Until I looked through the police reports, I didn’t know that while I was waiting in the unmarked police car outside the basement apartment, one of the officers called the landlord of the building, a man I knew as the bartender at our favorite dive downtown. He came to the apartment, maybe while I was waiting outside, and confirmed that he owned the building, and that his tenant was a friend, the same person as The Suspect. After The Landlord refused to tell the police where they could find their suspect, and after he tried several times to call his tenant, he was arrested for obstructing a government operation. He was later processed and transported to the county jail.
I also didn’t know that, in the early days of the investigation, one of The Suspect’s former students showed up at the police department, admitting that The Suspect paid him one hundred dollars to help him build the soundproof room. They spent an entire weekend working on it together. The Landlord of the building let them use his pickup truck to haul supplies and stopped by periodically to check on the progress. At one point he brought fresh watermelon and cantaloupe for them to eat. The student said he remembered that his former instructor had paid for everything with an envelope full of cash.
Until I looked through the police reports, I didn’t know that on July 5, the night of the kidnapping, The Suspect called the Mall 4 Theatres, asking if My Handsome Friend was working that evening. My Handsome Friend had told his bosses and fellow employees that some psycho might come to the theaters looking for him, and asked them not to give out any information about him over the phone or in person, or to let on that he still worked at the theater. My Handsome Friend told police that for six months The Suspect had been following him, driving past his house and the building where he worked, because he thought we were having an affair. My Handsome Friend told police he believed that The Suspect might harm him.
I also didn’t know that, after the story was reported on the news, people phoned in to the Crime Stoppers hotline to offer information they had about the case. One woman, an employee at a big-box hardware store, had helped The Suspect select glue for the Styrofoam he would later use to build what he called a sound studio. One man, who worked at a sound-supply shop on the business loop, said The Suspect had asked him how to build a soundproof room insulated enough to muffle a woman’s screams. For making movies, The Suspect had said.
According to the police reports, bank records reflect that sometime after 5:00 PM on July 5, 2000, The Suspect withdrew $750 from his checking account at an ATM only blocks from the building where I worked. Which means he may have gone to the ATM as early as 5:01 PM, moments before he approached me in the parking lot outside the building where I worked. Or as late as 11:59 PM, after he returned to the apartment where he had built the soundproof room and discovered that I’d escaped.
Early the following morning, before I’d called my parents or returned to my apartment to shower and pack, before The Nurse had finished searching the surfaces and cavities of my body for evidence, he withdrew another $750 from an ATM at a gas station at the intersection of two highways 150 miles away to the west and north by interstate. From that ATM he drove fifty-two miles south and parked his rental car on a street in the downtown business district of one of the few actual cities in the state, where it would be discovered by an officer from the Stolen Auto Division a month later.
On July 7, two days after the kidnapping, he purchased an airline ticket to León, Guanajuato, Mexico, at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. After arriving in Mexico, after passing without incident through immigration and customs, he walked to the ticket desk and purchased an airline ticket to Porlamar, the largest city on the Island of Margarita, just off the coast of Venezuela. He got off the plane in Santiago Mariño Caribbean International Airport that afternoon and withdrew $1200 from an ATM. That evening, just before the bank froze his account, just before I learned to accept the weight of my sister’s gun in my hand, one final debit for $29.56 posted to his checking account, from a restaurant at one of the island’s resorts.
One police report describes how, on July 12, one week after the kidnapping, at 9:10 AM, The Suspect called his stepfather at his farm in southern Missouri: a cabin just this side of a shack, the only building I remember now along the gravel road stretching across a heavily wooded hilltop, where it seemed a fresh buck was always swinging from a tree, the red gash of its belly gaping open. I remember eating stewed squirrel in the kitchen at a card table, loading the woodstove in the cramped living room, watching the clouds of my breath from a mattress on the floor in the only bedroom. I don’t remember seeing a phone. But it rang three times, the report says, before The Stepfather picked up. He asked, Where are you? The Suspect wouldn’t say. They talked briefly about the case. Yes, I did get her, The Suspect admitted, but he denied the allegations of rape. If you want to call Lacy, go ahead, he said. The Stepfather asked again, Where are you? The Suspect refused to say, but then started talking to another person near the phone in Spanish. At 10:00 AM on July 12, The Stepfather called The Detective to report the call. He said The Suspect seemed very upset about the media exposure on the case.
