Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  I hadn’t spoken those words before. I think it was my athlete’s mentality; admitting to being tired meant that I was confessing to my body being tired, that I couldn’t take any more work, that I was, in a sense, quitting.

  My mother and Anette assured me that it was okay to be tired. They told me it was up to me, but I wouldn’t be showing any kind of weakness if I took something to help me sleep. It would only make me feel better and help me get back on track sooner.

  I gave in and took a sleeping pill I’d been prescribed. I remembered nothing until I woke the next morning. I still felt light-headed and as if a storm was raging in my belly from all the medications, but at least I had slept without being haunted. Unfortunately, when I woke up, another kind of nightmare had begun. The Norwegian media had learned of the story and I was receiving emails and phone calls. I ignored all of them at first. The phone rang, and the caller ID showed a number I didn’t recognize. I felt an uncomfortable buzz in my gut. Normally I would give my name when I answered the phone, but this time I didn’t.

  “Who is this? What do you want?” I asked.

  “I’m a media director,” a man’s voice said. Something about how calm he was angered me more. “I’d just like a moment of your time if I may?”

  I don’t know why I didn’t just hang up; part of the reason was that he was being so polite, but mostly it was because I knew that if I was going to be able to have my say, I’d have to allow him his.

  He proceeded to tell me that he was coordinating efforts for some of the country’s news media and hoped I would consent to an interview. I was furious and not afraid to show it.

  “I don’t want my name or my private life written about at all!” I said. “This is nobody’s business!”

  He got very quiet, and we hung up quickly.

  I stood there for a moment with the phone clutched in my hand, surprised by the film of moisture that had built up and how my hand ached from having grasped the handset so firmly.

  I looked at my mother and my father, and they both smiled. My father said, “You have to do what’s best for you and for no one else.” I knew that he wanted to offer more of an opinion, say something stronger against having all our privacy invaded in that way, but also that he felt he couldn’t. He didn’t want to feed the fire of my anger.

  My mother looked as if she was about to speak and then walked over to the refrigerator to take out some fruit she had placed on a tray. “Shameful,” she said. “Don’t they understand?”

  It was clear that they didn’t. One good thing came of that call. I was so angry, I felt like some of my old energy was coming back. In fact, I felt good enough to go to the grocery store with my mother and father to get food for dinner. It felt good to be out with them doing something completely normal.

  We were standing at the checkout line, the stand of magazines and newspapers towering over me. I looked at the cover of Her og Nå (Here and Now) and a photo of the television actress Ane Dahl Torp and wondered again why some people thought I looked like her. Out of the corner of my eye the word “Texas” stabbed my attention. A copy of Norway’s national newspaper, VG, had been misshelved and bowed forward. I pushed it up to read the full headline: RAPED NORWEGIAN GIRL IN THE U.S. KIDNAPPED WITH GUN. LEFT NAKED.

  I suddenly felt clammy, as if I were wearing sweat-soaked clothes. I thought I might vomit. I gagged but kept scanning the article and saw photos of the three men. I couldn’t get away from them, not even here, not even the place where I should have been able to feel most safe.

  Brushing past my mother and father and another shopper, I ran out the door. The cold air seemed to still my swimming head. I stood just outside the entrance of the store; a few people passed me by and looked at me and then quickly away. I tried to take in great gulps of air, hoping that the oxygen would replace the anger and frustration that was swelling inside me. Was there nowhere I could go to escape what had happened?

  My mother draped her arm around me and led me toward the car. My father rushed ahead to open the door for me, and I sat inside taking deep and regular breaths. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. My father dashed back inside the store while my mother crouched just outside the car and ran her hand in circles around my back, whispering to me to take my time.

  “I just wanted to come home. I just wanted it to be Christmas. Like before,” I finally said.

  “I know. I know. We wanted that, too. It will still be that way.”

  “How did they know? How did they find out? People here aren’t stupid.” I looked out the window as more shoppers filed past. “They’re going to know it’s me. How many of us went to the U.S.? To Dallas? They’ll figure it out.”

  I thought of how I’d come home early, before most schools let out for the holiday. I pounded my fists against my thighs. “Why did I come home early? I knew—”

  My mother took my hands. “You did the right thing coming home. You can’t second-guess yourself on everything. We’ll figure this out.”

  My father had returned with the groceries and packed them in the hatch. He sat staring straight ahead. I watched him for a moment in the rearview mirror as his face transformed from angry to neutral. He chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip for a moment before he turned the key. As we made our way toward home, I watched as my parents’ posture changed, as if they were wax figures slowly sagging as the car’s heater roared and the wipers beat a steady rhythm. In my mind, as the wipers moved back and forth, all I could hear were the words “This sucks,” over and over again in time.

  After I’d had some time to cool down later that night, I called the media director I’d hung up on earlier. I didn’t like the idea that someone might think I was being unreasonable. That would only compound the problem of the media being insensitive toward me. I asked him to understand that I was here to enjoy the holiday with my family and I wanted privacy. Maybe I’d be ready to talk about it later, but not now. He said he understood and thanked me. I felt much better about the situation; I didn’t like the person I’d presented to him in our first conversation—someone who was too reactive, too volatile. I told myself that I needed to be in better control of myself. Factors outside my control were going to produce these kinds of ups and downs, the one-step-forward-two-steps-back dance I’d been forced to do. I had to control my reactions.

