Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  The plane ride back reminded me of when I flew home for the first time after the attack. I was switching identities again. The more miles I put between me and Norway, the more I settled back into Dallas Monika. I used some of the time to write, some of it to puzzle out just how my desire to be a help to others would fit into all my other plans, how they would mesh with the rest of my American life. Shortly after I arrived in Dallas, I let Kristine and Silje know about the book project and my desire to turn the experience into something beneficial to others.

  “Whatever we can do, let us know,” Silje said.

  “That’s great!” Kristine smiled and then her eyebrows went up. “I wonder who’ll play me in the movie.”

  We all laughed. It was great to be back, back in the arms and minds and hearts of my team within a team within a team.

  I didn’t have to wait a long time to turn my attention to all the things that were next. Track practices and classes got me back in a good groove. Erin was true to her word and e-mailed her personal contact information, and we shared our feelings with each other. I was so incredibly grateful for what she had done and hoped that she was doing okay. She assured me that she was, and was taking a little bit of time to think about the next steps for herself. Life would go on, she reminded me.

  As soon as I returned to campus, I met with Brandon. He had told me that he had some news for me. As much as I told myself not to anticipate too much about what he might have to tell me, I walked into the Starbucks thinking that he was going to share with me news that he and Alfonso Zuniga’s attorney had reached an agreement. They hadn’t. In fact, Zuniga’s attorney had taken an outrageous position.

  “Five years?”

  Brandon sipped his coffee and nodded slowly, his eyes large and disbelieving. “Yes. Can you believe it?”

  “No.”

  “He claims that he didn’t know what was going on, that he was there driving and the other two told him to pull over and that was as much as he was involved. He’s willing to plead guilty if he gets five years at the most.”

  “No way!” I slammed my hand down on the table. I quickly looked down when I saw a few people glancing our way. Even in Norway, with our liberal court system, he would not have gotten that light a sentence if he’d gone to trial.

  Brandon remained his usual calm self. He had a way of always staying cool, and that helped me settle down.

  “You’re right. There’s no way that we can make that kind of plea agreement. At first I thought his lawyer was trying some kind of negotiation tactic, but he’s stuck to that.”

  “Well, I went through one trial, I can do another.”

  Brandon smiled. “I thought you might say that. We’re going to get him, don’t you worry.”

  As well as Brandon knew me, and as much as I knew that I had to be flexible and adjust, worry began to take over. The night after my meeting with Brandon, I couldn’t sleep at all. Maybe it was silly of me, but after the first trial, I had felt such a sense of success and really believed that I was on to the next phase in my life. I’d focused so much on that first trial and how it would signal the end. It was as if I had been in a race, counting down the laps to the last one, the bell lap, and had gotten to the finish line, expending all my energy in a last kick and winning the race, with everyone coming up to congratulate me, but then a few hours later, I’d been told that I hadn’t run the right number of laps, I needed to drop everything, get back in my running clothes, and go and finish the race.

  As upset as I was, I knew that I couldn’t let Zuniga and his lawyers get away with five years. When I came back from Brandon’s meeting, Kristine and Silje could sense immediately that I was upset. They joined me on a run, and we talked about what had happened. They told me that they knew that Coach Wollman would understand, as he had before, that I wasn’t going to be like the rest of the girls on the team whose time was more or less their own.

  “I just want to be normal again,” I shouted as we weaved our way through campus.

  Kristine laughed and said, “When were you ever normal?” She picked up the pace and I sprinted to catch her.

  “What’s so special about being normal?” Silje said. We resumed running side by side, and Kristine and I both laughed. This was a common topic among us. The life of an athlete set us apart and we liked that. Fitting in wasn’t as high on our list of priorities as it had been when we first came to campus as foreign students and foreign student athletes. We’d stayed true to ourselves, but we’d found a place in the campus community and outside of it. We had our quirks, and though we were three girls from Norway, eventually everyone got to know us as individuals. Silje was the dutiful one, the one who was most dedicated to her running and her studies. Kristine was the entertainer. Wherever Kristine was, you’d hear laughter. I existed somewhere in the middle ground, in some ways more like Silje, in others wishing that I could be more like Kristine. There were times when those identities merged, and I thought once again of the sometimes-you-just-have-to-not-give-a-shit advice that I’d given to a teammate.

  I decided this was one of those times.

  “Last one there has to pay!” I said, reversing direction and heading toward the frozen yogurt store.

  I had months to prepare for the trial. Brandon let me know that one of the challenges I faced was having gone on record in the first trial with my account of the events. I had to make sure that I didn’t deviate from what I’d said the first time around. I read and reread those transcripts, reviewed with Brandon the key points in my testimony, and went back through the journal I had been keeping.

  I noticed that from the first days after I was raped, I had been trying to make sense of the “why?” At first, there was the inevitable “Why did this have to happen to me?” but even in the earliest entries, I could see that there was something deeper than that.

