Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  The police were persistent. They contacted T-Mobile and got a list of all the incoming and outgoing calls since the time I was kidnapped, then researched all the addresses associated with those calls. One of them came from Red Bud Lane, so undercover police officers monitored activity on that block. When they saw two suspicious-looking men walking out of a house, they called for uniformed officers to take over. When those officers arrived, they were able to stop the two men because they’d chosen to walk down the middle of the street.

  “Jaywalking.” Kelly laughed and clapped her hands.

  I was confused. “I’ve never heard of that. What does it mean?”

  “In this city, it’s against the law to walk in the middle of the street. That’s what sidewalks are for. The point is, who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t been able to stop them?” Erin shrugged.

  I nodded, understanding just how much luck had played a part in all this.

  One of the two men was Luis Zuniga. The men were asked to empty their pockets, and both of them had small bags of what was later confirmed to be black tar heroin. Luis also had a Nokia cell phone. When one of the officers flipped it open, a pink floral background shone on the screen. Luis explained that the phone belonged to his girlfriend.

  Scanning the list of contacts, the officer saw that the first entry was listed as “BFF.”

  Erin sipped her water. “That was Kristine, right, your BFF?”

  I don’t know why, but Erin remembering who Kristine was from my journal entries pleased me. She was paying attention. Maybe I wasn’t just a case or a client or a victim to her.

  “In a way, we got lucky again. Having those guys on suspicion of drug possession meant we could detain them. That gave us more time to put more of the puzzle pieces together.”

  “It’s like sitting here hearing about something on C.S.I.,” Kelly commented thoughtfully.

  Erin smiled to reduce the impact of her words. “I like a good drama as much as anybody, but those shows aren’t exactly educational. They sometimes give people a very inaccurate sense of how this whole process works.”

  As Erin continued, I became even more aware how a combination of hard work and luck had played a part in catching the men who raped me. The same night as my attack, three Hispanic men in a black SUV had also beaten and robbed a man. They’d also stolen his phone. The police used the same pinging technology to triangulate locations of his phone that they’d used in tracking my location. Eventually, they traced one of the calls made on that stolen phone to a woman named Aracely Zuniga, who’d been pulled over on a traffic violation.

  On December 8, three days after I was assaulted, Aracely Zuniga agreed to speak with police officers about Luis Zuniga, who she would eventually reveal was her nephew, as was Alfonso Zuniga.

  As it turned out, her son was the man who had been arrested along with Luis on heroin charges. Her daughter, a woman named Miriam, was the common-law wife of an abusive man named Arturo Arevalo, who was the father of Miriam’s two young children.

  “Ms. Zuniga said she wanted nothing more than for Arturo to leave her daughter and everyone else they both knew alone. He’d just gotten out of jail and she didn’t want that kind of man around her grandkids. She said that nothing good ever happened when Arturo was around.”

  “The Worst One,” I said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “No wonder the Weak One seemed so afraid of him.”

  “I wish that instead of being afraid of him, he’d have knocked some sense into Arturo,” Kelly said. She looked at me, stricken. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to what-if.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I know what you mean.”

  While being questioned, Aracely Zuniga provided police with the address of the building where both Arturo and Alfonso lived, the information that all three men hung around together, and the fact that one of them owned a black SUV.

  Erin’s story of the investigation and eventual arrest pleased me for lots of reasons, but the one thing that I wondered at and admired the most was how a couple of women, Aracely Zuniga and later a woman named Cynthia Frias, played key roles in helping the police. Ms. Frias was married to Alfonso Zuniga. She allowed the police to search the apartment she shared with Alfonso while he was in for questioning.

  The police found a gun clip and bullets, in addition to the robbery victim’s stolen cell phone.

  They were unable to find a gun, but Cynthia Frias called shortly thereafter with information about where to find the gun: it was hidden under Alfonso’s doghouse.

  I didn’t think that the women had known just how awful their husbands were, and I wondered for a long time after how they felt when they found out what the men had been arrested for. I had to believe that they had no idea that their husbands were capable of participating in a gang rape.

  Again, a bit of luck had been on our side. When the other two men heard that Luis had been arrested, they had made a plan to escape to Mexico. The police showed up at the apartment complex where the two men lived three minutes before a distant cousin of theirs arrived to drive them to the bus station.

  Three minutes. That was the difference between this crime being solved and me having to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life, fearing that one day those men might come back for me.

  “Most cases require that we get a good break. We got one, maybe a couple, but they won’t mean a whole lot if we don’t take full advantage of them and get the conviction and the sentence that you want. That’s not completely in my control, but to a great degree it is. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that everyone’s hard work, your contributions, and those good breaks don’t go to waste.”

  “Thank you. And I’m sorry if I’ve been—”

  Erin held up her hand. “Appreciated but not needed. I admire tenacity and you’ve got it.”

