“Mahtob, where are you?” Her words were clipped, breathless. I knew that tone of voice. She was frantic.
“I’m home. I just got back from class. I had my phone turned off until just now.” Was she buying my calmness?
“I don’t want to worry you, but . . .”
This was not good.
“Your dad has found us. I answered the phone at home today, and it was him. He asked for you.”
There it was. My single greatest fear was now my reality.
Since childhood, the words your dad had angered me. He wasn’t anything to anyone else in my family. People didn’t say to Mom, “your ex-husband.” No, they said, “Mahtob’s dad.” They didn’t say to my brothers, “your ex-stepdad,” or to my grandma, “your ex-son-in-law.” It was always, “Mahtob’s dad.” He was mine, no matter how badly I didn’t want him. And no matter how badly I wanted to be my own, I was his.
“Did anyone follow you?” Mom said.
“No, I don’t think so. I paid close attention and I didn’t see anything suspicious.”
“Go check to make sure your door’s locked,” she ordered.
“It’s locked. I always lock it.”
“Is anyone else there?”
“No, it’s just me.” My calm facade had crumbled. I could hear the tremor taking hold of my voice.
“We already knew he had your e-mail address. Now we know he’s got our home phone number, which means he has the address. He may know about your apartment too. We can’t be too careful. Don’t let anyone in. I’m almost there,” she continued. “Pack a bag. I don’t know where we’ll go or how long we’ll be gone. We can always find a place to do laundry.”
Her words continued, but my mind was adrift in a violently churning sea of recent events. Waves of realization crashed over me. A myriad of independent dots simultaneously connected, revealing a sickening scene—hang-up calls at Mom’s house, the flood of e-mails from random strangers, the message from the State Department to be on alert, the persistent film producer from Finland . . . The producer from Finland. This is his fault.
For years Mom had stood before audiences and said that one of the strongest factors we had working in our favor was my father’s laziness. In Iran, Mom had used his weakness to our advantage. After her bout with dysentery, which nearly ended her life, she’d decided our best hope of escape lay in outworking my father.
Her plan had worked. It was my father’s laziness that had helped us escape, and it was his laziness that had kept us safe since. He lacked motivation. Sure, he wanted to see me again, but on his own, he was exceedingly unlikely to take any action—unless he was provoked or he had someone to do the work for him.
Enter the producer from Finland.
I had come to know my share of producers over the years. They were tenacious people. A producer must be driven, resourceful, creative, and above all persistent. And my father was masterful at reading people and discerning how best to utilize their assets for his gain. That was, I believe, one reason he and my mom had done so well together in the years before we went to Iran. Mom is an untiringly hard worker. My dad had never needed to lift a finger because before he could think of what it was he wanted, Mom would already have it waiting for him. Now he had roped in a producer.
I raced about my room opening and closing dresser drawers and closet doors, throwing clothes in a duffle bag without bothering to fold them. There was no time to waste with neatness. I raced around the corner into the bathroom, open bag in hand. I tossed in a toothbrush, toothpaste, my makeup bag.
What was I forgetting? What else did I need? I couldn’t think. My head was swimming.
My phone chirped, and then Mom’s voice came over the speaker. “I’m walking up to the door. Come let me in.”
I ran down the stairs and opened the door just wide enough for her to squeeze through. The instant she was in, I slammed it shut and locked the dead bolt. She looked pale and disheveled.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, following her up the stairs. As we passed through the living room I drew the curtains.
“Before I left home I grabbed our passports, just in case we need to leave the country. Yours is expired. The first thing we need to do is go to Chicago and get that renewed. We shouldn’t be around here anyway. Your dad may be here.”
I scribbled a note for my roommates explaining the situation and asking them to be careful. Then I grabbed my backpack and duffle bag from the bedroom and headed for the door. We paused at the top of the stairs. Was it safe to go outside? Turning back, I peeked through the closed curtains. The only movement in the parking lot below us was the blowing of the fall leaves across the pavement. Deciding the coast was clear, we hustled for the door.
Mom was barreling out of the parking space before I had my seatbelt buckled. “I have to go to campus,” I declared with urgency.
“What? Right now? That’s not a good idea.”
Mom’s priority was to get out of town and out of the path of the storm that was following us. “I’m scheduled to work on the mother infant study tonight. I can’t just not show up. They’ll worry, and if they call me I won’t be able to explain.” We had already decided that we should be extremely cautious about what we said over the phone. There was no guarantee our lines were secure.
“You’re right.” Mom turned the car toward campus. “We’ll have to make it quick and hope no one spots us.”
I had been an undergraduate research assistant on the Mother Infant Study at MSU since my sophomore year and felt as if I were part of a groundbreaking historical work. I wasn’t aware of any other piece of research that had explored so comprehensively the implications of domestic violence in the lives of mothers and their children. It was work I found challenging and immensely rewarding.
Mom dropped me at the back of the old brick building. Nervously, looking all around, I scurried to the door, down the stairs, and into the office, where I found three of the graduate assistants who ran the project. My voice sounded distant as I explained. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t work tonight, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to work again. I’m so sorry. I know that puts you in a bind.”
