Riverine

by Angela Palm

  When he exited the truck to retrieve the pizza, I pictured him sitting on his bed in the dark, mindlessly pulling eyelashes out, his blue-green eyes farther away than Neptune.

  The truth is that Mike and I probably would have broken up if he hadn’t pitied me. We had both moved into the apartment building, where we met, for different reasons. I had hardly any money despite working two jobs, one low-level government job and one as a barista, but had wanted to live in downtown Indianapolis anyway. He had no money because he was still paying rent on another apartment he had lived in with his ex-girlfriend—he was that generous. He had never wanted to live in Indiana, and only moved there to take his job. He wanted to leave the state as soon as possible. The building, historic and with decent views of the city, had a mixed tenancy. There were students, a few young couples, middle-aged and elderly men and women who lived alone. The neighborhood was rough, though not unlivable, but I chalked that up to life in the city.

  Two years after I moved in, though, I learned about Indiana’s online sex offender registry, which was state-of-the-art for its time—replete with details of people’s criminal backgrounds, their photos, their addresses and places of employment. I immediately searched my neighborhood, and no less than sixty hits popped up within a one-block radius of my address. When I widened my search to a half-mile radius, there were over one hundred. My building, as it turned out, neighbored a halfway house for sex offenders who had recently been released from prison, and several others lived in my building. Worse, I had moved from the fourth floor to the garden floor because it was even cheaper.

  I had never been afraid of the city. My car had been broken into three times in three years, and I was resilient. I would call the cops, who would write it up because they had to but would inevitably tell me, “Don’t expect to get any of your stuff back.” I would shrug and call the glass company. A standard $140 repair. When I’d lived on the fourth floor, I often curled up in my balcony window with my cat and a notebook, comfortably watching drug deals on the sidewalk below as I penned bad poetry about city life: the catcalling men, the public debauchery, the homeless, the unexpected kindnesses, the insane beauty of it all. But the long list of ex-rapists, some of them with multiple offenses, paralyzed me. I began to fear coming home at dark and being alone, which only made me stay out longer to avoid returning to the building, spend more money, have one more drink, and, before Mike, stay over with men when I didn’t even want to, pushing further into my own danger zones.

  I memorized the faces of the men on the registry, memorized their crimes, their scars, their tattoos—all of which were documented in their individual registries. There were three main categories: Sexually Violent Predator, Sex Offender, and Offender against Children. I focused my memorization efforts on the first. Face, Name, Race, Convicted of. Scar on L eyebrow, Tattoo on Upper L Arm (“HONESTY”), Piercing on Face (EYEBROW), Piercing on Tongue (ONE PIERCING), Tattoo on L Hand (4 ACES), Tattoo on R Breast (SKULL), Tattoo on R Breast (BOXING GLOVES), Tattoo on Neck (“SALINA”).

  Shortly after I began noticing the people I was crossing paths with regularly, bracing myself when I saw one of the men from the list, a man began harassing me. First he’d say hello to me in the parking lot. Then he’d say hello in the mail room, shuffling in with me, always a bit too near me. When he knocked on my door one afternoon, I opened it a crack. Before I could say anything, his dog, a boxer puppy, nosed its way in and disappeared into my apartment. The man threw my door open, pushed me aside, and ran after his dog. “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder as he stepped into my bedroom. I stood in the doorway, holding the door wide open as I inched into the hallway. There was no one around. “You need to leave,” I called into my apartment. “You need to get your dog out of here.” I wanted to say that if he didn’t I would call the cops, but I didn’t want to provoke him. He did leave, though, carrying his unleashed dog with him. He never mentioned why he had knocked on my door in the first place.

  When Uncle Pat had a stroke, my mother went to Michigan to visit him and clean his house while he recovered in a care facility and attempted rehabilitation. It was late winter, and feet of snow buried northern Michigan. When she opened the bed of his truck in search of Uncle Pat’s snow shovel, she found the rottweiler, Ginny, lying dead. Frozen stiff.

  We had hoped the dog was in the truck’s bed because the ground was too frozen to dig. Because Uncle Pat’s health was too poor to shovel. We had hoped the burial had been interrupted by his stroke. But we were wrong.

  “I was waiting to bury her when she thawed out,” Uncle Pat said, “so her brother and sister could say good-bye.”

  “When did she die?” my mother asked him.

  “Two months ago,” he said.

  When I talked to my mother on the phone, I asked her what she was going to do.

  “Bury the body,” she said flatly. “What else can be done?”

  “He could get on some medication. That’s what,” I said. “You do realize he intentionally froze the dog and planned to thaw her out for the ‘siblings’? And you do realize that storing a dead animal in a car is not a mentally healthy behavior?”

  She couldn’t disagree.

  In Indianapolis, I started exercising at the gym instead of jogging outside, and whenever I walked from the parking lot to the building, I popped Mace in one hand and my keys in the other, positioned between my knuckles like a knife. Jo, who had moved to Indianapolis too and also lived in the building, told me a man had put his hand on her bottom in the elevator. When I asked what she did, she replied, “Nothing. I just ignored it and walked off when it got to my floor.” I was surprised because she had had self-defense training. She had worked for years as a police dispatcher and had even attended the police academy for a while. My plan was to stab a man in the eyes or neck, depending on his height, if he attacked me or put his hands on me in the elevator, and in my mind, I watched myself do it over and over so that when it happened, I could simply react without hesitating, without the anxiety attack I knew would come over me if I wasn’t prepared.

