The only time he’s talked to the girl since returning to Venezuela, he says, is when she called to beg his forgiveness. He says the girl told him at the time that she wanted to withdraw the charges but was afraid to because the authorities would punish her for giving false testimony.
The gringos, he says, solicited an extradition for an American. But I’m Venezuelan. The court records from the trial say this is exactly why they release him and deny the extradition. The Venezuelan government, the court rules, has the responsibility to protect its citizens.
I know the case will never come to trial. The FBI and Interpol will never catch him outside Venezuela’s borders. And the Venezuelan government will never hand one of its citizens over to another nation’s authorities.
And for that I am grateful.
It spares me a certain set of uncomfortable choices: whether or not to travel to the trial with my children, how much and when to explain, whether or not to meet his gaze across the courtroom, or to confront him in the hallway, or in his cell in the courthouse, or in the shuffle before they drag him ceremoniously away. Where would I begin? Thirteen years after the kidnapping, the possibility of sitting in the same room with him seems so perilous: a precipice beyond which I can’t see. I’m spared the shame of the witness stand, of having to say out loud what exactly happened in the back bedroom of the basement apartment. Could I speak those words? I’m spared the sentence he might serve, which would begin and end. And then he would walk free.
I haven’t seen the official case file at the offices of the county prosecuting attorney. Because the case is still active and open, The Lead Investigator says he can’t copy and send me the file, but he’ll let me see it anytime I want. He doesn’t see any reason I couldn’t visit the evidence room, where they’ve stored the snakeskin-print shirt I was wearing the day of the kidnapping, and my favorite jeans—the ones with a hole in the right knee, and the bracelet with the carnelian stone Mom bought off QVC for my twenty-first birthday, and the plastic sheet he used to cover the mattress on the floor, and the down duvet he brought home from Denmark, and his handwritten notes, and the used tampon he pulled from my body, and the tissue smeared with my blood that police found on the floor. They still have the rifle.
I can go see it anytime I want, The Lead Investigator says.
But I won’t go, not ever. Because I already know what it looks like, how it smells. I already know the sound each time the trigger is pulled.
Click.
Click.
Click.
[eleven]
THE DREAM GOES like this: I am in a mall, or the post office, or the supermarket, or the bank with my two children. People mill around us, each face like every other face. I am running late, or I am too early to meet a friend for lunch, or I am trying to retrieve the cell phone ringing in my diaper bag. I see him approaching at first only out of the corner of my eye—intent, purposeful, his jaw set crookedly, his snarling upper lip—and my stomach transforms from a regular stomach into a black-hole stomach that begins to swallow me, and all of dream-time, which moves more slowly anyway. In some dreams I cry out in a wet, drawn-out way—a baby deer bleeding to death in my throat. In other dreams I beg for help from the nearest stranger. I try to ask the bank teller to call the police but my mouth is full of feathers. Sometimes I call the police myself. They never come in time. I ask a kind-looking woman to pretend my children are her own. Keep them safe, I croak. The kind-looking woman, my daughter, my infant son—he will kill them all and make me watch. In the end, he smirks a little, and even the dream-time stops.
On my very worst days I can’t handle my children touching me. I can’t handle seeing them or hearing their voices asking me for things. They’re always asking for things. My daughter asks for a glass of milk, and when I pour it for her, hand her the cup, she slams her hands down on the counter and demands juice. It’s not really about the milk or the juice. My son climbs on the dining table, or clings, screaming, to my legs while I’m making dinner. It’s not food or milk or a nap he wants.
I don’t know how to give him what he wants.
I don’t want to give him what he wants.
As I slap the tiny hand pulling up the hem of my skirt—No!—I can’t stop myself. I’m already fleeing from this moment to another, closing all the doors behind me as I go.