I leaned back against a desk for support and stared mostly at my feet, unable to look any of them in the eye. When I did glance up, it was clear by their matching expressions of concern that I was failing miserably at maintaining my calm. I could feel my body and my voice trembling.
“What’s the matter?” one of them asked. “Is everything all right?”
I felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room. Sweat beaded on my forehead and atop my lip. I didn’t want to say it out loud. I didn’t want it to be true, but I couldn’t just abandon my fellow researchers without an explanation. They deserved at least that much. “My dad found us,” I whispered breathlessly.
With those words the floodgates broke open, and I began to sob uncontrollably. Until that moment I hadn’t shed a single tear since the e-mail announcing my father’s intention to stage a reunion. But there, in that tiny office, forced to give voice to the reality of our situation, I was overcome by emotion.
The spoken word possesses a mysterious power. In silence, truths can be denied, but once they’re paired with words and uttered aloud, they are transformed into tangible, salient entities from which there is no hiding.
In that instant, the weight of my new reality was heavy upon me. My dad had found us. Mom and I had taken every precaution, and yet he had found us. It had been nearly fifteen years since Mom and I had escaped, and still we were not free.
That was a pivotal day for me. For the first time since our escape, Mom and I had chosen to run. Every other time my dad posed a threat, we had stood our ground and fought, but not that day. One phone call from my dad and we had pulled up stakes and left our lives behind.
I sat silently in the passenger seat, arms folded across my chest, as Mom drove us out of East Lansing. My anger swelled as the distance between me and my life grew. Who did my dad thi
nk he was to interfere like this? What right did this producer have to meddle in my business? For him it was just another story, but this was my life.
How had they found us? Why now? If my dad was going to resurface, why had he waited until I finally dared to let myself believe Mom and I were safe? Was it his aim to deal the greatest possible psychological blow? Where was he? He had been put on a government watch list and couldn’t legally enter the United States, but I knew that wouldn’t stop him. If he wanted to get in, he would. Was the Iranian government somehow behind this as they had been behind the Turkish interview fiasco? My mind raced with questions for which I had no answers.
Evening descended shortly after Mom and I took flight. In my rage, I refused to recognize the beauty of the Chicago skyline as we drew near. I’d always loved the way the lights of a city twinkle from afar in the darkness. Even in Tehran, an evening drive along the curvy mountain road that overlooked the city had filled me with joy. This night, however, I felt no joy—only intense bitterness mingled with overpowering exhaustion.
Mom and I were both weary by the time we drove into the heart of the city. In a daze, we wandered into the luxurious Westin Hotel on Michigan Avenue in the Magnificent Mile shopping district. Mom paid an exorbitant amount of money so that we could spend a few brief hours sleeping in a place that felt safe.
The bed, as promised, was heavenly—layer upon layer of fluffy pillows, crisp sheets, and the most luxurious down duvet—all in white. I sank into the comforting embrace of that bed and enjoyed an inexplicably peaceful night’s rest. Those few hours of reprieve were a beautiful and gracious gift from God.
In the morning I awoke, and for a split second I felt nothing but the complete relaxation of floating in clouds of down feathers. I was wholly at peace. Then I opened my eyes to the light, realized where I was, and was jarred back into my terrifying reality.
CHAPTER 25
Not knowing how far we would have to run to evade my dad, we first needed to renew my passport. We headed to the federal building in downtown Chicago. On the outside it looked like a modern skyscraper, but inside, where Mom and I sat waiting for hours for my paperwork to be processed, it was dimly lit and drab. Dozens of other people sat in chairs lining the room, all waiting for their five minutes with one of the officials seated behind the glass divider.
Hours passed, and my mind raced. The implications of my father’s intrusion were settling in, and the more I thought about the situation, the angrier I became. Eventually I would be called to the window to sign the forms. I would be given a new passport, and then what? Where would we go? How long would we run? What about my life—my family, my friends, my apartment, my research, my job, my classes?
On top of everything else, this was midterm. I had three exams and a paper due. It was one thing to miss a day or two of classes, but I couldn’t miss my exams. I couldn’t refuse to turn in my paper. If I did that I would fail not just my classes, but my ongoing battle to live a normal life.
Sitting there in the dreary passport office surrounded by immigrants, most of whom it seemed didn’t speak English, my stubborn streak kicked in. I wasn’t willing to walk away from my life. I wasn’t willing to let my dad take away everything we had worked so hard to accomplish. We would go back, and we would fight!
Mom was more reluctant than I was. Answering the phone and hearing my dad’s voice had been traumatic for her. Later I would learn she had hung up and vomited. Just the sound of his voice still terrorized her even after nearly fifteen years. He probably would have found some sick satisfaction in knowing that.
Striking a compromise, Mom and I agreed to go back to Michigan, but to keep away from her house and my apartment. We stayed on the move and on guard. Each night, as late as we could manage, we checked into a different hotel, where we did our best to sleep for a few hours. By dawn we were showered, dressed, and back on the road.