  I left that lunch feeling very good about the position we were in and about Erin. She was solidly on my side, appreciated how much I wanted to help, and was passionate about the work she was doing to help women like me. I was so grateful that Kelly had found a way for us to get to know each other after all, so that I could get a real sense of Erin. It had been hard to talk to her in that first formal, awkward meeting, and I desperately needed to get to know her in order to see her as a trusted member of my team. Our lunch made me realize that she really did have all of the qualities I wanted in my legal counsel, and made me feel like I was in good hands for the next step.

  I wasn’t certain how to feel about the fact that Luis, having been held for three days before the other two men were arrested, confessed that he had taken part. He, of course, claimed that the other two men were the ones who had really harmed me. He had helped our case by confessing and filling in some details, but he had also done horrific things to me. Could he possibly believe that his reluctance to do such horrible things to another person was in any way an excuse? His weakness took on so many dimensions that I had a difficult time processing how I really felt about him. But it still stuck in my head that at least he had admitted what he’d done.

  I was conflicted about how to make sense of Luis, but I knew how I felt about the others. When questioned, Alfonso kept spinning different tales about what had happened. Arturo had somehow snatched me as he, Alfonso, drove past us. He tried to tell Arturo not to hurt me. Arturo threatened his family if Alfonso didn’t go along with the plan. Luis was trying to help me. He didn’t want any part of what was going on, so he dropped me off back at the spot where I’d been grabbed.

  Later, Alfonso changed his mind about what had happened. He never touched me. This wasn’t the first time Arturo had done such a thing. He was frightened because Arturo had a pistol. “Arturo is bad,” Alfonso kept repeating.

  I knew that. That night, I’d thought of Alfonso as the Boss, since Arturo had referred to him as “my boss.” Now, based on what Erin was telling me, I realized that Arturo was the one in charge, the one who had a powerful influence over the other
two.

  Unlike the other two, Arturo refused to admit that he had played any role at all in kidnapping and raping me. I couldn’t understand how someone could lie that way, not face the horrendous truth about himself even when he was obviously cornered. At times during this whole ordeal, I may have been in denial, but I still acknowledged the truth about myself and what I’d experienced. What was it like to completely deny something so dramatic? For the first time in my life I wondered about evil people, and if they ever looked at themselves in the mirror and saw what others saw.

  I didn’t know how Arturo or the others could live with themselves, but I did know this. I didn’t want them to live among the rest of us. Other people who were close to me didn’t want those men to be allowed to live at all, but I didn’t want them to be executed on my behalf. I didn’t see the point in taking their lives from them—their freedom yes, but not their lives.

  My priority was keeping those men away from other people—so that none of them would ever have the chance to hurt anyone else, so that no one else would have to endure what I had.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Going Solo

  Shortly following my return to Dallas after Christmas, I went for a training run with Kristine. I still wasn’t feeling 100 percent, but it felt good to be back on familiar territory and running. Kristine and I started off chatting a bit, but as we picked up the pace and the distance grew longer, we lapsed into the comfortable silence that can pass between two close friends. We hadn’t discussed a destination or a route beforehand, and after the first mile or so, I took the lead. I wasn’t consciously aware of making this choice, but I found myself heading in the direction of where the party had been held.

  As we neared the familiar apartment, Kristine reached out and put her hand on my forearm, halting our progress. Her eyes pleaded with me. With a shake of her head, she indicated that she didn’t want to go back there. I slowed nearly to a stop, lingering at the crux of the intersection, feeling like it would be a good thing for me to go past the site where I was taken from, as if I could somehow transform it from a place of fear to just another stretch of road I ran along. I knew that Kristine was still struggling with putting that spot into the context of the rest of our lives, as independent women and as competitive runners. I didn’t want it to become either holy ground or unholy ground. It was just a place after all, a few meters of blacktop and stones.

  Still, I honored what Kristine wanted and we turned right and down another long tree-lined avenue toward White Rock Lake and the park there. As we wound our way toward the Botanical Garden and the Arboretum, I firmed up a decision I’d been toying with the whole run, concerning my return the next morning to Parkland Hospital to be tested again for HIV.

  Kristine and I stopped at a mini-mart before going back to our place. We stood in the parking lot for a few minutes, sipping our vitamin waters.

  I picked at the label on mine and then squinted into the sun, Kristine’s image obscured by light and shadow.

  “I think I’d like to go by myself tomorrow.”

  Kristine nodded. “You’re sure?”

  “I am,” I said with greater conviction than I really felt. “I’m not looking forward to going back there, but I need to start doing things on my own again.”

  Kristine chewed at her lips for a second and seemed about to speak, but I jumped in. “I know that you’re willing to go. I appreciate that, but I’m getting tired of feeling like I’m imposing on everyone’s schedule. I know that’s how I feel and not how you are feeling, but I hope you’ll understand.”

  Kristine smiled and rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said in her best American Valley Girl impersonation. She wrapped me in a hug and said, “Good luck. I’ll be thinking about you.”