  I woke up the next morning feeling groggy but determined to go for a ski workout. As I bent over to put on my socks, my vision narrowed and my head felt light and empty. No matter. I was going to do this. My parents had left the newspaper for me to see. Another headline: TOOK HER UNDERWEAR AS A TROPHY. The article went on to say that the paper had been in touch with me and that I wanted to be protected from the media. How was this headline protecting me?

  I dumped my breakfast into the trash and headed out to the trails. Maybe there I’d find some relief. Starting off, my legs felt wooden, unresponsive. I told myself that was to be expected. I wasn’t warmed up. I hadn’t exercised for a few days. I felt as if I was taking a breath for every stride instead of every three or four. I started to get agitated, and my frustration added to me feeling like I was hyperventilating. All I wanted to do was lie down in the snow and sleep. I kept telling myself to go, to push on.

  I knew, intellectually, that my body had energy stores that it could go to in order to fuel my muscles. I wasn’t so depleted that I’d burned up all those resources. That meant that my tiredness, my poor performance, had more to do with my mind than anything else. I just had to push myself.

  Along with those thoughts came another notion. I should just enjoy being outside. I loved being outside, and these trails were some of my favorites in the world. I’d grown up skiing and running through these woods and fields. I’d come to realize that for me, that was a kind of meditative practice—a way to empty my mind. Yet there I was, slogging along, angrily plowing at the snow with my poles, my mind filling up with more negative thoughts than I could sweep behind me.

  I thought again of the statement “We
lose ourselves in the things we love; we find ourselves there, too.” I’d both lost and found myself in physical movement for so long that to have that freedom and that pleasure denied me was torture. I knew that I should let go of all those thoughts about how easy this used to be, how much fun it was before, and just enjoy the fact that I was alive and skiing. Somehow, that didn’t seem enough.

  I came back frustrated and angry. I stood just outside the door trying to gather my composure. I didn’t want my family to see that I was upset, and when I stepped in the house, I saw Anette and my mother in the kitchen. I saw them smiling and heard their casual greetings, but it all seemed like we were trying too hard.

  “How was your outing?” my mother asked.

  “Fine,” I said, then thought better of that. “Good, actually. It’s always nice to be skiing.”

  “I wish that I could have gone with you,” Anette said. “I would probably just have slowed you down.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not true. But it was good to be alone for a bit. I could clear my head.”

  Though nothing that I could easily identify was troubling me at that moment, a tear slid down my cheek. I turned away from the two of them and said, “I should shower before dinner.”

  Later that evening, we all sat in the living room. I was on the couch next to my mother, and at one point she pulled me toward her. I snuggled against her, and she began to massage my scalp. Suddenly I was back as a little girl in the tub with my mother washing my hair for me.

  “You know,” my mother said, “we understand that everything is not completely fine all the time. It’s okay for you to feel however you feel and let us see that. I know you don’t want to worry us, but it’s more of a worry to wonder than it is to know and see what’s really going on in here.” She tapped my head with her knuckles.

  “We’re going to worry anyway,” Anette added. “It might as well be for the right reasons.”

  I reached up to still my mother’s hands for a moment. I thought of what I’d told them the night before, the first part of my working back toward that night. Part of me wanted to scold them a bit, let them know that this was hard work for me. But I knew that they were right. I plunged ahead.

  “I’m afraid. Of myself and how I respond to things sometimes.”

  “And it makes me afraid sometimes when I don’t see how you are responding.” My mother sighed. “You don’t have to capture and hold so much in. It’s okay to be angry or sad.”

  “But I get mad at myself when I—”

  Anette came and sat down in front of me. “Please don’t do that to yourself. I can see how hard you’re trying. Give yourself a break. Trust us. You’re not going to chase us away.”

  I took to heart what they were trying to tell me. I saw that getting upset with myself for being upset could just spiral and spiral. I had to accept that from moment to moment I didn’t have to be in complete command of my emotions and myself. I hadn’t realized just how much tension I was carrying in my whole body. Normally I was so attuned to my physical self and its state, but I’d been so preoccupied with so many thoughts that I hadn’t noticed just how sore my jaw was, how I was clamping my teeth together so tightly and hunching my shoulders around my neck. It was almost as if I’d gotten to the point that I had to consciously tell myself to take in a breath.

  Still, I wasn’t ready to tell them about the details of the attack. I had to work my way up to that point. I continued to open up to them, reminding myself that it was okay to go at my own pace. I didn’t have to match or beat anyone else’s time.

  For the next two days, I let my emotions dictate to me what I did, where I went, what I said or didn’t say. I tried to be in the moment instead of going back to the past, or thinking ahead to the next semester, the next track season, the next steps in the investigation, and what I imagined would be a trail I’d have to pick up soon after I returned. I hadn’t realized how much effort it had taken to stay in control. I don’t think I was very good at the letting go maneuver; I’d still find myself feeling bad and immediately trying to figure out some way to turn that around.

