The Other Side (19 page)

In the transcript of the Venezuelan extradition trial, he testifies that he was arrested only by chance, for having mistakenly associated with a member of a drug cartel, that only after questioning him about his associate—whom he barely knows—did the police conduct a background search on him and find the charges: kidnapping, rape, forcible sodomy, felonious restraint. After he admits that the Interpol case exists, he explains to the court that they must understand that this is a ridiculous farce initiated by a bunch of hillbillies. He explains how it looks in the United States for an older man to be with a beautiful young girl,
and to be Latin on top of that, in a place where to be Latin is to be black
.

After he explains that he lived with this young girl for years until she abruptly cut him off, he admits he did follow her, he did take over the use of her car, he did bring her against her will to an apartment where he asked her to apologize.
I was affected. I wanted explanations
. He tells the court that, after the girl finally did apologize,
We cried together and had consensual relations, as couples do
.

He had to leave to run some errands, he tells the court, and admits tying the girl's hands to the chair. When he
returned, twenty minutes later, the police were already there. At that point he fled and decided to return to his own country, where he's been living ever since, working at his job, paying his taxes like a good citizen.

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
.