Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  This life, my life… The surprises would never really stop, would they?

  What was gonna happen next?

  What fresh hell was waiting for me in between writing stories and soccer/swim practice and Walking Dead episodes and playing Skyrim on my Xbox?

  Lou’s first adventure of the two-book series would be published in just fifteen days.

  Kristin, my new editor, made the offer for two books, and she had all the best words. Then they sold the UK rights, and I had a British publisher—Titan UK wanted me to come across the pond for a tour.

  This was happening.

  Twelve years had passed between the publication of A Quiet Storm and Land of Shadows. My entire thirties had been traumatic and exhausting, with bursts of promise and joy. I would now have the writing career I’d fought for, with a body that had been cut up and restored too many times to count.

  Over in the UK, there was one word I couldn’t say.

  The producer for BBC Radio Four, Woman’s Hour.

  Gangbanger.

  Here in Los Angeles, that’s the word we use for gang members. He bang means He’s a member of one of our urban men’s groups. Sure, it also meant group sex, but not in Land of Shadows.

  Not for British listeners.

  There was something about that word—which in the UK meant violent group sex—that spooked the Brits. For me, the word had no power—in my part of the world, gangbanger was as ubiquitous as Kool-Aid and Doritos. It was just a word.

  Still, I was asked not to say gangbanger during the Woman’s Hour interview.

  Easy.

  Don’t say gangbanger. Don’t say gangbanger.

  Moments into the interview, that word tumbled out of my mouth. Not that I realized that it had. Afterward, my husband met me in the greenroom, smile on his face. “You said the word. Like, twenty seconds into the interview.”

  Some words cannot be silenced with just an hour’s notice.

  I HAD A DOCTOR’S APPOINTMENT FOR WHO-KNOWS ON June 4, 2014. Oh, yeah—bad cramps. A weird thing since I had no uterus. That morning, my doctor was telling me that I most likely had endometriosis, another side effect of ending Tamoxifen therapy, and that condition didn’t require a uterus. It simply grew wherever the hell it wanted to grow.

  More words. More fixing things. More hoping for normalcy.

  She suggested that I try another drug called Lupron Depot to combat the bad cramps I’d been experiencing.

  More drugs.

  Tears burned my eyes, and I wondered, what side effects would this therapy bring? And what therapy would I need in two years to combat those side effects? And on and on and…

  What had I done to bring this—?

  My cell phone rang from my purse.

  My doctor was talking to me about my next appointment.

  The call rolled to voice mail.

  Doc tore the prescription from the pad and handed it to me. She wished me well and said, “See you in six months.”

  Alone again, I checked my phone.

  Jill!

  Would this be good news? Or the news with words I’d come to know best?

  Not now. No. We’re passing. Revise and resubmit. Thanks, but…

  By now, I was used to disappointment—from both my body and my writing. That morning, I couldn’t decide whether to rush to my car to call Jill back… or take the scenic route through Canada.

  Eventually, I slipped behind the steering wheel and took a deep breath. I selected Jill’s number and clenched for bad words made softer by Jill’s expertise.

  Kristin at Forge had just offered to purchase two more books for my now four-book series.

  Lou would survive.

  I would survive.

  Yeah, there would be more words to learn—oovectomy, abdominal adhesions, sudden-onset menopause, shopping agreement, no, not now, maybe later.

  And credit-card bills and accumulated debt with so many surgery fees and imaging costs and… and…

  Okay. Fine. This was my normal.

  I’d punch back.

  I always punched back.

  Most times with words. By refusing to surrender.

  A scary, wonderful, messy life that bled past the edges of everything. A life that took in too much at times, that seemed unfair and strange and stupid. Lou, Miriam, Rikki, Stacy, Danielle, and every character I will write today and tomorrow help me unload some of this life, help me make sense of it all. And readers, not all of you but a lot of you, appreciate my words about this life.

  Because your life may not be altogether different. Because you, too, have heard hard words, winced at their sting. You’ve shimmied and shimmered—until you’re grounded with strange, mean, uncaring words.

  Uptight.

  Stupid.

  B****.

  N*****.

  C***.

  A child of the church with musical ability, I was surrounded by song and melody. Alto in youth and school choirs. Violin player. Handbell ringer. Self-taught piano player. As an adult, my favorite religious songs had become more complex—from Jesus loves me, this I know to God with us, the living truth. Going through this… this strange, scary, convoluted journey, I needed gospel music, songs that spoke to my pain and fear and anger. And I listened to songs—Fred Hammond most times, “You Are the Living Word” and “No Weapon” and “I Will Trust” on repeat. Listened and sifted through the words for promises that I would be okay, that no weapon formed against me—even my own body—would prosper. On my drive to work, these songs infused me with hope, with promises that it would all work out in the end. The end? What kind of end?

  Those songs—powerful words made to be sung—on Fred Hammond’s albums still bring tears to my eyes. How his words ministered to me, how his words that played an active part of my healing prick me and shape me fifteen years after my obstetrician palpated that suspicious lump. I cry because I remember how I survived, how I climbed into my car each day and drove to work, pretended that I was okay, prayed that I’d be okay. Hummed those songs, Fred Hammond’s words beneath my breath as the room dipped into silence and I could hear the crunching of those bad words in my head.

