Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  But it didn’t make me feel better, at least in the weeks right after the rape, knowing that I’d found Rosalie’s murderer, that I’d found Trish. I would have preferred it to have been Rob or Karl who was an evil, woman-hating killer. I would have preferred it to have been anyone but Wayne, who I’d believed and tried to comfort.

  Because that made it worse.

  Carole tried to help. She took me to her self-defense class and wanted to practice karate moves with me at the shop. But my body hurt too much. When I saw her coming towards me with her arm upraised my heart stopped and I wanted to scream. I couldn’t defend myself.

  “Hit me, Pam,” she urged. “You’re angry. You want to kill. Let it out.”

  But I couldn’t hit her. I could only shrink back. The anger was deep inside, paralyzing me. I wanted to kill. I wanted to kill Wayne very badly. But I wasn’t going to be able to.

  It was Beth who helped me first, Beth and Janis, who’d decided she was moving to Seattle. They took me to the ocean one weekend in late January. While Janis ran up and down the beach with her delighted terrier, Beth and I walked slowly in the wet sand. She held my hand, and she talked about herself. I could tell it was hard for her.

  “I was raped too. A long time ago, when I was eighteen, after I’d moved to San Francisco. It wasn’t as violent as what happened to you, but it was pretty bad. I couldn’t have sex for a couple of years after that. The worst thing was that it was the man who I was so crazy in love with who did it.”

  “How did you deal with it?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone. I tried to push it out of my mind. By not having sex I didn’t have to think about it. It was only twelve or thirteen years later that I even remembered it had happened. You’re only the second person I’ve ever told.” She watched Janis throw a stick to the dog. “She’s the first.”

  “Do you think—that Wayne raped Trish too?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “But it’s so personal.”

  “So is what happened to you.”

  I didn’t say anything. It felt good to be on the foggy beach. The white breakers came in with a violent crash and slipped away again like ice melting. The sun came out at intervals, like a pebble someone kept tossing up into the sky.

  I had only seen Trish twice in the two weeks since the incident at the cabin. At the hearing where we’d both testified against Wayne she’d kept her head lowered as she’d told the story. It was very simple really. Rosalie had tried to help Trish get out of prostitution and Wayne had killed her because of that. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, but she believed it now.

  She was living at the runaway shelter on Beacon Hill and receiving extensive counseling. I called and asked her if she’d like to get together for dinner.

  “Ernesto misses you.” I paused. “And so do I.”

  She came and met me at the shop at five, wearing her familiar black hat and jeans. Her triangular face was almost bare of makeup.

  “Hi, Trish,” said June, unusually gentle. Ever since that night she’d been walking around on eggshells, treating me like an invalid. I didn’t want her pity but found it difficult to talk with her about what had happened. Maybe I was upset to think she’d seen me being raped. Maybe I couldn’t help blaming her somehow for not getting there ten minutes earlier.

  “Hi,” said Trish shyly. Did she remember how June had held her and talked to her?

  We drove up to Capitol Hill without talking much. She said she liked the shelter, that she’d given up smoking. “Cigarettes make me sick!”

  I wondered if she’d changed her mind about green vegetables. To be on the safe side I’d prepared cream cheese enchiladas that just needed to be heated up.

  “It seems like years since I was here,” she said, coming into the living room. But Ernesto hadn’t forgotten her. He bounded over and threw himself at her feet like a raccoon cap, purring wildly.

  “Hi boy, hi, hi.” She bent and stroked him.

  “I heard from my sister in Nicaragua,” I said suddenly. “She’s having a baby. It’s going to be strange to be an aunt.”

  “It’s going to be strange to be a sister,” she said. “My mom’s due in about a month. You know, she came and visited me… We talked…”

  We were both polite, hesitant, afraid of treading new ground. I felt an awkwardness I hadn’t had when I was trying to save her from herself. A new vulnerability.

  “That woman I mentioned, Hadley. She’s coming back to Seattle in February…”

  “That’s great,” said Trish. “…Did you tell her—about what happened?”

  I shook my head. “No, not yet. It’s kind of hard to talk about.”

  “I know.”

  “Listen, Trish, I found your diary in Rosalie’s room and your dad gave me the one you left behind. I read them.” I pulled the little books out of the shelf and gave them to her. “I’m sorry. I was trying to find you—and they did help.”

  She took them without apparent emotion. “Sometimes I told the truth in them. There were a lot of things I never wrote. I’ve started a new one now. I’m going to try to be honest.”

  “When I was your age…” I didn’t like the sound of that and began again. “I used to keep a diary but I stopped a long time ago. I’ve been thinking of starting one. There are a lot of things I can’t seem to talk about. I thought that if I wrote them…”

  “About Wayne?”

  I nodded.

  “You know, it’s weird,” she said, stroking Ernesto and not quite looking at me. “When I was up in the loft, when he was—doing it to you—I felt like it was happening to me, more than when it did happen to me. I mean, it hurt me that it was Wayne who did it to me, but it had happened to me so many times that I was used to it. A long time ago I stopped feeling anything. I just went away in my head. Having sex didn’t feel like it had anything to do with me. But when I heard you struggling and moaning and heard what Wayne was saying to you, it was like I felt it was happening to me. And it hurt me in a new way. Like it was the first time I really felt it.”

