best friend and me to see a live performance of Peter Pan starring Sandy Duncan, and at one point I had inadvertently wandered off, as a result of which my mother became hysterical and suffered a panic attack. After that, whenever we left home, mom refused to let me out of her sight. Dad wasn’t as vexed and on this subject my parents bumped heads and all the resentment and idiosyncrasies came flooding back into the plastic mirage that Adam’s disappearance had forged.

Akin to actors on a stage, my family seemed to be performing well together. We had all piled into the family’s maroon 1978 Oldsmobile Fury and gone to my grandparent’s high-rise beachfront condo in Hallandale beach. The drive up the turnpike took us past the Hollywood mall in which from Adam was taken. News vans were still blanketing the area, for the South Florida channels were engrossed with the story, helping catapult it to make national headlines. For two weeks every report about Adam had an aspect of hope, but that hope would not last. There would be no fairytale ending for Adam, nor would there be for my parents’ marriage. The news of Adam’s death and the end of his search also marked the end for my parents. They had realized that as much as they loved my brother and me, staying together was a countdown clock ticking away the seconds on a bomb ready for detonation, and it would be smarter and better for everyone if they separated. It was devastating for me, but knowing now what I couldn’t fathom then was that both my mom and dad would move on and find other loves, other lives. Our family grew in ways I could never have conceived when I was a boy.

That was the summer of 1981; Raiders of the Lost Ark made every young boy want to grow up to become Indiana Jones. Fairytales became reality with the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana, while Video Killed the Radio Star on MTV launched a paradigm shift in the way young people were entertained. It was a summer of tears and it was a summer of change. It was the summer of Adam.