  Just a few months ago, I heard those words so many writers hear.

  No.

  Numbers.

  Not right now.

  Sorry.

  Months ago, those words broke me. I’d worked hard on a new story—I’d taken everything that I’d learned from writing the Lou Norton novels, the James Patterson story, the science-fiction short story, and the stand-alone seven-sinners novel and had created another interesting heroine with a twisting path and a smart mouth. After finishing, I was convinced that it was the best story I’d ever written, and I was certain that it would sell.

  That afternoon, I cried in my office at work. Kept the door closed until my eyes whitened again, until my breathing straightened, until I could fake it. Took about twenty minutes.

  Later that day, as I drove my almost-fifteen-year-old daughter home, I shared with her my story of rejection. And as I talked to her, I cried again and told her that this hurt and that I was tired and that I couldn’t do more than what I’d done. I told her that I wished that I didn’t have to write, that maybe I wasn’t as talented as I thought. I told her that maybe I should find something else to do—she and my husband had given me a sewing machine for Christmas. Maybe quilting would be my thing now. Quilts are nice.

  After handing me a napkin to dry my eyes, my kid held my hand and said, “I’m sorry, Mom.” She kissed me on the cheek, then let me listen to Rachel Maddow’s show on the radio without hassle. When we got home, she disappeared into her bedroom to do homework. Her Intro to Comp and Literature class had just started Brave New World, and she’d already told me that the words and ideas in Huxley’s pages scared her. She was learning new words, too.

  I cooked dinner because life went on. I told myself, while sautéing salmon, that I had experienced worse, that I’d published more books than the one book I’d prayed for. If I never landed a
book contract again… My eyes burned—the thought of never landing a book contract again was not a new thought, but it was a thought that I hadn’t thought I’d think again, you know? Here I was, though, hours after rejection (again), cooking dinner (again) and wondering if my writing career was over (again).

  Before bedtime, my daughter came to the den to say good-night to David and me. Along with a kiss on my forehead, she also gave me a present: one of her new binders. She had printed out and glued past reviews and stars from my novels onto the binder. She’d written, “Don’t stop, Mom.” And I cried again—there were so many words that I’d forgotten. So many words I’d discounted. That night, after a brutal day, Maya had helped me to remember.

  The next morning, I prepared for work. Dumped leftover salmon and potatoes into a plastic container for lunch. Gave the dog her dental stick. And then I grabbed a new notebook and a pack of pens from my storage bin. I had plenty of stories that needed to be written. So many things I had to say. Quilting was great, but writing… Nothing compared to a nice pen drifting over clean white pages. Nothing compared to finding new ways to use twenty-six letters to give body to a thought in your mind.

  Words hold tremendous power—they shape lives, end lives. They set mood—on paper, in songs, in a conference room. We second-guess their meanings and their mysteries, and sometimes, we still do not understand.

  I am now in the last year of my forties. I am still learning the meaning of lots of words, simple words. I am still remembering words, simple words.

  Enjoy.

  Relax.

  Appreciate.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  THE BEAMS KEEP FALLING

  – Steph Cha –

  MY FIRST APARTMENT WAS A DIM TWO-BEDROOM ON THE ground floor of a one-hundred-year-old building in New Haven, Connecticut. I was twenty-one and starting law school, still fresh out of college, where I’d spent all four years living in filthy dorm rooms. I had almost no role in finding the place and would not have known what to do if I had been looking on my own. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I didn’t know anything when I was twenty-one.

  I’d met my roommate, Maka, at an admitted students’ weekend that spring. We’d been planning to find an apartment with another girl in our class, but she ended up rooming with someone else when three-bedrooms proved hard to come by. It was this third girl who found our place for us, since she lived close enough to New Haven to apartment hunt in person. She gave us the address, the price, and her general observations. We needed an apartment, so we went ahead and took it, sight unseen. At least neither of us was particular.

  The building was called the Taft, and we moved into apartment 1A in August 2007.

  It wasn’t an especially nice apartment. It was old, and there were always weird noises—temperamental pipes, a periodic squeak that sounded like new sneakers on a waxed floor. There were maintenance issues, too. A whole month when both of our toilets kept breaking, and we had to use the bathroom of the restaurant/bar on our floor, a place called Hot Tomato’s with a popular half-price martini night. Occasionally we had mice. But it was my home for three years, the first place I lived as an adult that felt like mine.

  Our bedrooms were upstairs. Downstairs, we had a kitchen, a living area, and a tiny dining space: a four-top table crammed between the stairs, the door, and a giant pillar that went through the whole apartment. (I don’t think we ever figured out what that pillar was for.) I spent most of my time downstairs, and most of that time on the couch.

  I’ve changed in a lot of ways over the last twelve years, but one constant in my life is that I am extremely sedentary. I don’t leave my house if I don’t have to—I prefer to be home, where I don’t have to get dressed or brush my teeth if I don’t feel like it—and I more or less live on my couch. I’m on my couch right now, as a matter of fact, in my pajamas, flanked by my basset hounds.