We knew it was taking a huge risk to maintain a routine of any sort, but I was determined to finish out the semester. So Mom drove me to my classes and watched to make sure no one followed me into the building. Sometimes she parked and watched the area while I was inside. Other times she drove around aimlessly, trying to avoid detection.
We didn’t know if we were being followed. We didn’t know if my dad was in the country. We didn’t know if the Finnish producer was in the country, if others were working with them, or to what lengths they would go to stage a reunion.
When class finished I would call Mom. If the coast was clear, she would drive as close as possible to the door and pick me up. If it wasn’t, I would hide out in the building, trying to look as calm as possible, until she sounded the all clear. We were suspicious of everyone and everything.
I was especially concerned for my roommates’ safety and found it particularly frustrating that they might be in danger simply by virtue of our association. Trish was the only one with whom I kept in contact. Our conversations were clipped, and we spoke in coded messages rendered decipherable only by years of genuine friendship. I found it ironic that as a child some of the adult members of our church had tried to petition to have me removed from their school because they were afraid of the danger my presence would bring, and yet, Trish, who weighed maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, didn’t think twice about jumping in her 1986 station wagon, the kind with the faux wood paneling, and meeting me. She brought me clean clothes and textbooks, but most of all she brought me a much-needed dose of encouragement.
Law enforcement agencies became involved. The FBI, the Michigan State Police, the MSU Campus Police, and even the Canadian authorities worked to ensure our safety. Trisha’s parents were alerted to the situation, so Scott, Trish’s fiancé, started driving her to class and keeping a protective watch over her. No one told me then that their biggest fear was that if someone came to kidnap me, they would take Trish instead, mistaking her dark hair and olive complexion for a sign of Iranian and not Italian ancestry.
Eventually, Mom and I had to go back to her house. This was the only way to get the calls traced and to try to establish my dad’s whereabouts. We were never alone in the house. The men in our family took turns pulling guard duty. The curtains were kept drawn at all times.
Everyone was on edge. Tempers ran hot. Mysterious things kept happening—subtle, doubt-inducing incidents that made us all feel as if we were losing our minds. An uncle, armed with a gun, would walk the perimeter of the fenced-in backyard, stopping to ensure the gates on either end of the house were securely locked. Fifteen minutes later they would repeat their surveillance, only to find the gates unlocked. These little inconsistencies, coupled with our intense fear, left us feeling paranoid even to the point of not trusting our paranoia.
At the same time, the phone didn’t stop ringing. We had to answer in order to trace the calls. We could hear someone breathing on the other end, but no one spoke. They would hang up, and immediately the phone would ring again. These calls came every ninety seconds, sometimes every minute or every thirty seconds. On the good days they came every fifteen minutes. It was clearly a game, and it was driving me insane.
Because the calls were international, we weren’t able to trace them to their point of origin. The only thing that could be determined was that they were coming into the United States from Montreal. My dad had relatives in Canada, and in those days we knew that if he had made it that close, he could quite easily drive through the border into Michigan. A passport wasn’t needed to travel between the two countries.
After we returned to Mom’s house, she played my dad’s message for me to hear. The answering machine was on a shelf at the top of the stairs that led to the basement. I sat on the cold gray tile, my feet resting on the second step down, as Mom hit the play button. I only listened to the recording once.
I was surprised to learn that I didn’t remember his voice. When I’m frightened, my heart still echoes the deep pounding of his footsteps, but time had erased his voice from my memory. He had a heavy British accent. If his words hadn�
��t been so infuriating, I may have even found it charming.
Like all the other events surrounding his intrusion, I kept no log of day or time or manner of attack. It was too painful to physically document these things. I didn’t want them to be real. I didn’t want them to be part of my life, and so for more than a decade I’ve left them as intangible fragments carefully locked somewhere deep in the furthest recesses of my mind.
His message, as I recall it now, went something like this: “This is Dr. Mahmoody calling.” Dr. Mahmoody! He was addressing me, his daughter, and he had the gall to refer to himself as Dr. Mahmoody. He said he wanted to talk to me, to tell me the truth.
“You’re twenty-one. Now you can think for yourself.” He clearly didn’t know the first thing about me. I may have been quiet, but since childhood I had been an extremely strong-willed, free-thinking individual. No one told me what to think.
“I want to tell you the truth because what you’ve been told all these years is a lie.” Hearing that, I had literally laughed out loud. I turned to Mom with a hate-filled smirk and quipped sarcastically, “What? Did he forget that I was there?”
What an arrogant con artist, I thought. What an absolute narcissist. He actually believed he could just show up and rewrite our family history. He would feed me a tale, and I would believe him. Just because he said so, I would discount everything I knew to be factual and take his lies to be truth. How sad and pathetic . . . and terrifying.
I wondered if he actually believed his own lies. Had he been telling his fabricated stories for so long that he had forgotten what had really happened, or was there a tiny sliver of his soul that couldn’t be deceived? I still don’t know the answer to that question. I would like to believe that his conscience wasn’t completely dead.
He claimed to have found my contact information on the online MSU student directory. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but when I checked, it was listed there. The age of the Internet had brought with it a whole host of new security considerations.
My Name Is Mahtob Page 19