  One morning I was studying for my first law school exam—I’d been accepted after a bumbling, unstudied stab at the LSAT—when someone knocked on the window of my apartment that faced the small garden courtyard. I yanked the blinds up to find the man whose dog had run into my apartment standing at the window with his pants down. I dropped the blinds and ran to the door to check the lock, pulled the chain to make sure it was set. I hid in my room, and by the time he started knocking, I was on the phone with a 911 operator. “There’s a man harassing me. He had his pants down at my window. He’s at my door and won’t leave,” I whispered into the phone. They told me to sit tight, that an officer would be over shortly.

  For the first minute that I waited, the man laughed as he knocked at my door, randomly calling out, “Woo! Woo!” By the time the cop arrived, he was long gone. The cop wrote it up, but since I didn’t know the man’s name—his wasn’t one of the faces I’d memorized from the registry—there wasn’t much he could do. “I’ll drive around your block for a few minutes. He won’t come back,” the cop said. But I wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t know that. The man lived either in the building or in one of the buildings next door. Our paths would inevitably continue to intersect. In a sense, I was relieved he hadn’t been caught. They wouldn’t hold someone in an overpopulated city jail for long, and if he knew I’d called the cops on him, what further harassment would that bring?

  I slowly put the incident out of my mind, but I remained on edge. I put two kitchen knives in my bedroom, one on each side of my bed, and kept a second can of Mace in my nightstand. I didn’t know what else to do. I had learned a few self-defense moves years earlier, but when I was faced with an actual threatening situation, the memory of them disappeared somewhere unreachable, leaving me incapable of any defense no matter how mentally prepared I felt.

  I stayed with Mike when he was in town, returning to my apartment for any length of time only when he was o
ut of town for work—usually a few nights a week. One of those nights, I was awakened by a noise outside my window. I saw a shadow pass by and knew I had to react to whatever was about to happen. I grabbed the knife nearest to where I lay and waited, unable to move. When I heard the living room window open—my god, had I actually left it unlocked?—I swallowed hard and forced myself to run screaming up the flight of stairs that connected the two floors of the apartment. I screamed and dialed 911, waiting for the man to come up the stairs after me. I could have run outside, but it was one in the morning and the streets where we lived weren’t a great place to be at that time either. This time I stayed on the phone with the operator until the cop arrived. I waited upstairs on the sofa as he swept the lower floor. He turned up nothing but a half-opened window.

  “You probably scared him off when you screamed,” he said. He consoled me for a few minutes, wrote up the incident, and said he would patrol the neighborhood.

  “That’s it? Aren’t you going to, like, check for fingerprints or something?”

  He politely told me there was nothing more he could do. I roped him into a few more rounds of useless questions, but none of them would make him stay much longer.

  “But I can’t stay here,” I whined to the officer as he started walking away.

  He looked at me sympathetically, but ultimately I was on my own. “Can you call a friend to come pick you up?”

  After the cop left, I walked back downstairs and locked the window. With my cell phone, I took a picture of it that I would later stare at obsessively: two big handprints on the glass that glowed almost white against the darkness outside. I dragged my pillows and comforter into the bathroom—the only room without a window—locked the door, and curled up in the bathtub. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so at four I called my friend Ameet to come get me. He lived a few minutes away. “Call when you’re here,” I said. I stared at the phone until it rang again.

  “I’m right outside your building in my car.”

  I started crying.

  “Ang, you’re fine. You’re not staying the night there. Stand up, run out the door, and get into the car.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t move,” I sobbed into the phone.

  He coached me for ten minutes, and still I couldn’t move. “I’ll come in and get you.” But when he knocked, I still couldn’t get out of the bathtub. He called me again on my cell phone.

  “You’re a really good friend,” I told him. “The best. But I can’t move.”

  “You’re giving me no choice here.”

  “Can you stay on the phone with me?” I asked.

  And he did. Until the sun came up.

  When I finally walked out of my apartment that morning, to take my Property I exam, I knew everything was going to end. I would fail the test. I would never become an attorney, and if I was honest, I didn’t really want to anyway. That was my mother’s dream, not mine. I also knew it was the last time I would go inside my apartment at night.

  Mike returned from work later that day. We sat at his kitchen table in his apartment on the sixth floor, and I told him I needed to move. I would find the money somehow, though I had already taken out the maximum loan amount to cover my current expenses and the costs of law school. He sat nearby when I called the property manager’s office to see if I could transfer my deposit and get a different apartment in one of their other buildings, but nothing was available. Mike watched me for a few minutes. “I guess you can live with me.”

  He asked me to marry him a few months later. We went to London thanks to his free flight benefits, and he proposed in front of Buckingham Palace with a well-planned speech and a huge ring. It was extravagant and, like a fairy tale, almost beyond belief. I tried not to think about whether it would have happened if he hadn’t taken me in and saved me, or if he weren’t so kind. A few days after we returned, we watched the movie Blood Diamond, and determined that it was too late now. He couldn’t sell the ring back. I would wear the (likely) dirty jewel.

