The Other Side (17 page)

Dad greets us at the door in a new sweater: pine-tree green. Fern-shoot green. A smile stretching from ear to ear. His New Wife emerges from the kitchen to hug us all, even My Boyfriend, though this is the first time they've met. In the Victorian house they've bought together, glass beads hang on strings from every window, casting prisms around the rooms. Dad insists we sit on the new gray corduroy couch: me, each of my two sisters, My Boyfriend. His New Wife pours glasses of wine. My grandmother arrives and we all sit down to dinner: spaghetti and meatballs, a loaf of crusty French bread, a salad of spring greens.
This is not what I would consider holiday food
, my grandmother says, in her way. She turns to My Boyfriend.
Now tell me: What kind of man are you?

Four years after the kidnapping I learn I've been accepted into a prestigious writing program in Texas for a PhD. My Boyfriend and I trade in both of our crappy cars for one that can pull all of our belongings in a U-Haul trailer. My Boyfriend finds work quickly in our new city. He drives the new car to work each day while I catch a ride to campus. In the evenings, my classmates invite us out to dinner, where we talk about semiotics or the ubiquity of ampersands in workshop lately, or the landscape as form in avant-garde poetics. At these dinners, My Boyfriend talks to the spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends of my classmates about more interesting things. They plan to make a band together called The Significant Others.
None of us know how to play instruments.
YET
!
As a present for his birthday, I arrange a behind-the-scenes tour at the downtown aquarium, where a short executive with shaved hands leads us through the rooms and rooms of filtration systems and lets us peer into the tops of giant glass tanks. In the pump room for a 150,000-gallon aquarium in the restaurant, the short executive with shaved hands introduces us to a scuba diver, who is preparing to jump in.
It happens sometimes
, the short executive says.
Let's say a couple is dining at the restaurant. He wants to propose. For a nominal fee, the scuba diver will jump in and hold up a sign:
WILL YOU MARRY ME
?
The scuba diver nods, shows us the sign. The executive asks if we want to go down to the restaurant and see. I think,
Is it us? Is he proposing to me?
My Boyfriend holds open the door of the pump
room, follows me down the stairs. The short executive with shaved hands leads us down into the dining room, where a man is already kneeling in front of a table. The woman is crying, nodding. People in the restaurant are clapping. My Boyfriend claps; he's watching the man stand up. He looks at me. He takes my hand.

He asks for nothing in return.

Five years after the kidnapping, a friend from my writing program throws me a birthday party at her house. I buy a dress to celebrate all the things that are suddenly going so well. There is music and food and it seems like hundreds of people. All of my new friends are there, and My Boyfriend's friends from work. At midnight, my friend brings a cake out with twenty-seven lit candles and everyone sings, just to me. It makes me so happy I could nearly explode. They ask me to toast. I say something a little silly, a little drunk, about how I am feeling so very grateful.

As everyone raises their glasses, My Boyfriend interrupts, insisting he also has something to say. He says,
I love you. I want to spend my life with you
, and pulls a velvet box from his pocket. I am completely surprised, completely not expecting it, struck completely mute. I am crying, covering my mouth with my hand. I take him in my arms and say
Yes yes yes
.

In the photos of our wedding, we both look radiant and happy. We gather at the park with our family and the friends we have made in this city. My parents stand beside me, Dad with His New Wife, Mom with the man she has married only weeks ago. Beside My Husband stand his father and sister and godparents and aunts. The vows we exchange are simple.

I promise to treat you as my equal in all things
.

[ten]

IN A VARIATION
of Schrödinger's famous thought experiment, we are instructed to imagine the steel chamber from the perspective of the cat. Except the cat has been replaced by a person, and the poison gas and radioactive trigger have been replaced with another life-terminating device—an assault rifle, let's say. Every ten seconds, the weapon is either deployed, killing the person, or it makes an audible
click
and the person survives. Outside the chamber, those two outcomes—death and survival, the bullet wound and the sound of the empty chamber—exist in equal probability, creating a paradox as in the original experiment. Inside the chamber, the person might have been killed or not killed—
click
—but because the mind is bound to follow whatever path does not lead to death, and because it isn't possible to experience having been killed, the person's only possible experience is of having survived the experiment, regardless of the odds.

Every few months, or years, or days, or some random and indeterminate amount of time, I enter his name into a search engine. I look for any news: an address, a phone number, a blog post, any indication of whether he is in this country or out of it, whether he is trying to find me or is content to let me go. At first I collected the information in a real, tangible manila file I kept in a drawer of my desk. Now it's in a folder of bookmarks on my computer.

I can open the folder and see that the first story about the kidnapping runs in the local city paper on July 7, 2000: two days after I escape. In the upper-left corner, there is a tiny, low-resolution photo of the accused. Unattractive, unassuming, he does not, even now, look to me like a rapist. But there, above the photo, the headline reads:
GRAD STUDENT SOUGHT IN RAPE
. The article, written by a female journalist on the local city paper's staff, gets the facts only slightly wrong. She writes that the victim
found her car outside covered by a tarp with the keys still inside
. The keys were not in the car, but on a table in the apartment. I remember this because I spotted the key chain, a lizard, which My Good Friend had made for me a few nights earlier, stringing green and white plastic beads onto a length of clear plastic twine.

For years I imagine the female journalist as elderly, as a sort of female journalist archetype, so hardened by the decades
spent covering petty or disturbing small-town crimes that she can't be bothered to get the facts exactly right. But when I enter her name into a search engine, I discover that she is not an elderly journalist, but a woman roughly my age, who had only recently graduated when she wrote the article. For some reason, this allows me to forgive her for the factual inaccuracies. I bookmark her website and add it to the folder on my computer.

An article appearing in the Tuesday, July 11, 2000, issue of the same local city paper warns readers that the
search for the man accused of abducting and sexually assaulting his former girlfriend has become an international pursuit
. The article describes how, after tracking his credit card activity, detectives learned that The Suspect purchased an airline ticket to Mexico, and then another one to Venezuela, where he stayed for a time at a resort on the coast.
He's a very intelligent individual who's scaring me
, says a captain on the local police force. A professor from the Spanish department describes The Suspect as
erratic and disorganized
as a scholar, but
affable, . . . a gifted, erratic dilettante
. The professor asks not to be named. I read the article from the safety of the home I share with My Husband and our children, wondering why this professor could have possibly thought he, of all people, was at risk.