  I’ve always understood, on some level, that running was a very selfish endeavor. I benefited from it physically, mentally, and spiritually. But there was a kind of halo effect: when I felt good about my running and myself, then I treated other people better and they may then have treated other people better as well. For a long time, that was enough. I felt good about being a positive person and that I had generally a very good and strong relationship with most everyone else I came in contact with.

  I worried sometimes that the inverse of that could be true as well, that a kind of devil’s horns effect might exist. If I was crushed by this experience and allowed it to drag me down, I might negatively impact other people. I was fairly close to being obsessive about preventing that from happening. I found that I frequently exhausted myself, and most likely everyone else, in my efforts to, as I’d said while running with Kristine and Silje, be “normal.”

  Even though I’d laughed and joked with them about it being okay to not be normal, the fact was that when I was really honest with myself, I knew the rape had altered me. I wanted to be a normal girl who didn’t have to wonder when she met some guy at what point in the relationship she would have to tell him about her secret past. I wanted to be a girl who wondered if a guy liked me or not only because of some part of my personality or looks and not because of something that happened to me in the past.

  But I also wanted to help people. And if I was really going to do that, I had to let them see some of my weakness and vulnerability. Ironically, in a way, that would be showing them my strength. I was hurting, I was exhausted, I was confused, but I’d come back from that and won. I’d be lying, and doing people a disservice, if I came across as if none of this was a big deal, if I let people believe that I was unaffected, that it hadn’t been a struggle for me to figure out the best way forward. I’d come to see that my recovery was littered with missteps. I was also starting to better see how I’d been making similar mistakes in my life and in my recovery. If I learned from my mistakes in my running, I could do the same in the rest of my life.

  I still wasn’t sure exactly what that plan would look like, or how it would fit into my schedul
e. Before, that would have driven me crazy, but I was learning to give myself a break. As that Take Back the Night event had shown me, sexual crimes affected the lives of a lot of people. I could help them and, in doing so, help myself. It was now a question of knowing which was the lead leg and which was the follow. Funny that I had to learn how to put one foot in front of the other in the correct order after all these years.

  I’ve always been a believer that nothing good ever comes about from things being easy. Having to testify again was going to be hard and take a lot of preparation. There would likely be some ups and downs in the trial. That’s how things went for me in other parts of my life—especially on the track. One step forward, one step back. That proved to be the case on April 2, 2011, when I ran the three-thousand-meter steeplechase at the Bobby Lane Invitational in Arlington, Texas. I came in second, but my time was slow, almost a minute behind my PR. That was one of the down moments. I hoped that on April 11, when I was scheduled to testify, I’d have one of those up moments.

  The worst thing about that race wasn’t my overall time; I had come in second place by just a second. What bothered me was that I hadn’t dug deep and fought at the finish to overtake the other woman. My focus was so split by the trial that I had no mental energy at all that day. I wondered if I could have won if I had kept my head in the game. As I cooled down, I beat myself up about how I’d come to Dallas as a runner on a scholarship, and that was my job, and I owed it to these people to devote myself wholeheartedly to training and racing. That was all true, but I realized that I also had to understand what everyone else seemed to: that I had to put it all in perspective.

  I didn’t have time to dwell for long on my poor performance. Wenche picked me up in Arlington right after my race so we would make it to the airport in time to pick up my mother. Something about having my home-and-away mothers with me made it a bit easier to get over how poorly I’d done in that race. The race that really mattered was the trial. This was the last one. I’d have another season of cross-country and track to run once this trial was over. I would be able to work as hard as I could in training and racing then, but I had to keep in mind how divided my time was now.

  The second day of the trial, I found myself with my focus split again. I had an Applied Physiology exam scheduled for the afternoon. Meanwhile, at the same time Brandon was involved in jury selection. He didn’t think I’d have to testify that day, but I was to keep my cell phone with me in case I needed to rush over to the courthouse.

  I had told my professor, Scott Davis, about the trial. He’d had no idea I was the rape victim, and that surprised me. He said that I could bring my phone with me to class—something normally prohibited. I thanked him, but prayed that I would be able to finish the exam in peace. No luck, though; in the middle of the exam, Brandon called. Dr. Davis met my gaze and nodded. I got up and went out into the hallway, not caring that everyone else in the exam room had looked up to follow me. My heart racing with anticipation and thinking that I was going to have to rush out of there, I answered the call.

  “Hate to tell you this,” Brandon began, and my heart sank. “The judge is sick. Postponed for today.”

  Brandon called again later that day and asked me to meet him the next morning. At the time I didn’t think it was odd that he wouldn’t be in court, but when he showed up he told me that the judge had postponed the trial for another week. He offered to make alternate flight arrangements for my mother, who had come into town to support me during the trial but was now scheduled to leave before it even started. I tried to turn this news into a positive—the delay meant that my mom would be with me for a few more days. Fortunately, her very understanding boss let her extend the time away. But as my mother put it, even if she hadn’t gotten permission, she would have stayed. “Some things are more important than work,” she told me. We’d been having a good time together, and I wanted to focus on that and not on any disappointments.