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]<
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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.
In the apartment I rent with My Older Sister, we stitch together a family and leave out all the arguing. After work we make dinner while roaches scurry across the countertops. After dinner we smoke cigarettes on the balcony and watch mall traffic collect and disperse at stoplights along the boulevard. Each week we change the message on our answering machine: lately we take turns singing Michael Jackson’s “Workin’ Day and Night” in squeaky falsetto voices. If I am not working at one crappy job or another, I am sitting in a large lecture class at the university, or having sex with boys I barely know: the short one who lives in our building—in his car in the parking lot, on the couch in his living room, and in his roommate’s water bed; the customer service manager at the big box store where I work as a lab tech in the Vision Center fucks me in the HR office, the men’s bathroom, on the table in the contact lens room. One night I bring home a biker I’ve met at the bar, who returns the next night and the next, and then he has moved in. On my day off I see an ad for Persian kittens in the classifieds and My Biker Boyfriend drives me to a dark house where I select a black one with long hair from the stacks and stacks of cages. My Older Sister gets a puppy and we all move from the apartment to a duplex with a yard and a garage.
At the Vision Center I wear protective goggles and feed plastic lenses into the machine, programming precise sizes and shapes on the knobs and dials while music blares from a speaker I’ve set up in the tiny office at one end of the lab. From the window over the machines, I watch customers checking out at the rows and rows of registers in the main store. The checkers smiling, mouthing the words, Did you find everything you needed today?
I bevel the edges of the lenses and dip them into tint or UV coating before screwing them into frames, checking each pair to make sure the axes of the lenses match the prescription, that the distance between the center of each lens corresponds to the distance between the patient’s pupils. One of the technicians pokes her head into the lab to let me know a customer needs a contact lens tutorial. I wash my hands and step into the small room, the tiny table spread with lens solution and clean towels, a mirror and tiny cardboard boxes, tiny mouths gaping open: Oh.
In the break room at the back of the big box store, I try to call My Biker Boyfriend at his bar downtown. He doesn’t answer. I smoke a cigarette and buy a soda out of the machine. The technicians in the Vision Center page me over the intercom to come back to the lab. There’s a line out the door. One of the techs is a no-show for her shift. After I check out each customer, I adjust their new glasses to fit. The oil from their skin collects on my fingers and palms. I smile and say Have a nice day and return to the register to help the next customer. I look up and see My Spanish Teacher checking out at one of the registers in the main store. He pays and walks to the door. I’m busy, but he waits, watching me. All through the evening rush I feel his eyes on me. I want to see you again, he whispers in my ear as I’m counting down the register before close, his hand on my shoulder, my arm, the tips of my fingers.
After locking up, I call the bar again. I am eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the tiny office at one end of the lab, the phone in my hand. Finally My Biker Boyfriend
picks up. He was out last night doing coke with his friend, he says. I say, We need to talk when you get home. He asks, half joking, if we are breaking up. I haven’t decided until just now, until exactly this moment. I clear my throat: Yes.
My Older Sister doesn’t understand why I am moving out. My Biker Boyfriend should be the one to go. She and I should stay together. We’re a family. I need some space, I say. I need to be alone. I find a classified ad for a studio in a student slum between downtown and campus, where the rent is $250 a month. I have the security deposit because I have just gotten paid. My Older Sister borrows a friend’s pickup truck to help me move my things: a bed, a couch that seats two people, a skillet, a coffee pot, the black Persian kitten and its litter box. I have a few books and CDs and magazines tossed into a laundry basket. She’s pissed but hugs me anyway before she climbs into the truck and pulls away.
I spend the whole afternoon putting things in their places. After I drag the bed up the tiny flight of stairs into the raised loft, I use a broom I find in the closet to sweep dead spiders to the center of the brown-carpeted floor while the kitten bats at their carcasses. After I put my skillet into the cupboard and discover an inheritance of plastic cups, I arrange the plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the shower. The kitten drinks water from the toilet. After I make the bed and hang my clothes in the closet, I shower and place a bowl each of cat food and water on the floor. I smoke and pace and look out the windows. I dress again and walk out the door.
The Other Side Page 2
