But Gina wasn’t letting up on herself.
“It was my mistake. It was too much all at once, and I feel terrible about it.”
When she awoke again a couple of hours later, Gina was already showered and dressed. She probably wanted to get back on the road, but she wasn’t pressing her about it.
“If you’re okay,” Gina said, “maybe I’ll take the car out and get some gas. You can stay here and rest a little longer.”
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She was glad just to lie there for a few moments while she tried to sort things out. She needed time to think. She’d gotten a little light-headed when she found out that they were headed for California. It had never occurred to her that Gina lived so far away. Was it just yesterday that they had left Indiana? So much had happened.
Everything they talked about at dinner had just added to the pile of unexpected news. She knew almost nothing about Gina at the time she got into the car. But then after listening to her for a while, she realized she didn’t know anything about her own early life either. She wasn’t angry with Gina for explaining everything the way she did, even though at times she felt a little dizzy about it.
She found out she was born in Bosnia, and that was a surprise. She always assumed that she had been born somewhere in the United States. She had only heard the name Bosnia mentioned once in class, and she didn’t know if she could find it on a map. Gina described it as a beautiful place, and she wanted her to see it someday. But it sounded like Bosnia had just gone through something terrible. At the time she was born, there was apparently a war going on all around her. That news confused her. Why couldn’t she remember anything about that? She never thought about her early childhood memories, but she wondered how, even as a baby, she could have forgotten about all of those things as they were happening.
She had to catch herself every so often as she was listening. She couldn’t believe she was sitting somewhere in the middle of America, with someone she hardly knew, listening to an entirely new story about herself. It was a wonder that all the food didn’t catch in her throat. Gina told her a lot about her family and about her early years, and each new bit of information seemed to carry her further and further away from the life she’d grown up with. A couple of times she thought about her mother and how worried she must be. She didn’t want to hurt her, but she didn’t regret taking off like she did—not with him around.
Every bit of news had its own little jolt. She found out she had another name: Jelena. As Jelena’s story started to become more and more real, she worried that her own story might be starting to fade. For a moment, she feared that Gina would begin calling her by that name. Would she have to start using that name herself? Gina seemed to sense that this was bothering her, and she tried to reassure her. Jelena was a pretty name, she said, but it was now just part of her personal history—like something in a museum. The way Gina put it made her feel good. “I now know a wonderful young woman named Alexi, and I don’t intend to change her a bit.”
She learned about her birth mother. When she first got into the car, she had fantasized that Gina was her real mother. But Gina said no. Her mother was a beautiful young woman named Anja. She was very musically talented. She had gorgeous black hair. “And she had beautiful eyes, just like your own.”
“Alexi, she would have been very proud of you.”
The way Gina said it made her ask, “Isn’t she still alive somewhere?”
“I don’t think so,” Gina said, “but I don’t really know for sure. From everything I’ve heard, she may have died in the war or in the killings that followed afterward.”
Her heart sunk. That wasn’t fair. As she listened to Gina describe what happened to Anja, the food on her plate suddenly became more indigestible than it already was. She had just found her real mother, and now she was suddenly jerked away from her.
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Gina had one other thing to tell her. But from the way she was fidgeting around, it was clear that she wasn’t looking forward to saying it.
“I hate to spring this on you without warning. But it’s something you need to know, and I can’t think of any other way to tell you.”
She told her it was okay. Whatever it was, she wanted Gina to say it, because she hated seeing her so uncomfortable. But she didn’t realize that the thing that Gina had to say would spark her sudden burst of despair.
“Alexi, I’m your father.”
Gina
Alexi, I’m your father.
Alexi, I used to be your father.
Alexi, before I started living as a woman, I was your father.
I didn’t know how to tell her, so I ended up stumbling over it. I wanted to say I felt very close to her. I wanted to tell her I loved her and let her know the whole story behind that love. I wanted to say I was still her father even though I didn’t appear to be anyone’s father. But I didn’t say any of those things very well. You’d think after years of selling stories—and telling stories—I’d be better at that sort of thing. But I wasn’t.
Alexi was shocked—how could she not be? There was a look of bewilderment on her face at first, and that was replaced by a flash of anger. Then came a lot of the sobs and tears. I tried to reassure her as best I could about me—about the real me—about the real me that would always really be me. Most of all, I wanted her to know that I was there for her. She let me wander through my story. After a while, I think she started to get used to me as I was. It was a lot to ask of her; she had never known anyone like me. But I sensed she was starting to figure out how I fit into her world. That was more a tribute to her understanding than to my eloquence. I reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. She squeezed back.
