The Other Side (8 page)

I change the password of his e-mail before pouring half a bottle of wine down my throat. I take my pills, extras for good measure, and pass out fully clothed in bed.

The next day, the e-mails start coming: each more frantic, more threatening, in turns more bartering, more berating, more abusive. I don't respond and eventually he stops sending them.

The story is in the paper. It's on the local news once or twice. I never come forward and identify myself as the victim, and without a face to attach to the story, without some
culprit to arrest and parade before the cameras, the public loses interest. I don't lose interest. I send a copy of a newspaper article to his ex-wife in Denmark with a message attached:
This happened to me. I thought you should know
. She responds by asking for my number, wants to know if I'd be willing to talk on the phone.

Her voice relates without emotion another version of the events from years earlier: the divorce, the abduction of her children, the trial, and her husband's deportation from Denmark. In her version, she had finally left him after a decade of abuse. In return, he locked her in a basement and fled the country with their children.
You are lucky
, she says,
that he didn't get you pregnant
.

Rumors begin to surface: a woman claiming to know me personally sends an anonymous e-mail confessing that he came to her door one night asking for sex. It doesn't surprise me. Someone writes to say he once saw The Man I Used to Live With shooting up in the back room of a bar downtown. This seems like a stretch. I never knew him to shoot up, never saw him shoot up, but after all that has happened, I don't know what to believe anymore.

One sunny afternoon The Detective escorts me to our old apartment on campus before it is emptied and its contents are either given away or destroyed. He stands outside
the front door while I wander from room to room, touching only the very tops of things. I'm supposed to be looking for my belongings: a silk shawl, some pottery, a textbook or two. Eventually he opens the door:
Everything okay?

If he comes into the bedroom he will find me sobbing in the closet, my face buried in the hanging clothes.

At some point I destroy all the photos of him, but I don't remember how or when. I remember going into the apartment we once shared while The Detective waits outside. I remember looking for the pottery and the jewelry we bought in Mexico. I remember finding an album on one of the shelves in the living room and taking it with me when I leave.

I remember there is a time in my new apartment, after my bed has been delivered, after My Good Friend finally feels safe enough to move in, after there is furniture in the living room and food in the refrigerator, and after there are always empty alcohol bottles on the countertops and dirty dishes in the sink and cigarette butts in empty planters on the balcony, I sit down on the floor of my bedroom and open the album. I shut it again almost instantly. Maybe at that moment I pull out the photos of him and throw them into a trash bag and carry the bag out to the dumpster and heave it in.

I remember there is a time when I have many photos of him—of our two bodies standing in front of the same granite monument, of his face frowning or smiling, of his hand moving blurrily through the frame, of his shirtless belly, his eyes like two bloodshot slits, of one shoulder and the back of his neck—and then suddenly I have none.

For years and years I have none.

And then I find a photo of him buried in an album on his mother's Facebook page—she and I are not actually “friends”—from a trip she took to Venezuela. In the photo, the two of them lean together. She smiles. They are outdoors or near a window. Her caption reads:
My son
. He has changed very little. Maybe he's put on weight. His hair has gone gray. He wears it shorter now. Mostly he looks just as I remember, directly into the camera.

I can't delete the photo, or cut it up, or erase it.

I can't even look away.

I destroy the photographs of him, but I keep the ones of myself.
Even though they're more troubling to look at. There is the one of me sitting on top of the pyramid at Chichen Itza, my bare wrists resting on my bare knees. I'm wearing a gigantic floppy hat and cheap plastic sunglasses like every other gringa tourist in the park that day. Later, as we cross the border from that state to another, border guards will
stop us and search our car, one with a machine gun slung over his shoulder, the other with the gun pointed at me, his tongue passing over his lips.

There is the one of me squirting lime onto a raw oyster in Veracruz, my hair bleached white from the sun, my nose and cheeks burned bright red. The next night, after The Man I Live With locks me out of the hotel room, I will stand on the street in my underwear, banging on the door, begging to be let back in.

There is the photo of me standing near the baggage claim at Brussels National Airport, just inside a pair of automatic doors. I'm wearing his blue flannel shirt, my cargo pants, a brand-new pair of hiking boots. I hoist an army ranger backpack over my shoulder and carry a purse in front of my body like an egg. We have just disembarked from a seven-hour overnight transatlantic flight; he slept with his back to me the whole way.

And then there's me nursing a beer from a paper bag in Brussels's Grote Markt, one hand on a knee of the brass statue of Everard 't Serclaes near the square. I smile. I look happy and young and in love.

There's one of me stepping out of the tent at Camping Zeeburg in Amsterdam, cutting through the fog with my long skirt, my face obstructed by a curtain of blond hair. Underneath: a bruise across my cheek.

There's me sitting on the wall of Napoleon's fort in Paris, tired of smiling for the camera.

Me straddling a narrow alleyway in Toledo, one hand and foot against each of the two opposing walls, the flesh between my legs raw and pulsing with pain.

There's one of me buying a shawl from a silk merchant later the same day, my back to the camera.

And the one of me looking out the window of the train between Prague and Berlin, watching the towns pass, the trees pass—the leaves just a blur of green—realizing even then what he's captured in this photograph of me.

[five]

HOW IS IT
possible to reclaim the body when it's visible only in a mirror? A reflection of the body, external and reversed: the image both belongs to me and doesn't. The photos, which I still have tucked away in the plastic sleeves of leather albums, reflect something more than what they show: a gaze that follows across the distances of continents and years. I can move my body through the world, and yet there is also an image of my body that resembles in every way the real thing: two people, bound together by this perceived resemblance—a woman who has died, a woman who goes on living.

In the photos of me at ten, eight, and two, there's the long blond hair falling in ringlets, the wide easy smile, the dimple on each rosy cheek. At seven, I am entered into a beauty pageant by my parents, my mother's idea, an excuse to squeeze me into puffy Easter-colored dresses, to fuss and fuss over my hair and makeup. In the pictures, I don't look like a child
of seven. I walk in that sashaying pageanty way I've learned from watching Miss America on television—I've practiced in the hallway of our house for hours, for days—back and forth across the stage, back and forth in front of the audience, the judges, all of them veiled in shadow, only their smiles visible.

When I go from being a beautiful child to a beautiful young woman, men compliment my body all the time: the crossing guard tells me I look lovely on my way to school; a classmate comments on my budding breasts; a teacher takes note of my flattering new haircut; a supervisor at the grocery store where I work compliments my thigh-grazing skirt; my regular customers offer me cash tips, phone numbers, fake proposals of marriage. I blush, or giggle, or smile at all this attention.

I would give anything to keep getting it.