Dancing with the Octopus

by Debora Harding

  That in itself was enough to deplete the exercise of value. I hated everything about what I was doing. I hardly remembered who I was that long ago. How could the adult me write the memory of a fourteen-year-old accurately?

  Once I realized that the pacing was under my command, I began to assert control over the emotional reflex that stopped me. It was only fear. There was little at risk. I needn’t share this account with anyone—ever. After several days, I started feeling a little more confident. By the end of the week, I had almost five pages.

  But when I read back through it, I started doubting myself again. How much of it was fact, and how much of it was the colorful memory of the child-teen I was? How, for example, could I have gone to school that following Monday, just five days after the event? And after we moved to Iowa, why didn’t I show signs of being a traumatized victim? I worked at the local library, became a cheerleader, joined the marching band, was at ease in relationships with boys, detasseled corn and walked beans in the summer, joined the track and swimming teams. My drinking was heavy in high school, but not significantly different from my classmates.

  Did I have the details right? Had I really grabbed his fist when he was holding that knife at my throat? Why was I so convinced he had a gun when we pulled into that gas station—did I see it? Could I have jumped out the door? And why was I so convinced he was going to kill me near the stockyards? And surely there’s no way it could have been as cold as I remembered, cold enough to kill me if I hadn’t moved?

  As the questions rolled in, any gains I’d made in my confidence that this account was true evaporated. But there was one real benefit. I had proved I could go back in history and still stay rooted in the present. The emotional force of it didn’t bend me. I hadn’t disappeared into one black hole. I had put the fragments into an order that created a narrative line. They were no longer dancing around my head at random, shadowy feelings, looking for a home.

  Now, I wondered if it were fact-checked, how much of it would be true. Luckily, I was married to an investigative reporter.

  In Which the Octopus Is Rendered Real

  Shepherdstown, 2002—Thomas and I agreed that while he read my account, I’d take the kids to the Baltimore Aquarium. An hour later, my son, my daughter, and I were walking around the underwater kingdom, checking out seahorses, jellyfish, urchins, and sharks. Next we sat in the front-row seats for the dolphin show and were soon splashed by their fins as they swooshed by. Listening to my children’s giggles and full-body laughter proved the perfect antidote to my anxious mood.

  On our way out, my daughter spotted the one tank I had carefully bypassed. “Come on, Momma,” she said clasping my hand, “let’s go see the octopus.” My son was soon joining in, pulling my other arm as I reluctantly let them drag me toward the darkened hall that encaged the gross beast.

  We sat down in front of the enormous tank, on coal-black carpet. The kids wrapped themselves around me as our eyes slowly adjusted to the change in light. There it was, before us. A giant octopus—its sack of a head, its mantle with huge shaded eyes, its flowing dangling legs covered with rubbery oval suckers. It was looking directly at us.

  My children stared back, their eyes round with curiosity and awe. Silenced by the magnificence of the monster, I checked my own emotions and found myself split. The parent interpreter who so wanted to get this moment right.

  The fourteen-year-old me who was horrified at the violent appearance of the beast. The seven-year-old me who was desperate to transform the image in front of me into Dad’s fantastical pet.

  I was saved from my conflicted feelings when an enthusiastic aquarium volunteer walked over. “Do you want to know about her?” she asked. My kids nodded enthusiastically. The volunteer pointed out how the huge octopus was able to change colors, how its texture went from smooth to corrugated to prickly. She told us how the octopus was as smart as a cat or dog, and just as she was saying that, the octopus pushed up against the glass, and beneath its giant head its tentacles flowed with the water. It appeared to be dancing.

  The volunteer said that the octopus was playing, and sure enough it reached for some orange-and-green plastic toys bobbing in the water. We watched as it grabbed one, then two, then three different objects with the tips of its tentacles, waving them around. The kids squealed with delight. And I joined them. It was just so funny.

  I felt the inner tension flow out of me, the knot in my heart melted by my children’s joy. By the absurdity of life.

  We must have sat in front of that octopus for twenty minutes, watching it somersault, pulse through the water, play some more, slowly relax. Finally, I suggested to the kids we go get some ice cream before the drive back.

  Later at home, after we’d put the children to bed, Thomas and I sat down at our kitchen table with a pot of herbal tea. He told me he was blown away by reading the account, that he knew it must have been hard for me to write these memories down. Then he took a deep breath, let the moment sink in for both of us. And continued.