  Maybe there’s something about the contrast between hospital hallways in the middle of the night and the middle of the day that makes a huge difference in perception, but Parkland wasn’t as horror-show creepy as I remembered it. Instead of the awful artificial light, sunlight poured in through the windows. Instead of the hallways being empty, they bustled with activity, and instead of the emergency exit lights shining like a warning of something ominous, they simply stated a fact.

  I sat in the exam room, propped my arm on the table, and watched as the needle probed beneath my skin and my blood filled the syringe. I resisted the temptation to ask how long it would take to get the results and told myself that I had nothing to worry about. I was fretting like mad inside, but I smiled and thanked the nurse who’d done the draw.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said.

  I immediately thought that she was speaking to me like I was a child, and realized that to her, that’s exactly what I was.

  I shook my head. “No. It was nothing at all really.” I kept the cotton ball firmly pressed to my arm, noting the difference between the feel of my skin on my own skin and the nurse’s gloves, the barrier between someone who’d gone through what I had and someone who’d not.

  When the results came back negative, I felt an enormous sense of relief. I realized then just how fearful I had been. I’d have to have additional follow-ups, but knowing that it looked as if I was in the clear made me feel cleaner. I shared the news with Anette and my parents, but mentioned it casually, as if I had done well on a quiz for one of my classes, just a routine part of my day as a normal university student. The thought that I was possibly carrying a virus—one that I had gotten from them, had made me feel dirty and uncomfortable in my own body. I hadn’t realized just how heavy the burden of maybe carrying a virus could be—it was as if I’d been dragging a car tire behind me for all those weeks.

  I knew that many people lived long and productive lives with HIV, but what I had a hard time dealing with was where the microorganism had come from. Had I been infected, it would have meant that I was literally carrying in my body a part of one of those men. That would have meant that I would never be free of them, that woven into the fabric of my body would have been something of one or possibly more of the people from whom I wanted to get as great a distance as possible.

  I saw passing that test as a mark of progress. Another lap to be counted off. Another runner passed, a position gained. I’d even come to terms with the fact that the trial wouldn’t begin for another few months. I had a track season to focus on, and decided that I would pour myself into my training even more fully as a way of making the time pass quickly. I was a competitor, and competitors compete. They rise to a challenge and take up the fight. I took what Erin had said about good breaks and taking advantage of them to heart. I’d thought much the same thing about my having survived the attack. It was up to me to make something of this chance.

  I can see now that this marked a change in the relationships I had with my friends in Dallas, most particularly with Robin. I’d always been so independent before, and then after the rape I’d needed others to help get through even the smallest things. The pendulum didn’t so much swing between those two points as it did freeze at one end and then suddenly jump to the other side. I exhibited the abrupt shifts between “help me, help me” and “let me do it myself” that I’d seen in children. I became aware of that and tried to make those shifts less abrupt, hoping to strike a finer balance somewhere in the middle, but my tendency when faced with any problem was to lower my shoulders and plow forward. Keeping others at just the right distance from me wasn’t easy when they perceived my actions as pushing them away and I perceived my behavior as asking politely, and maybe nudging them a bit, to give me the space I needed.

  It seems strange to me even now how vulnerable I was at the beginning of the healing process, and how hard I tried later to let everyone know that this was something I could handle myself. It scared me to rely too much on others to help me with my healing. What would happen to me if they were to grow tired of me and my struggles? Unfortunately, because he was in many ways the one closest to me, Robin bore the brunt of the head-spinning alternation.

  I was definitely feel
ing better physically. Sleep was something I began to welcome again. The nausea that had plagued me began to subside. I couldn’t bring myself to eat peanut butter, something I had done regularly before. Prior to leaving for the party that night, I’d eaten a peanut butter sandwich. Memories come in strange packages.

  As the first meet of the track season approached, I was starting to get some of my stamina back. Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. I was on the track, but with my renewed sense of physical strength, my determination to return to normalcy had also increased, as did my efforts to make sure I made that a reality.

  During one of the sessions with Dr. Soutter, she used the term “new normal.” I knew what she meant, but it wasn’t until I was doing a series of four-hundred-meter repeats—one lap of the track at a fast pace followed by a brief jog and then another fast lap—that I began to really reflect on what she meant. We did those repeats as a group—all the distance runners together in a pack. I liked that, but I also knew that when we crossed the line and our times were shouted out, everyone would know where we stood in that pack. I had a kind of love/hate relationship with that idea. It was good to know where I stood compared to everyone else, but in a way this was a declaration of the state of my fitness. Runners take a large amount of pride in demonstrations and declarations of how much we are able to suffer, how much pain we can take. That’s what our times in races and workouts really came down to. How much pain could we endure? Having that out there for everyone to see, when the time was fast, was a good thing.

  As we passed the start/finish line for each lap, Coach Casey shouted out our times. Before the rape, I’d typically been able to run the four hundred meters in seventy-four to seventy-five seconds. During that workout, I was clocking them in seventy-nine seconds. That might not sound like much, but a ten-thousand-meter race takes about twenty-five laps, and those seconds really add up.