  I had started crying, helplessly, as the memory of that night went through me again. Trish came over and stood next to me, clumsily holding my arm and then putting her arm around my shoulders. She was taller than me and smelled very young.

  “Come on, come on,” she said. “You’re still you, no matter what happened. And nobody can take that away from you.” She began to cry too, “For a long time I didn’t know that. I let everybody tell me, I let Wayne tell me, You’re no good, you’re a whore, you’re stupid, you’re never going to get off drugs. I thought it was my own voice telling me those things, but it wasn’t. It was his, it was theirs. And I don’t have to listen to it anymore.”

  It had been so long since I’d had anybody to hold me, so long since I had been able to admit that I needed any kind of help at all. I stopped thinking that I was the one who was older, that I was supposed to be protecting her. I held her. I let her hold me, and cried myself out.

  Afterwards we had dinner and she ate all her salad. Later we made popcorn and played a game of Scrabble. Ernesto sat in Trish’s lap; he purred like he could never get enough.

  41

  THE NEXT DAY AT work I told June, “Okay, I’m through acting like a crushed grape and you don’t have to treat me like that anymore either. Let’s talk about what you felt.”

  “Guilty,” she said. “That I’d left you alone, that I hadn’t gotten back sooner. I could have killed that motherfucker. I would have killed him, too, if the cops hadn’t been there.”

  “Do you think it could have happened to you?” I expected her to say no. She was, after all, stronger than me, tougher; she would have grabbed the ski pole away from him and stabbed him in the eye before he could have tied her up.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. It keeps going through my head over and over, ‘It could have been me, I’m so glad it wasn’t me…’ I used to think rape was something that happened to stupid people.
But you’re not stupid, no more stupid than me anyway. We never should have gone up there alone.”

  “Trish would have been dead then.”

  “I know. I know.”

  We were silent, each of us struggling to come to some acceptance of what had happened, looking for a way to move forward.

  “Are you going skydiving this weekend?” I suddenly asked.

  “If the weather’s good… Why? You want to come along?”

  “Yeah, I do.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this. “I’m thinking about jumping.”

  My body felt frozen, broken, useless. I needed to do something that would wake it up again and release it.

  It wasn’t as easy—or as hard—as simply strapping on a parachute and leaping. I had to go through a long training session with certified instructors in a classroom situation.

  They showed slides and made diagrams. They hooked me and the other students into parachutes and made us hang from the ceiling. The straps between my legs cut into my newly removed stitches and hurt like hell. Then we spent two hours learning to jump, first from a height of four feet, then from six feet. Over and over the instructor drilled us, “Land with your feet together, crouch and roll to the side.” Then we got into a little pretend airplane and practiced some more.

  They were leaving very little up to chance. No telling what you’d remember once you got up in the air. We had parachutes on our backs that opened automatically and parachutes on our chests that we could pull with an emergency tab. We even had small radios strapped to us, so they could guide us through the jump and tell us where to land. We were supposed to aim for a gravel pit that had arrows around it. We were not supposed to land in the motel swimming pool, the trees or, god forbid, the freeway.

  June went up with me. The airplane seemed even smaller and more fragile than before, angling up sharply, incredibly noisy. My stomach felt like a deflated, quivering balloon and every nerve resisted what I was about to do.

  I thought about Penny coming home in a week and how glad I’d be to see her, about being an aunt, about Hadley and what might happen between us. I thought about what I’d learned from Trish, and from Beth and Janis. I even thought about Carole and how in a funny way we were friends, after all. Anything to stop from thinking about how high up we were and how there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to hold me between heaven and earth.

  “Ready, Pam? You’re first.” June squeezed my arm and her brown eyes were full of excitement and compassion. I love you, babe. I’m proud of you. See you on the ground.”

  I hung on to the wing strut a moment and then let go. I fell straight down, leaving my heart somewhere above me, fluttering out like the tiny lead parachute.

  One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand… The main parachute opened with a soft jerk and suddenly everything was very quiet and I could see. I was caught, floating, safe. Safe, like Penny had said.

  I was flying, free and easy, and the earth looked very beautiful from here.

  Acknowledgments

  MANY PEOPLE HELPED ME in the research and writing of this novel. In particular I’d like to thank Guila Muir for hanging out with me on the streets of Seattle; Verna Wells, intrepid skydiver; Hylah Jacques for a night on the Sea-Tac Strip and valuable editorial comments; Debra Boyer for her information and insight; Evelyn C. White for much useful criticism; and Rachel da Silva, who notices the small things. Judith Barrington and Ruth Gundle provided a home away from home in Portland and many important contacts; Ruth in particular gave me all the legal advice I wanted—and more. Many social workers, activists and prostitutes gave generously of their time and experience. I was also very much helped by Liv Finstad and Cecilie Høsigaard in Norway and by their groundbreaking research on juvenile prostitution in their book Bakgater (Back Streets). I would especially like to thank Jen Green of the Women’s Press in London and Faith Cordon at Seal Press for editorial support and advice that made all the difference.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Pam Nilsen Mysteries

  Acknowledgements

  THIS NOVEL WAS WRITTEN in England, where I benefited from discussions with British feminists as well as from a new perspective on the American porn wars. I’d especially like to thank Sue O’Sullivan and Linda Semple for reading the manuscript; Jen Green, Leslie Winegrad and Barbara Gunnell for material and emotional support; and Ann Coppel for technical information. Abundant thanks to Faith Conlon, the best editor and friend a feminist crime writer could hope for.