At dinner, weeks after our honeymoon in Belize, we tell our friends about the results of the pregnancy test, and everyone sits without speaking, mouths hanging open, before one friend begins clapping very slowly, as if this were the climactic scene in an Afterschool Special. Our friends say Oh, that’s wonderful, just wonderful. But then soon they are no longer calling us for karaoke night or to come over for dinners in the backyard or to meet them at the bar after teaching or for breakfast at the coffee shop.
I stop smoking the day I learn I am pregnant, and I stop drinking and taking my medication. At first the hardest part is withdrawal: some parts of my brain waking, misfiring, shooting sparks in every direction; other parts drifting slowly off to sleep. I can’t remember my students’ names anymore and begin calling them all “Bob.” Can anyone share thoughts about how Offred subverts patriarchal control . . . Bob? Bob? I can’t write poems anymore, not without a drink, not without staying up until two in the morning, not without a lit cigarette in my hand. Then the hardest part is the puking. How, once again, six years after the kidnapping, I am always puking.
One afternoon I can’t get out of bed. My Husband rubs my back while I sob hysterically. He asks, What’s wrong? What’s wrong? The truth is: I can’t stand waiting for it anymore. I wish the other shoe would drop already, I say. He does not call me hormonal because he knows better. Instead he asks, What if this is the other shoe?
When summer comes, My Husband and I buy a video camera and drive all morning and afternoon and evening, from Texas to the town with only three stoplights, thinking we’ll stay for a long visit. We’ll film a documentary or research my genealogy or practice time-lapse photography. We spend hours and hours and hours filming interviews with my grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles, and in the process I learn that my mother grew up very very poor, and that my father grew up working very very hard, and suddenly their life together makes a kind of sense. My father tells me that when his own father died of metastatic melanoma six weeks after I was born, he lost his best friend in the world. It’s a grief that brings him to tears, twenty-eight years later. My mother tells me about her breast cancer, and how she woke up from surgery and went into convulsions when she felt the pain, and again when the doctor removed the bandages. She tells me how she was lucky to survive. It was the aggressive kind. It wouldn’t have taken any time and then she is crying very hard, and squeezing my hand very tightly, and asking me to forgive her. I’m so sorry, Lacy. She is looking intently into my eyes, mascara running from behind her glasses, and saying that if there is one thing I absolutely must teach my child it is how to love. I will do better, she says, squeezing my hand. I swear I am trying to be better.
Sometimes I dream we are having a civilized conversation. I am writing at my favorite coffee shop, or at an outdoor café, or I am turning the pages of a magazine under an umbrella on the beach. I hear a voice say, I thought that was you, and he sits down. In this dream he talks and talks, waving a hand in his usual way. He’s moved on, he says. He’s moved far far away. It’s such a reassuring thing to hear. I almost forget to feel afraid.
It’s two in the morning and I’m shaking. My Husband is the only person in the hospital room and I have no words. I’m trying to communicate to him that I want to escape. I want him to help me crawl out of my skin. Help me. Up. Out. Help. Out.
The anesthesiologist is on his way. He’s taking his sweet time. Maybe he is listening to headphones and nodding to the nurses in the hall. How you doin’. I want to tear my face off. I want to use My Husband as a footstool, to climb him and hang from the ceiling, which seems like a safer place to ride this out than in the bed.
Su
ddenly: a rupture. A little relief from the pressure. But just when I start panting and clawing and growling, the anesthesiologist comes sauntering in. He barks at me: Sit up. Lean over. Hold still. One gloved hand holds my shoulder—latex smell, condom smell—the other pushes a needle into my back.
The body goes thrashing. The father of my child, gray-faced and sweating, a deer caught in headlights. He smiles a polite smile. The body breathes and bears down. Breathes and bears down. The body opens its mouth and a sound flies out. One of the nurses pushes the code-blue button on the wall—click—and while I am screaming and bearing down hard enough to leave myself with two black eyes, every nurse and doctor on the floor rushes the room. A nurse mounts the bed, climbs on top of me, and pushes downward on my belly with the heels of both hands until our daughter tears through me. One doctor cuts the cord without a word, and another carries her body away.