  From the first day I’d been home, I was hoping to see my friends and had spent a lot of time thinking about what we might do. A week into my stay, I hadn’t seen any of them but Ida yet. I tried not to make too much of the texts and phone calls that went unanswered, the excuses about being too busy or too tired. “One of these days.” “Soon.” “Let me get back to you.” I told myself that this was a good sign. They were busy with things to do at the holidays. They weren’t treating me any different because of the rape. If I wanted to act as if nothing had happened or get back to normal as quickly and easily as possible, then I had to accept it when others acted that way, right?

  Ida was being a really good friend, and that was what mattered most. She also told me about a chance to catch up with my graduating class. What we grow up with seems normal to us, so it wasn’t until I went to SMU and talked with people from the U.S. and elsewhere that I realized it was unusual that my entire graduating class at the school of sports (the equivalent of tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade in the States) was made up of just thirty students. As one U.S. teammate put it, that was a tiny school; she had that many fellow students in a History class. The good thing was that because our class was so small, we got to know everyone really well. I considered my former classmates friends.

  Sticking to my decision to do what was as close to normal under the circumstances, I decided to attend the reunion. To make things easier for me, Ida had gone into the party to let everyone see her son and also to let those who didn’t know what had happened to me. The whole evening I felt oddly off balance. At first no one came up to talk to me, and then those few who did didn’t mention the attack at all or ask me how I was doing. They responded to me like I was the new girl at school, not someone they’d known well for years.

  I had a lot of trouble sleeping again that night, but not because of any nightmares about that night in Dallas. I wondered if maybe I was fooling myself, that the Monika I thought I was presenting to others didn’t bear any resemblance to who I’d been when I left for my second year at SMU only a few short months ago. I thought that I was dressing and acting like my old self, but maybe everyone saw through my act.

  I shared those thoughts with Anette, and she shook her head. “It’s not you. It’s them. Don’t blame yourself. They don’t know how to act. A lot of them haven’t been anywhere else or dealt with anything. That’s not an excuse. Just because they don’t know what to say doesn’t mean they shouldn’t say anything. That’s just rude and ignorant.”

  How people respond in tough circumstances says a lot about who they are. I always loved Anette, but our relationship had evolved into something deeper and richer. With many of my friends from home, though, it was a much harder transition. They felt so distant. I’d bought gifts for my closest friends, and I’d thought that we’d see one another before the holiday, but we hadn’t. So one morning I got in the car and drove the quiet streets toward Dania’s house. As I rounded a bend, the small stack of presents slid off the seat and onto the floor, a puddle of shiny paper and ribbons reminding me of how different this year was. I grabbed Dania’s from the pile and walked up the driveway, feeling an odd sense of approaching a home that was unfamiliar to me despite how many hours I’d spent there.

  I briefly considered knocking on the door, being the one to make clear how strong my desire was to see her, for things to be back to the way they had been. Instead I stood there in a cloud of my own breath wondering why it was that she and the others hadn’t responded to me, why it had come to this—me feeling more like a criminal creeping around than julenissen, the Norwegian equivalent of Santa Claus. My hope that someone would notice me and invite me in didn’t come true. I left the gift on the doorstep like an abandoned child, and feeling very much like one myself, I got in the car and gave up on the idea of dropping off the other presents.

  At the time I couldn’t articulate this,
but later on I came to better understand and put things in a different perspective. I needed to make the distinction between what happened to me and who I was. I think part of the problem was that people weren’t sure what to say because they didn’t want to upset me by asking the wrong thing. The rape was hard for me to talk about, and it was for other people as well. But I was not just that one thing that happened. I still existed outside of that event. I think people were struggling to know what to do because they saw me in a new way—as a rape victim. And what I wanted then, more than anything, was acknowledgment and proof that I was more Monika Kørra than Jessica December Watkins. The day after the high school event, my father asked me to go for a run with him. Since I’d been home, he’d been fairly quiet, and I knew that he was trying to be respectful, to let me take the lead in talking with him. That’s how things had been between us before as well. He trusted me and was there for me when I needed him. Even though I hadn’t told him how upset I was over the way the reunion had gone, I took his asking me to go along with him as a sign that he sensed I needed him.

  We ran along, mostly in silence, our few comments accompanied by the sounds of our footfalls. The wind whipped around the corner of a building, inciting a tumbling riot of snow, so much like my thoughts and feelings. My throat constricted and tears fell and froze on my cheeks. I tried to stifle a sob and failed. My father wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and we both briefly staggered over a hardened clump of snow before righting ourselves.

  I knew that my father was struggling with the idea that he hadn’t been able to protect me from harm. When I was younger, my father and I were like best buddies. We always joke in our family that I was the son my parents never got. That I was so interested in things my father loved—skiing and running and other sports—brought us close together. In Dallas, I missed the good-luck hugs he and my mother gave me before a race. I missed seeing my father standing on the sidelines of the track with a stopwatch in his hands or at a soccer match shouting encouragement. Mostly, I missed the times when, after a race, the two of us would go home together and stop for ice cream or candy, both of us understanding that this wasn’t something we would tell Mom. I couldn’t keep this secret from him.