The Other Side (23 page)

There's the story I have, and the story he has, and there is a story the police have in Evidence. There's the story the journalist wrote for the paper. There's the story The Female Officer filed in her report; her story is not my story. There's the story he must have told his mother when he called her on the phone; there's the story she must have told herself. There's the story you'll have after you put down this book. It's an endless network of stories. This story tells me who I am. It gives me meaning. And I want to mean something so badly.

The first poem I ever publish appears in an undergraduate literary journal a few months after I graduate, after the kidnapping. I'm invited to read at the issue launch party, where a single microphone stands in a little clearing in the corner of a dark restaurant. Months earlier I sat at a table in this same spot, eating dinner with The Man I Live With, who was angry about one thing or another, calling me a cunt while I cried into my soup. I'm the second reader, or maybe the third, so nervous that the paper flutters like an animal in my hand. I'm standing under a spotlight, sweating through my shirt, my voice cracking every few syllables:

       
I can feel you

       
in the back of my throat.

       
In the place I begin

       
the word “god.”

I've practiced in front of the mirror at home every morning for weeks. My professors, teachers, My Good Friend, and an ex-lover sit in the audience, all of them veiled in shadow. It's better that I can't see their faces.

In graduate school I begin trying, in earnest, to write. I write about anything but The Man I Used to Live With—the
seasons, my mother and father, protofeminism in neglected epistolary novels from the early modern period, the Spanish Civil War—but it always comes back to him, to all that happened. I try to write about My First Husband who sleeps on the couch watching
NASCAR
while I sit at my desk blowing smoke out the window; instead I write about the dreams, the pills, the swarm of gnats mating outside the screen. It's the only thing that pulls me out of bed: these poems that lie and misdirect, that circle and circle all the things I can't say out loud. Each day I begin writing, I think,
This is it. Today is the day
. As if typing anything other than that unthinkable thing were a kind of breaking free. Each day, as I'm sitting at my computer, watching the words accumulate on the page, I feel elated, euphoric.
Look at how far I've come
, I think.
How far these words can carry me
.

After I graduate from that writing program and enter the prestigious one in Texas; after I write my dissertation and earn a PhD; after I have written and published my first book, I begin trying to write this one. The story I must tell.

I try to write in the daytime, sitting at my desk, or on the couch, or reclining in the bed, while my daughter is at school and my son naps in his crib. I try to write about The Man I Used to Live With, about all that happened, but instead I write about addiction, or my children, or the
dreams. I say,
I can't write with all these distractions. All these interruptions make it impossible to think
.

I try to write at night, while the children sleep in their beds, while their father sits beside me on the couch or reclines on the pillow next to mine, his own computer propped open on his lap; instead I shop for houses we can't afford, clothes I will not buy, vacations we will not take. I say,
Maybe if I could just get away for a while, if only I could have a little time and space to think
, and I apply for an artist residency in upstate New York, where the windows of my studio look out to the green edge of a rolling mountain range, the tall grass licking at the trees.

The first day, the day I begin writing this book, I sit at the computer, in front of the window, my eyes on the grass, my fingers on the keys, and tears stream down my cheeks. I down whole glasses of scotch and crawl under the desk.

After dinner, I call home from my computer and watch the small lithe bodies of my children tangle over My Husband, who tries, in earnest, to talk about his day while they whine or cry or paw at him or the image they're seeing of me. It's past their bedtime and they need to go to sleep. I say,
I love you. I miss you
. And mean it. And they say,
Please come home
. I blow a kiss and My Husband mouths the words:
Are you okay?
And I say,
No, not at all, actually
. I want to come home. I want the tangle of their bodies in my lap. I need that. I need My Husband's breath in my hair
before I drift off to sleep. Their love is all that saves me from the dreams.

After we hang up, there is only silence. There's only darkness lapping at the window. There's only an empty page on the screen.

Only the story can bridge it.

The funny version of the story goes like this: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . . I was kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with. I'm kind of fucked up about it.

It's not a joke I tell at parties.

Most of the time I don't tell the story at all. Whole close friendships have come and gone or continue to this day and I haven't breathed a word.

Other times it takes only one glass of wine and I'm spilling the beans to near strangers. Or it doesn't take wine. Maybe it's ten in the morning. A new friend tells me a secret. I tell mine. It's usually the same reaction: first there's shock, a hand over the mouth or to the chest, always
I'm so sorry
.

I'm the one who's sorry. I'm sorry I keep telling this story.

Here is the shortest version: for five hours on July 5, 2000, I was held prisoner in a soundproof room in a basement
apartment rented for the sole purpose of raping and killing me.

I could also say I lived with my kidnapper for two and a half years, and during all the time we lived together he didn't call it rape but fucking. When I finally moved out, he thought it would take only a few days of good, hard fucking to convince me to come home. If I refused, he planned to shoot me in the cunt and then the head.

His words, not mine.

I'm afraid the story isn't finished happening.

Sometimes I think there is no entirely true story I could tell. Because there are some things I just don't know, and other things I just can't say. Which is not a failure of memory but of language.