The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  I have run this section of the path so many times that I nearly have it memorized. The path meanders alongside the bayou, through a wide basin cut over all the years of its existence. I cross a bridge over a small creek that feeds the larger one, through a tunnel carved between trees, past the ferns and mosses that grow on the forest floor, the sweet damp smell of their rot seeping back into the earth. There are three bridges like this one between here and the water fountain. I convince the dog to keep running on the promise I’ll let him stop there to smell the wildflowers while I stretch my hip.

  * * *

  I run despite the aches and pains, old injuries from the thousands of miles of running since I began as a teenager. Then, as now, I would wake up before the rest of my family and tiptoe out the door. I drove my father’s blue ’68 Ford F-150 out to the lake at the edge of town and ran along the dam. There was almost never any traffic, almost never any other people. Only me—just a girl—and the lake stretching out under the fog. I didn’t have a care in the world.

  Probably the world cared more to harm me then than it does now, but I didn’t know that yet. I knew to wear reflective colors, keep my body covered, run against the direction of traffic instead of with it. Now I know that wearing a ponytail on the wrong path at the wrong time could have meant the end for a girl like me. Back then, all I knew was that I felt an agitation with the world that running helped me air out. I could stretch my legs, sing loudly, throw my arms into a cloud of gnats above my head. I could stop or skip or keep moving. I could talk to myself or simply listen. Running became a kind of church I attended, a religion between the world and me.

  I tried running on my school’s track team for a year or two, but I wasn’t particularly good at any of the events. I can’t make my body move fast enough to be a sprinter, and at that time I didn’t yet have the stamina to go long distances either. My coach—a man, it should be said—couldn’t figure out what to do with me on the team. He put me in hurdle events, on relays, sent me to the weight room. I wasn’t good at anything, he told me. At practice one day I stepped in a hole on the track by mistake and twisted my knee; there was a surgery, rehabilitation. I didn’t compete on the team after that. In truth, the injury saved me. Running had never been a way for me to win something, but rather a way to simply be.

  In college I ran laps around the outdoor track after class; on the weekends, I ran through the neighborhood where I lived. When I moved in with the man who would later try to kill me, I ran in long circles—away from the apartment we shared toward the shops downtown, where people sat at little tables together drinking coffee or reading books—and back again, and all the while I imagined the life I could have if only I were brave enough to leave him. I ran no matter the weather—through the snow, and the falling leaves, and the driving rain—because he didn’t watch me, didn’t follow me, had no idea where I was. He believed I belonged to him—my body, my words, my every action and gesture and thought. Running, I knew I belonged only to myself.

  After I left him, after he tried but failed to kill me, I didn’t run for years. I was too afraid. I adopted the dog maybe for this reason, because eventually I felt that old agitation. I wanted to be brave enough to run again and felt I needed company, or protection. I needed a very large dog with very sharp teeth. I needed to cover myself in tattoos. And maybe to carry a hammer.

  * * *

  All these years later, I run because sometimes I am still afraid and I am trying not to be. The dog is as alert as I am, pointing his hearing in the direction of every sound: that pounding is only the echo of my shoes; that rustling is only a rabbit diving under the leaves—as afraid of the very large dog appearing out of nowhere as I feel of whatever danger might wait in the darkness for me.

  I have learned during all these years of being afraid that fear has a force and momentum all its own. First, I see a shadow in some dark corner—nothing more than a memory, maybe—and then the shadow becomes electric and every neuron fires with it, a charge that shocks the blood pumping in my chest, the air I pull into my lungs; it buzzes in the street lamps, the rippling water, every blade of grass. Even the tips of my fingers prickle with its current. I take deep breaths. I time my steps to the dog’s. We are a team, the two of us. He knows the drill. He keeps me running while my heart slows, while the shadow inside me retreats.

  It’s been decades of this now. This is the single longest and most enduring effect of having been kidnapped and raped all those years ago by a man I once loved: I am unable to live in the present. I’m always in some other time, either trying to see the danger that might evolve in the future, or trying to understand some heartbreak or accident in the past. I am too afraid, too angry. I’m too vigilant. Too worried. Too ready to catastrophize. Too quick to lose my temper and implode. And all of that work that I do to be in some other place, some other time, worrying about something terrible that just might happen, keeps me from experiencing all the joy that is all around me in the right here and now.

  * * *

  Lately, I have found myself running longer and longer distances, have found it harder to air the agitation out. It started when the Republican candidate for president admitted to being a serial sexual assailant on the Access Hollywood tape. I had mostly tried to avoid listening to him until that point, since he reminds me in so many ways of that man I used to love, the one who believed even my happiness belonged to only him. Suddenly I was a hunted animal all over again, crouching, slinking, trying to remain alive and unseen. That none of this disqualified the candidate only gave speed and endurance to all the things I had been trying for so long to outrun.

  The day after the election, after it was clear he’d won, I woke even earlier than usual from a nightmare in which my house was falling apart, my family was missing, everything I loved was either ruined or gone. It wasn’t safe to go outside and look for them. This dream came after months of nightmares: dreams where every building I entered had no floor, nothing to stand on; dreams where everyone walked around with guns in both hands, aiming. I went for a run that morning, hoping to run myself empty of that feeling, or to erase it, like a stain I could wash out if I just scrubbed hard enough, like a bad meal I could purge in a single furious fit and then be done.

