The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  I never say anything at all.

  I want to have another baby, I say. It’s a Saturday afternoon. I’ve just put my daughter down for a nap in her bed. My Husband is planting a tree in the yard behind our house. He’s hesitant. It’s been only a few months since I came out of the depression from the first. I’ve started a book, I remind him, a task we both know keeps my mind from skittering away, and I’ll be nearly finished with it by the time the baby is born. He makes me promise to find a therapist, someone you can trust, to prepare for what may follow out of the birth. I want to be better, I say. I swear I am trying to be better.

  I tell The Newest Therapist that ten years ago I was kidnapped and raped by a man I knew. We’re sitting in her office, a room with tall windows and creaky wooden floors in a converted Victorian house. A pair of plants hang from twin hooks near the windows. But I don’t want to talk about that, I say.

  Bullshit, she retorts. She asks for the two lists, and after reading the one I hand to her, after assuring me that I’m not remembering incorrectly, that I’m remembering exactly right, she suggests a few diagnoses for The Man I Used to Live With, and puts the DSM-IV in my hands. We talk about what may have drawn me to him in the first place, and about strategies for getting my anger and fear in check. We talk about the book I am writing, poems about growing up in the rural Midwest, and about the book we both know I must write after this.

  When my son is born, the birth is peaceful: slow and calm and controlled. At the hospital, Mom holds one hand, tears welling behind her glasses; My Husband holds the other, cheering me on. Outside, in the waiting room, my sisters play board games with my daughter. Dad leads her up and down the hallways, to the bathroom, to the aquarium, to the cafeteria for a banana and juice.

  Back in our home, days later, logs crackle in the fireplace while my daughter feeds her brand-new baby brother a bottle, holding his head so gently to her chest. They are both cradled in My Husband’s arms; all three of them cuddling under a blanket at one end of the couch. I sit at the other end, only a little apart, taking pictures of the light glowing in their faces.

  What do you feel in the dream, The Newest Therapist asks, when you see him approaching? She suggests a few quiet options: Do you feel concerned? Or nervous? Or afraid? I know she wants me to pin a name on the feeling. It’s part of the process, the experts say, of becoming a whole person again, of weaving the traumatic event back into the fabric of memory. If I can name what I feel when he comes to kill me in my dreams, for instance—fear or fright or terror—maybe I can choose one name for what I felt when I saw him approaching me in the parking lot, or when he drove me around in circles in my car, or when he asked me to lie down on the mattress in the corner of the soundproof room.

  But I do not feel fear, or fright, or terror. I did not feel concerned or nervous or afraid. There is no one word for it I can say. Because though I probably do feel something like fear and fright and terror, I also feel joy and ecstasy and relief. He’s finally come back. There’s no more waiting, I think.

  When I’m awake I see him everywhere. The man who crosses the street not at the intersection, not when the signal says WALK, but up the way a bit, near the middle of the block. Or the man in the restaurant with his back to me: his long curls, the cheap watch, its fraying nylon strap. It’s surprising how many strangers have his build, wear his clothes, stand with their feet spread wide apart, scratching the crease between neck and chin with the three middle fingers of either hand in the same arrogant way. Most of the time I recognize the impostor almost instantly because there is no feeling of being lowered by a rope very slowly, of my tongue turning to ash, to mud. I stop what I’m doing anyway and watch the stranger for a long long time.

  I am out walking the dog one morning and stop for a moment at an intersection to lean over the stroller, to tickle my son’s fat belly, and twist a tangle of his reddish curls around my finger. The dog perks up and takes aim at something behind us. I turn, see a man’s large frame standing right behind me, and scream. Not a yelp, but a bloodcurdling horror-movie scream. A long moment passes before I realize that this stranger, who lives in my neighborhood probably, is waiting patiently for a chance to pass. The dog foams and growls and tries to lunge for the man as he walks around us without speaking.

  In the afternoon I take my children to the park for a play-date. Two of my friends have invited us to join them; they each have a child the age of my son, and these children are happy to toddle around the jungle gym, climb up and down the ladders, and, only with tremendous encouragement, roll headfirst down the slide. I try to join the motherly conversation: the woes of finding day care, of keeping a part-time nanny, all the gear that must be schlepped to the doctor for a checkup only to return with a virus that causes diarrhea for days. My daughter follows her brother up the ladder a few dozen times before she declares that the babies are boring and bolts across the playground, where she asks a complete stranger to push her on the swings. He looks around, smiles at her benevolently, before giving her a little shove on the back.

  She doesn’t answer when I call her to come.

  When she sees me finally pick up her brother and march toward the swings to retrieve her, she sprints to the sandpit, where she greets a scruffy-looking vagrant sleeping on the park bench. Just as I reach the sandpit, she bolts again, this time to the other side of the jungle gym where I can’t see her, or anyone else she might be talking to. I apologize to my friends, put my son in the stroller, chase my daughter down, and leave.

  Before we get to the car, before I’ve buckled the children into their seats and locked the doors, my voice has grown so loud and terrible that it frightens even me.