The mind listens for the cough, the wail, the first undrowning breath. But there is only silence. Only the stretch of time. Not even all these arms can hold it in.
I open my eyes. My Husband stands motionless, staring out the door. People I’ve never seen before tell me I’ve done a great job.
Where is my baby?
The doctor explains in a calm voice that the baby is fine. He says the words shoulder dystocia and intensive care. I don’t understand him. Where is my baby? I’m trying to climb out of the bed to find the baby I am certain is dead. The nurses hold me down, tell me to stay put. Where is my baby? The doctor says they are checking her to make sure everything is fine. She is fine. I don’t believe him. Is she dead? Did she die? The baby is fine, he says. He is smiling and washing his hands. A nurse wipes between my legs, still in the stirrups, with a rough towel, swabs me with iodine, begins stitching me back together. Where is my baby? I am shaking—the pain and terror passing through me in waves. My Husband smoothes back my hair, runs his thumbs across my cheeks, wet with sweat and tears. He smiles a reassuring smile. The doctor says everything is fine.
I am allowed a drink of water. I close my eyes and rest my head on the pillow. While the nurse stitches the wound that is gaping and open, I am trying to stitch the mind back into the body. The door opens, and a nurse enters, carrying something in her arms. She places it beside me in the bed: the baby, bruised and breathing.
In the story I have told myself about how this would go, about how the baby will make everything better, I know this child instantly; I see her face and the past falls away. Life starts over at this moment, with this child I have always known.
But now that I am looking into her face, I don’t feel anything at all.
It’s morning, seven years after the kidnapping, and I’m closing the door to her room for the third time today, afraid to let it catch. Sleep while the baby sleeps, that’s what everyone tells me. As if I’ve never heard that before. As if it’s that simple. My daughter has never been a good sleeper, and today she’s at her worst. I need sleep more than I need to finish grading my students’ writing assignments, more than I need to finish my dissertation, or eat breakfast, or shower, or get dressed. But if I move from where I am standing with this doorknob in my hand she might wake up and hours might pass before she sleeps again. Maybe I could sleep standing this way: frozen for a long, long time.
I let go of the knob—click—she coughs, stirs, howls. White-hot sparks shoot through each exhausted limb, my hands contract into fists. Maybe I could leave her here. Take the keys and trudge through the snow to sleep in the car at the end of the driveway, far from the reach of sound or care. I don’t care. I could climb to the roof’s edge and fall headfirst. No child has ever died of crying. The ladder hangs from the far wall of the garage.
I lift her shrieking body from the crib and lay her down on the terry-cloth changing pad. I watch myself from the safe distance: wrestling the naked child out of and back into her clothes, brushing a slice of greasy hair out of my face, the pajamas hanging dankly from my shoulders and hips. I observe her. I observe myself. I prop her body against my chest, her head lolling forward against my neck. Her breath like milk. She bawls into that nook as we shuffle toward the window.
Outside, snow blankets the full reach of each tree’s branches, the minivan in my neighbors’ driveway, the shut mouth of their black iron mailbox, our gutterless street. A single brown bird shoots from the hedge. With my free hand, I open the window. The cold air blows in. Her cries multiply; I shut out the sound. Her face purples, ajar. I feel nothing as her velvet crown slides into the crook of my elbow, rooting for me. Always rooting. She bites once, hard, as we lean into the rocking chair’s curve, wedged between this moment and another.
Dad tells only one story about me, his middle child, a toddler, found pecking the buttons on the television console with a fat, sticky finger. He scolds me, tells me to stop. I ignore him, keep pushing the buttons, switching the channel each time. He raises his voice, and I ignore that, too. He smacks my outstretched hand. Hard, he says. But you don’t cry or wince or turn away. You set your jaw, raise your hand, keep pushing that button.
Mom reminds me how, when I was a teenager and arguing with her every day, she started putting this hex on me: When you grow up and have children I hope one of them is exactly like you.