  But that’s not how grief works. Later that morning, over breakfast, I told my kids who had won the election. They were shocked and dismayed and deeply sad, as I was. As all our friends were. They wanted to know how this could happen, what we do now. I told them that now, as before, we have to be kind—so, so kind to one another—we have to stick together, to take care of our community, and to protect our friends. “Yesterday, and all the days before that, it was our job to stand up to bullies,” I said. “That is still true today, especially true today, even if that job seems so much harder now.” It means we will have to be very strong, and very brave. “But more than anything else,” I said, “we have to love one another fiercely—so, so fiercely.” They asked why I was crying, and I said it is because I am so, so angry.

  I called it anger because they don’t know about rage and would be frightened if they did. After they left for school and I was home alone, I wanted to let that rage consume me. I wanted to rage at anyone who voted for that racist, sexist, xenophobic demagogue, who voted third party because they didn’t like what they perceived to be two equally bad choices, who didn’t vote at all. The candidate wasn’t the only person who won, it seemed—also all of the men who are like him in their own toxic ways, even the man I used to love. I had an appointment for a mammogram that day and glared at all the white women in the waiting room in their fresh white robes. Which one of you did this to us? I thought. I was contemplating the various ways I could make them suffer when I realized I was beginning to feel something I hadn’t before. Oh, I thought, so this is what hate feels like.

  * * *

  Hate is “a hideous ecstasy,” Orwell once wrote, and it can turn anyone, myself included, into “a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” I don’t hate anyone—not even tha
t man who became president, not even the man I used to love. I refuse to, because I meant what I said to my children about loving fiercely. I took them with me to cast my vote in that election out of a fierce love: for this country, for all of its people, for our planet. We all pushed the button together and called it history. On the day after the inauguration, I marched in Washington out of a fierce love for the millions of women who planned to gather there: my sisters, my friends, women I knew and those I hadn’t met until then. My family came along, marched out of a fierce love for me. It was a moment to take our rage outside, give it oxygen, and let it burn off clean. It seemed, at the time, like a consolation—or if not consolation, a transformation. A woman’s rage can transform many things, including herself.

  I’ve held on to my rage for precisely that reason. I’ve gathered it, decades of it. I carry so much rage with me that I grind my teeth at night, and grind them all throughout the day. I am careful not to become a woman who is “hysterical,” “militant,” “shrill,” “unhinged”; I try to “control” myself because my rage is too much, and the too-muchness would make my friends and enemies uncomfortable in nearly equal measure. But sometimes the rage is so large that nothing else can live alongside it, and because everything I’ve been taught to do with rage means harming myself or another person, I run. Now fifteen miles. Now twenty.

  * * *

  Rage has transformed me from a woman who runs away, to one who runs toward, who runs against and despite, who runs through. Running harms no one—takes only time and energy. I run because running requires that I be present wherever I actually am: in my legs, which carry me; in my hip, which I injured during a recent fall; in my arms, where the sweat is dripping from my elbows; in my chest, where my heart pumps dark red blood out to my fingers and back again; in my feet, which pound the dark streets and the path through the park, up hills and over bridges through trees. Running turns me into a body that can breathe, that can arrive here, in precisely this moment, despite sometimes paralyzing fear, despite everything.

  And then there’s this: each morning I run through the darkness for miles. I cannot escape all the terrible news I’ve heard or seen the day before, but the thoughts arrive and pass over me like waves. I cannot hold on to them, do not even try. I run over the first bridge, the second, the third, through a gap in the trees, and then enter the field and look up to see the sunrise greet me. Every morning! Beauty finds me despite everything, and in a thousand different ways every morning.

  And suddenly I can see it: how things seem to be coming together instead of falling apart. My body is stronger than it used to be, I can run farther than I used to, I take chances that I wouldn’t have before. I am here, alone, in the darkness, for instance, and I do not feel small and scared, but free and capable and strong. I feel something begin to open—that shut place I carry—and what stampedes inside me is a feeling of being unrestrained, unencumbered, unlimited. It is a joy that has no bottom and no top; it shines inside my body, faster, stronger, more brilliant than ever before. Running makes a tiny space for joy to enter my life, and I find my own justice in that.

  * * *

  Joy comes in the morning, or so the familiar saying goes. In the morning I run with the dog. I run with my neighbor. I run with two friends. I finished a half-marathon with blood on my knees and a smile on my face, another with tears streaming down my cheeks. In a few weeks I’ll run a full marathon. Twenty-six miles. I can see it already: how I cross over the finish line with my hands in the air. Everyone watches, but no one I know. They cheer, these strangers; they can’t possibly know how this story began, but they rejoice with me to see how it ends.