  You don’t understand, I say, my voice hoarse and rattling in my chest. The world is not the kind of safe place you think it is. Her hands squirm in my hands. She searches my face, trying to understand. There are people who would do terrible things to you. People who would take you and kill you and I would never ever see you again.

  Before I’m finished saying this, she cries out: Mommy, you’re scaring me!

  You should be scared, I say, starting the car.

  The worst dream goes like this: I am stuck in a single point, unable to move, while the world goes on at normal speed around me. I can’t open my eyes fully because the light is too bright. I can’t move my limbs, which are stuck in molasses, maybe, or made of molasses. Time, too, is sticky and slow. No particular danger threatens me, but I panic anyway. Nearby, a group of children squeal and giggle and run. A couple passes, holding hands, bread-and-buttering around me. They take no notice of me at all. A bus unloads its passengers. A tree drops acorns on the grass. The day is sunny and warm.

  On my very best days, my children and I take turns cartwheeling through the yard. We finger-paint long rolls of paper on the floor under the dining room table before I chase them through the house with messy fingers; they squeal, running, paint on their faces and bellies and armpits, and we are all laughing, laughing, laughing. We hold hands and jump through the sprinkler, each of us fully dressed, soaking wet. Or we pack a picnic and ride our bicycles to the playground, where we spread a blanket and eat cross-legged on the ground, or lying on our sides, or crawling like lions in circles. That afternoon we might fall asleep together in the bed, the grass blades still stuck in our hair. While I make dinner, we turn up the music and dance in the kitchen and I swing my daughter back and forth, back and forth singing, I know one thing: that I love you.

  I love you I love you I love you.

  And it’s true, so true, that suddenly I’ve got tears running down my face, so I put her down to find a towel, a tissue, any scrap will do. She pulls at my sweater. I just need a minute, I say, turning away. But then they’re both pulling at my sweater, their hands on my skirt, my legs. I just need a minute. Just a minute! I say. But then I’m already checking the soup, or sweeping the floor, or putting the dishes away. My son lies down on the floor, deflated. My daughter storms toward her room. They know it’s too late.
A door has closed. I’m gone.

  I wake in a cold sweat, crying out in pain. The father of my children wakes or does not wake. He rubs my back, rolls over, toward me, and invites me into the nook between his arm and torso. It’s real pain I’m feeling, I want to tell him, though I couldn’t point to any one place it most hurts.

  I climb from the bed and weave my way through the house checking all the locks on the doors, peering out the blinds of the windows, my skin prickling, my hair standing on end. I pour a glass of water in the kitchen, and think of taking the longest, sharpest knife out of the drawer before I crawl back into bed. I might watch the darkness through one open eye for hours before I close it and sleep.

  I open the door and enter the room where my children are sleeping. I stand between them, listening to their bubbles and hiccups, their slow steady breathing. I rest my palm on my son’s back, his cool cotton pajamas, and underneath, his dream-warm skin. I smooth back the damp line of my daughter’s hair with the corner of my thumb. I lean down to kiss her cheek, and inhale the smell that belongs to her and no other. She looks so beautiful like this: her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open.

  It all seems so fragile, this life that I have.

  But no, I take it back.

  This is the place I would point to.

  This, right here, is the one place it most hurts.

  [twelve]

  ONCE, WHEN DAD drank two beers at dinner, he insisted I’ve been writing poems since kindergarten. I have no memory of this. My first memory of writing is in fourth grade. While my classmates write expository sentences in cursive, I am writing a novel. Or that’s what I call it, anyway. A thinly veiled excuse to imagine myself caught in a love triangle with two of my real-life friends. We travel to a cabin in the Colorado mountains. The other girl goes missing. Finally, we’re alone. I have not yet been to the Colorado mountains, but imagine them steep, sloped, snowy, and thick with trees. I imagine they are dangerous. I show the novel to my teacher, my librarian, my friends, my parents. I offer all the handwritten pages, eager for their praise.

  By my first year of high school, I start keeping a journal: a spiral notebook in which I write everything I can’t say out loud. I show it to no one; no one knows I write each night before I go to bed. The notebook stays secret for years, until Dad finds it left haphazardly in the basement. He hands the notebook over to my mother, who calls me into the bathroom. She grills me about the material, this smut, this garbage. I stay silent and nod or shake my head. She wants to know if I am a virgin. I swear that I am. This is a bold-faced lie. A year earlier I was raped by a drunk boy in my friend’s basement.

  I don’t write that in my notebook.

  I write about sneaking out of the house to get drunk, smoke pot, and have sex with boys who have already graduated from high school. I write about fucking a grown man on the golf course in the middle of the night. How his cock is so large it nearly splits me in two. I write about the man who dances me into a corner at a party and fucks me in the front seat of his car. I write about the college student who fucks me on the bottom bunk at a frat party, my head spinning from the alcohol, my friend passed out in the next room. I write about going to apartments to give head. In my notebook, it’s all I want, this fucking.