As a transgender woman, I’ve had to deal with all kinds of reactions from others. How do you reveal your gender history? Do you do just blurt it out at some point in the conversation? If the people you’re talking to haven’t already figured it out on their own, it can get awkward. Some transgender women are right up front, mentioning it as soon as they meet someone. There’s something to be said for that, but that’s not how I am. I almost never say anything about myself unless I’m asked, and—surprisingly, I guess—I’m rarely asked. Many of my bookseller colleagues certainly know, and I’m fine with that. The rumors about me have probably wended their way around the business more than I know.
Others might disagree, but I think that’s the right way for me. I would never deny that I’m a transgender woman, but I don’t really define myself in gender terms. When you look at the way I live my life from day to day, you could just as easily categorize me in some other way—like, a bookworm. What I really fear is that if people learn that one big thing about me first, they’ll never take the time to learn anything else. It’s the kind of information about a person that can blot out the sun, if you’re not careful.
But I didn’t have that luxury with Alexi. In telling her the history of her own life, I had to tell her about mine as well. The two stories were hopelessly intertwined. I told her about a forgotten war in a distant land. It was a tale in which she was conceived and born under a different name to people she’d never heard of. And if that weren’t enough, the only link she had to those events was someone who had begun the story as her father but had been living as a woman ever since.
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I told her the whole story, but that doesn’t mean I told her everything.
I couldn’t tell her that I’d been forced to rape her mother. If I was going to tell her the details about what happened that day, I knew that conversation would only be many months later—if ever.
It took me a long time to come to peace with what had happened in the basement of that house. Even though there was a war raging upstairs—one that I had been dragged into against my will—I was still anguished by the role I played. I was on the run for many months after that day. But no matter where I was forced to hide, I was obsessed with trying
to locate Anja again. I wasn’t even sure of her name, but I had to find her and make things right. I didn’t know what kind of a reception I would get. I was technically part of the Militia that had tried to kill her family, and they would have every right to hate me when they saw me. When I finally learned that the family was hiding up in the mountains, I found out Anja had a baby daughter. That just added to my anxiety. Until then, I hadn’t realized that she had become pregnant.
I’m not sure why the family was so kind to me, but they took me in. They were just fundamentally good and decent people. I was there less than three months, but I became very close to them. In truth, they were the only family I’ve ever had. Somehow, I wanted to make it up to them for what they had gone through, but there wasn’t much I could do. Finally, they got word that their enemies—and mine, as well—were closing in on them. They knew they had to flee. But in that short time, I became enchanted with that beautiful baby. I could still not bring myself to call her my child, but that seemed far less important than having her there in my life. What I felt more than anything else was the simple joy of being around her.
It was during those brief months that I finally got up the nerve to talk to Anja about what had happened that day in the basement. She listened to me spill out my apologies, and then she came over and sat next to me, holding my hand.
“We were both raped,” she said calmly. I could tell by the look on her face that she had thought through the whole sordid incident and had come to peace with her feelings. “I knew by the look on your face that day that you had no intention of attacking me.”
When I tried to interject something, she calmly shut me up.
“I could feel the terror in your body. A brutal force had been let loose in that room, and it was attacking both of us. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you hadn’t been there—if you hadn’t been sandwiched between us—he would have raped me himself. That would have been far worse.”
“So what happened between us was in some sense up to me. It happened because I let it happen. If I hadn’t, he would have killed us both.” She leaned against me, trying to control her tears.
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“And then you did what you had to do.”
The thing that Anja said I “had to do” was kill him. I couldn’t tell that to Alexi either.
The scene is still fresh in my memory. The Hijena goaded me, practically inviting me to do what I did. I knew that if I didn’t do it, he would kill Anja and probably kill me as well. So I picked up the rifle, like they taught me to do, and I shot him.
It was brutal. The Hijena grabbed at his chest in surprise, his mouth moving through a range of sounds, as if he were trying to say something. Finally, he just coughed up blood and sank to the floor. Within seconds, he stopped moving. I was shaking all over. If I’d thought about it, I never would have been able to pull the trigger. And even with my aversion to guns and war—and with all my hatred toward the man who had been tormenting me—I still had no idea how ugly it would feel to kill another human being. I was gripped with revulsion. Within seconds, I dropped the weapon to the floor and ran up the stairs as fast as I could. I somehow made it out of the building and into safety. It wasn’t until hours later—after I had hidden myself in the woods surrounding the town—that I was able to think about what had happened. Once the Komandant and the others figured out what had happened, they would be screaming for revenge against me and anyone connected with me.
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As we drove the next day, I could see Alexi glancing at me a little differently than she had before. She was still trying to fit me into her universe. There were probably some male pronouns in her head, struggling to get loose. I knew she would be embarrassed if she slipped up and used one.