  “The happiest person in the world is one who learns lessons of worship from nature,” Emerson wrote. Running allows me to recognize the way that beauty sometimes arrives in my life almost entirely unbidden, like the clouds that tower in the air, tumbling upward, higher than mountains; like how the sky grows lighter as black gives way to indigo, to blue and purple, to red and orange near the horizon; like how a layer of mist hangs only feet above the field even as it condenses and gathers on the leaves as tiny gemstones glinting in the rising sun; like the sunrise. Sometimes I stop running to watch the sunrise. I watch in a kind of rapt wonder that never gets old—the play of light on our atmosphere that turns the sky all red and gold except for the darkness receding behind me.

  Someone once told me that his grandmother told him that an injustice is anything that gets between a person and their joy. I don’t know if that covers all of what an injustice is, but I like the idea that justice is anything that makes way for joy, that makes the condition of joy a possibility again.

  * * *

  Can this be what justice is? I think it can be, at least for me. I think justice means that I work together with others for our mutual joy. It means rejoicing in the joy of another, fostering the lives and good fortune of everyone, not only the people we consider “our own.” Justice means we value the lives of everyone equally, and protect and support them equally. It means we recognize and protect what is radical and unique about every single person—even those who cannot return this recognition. Justice means that children are allowed to be children, and then to enter adulthood with safe passage, at their own pace, in their own way. Justice means we pass responsibility for keeping peace from one generation to another. That we return our children from war and teach them to put down their guns; it means we never pick them up again, not ever. It means we teach everyone, from birth, that they are capable of nurturing, of healing, of compassion, of love. Justice means we repair instead of repeat. Justice is the permission I give myself to go out running, to trust my own strength and fortitude to fight off danger; or better yet, to trust that no danger will befall me at all. Justice is what makes it possible for me to be sitting on the kitchen floor with my children, who are laughing and telling each other silly jokes, and to stay right here in this moment, laughing also. This is a new moment in my life, a new place to simply be; it didn’t exist before and I couldn’t have made it alone. Justice means everyone has a place like this—places we make together, for one another, for us all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are many people whose advice, counsel, and encouragement were essential to the writing of these essays. My dear friends Casey Fleming, Joshua Rivkin, and Cameron Dezen Hammond, for starters, were generous enough to read portions of this book when it was not yet ready to show the rest of the world. Nick Flynn, Melissa Febos, Amber Dermont, Paul Otremba, and Sarah Sentilles listened to me talk through some of the thinking here, even as it was becoming the thinking here. I am grateful to the Fine Arts Work Center, especially Kelle Groom, for the several opportunities I have had to test this work on an audience, and to Kathryn Conrad and Anna Neill at the University of Kansas for the invitation to articulate my thoughts on the difficulty of speaking about sexual assault at a time when their own institution was under investigation for Title IX violations. I am indebted to my former high school classmate Melissa Flamson for drawing my attention to the story of a burning nuclear landfill in St. Louis; to Kay Drey, Faisal Khan, Ed Smith, Alison Carrick, Curtis Carey, Mary Peterson, Brad Vance, and Ben Washburn, who shared with me their experience, expertise, and professional opinion relating to this slow-motion disaster, and to the Just Moms—Dawn Chapman, Karen Nickel, Robbin Dailey, and Debi Disser—whose tireless advocacy on behalf of their families and their communities should inspire us all to demand more and do more for the community we all share. Ladies, I continue to hold you in my thoughts as you work to right these wrongs.

  I am grateful to the editors of Tin House, Dame, and Guernica for providing a home to earlier versions of several of the essays from this book, and more than this, I am grateful that in a cultural moment where nearly every headline portends Armageddon, where fearmongering or thinly veiled propaganda is what increasingly passes for information, these safe harbors continue to offer writers the opportunity to do what seems like increasingly dangerous work these days: th
inking about injustice in public, speaking truth to power, and fostering a sense of shared understanding with our fellow human beings.

  I am deeply grateful to my agent, Ethan Bassoff, who is quite possibly an entirely perfect reader, advocate, and friend; to Liese Mayer, for seeing the potential of this book to be what it has become; and to Kathy Belden, my editor at Scribner, who has shepherded this writing, and in some cases my thinking before there was writing, with precision, generosity, and grace. I am indebted to you, truly. Thank you also to Rosie Mahorter, Ashley Gilliam, Kara Watson, Brian Belfiglio, and the entire Scribner team for your dedication to bringing this book into the world with me.

  Thank you to my running partners, Shiro Zavahir Jaleel-Khan and Kathy Nguyen, for sticking with me (and my tricky hip) for all the very many miles, for talking me through difficult periods in my thinking and my running, and for coming back for me when I felt too tired to go on. Sharing the path with you has taught me many lessons that I will carry for many years to come.

  Thank you also to the sisters of my heart, Paola Tello and Kelly Secovnie, for loving me so unconditionally all these many years—for laughing at the humor in my mistakes, for offering wisdom in my confusion, for listening to me talk about the issues central to this book even while I searched for language. I love you so damn much.

  Thank you to my husband and partner in life, for always hearing me out, for knowing my process often better than I know it myself, for believing that I am capable of more than I think I actually am, and for supporting me in a thousand different ways while I manifest these as yet unrealized capabilities into being. And finally, thank you, always and forever, to our children, for teaching me each day of our lives what a flawed and beautiful place this world can be.