  Mom stands in the bathroom, the notebook in one hand, her other hand on her hip. She’s angry but her voice is a whisper. What have you done? Sitting on the edge of the sink, I say, It’s fiction, Mom. My way of dealing. A lie, and she believes me. She gives me back the notebook and it never comes up again.

  I’m cleaning my office when I stumble across a stack of my early poems stapled together, stuffed into a magazine file of my writing from college. I’m not even sure I want to read them, afraid I’ll find something new I’ve forgotten: a broken bone, a fist-sized bruise.

  Instead, I find delicate, trite little verses about The Man I Live With: how his touch, his gaze, his whispers in my ear wake me from a dream I didn’t know I was having. In these poems, my love transforms me: it’s beautiful, transcendent, sublime. The poems are terrible, but I remember feeling so proud of them, folding copies into envelopes and submitting them to magazines, printing and stapling a whole packet and pushing it across a table toward a kind and generous teacher. I remember showing one poem to The Man I Live With, who grows so angry as he’s reading that he tears the page into pieces that fall to the floor. You don’t get to write about me, he insists.

  There’s the story I have, and the story he has, and there is a story the police have in Evidence. There’s the story the journalist wrote for the paper. There’s the story The Female Officer filed in her report; her story is not my story. There’s the story he must have told his mother when he called her on the phone; there’s the story she must have told herself. There’s the story you’ll have after you put down this book. It’s an endless network of stories. This story tells me who I am. It gives me meaning. And I want to mean something so badly.

  The first poem I ever publish appears in an undergraduate literary journal a few months after I graduate, after the kidnapping. I’m invited to read at the issue launch party, where a single microphone stands in a little clearing in the corner of a dark restaurant. Months earlier I sat at a table in this same spot, eating dinner with The Man I Live With, who was angry about one thing or another, calling me a cunt while I cried into my soup. I’m the second reader, or maybe the third, so nervous that the paper flutters like an animal in my hand. I’m standing under a spotlight, sweating through my shirt, my voice cracking every few syllables:

  I can feel you

  in the back of my throat.

  In the place I begin

  the word “god.”

  I’ve practiced in front of the mirror at home every morning for weeks. My professors, teachers, My Good Friend, and an ex-lover sit in the audience, all of them veiled in shadow. It’s better that I can’t see their faces.

  In graduate school I begin trying, in earnest, to write. I write about anything but The Man I Used to Live With—the seasons, my mother and father, protofeminism in neglected epistolary novels from the early modern period, the Spanish Civil War—but it always comes back to him, to all that happened. I try to write about My First Husband who sleeps on the couch watching NASCAR while I sit at my desk blowing smoke out the window; instead I write about the dreams, the pills, the swarm of gnats mating outside the screen. It’s the only thing that pulls me out of bed: these poems that lie and misdirect, that circle and circle all the things I can’t say out loud. Each day I begin writing, I think, This is it. Today is the day. As if typing anything other than that unthinkable thing were a kind of breaking free. Each day, as I’m sitting at my computer, watching the words accumulate on the page, I feel elated, euphoric. Look at how far I’ve come, I think. How far these words can carry me.

  After I graduate from that writing program and enter the prestigious one in Texas; after I write my dissertation and earn a PhD; after I have written and published my first book, I begin trying to write this one. The story I must tell.

  I try to write in the daytime, sitting at my desk, or on the couch, or reclining in the bed, while my daughter is at school and my son naps in his crib. I try to write about The Man I Used to Live With, about all that happened, but instead I write about addiction, or my children, or the dreams. I say, I can’t write with all these distractions. All these interruptions make it impossible to think.

  I try to write at night, while the children sleep in their beds, while their father sits beside me on the couch or reclines on the pillow next to mine, his own computer propped open on his lap; instead I shop for houses we can’t afford, clothes I will not buy, vacations we will not take. I say, Maybe if I could just get away for a while, if only I could have a little time and space to think, and I apply for an artist residency in upstate New York, where the windows of my studio look out to the green edge of a rolling mountain range, the tall grass licking at the trees.

  The first day, the day I begin writing this
book, I sit at the computer, in front of the window, my eyes on the grass, my fingers on the keys, and tears stream down my cheeks. I down whole glasses of scotch and crawl under the desk.

  After dinner, I call home from my computer and watch the small lithe bodies of my children tangle over My Husband, who tries, in earnest, to talk about his day while they whine or cry or paw at him or the image they’re seeing of me. It’s past their bedtime and they need to go to sleep. I say, I love you. I miss you. And mean it. And they say, Please come home. I blow a kiss and My Husband mouths the words: Are you okay? And I say, No, not at all, actually. I want to come home. I want the tangle of their bodies in my lap. I need that. I need My Husband’s breath in my hair before I drift off to sleep. Their love is all that saves me from the dreams.

  After we hang up, there is only silence. There’s only darkness lapping at the window. There’s only an empty page on the screen.

  Only the story can bridge it.

  The funny version of the story goes like this: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . . I was kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with. I’m kind of fucked up about it.

  It’s not a joke I tell at parties.

  Most of the time I don’t tell the story at all. Whole close friendships have come and gone or continue to this day and I haven’t breathed a word.