  A year later, he married me even after he learned that I had loved recklessly and widely. Even after he learned that I had an uncle who had served time and indirectly threatened my life and with whom I would later ask him to share his holidays. Even after I confessed, as I always did, that I still hadn’t gotten over some boy from my childhood who had never even loved me back. And that that boy was a man in a prison and at some point, I would need to go there and see him. Mike loved me even though I was practically consumed by fear and incapable of trusting men and unwilling even to consider why. He loved me even though I had grown up in an old riverbed and had a bloodline that ran brown like its water. But where was the source? When was the water clear? When had the trouble begun? If I was going to survive my own history, I would have to find a way to drain a vein without a wound.

  PART III

  MOUNTAINS

  ITERATION

  I

  A few years ago, Mike and I discovered more proof of our aging. We were in bed, feeling weary. Time had sped up. Two babies in eighteen months was no easy feat. The world around us had shrunk, as it does with new parents. Neither of us had been able to bring ourselves to wash the Crock-Pot for over two days, and the whole house was starting to smell. It had only been two years since the first baby; the second was six months old. It hadn’t been long at all since this part of our life had taken its own form, filling the shape of two tiny people, yet it had also been an eternity. Mike asked me to feel a hard lump near his elbow, and I directed his long fingers to one on my hip bone. He shrugged. “Probably nothing.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I always dimmed the lights now—to shade the evidence of my abdomen in retreat of usability, my uterus like a deflating hot air balloon. A manifested past tense. He moved his hand to the top of my pelvic bone, where I had once been glued shut. “Can barely see it now,” he said.

  With the second baby I’d had an emergency C-section. Hours after the operation, I woke up in a room, trying and failing to remember the newborn’s tiny face. I registered Mike, asleep somewhere near me. The smell of blood, singed skin, sweat, and must filled my nose. I should have been smelling my son’s head. I had read that the top of a baby’s head gives off pheromones that drive the instincts for motherly love. But no one was smelling my baby’s head—its scent was evaporating into nothing, and my maternal instinct seemed to be going with it. When they finally rolled him in, I tried to nurse him, but his mouth was lazy. Already, his innate sense to search blindly for his mother with his mouth had waned, nature’s reflexes having been disrupted by the surgery and the hospital staff. Already, I failed him. What he managed to eat, he threw up. Again and again. I was assured by two doctors that this was normal, but I knew it was not and asked for a third. I could tell by their eyes that I was a nuisance, that they’d rather be sleeping, but what else could I do? There was nothing to pray to; there was no matriarch to whom I could defer; there were no ceremonies to perform. My grandmother had just passed away. My mother did not remember this part. The nurses were already busy with the next mother and child down the hall. My body had made it clear that it would not accept motherhood without a fight. There was only me and him, the whisper of instinct, and a stack of books that would guide me.

  Mike and I were planning a move to Vermont in order to live better, to find our best selves. Mike’s parents had barely spoken to him in fifteen years, while mine were overinvolved. We wanted space; we needed distance to find out what kind of family we would be together. We were drawn to Vermont’s promise of green and the height of the land; we would stand on top of it all and feel like we were home. It was everything we thought we were missing: topography above sea level, an outdoor lifestyle that spanned all four seasons, a progressive community that was more aligned with our values and our hopes for our children. In short, it was our ideal—geographically, philosophically, politically.

  In the house we’d bought in Indianapolis, we weren
’t living in fear of any direct physical threat. Though crime was a common occurrence and a worry, our city was not run by a drug cartel. We did not live in a communist state or in a perpetual war zone. Our dissatisfaction was relative. We knew that. The choice to leave was a privilege afforded to us by our flexible employment. As a pilot, Mike could live anywhere. And I did my editing and writing work from home. We were motivated by our fear of becoming our parents and of being a midwestern suburban family—the idea like a heavy cape that once donned would never be shed. We feared our children growing up slightly “backward,” as we had, and yet we missed the countryside. In Burlington, there were all the cultural and social benefits of a small city with all the beloved features of a rural life. It was positioned between a lake and mountains. We believed that a new location, the ideal place, could change us. Or, at least, allow us to be ourselves in a way that we could not achieve where we were.

  I had been increasingly reluctant to set foot in my hometown, to make the two-hour drive alone with a baby and a one-year-old in tow. Mike was gone for days at a time, and I wasn’t cut out for solo parenting. I was desperate for help, but there were a hundred reasons I struggled with going home—nothing ever changed, there was nothing to do, and I slipped right back into the subordinate role that I detested, required to play the part of the accepting daughter who kept her mouth shut when she didn’t like something she saw or heard. I couldn’t stand not feeling like an adult around my own children. I was in charge now, and being home threatened my control. I didn’t like who I was in that town, and there were too many ghosts there for me. And now I had my kids to think of. A racist comment, a homophobic suggestion impressed upon my children by my father or anyone else, a suppression of their natural talents or interests, and I would snap.