The Other Side (4 page)

In another report, The Detective writes how, on July 17, 2000, twelve days after the kidnapping, he and another officer came to my apartment to talk to me about the case. I told them that The Suspect and I met while I was a student in his Spanish class at the university. I told them that I had been trying to break up with him for some time, for lots of
reasons, but mostly because he had raped me on more than one occasion. I told the officers that when I finally did break up with him, six weeks earlier, he did not take it well.

The Detective writes that I told him and the other officer that The Suspect had been arrested before, in Denmark. I remember telling them the version of the story I was told: he was married for years and years to a Danish woman, they had two children together, and after they split up, he took the children to the United States, forgetting to tell her that he was leaving the country. The report doesn't mention how the officers looked at one another when I said this, how they might have wanted to ask more questions about this version of his story but didn't. The Detective writes that I said that The Suspect kept the children in the United States while his ex-wife called and called and eventually convinced him to come home. She told him she wanted to get back together.
A trick
, I told the officers. He was arrested as he got off the plane, and while he awaited trial, his ex-wife flew to the United States to retrieve her children. The Detective writes that I told them that the ex-wife has avoided The Suspect since that time. They have no contact. She gets no child support.

The next report in the file describes a fax The Detective received from his liaison at Interpol, who located a record in
the Interpol Criminal Register. The Suspect was convicted in Denmark in 1995 of depriving his ex-wife of her parental custody rights and received a suspended sentence of sixty days in prison. Earlier the same year he had been arrested for rape, though the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. The Detective speculates in his report that the victim in this dropped case was The Suspect's ex-wife, current residence unknown.

In the final police report, dated August 14, 2000, I am identified as Lacy Johnson:
VICTIM
. I read this and feel certain it is true. I see myself as the officers saw me: someone who phones the police station to report a suspicious number on her caller
ID
. I am a subject to be questioned, a story to be investigated, the victim of a set of illegal acts that were perpetrated by a suspect who has disappeared.

And yet, when I close the file, I remember how the truth is more complicated than this. I remember, for example, making choices. I look into his eyes while I undress. When it is done he apologizes and finds me something to eat. I tell him everything is
fine, just fine
and stroke his hair while he cries into my lap. He begs me to come back. Outside, in the hallway, his rifle leans against the wall. At any moment, he may or may not kill me. I remember how the two possibilities can coexist: I'm both alive and dead in every room but this.

[three]

A MINUTE OR
two late, the instructor walks into the room and introduces himself. He is not to be called professor or doctor, since he is only a
TA
in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He is twice the age of his students, at least. A wrinkled t-shirt drapes his round belly, and he often touches or tucks a stray brown curl behind an ear. When he talks, we listen. He talks and talks and talks. He has this way of always talking that keeps us always listening.

The class meets every day, and every day before class I stand outside on the steps, smoking a cigarette, under the awning and out of the snow. Every day the talkative Spanish Teacher says hello, or stops to chat about one thing or another. At first he asks about my major—education or engineering.
I can't decide
, I say. It changes each time I
drop out. He asks about my job. What I do in the evenings. He's new here, you see. He asks where I am from. Where I live. With whom. I'm surprised by this attention. And by how he watches me so intently while I speak. The Spanish Teacher talks to me before class, during class, after class. I like his persistence, the way he makes it clear I'm being pursued.

Weeks later, I'm sitting in a dining chair in The Spanish Teacher's living room in an apartment on campus: cinder-block walls painted white, government-issue tile floors, single-pane windows, window-unit air-conditioning.
It passes here for graduate student housing
, he tells me. I don't know why I have come, or why I tracked down his number in the university directory, or why I called and invited myself over. It's a risk to be here, to be seen. He sits across from me at the telephone table, fingering a stack of telephone books, wiping dust from the keys of his state-of-the-art fax machine. The opposite wall is lined with bookshelves constructed of cinder blocks and unfinished plywood boards. I've never heard of most of the titles: academic treatises on socialist utopias in film, or theoretical approaches to translation and international discourse.

Tonight I'm getting the short version of his international life history: an adventure hitchhiking across oceans and continents. It's a far cry from my own life growing up in a town with only three stoplights, a short, failed stint as a model in New York, and a so-far mediocre career as a
reluctant college student. By the end of the night he's pulling pictures of his children from a plain white shoe box. Touching them makes him sob like a child.
It all starts like this: he offers all that I didn't know I wanted, asks in return for all that I haven't yet learned how to give.

I have this image of my parents in an argument, which could occur at any time, on any given day: she sits on the couch like a sullen child—lips pursed, arms crossed—or leans against a wall in the kitchen. She doesn't want to be the first one to walk away from the fight. She's waiting for him to throw his hands wildly into the air, stare at her with his mouth open, sigh, smear one palm across his forehead or push his hair straight up on end. She's betting he'll walk down the hall and close himself behind a door. He talks calmly, deliberately, the giant wheel of his mind rolling her flat. I wish she would speak up, stand firm. Instead, she walks away, gives up, pronounces herself
done
.

Mostly my parents avoid one another: Dad in his armchair in the living room watching golf tournaments or reruns of
M*A*S*H
, Mom in her sewing room at the end of the hall, the door closed, her back toward the door, her
lap tangled with needles and thread. They spend decades in this stalemate.

The worst of it comes when I'm in middle school, just before My Older Sister moves out. She argues almost constantly with Mom, or if My Older Sister happens to be at work at the town's only ice cream shop, my parents argue about My Older Sister. My Mom says now that may have been what ruined everything, how he never backed her up. My Dad says it was that she never forgave him for anything. Not ever in the thirty-two years they were married.
Not once
.

Before I move out of the house I argue with Mom, too: crossed boundaries, invasions of privacy, unreasonable curfews. One day she finds a pack of cigarettes in my purse and demands I smoke them all in front of her. I break them into pieces and throw them in the trash. She calls me rotten. I call her a bitch and she slaps my open mouth for it. Maybe I deserve it. I think maybe she does, too.

By the time I walk into the classroom that first day of Spanish class, I have moved away from the town with only three stoplights and only one ice cream shop, away from the county with one major intersection, away down the highway to a college town, into an apartment near the mall with My Older Sister. I call home if the car needs repairs. Or if I need to buy an expensive book. I make the hour-long drive to visit on the holidays, but mostly to check on My Younger Sister, a sophomore in the town's only high school. At the end of every visit, I grab my purse
and my keys and turn toward the door. My parents hug me, in turns, and say
I love you
. And I smile and say,
I love you, too
.

It never occurs to me to ask for anything more.