Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  Before I was even aware of time passing, I heard the click of the door’s latch and Viktoria joined me in the hallway. Our gazes brushed past each other briefly, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Kristine duck under the arm of the man who held the door open for her. Another door opened and Detective Watkins waved us toward him. Viktoria and I took seats in a kind of waiting room, sat with our hands beneath us on molded plastic chairs that wobbled as if the fasteners holding them together had all spun loose. I wasn’t sure if it was the chairs or my frazzled state that produced the sensation that we were at sea, rocking over waves that upset my stomach and blurred my vision.

  To steady myself, I started calculating how much longer it would be until I was on my way back home to Norway. It was December 10, 2009. I was scheduled to fly home eight days later. I struggled with the numbers for a few moments. One hundred and ninety-two hours. I looked for a clock, hoping to make the answer more precise. The room had no clock. I couldn’t remember the exact time of my flight’s departure or its arrival back in Norway. I normally had a good mind for details, but with those faces, I began to question just how sure I could be of anything.

  I heard Viktoria clear her throat and watched her cough softly into the crook of her elbow. She sat absently tugging at a strand of her hair. The sound of the waiting room officer sliding his chair as he stood up startled me. Viktoria looked at me and rolled her eyes. I wanted to talk to her about what she’d seen, hoping that her recollection of things was better than mine. My thoughts about what it might be like to be in that room, in that building, under different circumstances, waiting to be told whether I was free to go or if I was going to prison, were interrupted by the sound of footsteps. Kristine joined us and took a seat. A minute later, Detective Watkins joined us along with Robin.

  I inhaled deeply, waiting for the verdict about our performance.

  Detective Watkins looked as if he was about to speak but then didn’t. He rubbed at one eye and then winked it several times in a row as if to clear it of something.

  “I want you to know that we’ve been working on your case 24/7,” he said.

  “Thank you. I really do appreciate it,” I said.

  “Several of us—we’ve wanted to get this riddle solved and get your attackers off the street. And now I have some information to share with you. We have the three men in custody.”

  For a moment I didn’t believe what I’d just heard. I looked over at the other girls, and their expressions confirmed that I’d heard correctly.

  “We know they’re the right ones. We’ve had one of them in custody for several days already; we found him with your cell phone in his pocket and he has confessed. We got the other two today at their residence, along with the gun they used to threaten you. All three of them are in jail now.”

  I jumped up from my chair and ran across the room into Robin’s arms. I cried; he cried harder.

  The feeling of relief was indescribable. I hadn’t fully realized just how scared I was until that moment, when this huge heaviness lifted from me. I was safe. The rapists hadn’t found me. They weren’t hiding outside my apartment or in my bathroom; they were in jail where they belonged. The police had done their jobs without fanfare, and had waited until now to tell me because they didn’t want there to be a chance that they were wrong.

  “I think this must be the best day of my life,” Robin said, and his words made me feel so warm. It felt like the best day of my life, too. Better than winning any competition.

  I hugged Kristine and Viktoria, so thankful that we were there together to share that moment. They’d been through so much and had been working so hard to support me. I could read the relief in their eyes as well. The three of us stood in a small circle, our heads inclined and touching, talking over one another in a nearly unintelligible language of relief and joy, about how hard it had been to look at the pictures, how we were sure that we’d somehow messed the whole thing up, how glad we were that those men couldn’t come after us now.

  “Oh my God, Monika,” Kristine said, nearly shrieking with glee, “this is so good.”

  What had gone mostly unsaid among us was the fact that I wasn’t the only one who was in danger all those days and nights. My two friends had also seen those men, and who knew what they might do to get rid of any witnesses? I realized the implication of what Detective Watkins had said about one of them having my phone. On it were pictures of everyone close to me. Those men wouldn’t have had to try to remember what we all looked like—all they had to do was scroll through all my photos. I pushed that thought aside quickly.

  Detective Watkins went on talking to us, but I could barely focus on what he was saying, words like “hearings,” “arraignments,” “prosecutors,” and all the rest bounced around the room and were lost. I looked around the room at my friends and saw them smiling, genuinely smiling in a way that I hadn’t seen since the night of the party. Once we had been escorted out to the car and returned to the drop-off point, the reality of what had just happened began to sink in. Coach Casey was ecstatic, and she phoned Coach Wollman with the news. He wanted to speak to me, but there was so much commotion in the car, I could barely hear him. I felt like I was back to square one with my beginner’s English, saying over and over again, “So happy! So happy!”

  A few moments later, I sat quietly while the others went on with their excitement. They had the men in custody. I almost couldn’t believe it. Then, just as had happened the night the police drove me to the hospital, it was as if the scene outside the car slowed. But this was different. The lights, the buildings, all seemed haloed and frozen, like icicles reflecting holiday lights, serene and beautiful. I hadn’t noticed them looking like that before, hadn’t taken the time to enjoy this spectacle. I looked at my friends, their eyes bright, their voices a choir of joy. I was alive. I was with these people who mattered so much to me. My prayers had been answered.