I think now that maybe that hex came through: If I tell my daughter to stop jumping on the bed, she climbs onto the dresser. If I ask her to behave while I take an important call, she throws a tantrum before drawing a beard on her face with a red permanent marker. If I tell her to pick up her toys in the kitchen, she empties a box of cereal on the floor. I might put her in time out, or yell until I’m blue in the face. She does not cry or wince or turn away.
It makes me furious. I want her to behave, even just a little. But she fights me about which shoes to wear, which bowl to use for cereal. She fights me about which clothes she’ll wear and ruin. She fights me about the punishment she gets for fighting me. She can’t win these arguments, because no matter how big and loud and strong she gets, I can always get bigger, louder, stronger. I want her to be a little afraid of me. It’s the only way to break her, I think. This defiant, fearless child. And it’s all I want right now: to break her. Just a little.
But then we are driving to the house where my daughter attends preschool; she is thrashing in her car seat, screaming at the top of her lungs. The body takes a breath, turns up the radio. My daughter spits milk in a wide stream on the upholstery of my first-ever brand-new car and pushes Goldfish crackers irretrievably into the horizontal crevice between the back passenger window and the door. The body takes a breath, adjusts the rearview mirror. But when my daughter starts kicking the back of my elbow with the pointy toe of her pink cowboy boot, I snap, and lean into the backseat of the car and smack her knee. Hard. Hard enough that she grows silent and stares out the window with giant tears rolling down her cheeks. I drag her and her tiny little backpack into the preschool house. The teacher greets us at the door. Before my daughter has taken off her tiny little coat I’m driving away in the car.
I don’t listen to the radio. I don’t talk to myself or roll down the windows. I try to relax in the silence of my solitary body, but all I can think about is the force of my hand coming down on her knee. I hit her, hard. For nothing at all. For being nearly three. I hit her because she doesn’t know how to control herself, and I don’t know how to let go.
I know how to tighten the cold hard fist of my heart.
I don’t remember how to open it.
The small space of my car closes around me. The air grows hot and stale, and I can’t breathe it in. My back sweats; my heart races. And just as I’m about to let the panic wash over me, I start screaming. It’s not a scream that comes from my throat, or from my lungs, but a scream that comes from the shut place I carry inside me, a scream that could swell and swell without end. It’s made of equal parts terror and rage, multiplied and multiplied by the silence of all these years.
By the time I get to work, I’ve composed myself again. I’ve cleaned t
he streaked mascara off my face and reapplied my lipstick. I don’t tell my colleagues what has happened in the car: not about smacking my daughter’s leg, not about the screaming. I teach a class. I meet with students. I eat lunch at my desk.
At the end of the day, I drive back to the preschool house to pick up my daughter. When I knock on the door, I can see she’s just inside, waving to me, her mouth stretched open in a crooked, gap-toothed smile, her arms open and reaching toward me, her eyes open and shining with joy. The door opens and she throws herself into my arms. She holds nothing back.
With her head against my shoulder, the weight of her tiny body against my chest, I hold her tight and don’t let go. I want nothing to break her. Not even me. Not ever. Not even a little.
In one dream I’m in a remote building: a garage or a barn or a basement. A place with corrugated metal walls and a very high ceiling. A shaft of light cuts through the rafters but has no source that I can see. I sit in a chair, unrestrained, watching as he feeds severed human forearms into a wood chipper. Afterward, he places a severed thigh on a table in front of me and begins to dissect it, slicing open the skin with a wheel-knife, pulling back the muscles and tendons with a pair of pliers and a fork. He has his back to me the whole time, so that I can see only the line of his body under his clothes, the cut of his hair, the faintest sliver of his cheek. Suddenly there’s a knock at the door. We both turn toward the sound; he goes to answer it. He turns and leads a long line of people I barely know into the room: the teacher at my daughter’s preschool, my dentist, the barista at my favorite coffee shop. I know what’s coming before it comes. I do not cry out or try to tell him to stop.
The Other Side Page 9