  “But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.”

  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

  1

  WHEN PENNY AND I were eight years old she went through a wedding phase. She used to like to get dressed up in some old lace curtains and to pretend she was getting married. Not to anyone in particular, just married.

  I was supposed to hold up the train and catch the flowers afterwards.

  Twenty-two years later Penny was doing it in earnest. If this had been one of those novels we used to read or one of the stories Penny used to tell me, then I should have been the happiest girl on earth now—my twin sister was getting married to the man she loved and I was the bridesmaid.

  Of course, some things weren’t quite the way we might have imagined them. Instead of a white lace dress and gossamer veil Penny was wearing an embroidered blouse and a handwoven skirt from Guatemala, and instead of tossing me a bouquet after the ceremony she handed me her baby, so she could kiss the groom.

  I kissed the groom too—after all, he’d been my lover once for nearly two years—and Penny kissed my partner (“On the mouth!” Hadley said later), then I kissed Penny and handed baby Antonia back to her, and we all trooped out of the house into the garden for the reception.

  It was late September. The leaves of the horse chestnut trees were the color of marigolds. The vegetable garden hadn’t been turned over yet, and there were still squash vines and tomato plants warming themselves in the afternoon light. Around the borders were dahlias, my mother’s dahlias, and roses in full bloom. The sky was a faint but very fresh blue and the air had that wonderful fall clarity, that is partly a fragrance of something ending.

  Hadley came up behind me and put her arms around my waist. Her hair smelled good, of fall and herb shampoo, and she was wearing a new light wool jacket that rubbed pleasantly on my bare arms.

  “Always a bridesmaid, never a groom,” she said.

  “It’s all so reactionary,” I muttered, while smiling at the arriving guests, and directing them to the happy pair. “If I were the one getting married—to you for instance—do you think all these people, all these relatives and friends of the family, would be turning up? No way.”

  “Some of them don’t seem too pleased to see that Penny has an eight-week-old baby at her breast,” Hadley noted. “I think the baby’s supposed to be a gentle swelling under the bride’s dress, so people can gossip and speculate.”

  It probably was the first time many of the guests had congratulated a bride who was breastfeeding even as she shook their hands. Ray hovered around her, ethnic in an embroidered white shirt and with his black hair brilliantined, the image of the proud husband and father. Who would have suspected this side of him even three years ago, when we’d both been experts on shared birth control? Who would have suspected, as we quarreled about the merits of diaphragm vs. condom, that today we’d be standing here, related, me the lesbian sister of his wife, him the father of my niece? We exchanged a shy glance from time to time—our anger at each other had been transmuted into an ironic and bemused sort of tenderness. Penny was the one I was mad at—for reasons I hesitated to examine too deeply.

  The afternoon
passed quickly. My lesbian friends came and were respectfully sarcastic, but I hardly had time to joke with them and hear their commiserations. I was too busy helping be the hostess at this house where Penny and I had grown up, where Penny and Ray and baby Antonia lived now. There were so many people to talk to: the Mortensens from down the street, Aunt Hilda who had come from Everett with her docile husband George, Uncle Walt from Minnesota with his wife Ingrid and their son the fourteen-year-old computer genius. There were Ray’s illustrious parents, Doctors Hiyamoto and Contrerez, who had flown in from the UNICEF station in Bangladesh. June Jasper, our long time co-worker at the print shop and Penny’s best friend, was here with her boyfriend Eddy (she didn’t think she had to get married, did she?) and her two girls Ade and Amina. There were friends from different stages of our lives—from grade school, high school, the university, from various political groups that had once taken up hours of our time—the Tenants’ Union, Crabshell Anti-Nuclear Alliance, Seattle Abortion Rights….

  There were new friends too. Zee, a Filipina who was studying filmmaking at USC and had flown up for the day. Beth and Janis, friends of mine from last winter; they’d brought Trish, who was now a junior at an alternative school and doing well. There were also new political comrades of Penny and Ray’s, people who’d gone to pick coffee beans with them in Nicaragua last January, as well as our newest worker at the printshop, Moe, and his lover, Allen.

  The garden was filled with people. “Penny looks so lovely,” said Mrs. Mortensen. “Your mother would have been so pleased.”

  I could only nod and smile and move away with the excuse of getting another tray of hors d’oeuvres from the kitchen. I was stopped halfway to the house by Beth.

  “Look over there, isn’t that Loie Marsh?” Beth gestured to a small but growing group near the porch. “What’s she doing back in town, I wonder?”