  Back at our new room, we all stood in the middle of the clutter and Viktoria asked, “So, what do you want to do to celebrate?” I could hear a tinge of teasing in her voice. They all looked at me expectantly.

  I shrugged and said as dramatically as I could, “I’ll have to think about that.”

  “Just let us know,” Kristine and Viktoria said and went into their room.

  Grinning from ear to ear, Robin handed me one of my equipment bags.

  “Let’s go.”

  A moment later, Viktoria and Kristine returned. They’d changed into their warm-up suits, too.

  “Ready?”

  In the first few days after the rape, I had veered off my schedule. I wasn’t a runner in the same way I had been.

  A hard workout may not seem like much of a reward to most people, but for me it was. While some people might have thought, You’ve been through so much, you deserve to take some time off, I thought just the opposite. I deserved to be able to run again. I’d earned the privilege to do the thing that gave me the most satisfaction. I was determined not to let anything get in the way of me becoming an Olympian, of me reaching my most treasured goal. Unlike that first time on the treadmill, I understood that it wasn’t so much my performance but my appearance that mattered. I showed up at the figurative start line for this race. The only other competitor I was running against that day after finding out the men had been arrested was the memory of those men and what they’d tried to take from me. That wasn’t my body, but my spirit, my drive, my ambition, my ability to take pleasure in my body’s efforts, to measure out precisely how effort and results were connected.

  I suppose that in some ways it would have been no different to be working out on an ordinary December day between the track and cross-country seasons. We weren’t formally meeting as a squad and adhering to a strict training regimen. If it hadn’t been for the rape, I would have been running every day, balancing my schoolwork with my training schedule. The men who had attacked me changed that; I hadn’t been able to maintain my discipline in the days since the rape and had been detached from everyt
hing that defined me as Monika Kørra, daughter of Kari-Ann and Tore, sister of Anette, the driven woman who had traveled halfway around the world for a chance to train with some of the best teammates in the world. Preparing for a workout was the best way I could begin reclaiming my identity, to show that being raped would not be the end of the world I had worked so hard to create. I could not erase the memories of what had happened to me, but I wanted to reduce them to just another facet of my life, another obstacle to overcome, to integrate them into the whole of my life.

  My roommates and Robin understood that about me. They understood without me having to explain to them what it meant to dedicate your life to something. We’d all come from another country and made difficult adjustments to succeed in an environment that was foreign to us. I was already used to thinking of Viktoria and Kristine as teammates. Robin, who also played an individual sport in a team context, like we did, also fit naturally into that same category. We’d all experienced something horrible, in individual ways, but we all had the same goal in mind: to help me become better and to have our lives back to the way that they had been.

  For the last four days, my friends had done their best to shield me from my emotions. When I started to cry, they made me laugh. When I felt fearful, they comforted and distracted me. But if I was going to conquer it, I needed to feel the pain. That was as true for my body as it was for my mind.

  We went on a group run to celebrate the men being caught. I still felt a buzz of anxiety in my stomach, and I scanned the area around me nervously, but it felt good to be running. For those first four days, my fear had been real—those men were out there, they knew where I lived, and it was in their best interest that I not be around to identify them. Now my fear was all in my head. I would have to meet that fear, to look it in the face and be able to say that I just didn’t care—that fear didn’t have a hold on me. I wasn’t there yet, but knowing that I was safe from those men, that they were in jail, gave me one less bad thing to focus on. I could cross it off my list and move on to another task on my “To Do” list.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Departure

  I felt a thump against my lower back and heard the low rumble of a voice behind me cursing and then heaving a heavy sigh. I shifted in my seat, brought my legs up beneath me, and leaned against the wall of the plane. Another thump and another curse that was barely audible over the sound of the jet’s engines. I knew that the man behind me was struggling to get comfortable. Kristine and I had taken our seats for the flight to London, and just before the doors were closed and we pushed back away from the gate, he’d come on board, clearly flustered. When he squeezed past the other two people in the row behind us, he leaned heavily on my seat, forcing me forward.

  On airplanes I was glad that I was Little Monika; other times, I struggled with what that meant. People who didn’t know me might have made the assumption that little = lesser. I’d fought that notion my whole life, that just because I was small in stature I couldn’t be as good at sports as other women and girls. We all make assumptions about other people based on physical qualities. It’s easy. It’s convenient. But it’s more often than not wrong.

  Just because I was aware of the dangers of making assumptions about people didn’t mean that I was immune from making them myself. I knew that even as I made the transition from Little Monika in Norway to Monika Kørra track-and-field and cross-country runner at SMU, people were still judging me based on a limited amount of evidence they had. In some ways, I was the typical collegiate athlete. In Norway, we didn’t have the same preconceived ideas about what it meant to be what Americans sometimes thought of as a dumb jock. It was also untrue that just because I was an athlete I had to be unconcerned about things like music, fashion, and other “girly” interests.

