The Other Side (21 page)

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 the 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.

I never say anything at all.

I want to have another baby
, I say. It's a Saturday afternoon. I've just put my daughter down for a nap in her bed. My Husband is planting a tree in the yard behind our house. He's hesitant. It's been only a few months since I came out of the depression from the first.
I've started a book
, I remind him, a task we both know keeps my mind from skittering away,
and I'll be nearly finished with it by the time the baby is born
. He makes me promise to find a therapist,
someone you can trust
, to prepare for what may follow out of the birth.
I want to be better
, I say.
I swear I am trying to be better
.

I tell The Newest Therapist that ten years ago I was kidnapped and raped by a man I knew. We're sitting in her office, a room with tall windows and creaky wooden floors in a converted Victorian house. A pair of plants hang from twin hooks near the windows.
But I don't want to talk about that
, I say.

Bullshit
, she retorts. She asks for the two lists, and after reading the one I hand to her, after assuring me that I'm not remembering incorrectly, that I'm remembering exactly right, she suggests a few diagnoses for The Man I Used to Live With, and puts the
DSM
-IV in my hands. We talk about what may have drawn me to him in the first place, and about strategies for getting my anger and fear in check. We talk about the book I am writing, poems about growing up in the rural Midwest, and about the book we both know I must write after this.

When my son is born, the birth is peaceful: slow and calm and controlled. At the hospital, Mom holds one hand, tears welling behind her glasses; My Husband holds the other, cheering me on. Outside, in the waiting room, my sisters play board games with my daughter. Dad leads her up and down the hallways, to the bathroom, to the aquarium, to the cafeteria for a banana and juice.

Back in our home, days later, logs crackle in the fireplace while my daughter feeds her brand-new baby brother a bottle, holding his head so gently to her chest. They are both cradled in My Husband's arms; all three of them cuddling under a blanket at one end of the couch. I sit at the other end, only a little apart, taking pictures of the light glowing in their faces.

What do you feel in the dream
, The Newest Therapist asks,
when you see him approaching?
She suggests a few quiet options:
Do you feel concerned? Or nervous? Or afraid?
I know she wants me to pin a name on the feeling. It's part of the process, the experts say, of becoming a whole person again, of weaving the traumatic event back into the fabric of memory. If I can name what I feel when he comes to kill me in my dreams, for instance—fear or fright or terror—maybe I can choose one name for what I felt when I saw him approaching me in the parking lot, or when he drove me around in circles in my car, or when he asked me to lie down on the mattress in the corner of the soundproof room.

But I do not feel fear, or fright, or terror. I did not feel concerned or nervous or afraid. There is no one word for it I can say. Because though I probably do feel something like fear and fright and terror, I also feel joy and ecstasy and relief.
He's finally come back. There's no more waiting
, I think.

When I'm awake I see him everywhere. The man who crosses the street not at the intersection, not when the signal says
WALK
, but up the way a bit, near the middle of the block. Or the man in the restaurant with his back to me: his long curls, the cheap watch, its fraying nylon strap. It's
surprising how many strangers have his build, wear his clothes, stand with their feet spread wide apart, scratching the crease between neck and chin with the three middle fingers of either hand in the same arrogant way. Most of the time I recognize the impostor almost instantly because there is no feeling of being lowered by a rope very slowly, of my tongue turning to ash, to mud. I stop what I'm doing anyway and watch the stranger for a long long time.