The truth is, I’ve always found it easy to pass as a woman. I’ve been blessed with narrow shoulders and a relatively small waist. My body was practically hairless when I was a boy. The modest levels of hormones that I’ve taken over the last decade have stopped most of the growth of facial hair and kept the hair on my head intact. My voice isn’t very high—sort of a contralto—but I’ve learned that the light touch of an Italian accent somehow creates a feminine mood.
I’m never sure what comes into a person’s mind when they hear the word “transgender.” Alexi knew a few things, but there were some big omissions in her understanding. I spent a good part of the next morning—driving across Kansas, of all places—trying as gently as I could to fill in the gaps. The thing to know is this: men who leap into the world of women can end up in all kinds of places. Transgender women can be quite different from each over. The images that people conjure up can be as broad as the prairie—ranging from men who have been surgically altered to the guy who just puts on his wife’s lingerie out of curiosity. The images are so different because the transgender women are so different.
I’ve tried my best to resist categorization. But don’t get me wrong: I have a soft spot in my heart for every person who has the courage to take on a woman’s identity—no matter how permanent or fleeting. But I worry when people latch on to a generalization and use that like a pair of blinders to block out everything else about a person. I didn’t want that to happen to me. And I certainly didn’t want that to happen between Alexi and me.
At one point, Alexi wanted to know if I was “seeing anyone.” I was so proud of my child for the delicate way she framed that question, I almost let go of the steering wheel and hugged her.
No, I was not, I told her.
I was actually happy to be able to report to her that I was living quite alone, because that made things easier. She was already on overload from everything else that I’d told her. Bringing one more “significant other” into the mix would have probably broken the scale altogether.
I didn’t bother to report the details of my love life, and Alexi had the good sense not to ask any more questions about it. But the fact is, my romantic life was in shambles. People who think that all transgender women lead exotic sex lives would probably find my social life pretty pathetic. I’d dated a couple of men who were attracted to me as a woman—only as a woman. When it became clear that they were not likely to be pleased with the body parts that Mother Nature had given me, I tried as gently as possible to ease my way out of the relationship before embarrassing everyone. One guy, however, figured it out and was mortified anyway.
There have also been men who’ve approached me from the other direction, presenting me with the opposite problem. One man who shall remain nameless—I’m not into outing anybody—reveled in my male attributes and seemed to use my feminine persona as a cover for that. I saw nothing wrong with his desires, and I think I understood what was driving him. The problem was he acted like he had trouble even remembering my name. If he’d shown a little more affection for the female side of me, I might have put up with the rest of it.
I could have added Sylvia to my list of romantic attachments, but I had no intention of saying anything to Alexi about my relationship with her. The minute we reached the West Coast, I’d be counting on Sylvia to begin the legal process for protecting her, and I wanted to keep that relationship as professional as possible. I didn’t want to complicate things any more than they already were. In truth, my affair with Sylvia was an aberration—really, an aberration for both of us. She prefers women, and I prefer men. But somehow we ended up with each other and fell madly in love—for a while. I’ve never quite figured that out. The only thing I can think is that our friendship is so right because our romance was so wrong.
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We stopped at a place in Colorado for lunch. After we finished our sandwiches, the waitress reappeared at the table with the dessert menu. I watched Alexi’s eyes move from the waitress to me and then back again. It was a quick movement, but it was one I rather expected.
“Would you ladies like anything for dessert?’
“Nothing for me,” I said.
Alexi h
esitated for a second, and then said she didn’t want anything either.
The waitress turned to me. “Okay, honey. Can I bring you the check?”
I nodded yes.
After she left, Alexi looked at me with a bit of a smile. She didn’t have to say anything, but I knew what she was thinking. I had passed some sort of test.
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We were driving once more into the late-afternoon sun. Alexi had been quiet, and I knew she was thinking about something. Finally, she told me what she wanted.
“Gina, will you do something for me?”
“Of course. What would you like?”
“Can you take a picture of me and send it to my mother?”
I didn’t have the heart to say no. Alexi was getting a little homesick—for her mother, if not for the home itself. I knew exactly what she was thinking. If her mother got a picture of her, she’d probably know she was all right. Alexi would then feel a lot better about what we were doing.
But that meant putting the batteries back in Alexi’s phone, shooting the picture, and sending a phone transmission back to Indiana. We could have done it with my phone, but that would have been even more problematic. As it was, it was risky enough. One more barrier would be dropping between us and those who were probably trying to find us.
But I couldn’t tell her no.
Davey
They finally had a break.
The email with the photo of Alexi was like a godsend to Susan. When she saw the picture—one that even showed a bit of a smile—she seemed to know that Alexi was safe. She started talking like they were going to find her and get her back.
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