  I’d never liked the idea of being labeled, and liked it even less following the attack. I felt like someone had written the word “VICTIM” across my forehead in large block letters. In my mind, I heard people talking about me, referring to me as “the raped girl, the foreign girl, you know the one.” I even saw a few negative posts about me on Facebook and other places; I tried to ignore them, but it was difficult.

  I was grateful to be getting away for the holidays. I was eager to get home to see my friends and family and spend Christmas with them, but I was also glad that I would be away from campus for a time. I hoped that by the time we returned, people would have forgotten about what happened to me, and would be caught up in the start of a new semester or, in the case of the team, a new season.

  The police had encouraged me to leave Dallas early. With the suspects in custody, I felt a bit safer, but I was still struggling to sleep and evade the horrible dreams. I fought against the idea that I was the raped girl, the one who needed special treatment. I wanted to attend all my classes, take all my final exams, and show everyone that I was okay; eventually, though, I had to give up on that idea.

  As much as our brains try to deceive us, our bodies don’t lie. I knew that from running, but it took me getting sick and developing a high fever that kept me bedridden for a few days to truly understand that my efforts to keep up normal appearances were a failure and a lie. In a way, I was able to outrace the rape in the first few days after, but as I lay in bed, physically unable to get up and move around, no longer able to keep to the strict schedule that I had adhered to for so long, all kinds of questions caught up to me. Without the structure of classes, studying, and running, stressed by the rape, the drugs I was taking, and the flu, I threw myself a brief pity party. It wasn’t bad enough that I had been raped, but now I was sick. And finals were on us. And I was scheduled to go home and I didn’t want to be miserable on the long flight. What else could go wrong?

  Losing the ability to run and to keep to my busy schedule was a blessing in disguise.

  At the time, I hated the idea of being sick and stuck in bed, but I can see now that it was my body’s way of doing the right thing for me. I needed to slow down. I needed to let the reality of what had happened truly sink in and make me realize that business as usual wasn’t going to work, that I couldn’t deny forever the reality that my life had been altered. I fought against that idea, but at least I acknowledged the fact that denial was my opponent. I’ve heard it said that “We lose ourselves in the things we love; we find ourselves there, too.” It took me time to realize that I needed to understand the distance between who I was then and who I had been before the rape in order to start to heal.

  I was both pleased and a little angry when a woman at SMU who worked with international students who had visa and travel issues was less than understanding about my request to change from leaving on the eighteenth to leaving on the thirteenth of December. It typically took a week to process international requests; when we showed up just a few days before the day we wanted to reschedule our travel to, the receptionist looked at us and shook her head. “These take a week. This isn’t your first time going through the process, so I’m sure you know that.”

  I said that I understood but that this was an emergency. I was on the verge of tears, both because I’d failed to remember something so important and because this woman didn’t understand or care how important getting away was for me. It hadn’t been my idea to move up the date I left for home, but suddenly the idea of not being able to do it was quite painful.

  I was tempted to say something to her about what I’d been through, but only slightly so. I tried to tell myself that she didn’t know, that I was just another of the foreign students she had to deal with, all of us making requests of her. That was a good thing to remember, but simultaneous with that sentiment was the anger that she didn’t understand who I was, what I needed, and how my case was different. The tension between those two desires—to be like everyone else and to be understood as somehow exceptional—tore at me.

  I left the paperwork with her and fretted over her response that she would make no guarantees. It was good, in a way, that she treated me just like everyone else. I wanted that to b
e how everyone dealt with me, but when faced with the reality of not getting something that I felt I really needed, I saw just how fragile those feelings really were, of being okay and able to handle all of this. My stomach was in knots with worry, but someone in the Athletic Department must have intervened on my behalf. I got the approvals I needed the next day. I look back on that incident and how SMU also helped me out by paying my medical bills, with enormous gratitude. At the time, I was so wrapped up in everything that was going on, and how poorly I felt, that I don’t think I expressed that gratitude fully.

  I was also enormously grateful that Kristine was able to travel with me. Before the rape, we’d had different plans, but the Athletic Department had arranged for the two of us to travel together all the way home. Hoisting my SMU athletics duffel bag into the trunk of George’s car, I’d felt a profound sense of relief.

  Despite telling myself that I couldn’t live in denial, I was glad to be leaving Dallas and heading home. I could get away from the place where the rape had happened, escape the newspaper and television coverage that was a constant reminder of it, and literally put a great deal of distance between me and the incident. I’d also be able to feel more directly the support of my family. I loved the holidays, and having something to look forward to and think about other than doctor’s appointments and phone calls with police and prosecutors felt good.

  Kristine and I had both talked about how excited we were to be going home, and whether it was our nervous energy burning off quickly, or the accumulated exhaustion of the last two weeks, our excitement soon turned to sleep. As soon as we’d taken our seats, we’d both put in our ear buds, and even before the plane lifted off, we both were asleep. I woke up somewhere over the Atlantic, jostled into awareness by a flight attendant and his cart rattling past. Kristine was still out, and I sat there, hoping to sleep but knowing that my mind was racing and that rest was unlikely.