Kim’s mother, Lenore, wants her daughter to see a bit of the world before becoming locked in a marriage with an eventual absentee husband while raising a child by herself, as had happened to her.
She might have been happy in marriage to Bryan once and may have remained so if he had been a present husband and father to their only daughter. Her disappointment has made her unreceptive to Bryan’s concerns about their daughter’s safety.
She is impatient with Bryan when he hesitates to sign a statement of consent for Kim to go on a trip to Paris alone with her friend, Amanda. At the airport, Bryan discovers that Kim and Amanda plan on following the U2 rock band around on their European tour to Berlin, London, Madrid, and Rome. This worries him, and when, by way of assurance, Lenore tells him that they – she and her husband – arranged for Kim to stay in the best hotels, Bryan replies that she has no idea what the world is like, given the very protected life that she leads. Lenore replies:
“Yes, and neither will she unless she goes out and experiences it.” Then adds: “Don’t you tell me that I don’t know what the world’s like. For five years, I waited for a phone call that didn’t come for weeks at a time, for a knock on the door telling me they’ll be no calls anymore.”
Bryan is silent by this time, fully confronted with the reality of lingering hurt and disappointment residing within Lenore, caused by the demands of a job that had absented him from the family he created. Finally, Lenore warns him that he will lose Kim if he smothers her instead of letting her live. After Kim leaves for France, Bryan fails to reach her on the phone. He calls Lenore to ask about her, and Lenore replies:
“Bryan, she’s 17. She’s in Paris. Give her some space. She’ll call. Take a sleeping pill. Have a drink or something. Good night.”
Then she hangs up the phone, returning to sleep that had been interrupted by Bryan’s call. It is when Bryan shows up with news that Kim has been taken that she falls to pieces. Bryan has her listen in on the phone call from Sam, who proceeds to describe the nature of the perpetrators and the trafficking trade. Curiously, Bryan had been the one to volunteer Lenore for this rather than Lenore insisting upon listening in, as could have happened if Bryan had tried to make her leave the room in order to shield her from what Sam had to say. Sam himself had hesitated after learning that Lenore was in the room, but Bryan said:
“She needs to hear this.”
During their argument at the airport, he had said that Lenore led a sheltered life. Was this his way of levelling her with a bit of reality about the world he had been immersed in, which took him away from her and their child? Perhaps, by confronting this, she would understand. Perhaps, she would sympathise with him a little and may even be open to forgiveness. She is impatient with Bryan when he hesitates to sign a statement of consent for Kim to go on a trip to Paris alone with her friend, Amanda. At the airport, Bryan discovers that Kim and Amanda plan on following the U2 rock band around on their European tour to Berlin, London, Madrid, and Rome. Even if this was his thinking, he must have understood her position as a wife and mother, because how many women get married expecting that their husbands will be absent from them for long periods at a time? I half-expected him to reinforce the brutal honesty by also playing her the recording of Kim being taken, but, mercifully, he spared her. I wonder at the amount of restraint it took him to refrain from exposing her to this. It probably helped that she was already in pieces just from what she had learned, therefore satisfying him that she understood the gravity of the situation. Before even the phone call came through, as Bryan rummaged through Kim’s room looking for clues to aid his investigation, Lenore had turned to him and pleaded:
“Please bring her back to me, Bryan.”
Now, their daughter was lost to her, too, and her return was totally dependent upon him. He was no longer redundant. Instead, he now held a position of central importance in the lives of Lenore and Kim, even more than the new husband and stepfather whose 17th birthday present to Kim had trumped his own. Now, Lenore looked to him as she must have done once upon a time. How balance the scales now?
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