  The delay also meant that I wouldn’t be able to race at the Mt. Sac Relays. This was the best meet of the spring season, one I’d really been looking forward to, especially since I’d done so well in the 10K the year before. Now, instead of returning to the scene of a major milestone in my training and my recovery, and being able to measure my progress, I was going to be stuck back in Dallas.

  I’d been mentally pointing toward this race all season, and now it was being taken from me. Sure, having my mom there in Dallas was great, but I really, really wanted to be on the starting line with fifty or more other runners, to bring to life all the mental images and sensations I’d been carrying around in my head the whole spring as I worked out.

  I’d also miss out on the bonding time on the plane, hearing the teasing the scared flyers got, the laughs the snorers wouldn’t hear, the paper wads being tossed into their slack mouths. Staying in a hotel packed with other student athletes, and just hanging out with people my own age and with a similar interest, was the payoff for all the hard work we put in. A meet like Mt. Sac was spread over several days. You got away from campus and classes, and your workouts only took a small portion of your time; since you were competing, once your race was over, you could just enjoy the experience.

  I wasn’t just disappointed. I was pissed off. I loved that race. No matter how positively I tried to spin things, it felt like every time things seemed to be progressing, I had to take another step back. I wasn’t looking to party or to hook up with anyone; I just wanted to be a regular college kid—someone who could get away and have some fun. To add to it all, the new timing meant that Kristine was going to have to miss Mt. Sac, too. I laughed the first time I heard someone described as a Debbie Downer (and had the term explained to me). But was that what I was? Not only did I mess things up for me, but I put other people’s fun in jeopardy or took it away from them altogether. I could live with having all my race preparation go for nothing. I could live with not being able to get out and have fun. But I couldn’t live with denying Kristine that same opportunity.

  I told Brandon, “I know you want to save Kristine’s testimony until later in the trial, but she has to go first. She’s put up with enough. If I have to miss the race, then I have to miss the race, but I’m not making her miss it, too.”

  “I appreciate what you’re saying,” he said, “but I can’t do that. You leading off and her taking the baton at the end? That works. You don’t mess with success.”

  I appreciated the track reference, but I wasn’t going to be thrown off that easily. We argued about it for a bit, but he finally agreed. “Okay, okay.” Then he took a breath. “I think you should know this: Zuniga’s wife and kids are going to be in the courtroom.”

  I felt like someone was choking me. How was I going to be able to say all those horrible things—the truth about what this husband and father had done—knowing that they were there to hear them? Why did I have to be the one who was responsible for taking their loved one away from them?

  Kristine did testify on Tuesday, April 11. We all drove to the courthouse together. My father called, just before his workday was ending, to wish us luck. He hadn’t been able to take any more time off, and I was glad that he wouldn’t have to sacrifice time he’d worked so hard for to take a “vacation” spent in a court building.

  “Be strong,” he said just before hanging up, and then added, “I know you will be.”

  My American moms and my real mom sat in the courtroom. My mom decided that after the first trial and being in the waiting room and not hearing what had gone on, she wanted to be in there. She understood English well enough that only the legal terms might puzzle her. I’d told her everything about that night, so I wasn’t worried that hearing it again would upset her.

  Kristine and I waited in the kids’ room again.

  “At least I won’t have to sit here for so long that I’ll be able to memorize these.” She picked up a copy of the children’s picture book The Stray Dog.

  “He’s cute,” I said, pointing at the cover and thinking of Anette an
d her dog Enja.

  “Yes,” Kristine said. I could see her struggling to say something else, keep the conversation going about dogs, or tennis balls, or anything at all but what she was about to face. Her lips trembled and she shook her head.

  “Cute,” she managed at last with a weak laugh.

  I scooted my chair toward hers and we sat face-to-face, our arms resting on our thighs, holding hands, heads bent as if in prayer.

  I know that what I was hoping for came true. Within the first hour, the bailiff came to call for Kristine. She stood and smoothed her pants and adjusted her blouse and hair. I stood, and we hugged for a long time, until the bailiff said again, “It’s time.”

  I watched Kristine leave and could tell by her slow and deliberate gait that she was struggling with this situation; she seemed to take a slight pause before placing one foot in front of the other. I hoped she’d turn and look back at me, but she didn’t. I stood there until the clatter of her footsteps faded.

  I flipped open the book. “It was a great day for a picnic.” I hoped that would be true for Kristine and me.

  She returned less than an hour later, the relief she felt expressed in her carriage. She stood taller and walked purposefully toward me.

  “I did good,” she said as she held her arms open for me to embrace her. “I wanted to do that for you.”

  The next morning, before I had to return to court, I walked with Kristine and Silje from our apartment to SMU.

  “I wish that you were coming with us,” Kristine said. Then, pointing at her bag that I had insisted on carrying, she added, “You know that’s what the freshmen are supposed to do for us.”

  “I know. It’s not that heavy.”

  “Maybe we can sneak you inside it,” Silje said.

  “I expect it to be heavier when you get back, with a medal, both of you.”

  It was bittersweet seeing all of my teammates clustered around the SMU minibus. A few of the girls came up and hugged me, and we exchanged good-luck sentiments for the days ahead.