  I was the same way in school, especially in the winter months, when I hated to go outside. I never worked in libraries or coffee shops. There were weeks when I barely left that apartment, and when I was there, I was almost always on that couch. I didn’t own a desk, so that was where I did most of my bullshitting and all of my work. I studied and did my homework there and wrote the first draft of my first novel. I kept odd hours (I still do), so I would often stay up super late and fall asleep on that couch, never making it upstairs. I’d say this happened around one out of every four or five nights.

  The couch was my roommate’s. I think it was from IKEA. Basic beige fabric, not beautiful but very comfortable. It was in our living area, right by the one downstairs window, which faced out onto a dingy alley and a brick wall. I walked through this alley most days—the back entrance to the Taft was in this alley, and it was closer to our apartment than the main entrance, which was through the lobby. It was a high-traffic alley, as it cut through a central downtown block, and when I was on the couch, I was something like three to five feet away from it, with just the window and the wall in between. We had an air-conditioning unit in that wall that carried sound in from the alley. We would often hear people walking through, occasionally recognizing the voices of people we knew.

  One night, three months after we moved in, I was up late, reading or working or just dicking around on the Internet, but in any case sitting on the couch. It was after three in the morning, and my roommate was long asleep upstairs. I had my pants off, as I often did, and was lounging around in just a T-shirt and underwear when I heard someone talking in the alley.

  I wasn’t tuned in at first. It wasn’t that unusual for there to be voices outside, even at night, and I had no reason to listen in on whatever he was saying. But then I heard the word Asian and then “I want to fuck your Asian ass.” That got my attention. He was talking to me.

  At that point, I realized I’d been hearing his voice for a while. I can’t be sure, but I thought he’d been droning on for several minutes. His voice was low, and he was telling me what he wanted to do to me.

  The window was closed, as were our blinds. We hadn’t put in a curtain, thinking the blinds gave us enough privacy. It turned out, though, that if the lights were on in our apartment, anyone willing to press their faces right up to our window could peer in and see past the flimsy blinds.

  I don’t know if I can really convey how jarring and terrifying that moment was, when I went from relaxing in my own home to being conscripted into the sexual fantasies of a strange man, a man whose face I couldn’t see but who spoke to me from only a few feet away, close enough that I could hear him clearly, though he never raised his voice.

  I think if I had been fully dressed, I would have gotten up and gone upstairs right away. But I didn’t have pants on, and he was saying these disgusting things to me, and I didn’t want him to see me running through my apartment in my underwear. Instead, I positioned my laptop to cover myself and waited silently for him to go away.

  He kept talking. I don’t know for how long—it felt like an hour, though it’s entirely possible it was only a few more minutes. I couldn’t tune him out, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, so I heard every filthy word that came out of his mouth.

  I was so scared, I didn’t say a word, and I moved as little as possible. (Once, I shifted, and he begged, “Oh, don’t turn over.”) I think I would’ve stayed like that, waiting him out, except that he started talking about wanting to come in, asking me to open the door so he could fuck me.

  At that point, I reached for my phone and called the police. I told them there was a man harassing me from the alley outside my window, and I made sure I was speaking loudly enough that he’d be able to hear. He stopped talking after that, but I waited several more minutes to get up and move around. When I thought enough time had passed that he must be gone, I called out, just in case, that I had called the police, and they were on their way. Only then did I go upstairs to wake up my roommate and tell her what had happened.

  The police came, and the man was, of course, long
gone. As relieved as I was that he was no longer pressed up against my window, I was upset that he had gotten away. I had nothing to offer the police to help them identify this man. Who he was, where he’d come from—it was all a mystery to me. Meanwhile, he knew exactly what I looked like and where I lived.

  I talked to Maka. I called my boyfriend. I cried. At some point, I fell asleep. The next day, I ordered Mace-brand police-model pepper spray from a home-security website. I told our apartment manager about the incident and requested that the back door be kept locked at all times. Maka bought us a curtain.

  None of this reversed the feeling of violation or softened the truth it exposed: that my safety was at the pleasure of men, that even the most pathetic man could make me feel like a helpless nothing girl.

  For some time, I fantasized about all the other ways that scene might have played out. I thought of all the clever, cutting things I could have said, the words that might have shown this man who he really was and sent him off in tears. I saw myself turning around and lifting the blinds to look him dead in the eye. I imagined grabbing a kitchen knife and running out to meet him in the alley.

  I think if I’d heard this story from a friend, I would have quietly taken for granted that I might have done one of these things if I were in her situation (probably not the kitchen knife). I’d never been averse to confrontation, and I thought of myself as someone who stood up for herself and for others. I was only twenty-one, and I had already had a number of arguments with gross drunk men. Of course, those had taken place at parties and bars, public spaces where I didn’t feel like I was in danger. This was the first time I’d had to face the threat of a man alone. It only took a few words for him to pour acid on all my nice illusions.

  If there is one good thing that came of this, it’s that I’ve never felt the need to ask why a woman might not fight back against a rapist, why she might find herself unable to face him or report him after an assault. I’ve known some formidable women who have suffered at the hands of men and who have not gone Kill Bill on them as I otherwise might have expected.