  He was shocked at the magnitude of the violence and how little he knew. Just for a start, he knew I had been abducted at knifepoint, but it hadn’t fully registered that it had been at four P.M. in the parking lot of my church and school, and during an ice storm. He knew a ransom had been demanded, but didn’t know there had been police at the house, that the phone was being monitored. He knew I had been dropped off, but he didn’t understand the physical shock I must have been in, that it had been record-breaking freezing temperatures, and it never registered I had been dropped off in the dark. Furthermore, he knew that the crime had been important to my relationship with my father, forged an inseparable bond, and now it explained my unshakable loyalty to him. He also hadn’t known that Mr. K had worn a ski mask and I could only ever see his eyes, and finally, he knew that my perpetrator had been jailed, but the significance of my never having had to appear in court—well, he understood the real power of that now.

  He suggested that it might be time to find out what the actual charges were and how many years of the sentence the man had served. Perhaps the knowledge might give me a little more control.

  “You mean you believe my account?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “You mean you think I’m remembering it correctly?”

  “Of course I do,” he said compassionately.

  “I don’t know. None of it feels real . . . There’s something else that keeps bothering me,” I said, blowing the steam across my cup. “A year or two after we moved to Laurens, I went into my father’s dresser drawer to borrow a T-shirt, and as I was flipping through them, I noticed a letter, hidden, and it was addressed to me. The return address was from Lincoln and it had a prison address on it. I felt guilty for discovering it, then guilty as I opened it, and then horrified after I read it. The guy had written me this creepy letter, like we were good friends. He said I’d want to know he had found Jesus and God had forgiven him and then, even sicker, added a sentence where he told me not to smoke cigarettes and to avoid the fast lane. It was so frightening and its contents so gross and disgusting that I put it back in Dad’s drawer.”

  Thomas asked if my father ever talked to me about the letter.

  “No. Why would he? I was fifteen years old. Once I read it, I did everything I could for the next couple of days to push it out of my mind. Just filed it in the box labeled, ‘Dad has it under control.’

  “And then there’s the other weird story. Remember Todd, that friend I introduced you to when we came through Nebraska on Bike-Aid? He told me one of my closest friends at junior high had gone on to work in the Nebraska State Prison. Her name was Kim.”

  Thomas looked at me blankly. His memory was a running joke in our relationship. At the time we met, he was still recovering from the sixteen stitches in his head, after the hit-and-run in Mexico that nearly killed him.

  So I recapped the story for him. That Kim had pursued a criminal psychology degree at the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln
, and as part of the degree requirement she had worked in the Community Release Center, where she had unwittingly become friendly with Mr. K. Later she confronted him after discovering his true identity.

  It turned into some kind of psychological conversion, as he fell apart and said that he could barely live with himself and he was so glad he had finally been able to face the truth. They paroled him shortly after that. I can’t say I received the story well. I didn’t want to hear anything about this man. And I appreciated the position Kim had been put in, which sounded terrible, but it felt like hearing there had been a reconciliation process conducted on my behalf. Yet I wouldn’t have wanted her to respond any other way. It was a bizarre occurrence.

  After I finished telling Thomas the story, he was more adamant about finding out where the guy was, where he lived. He said that as a victim, it was my right to know. And then reassured me that finding the information was a good thing.

  “I don’t know his name,” I said, and added with anxious dread, “We’d have to call my parents.”

  “Believe me, Deb. They are going to want to help you with this. We can at least find out the charges.” I wasn’t as sure as he was, but I reluctantly agreed. Of course they’d be helpful.

  He dialed. I heard him ask Mom if he could talk to Jim. I could tell she was saying he wasn’t available. Thomas put the phone on loudspeaker, explained why he was calling, said it in a way that didn’t give too much of my emotional privacy away—just told her I was having a difficult time, and he was curious, did she happen to know what the guy who kidnapped me was charged with?

  “Debora wasn’t kidnapped,” my mother said matter-of-factly. “But the man was charged with rape.” It felt like a full-body sucker punch. The confidence that Thomas had just filled me with evaporated. Thomas asked her again if she knew what the man had been charged with? What the sentence had been? She said no, she didn’t remember the charges.

  I knew I had been right in my instinct not to make the call. Thomas told her it was okay, he could get the information from the FBI if she remembered the perpetrator’s name. She asked why the FBI would have the information. The man hadn’t been serious about collecting the money. He never showed up.

  Thomas sidestepped the argument and asked her again if she knew the name of the man who kidnapped me. She said, oh, yes, she’d never forget that. His name was Goodwin. Charles Goodwin.

  Thomas hung up the phone, flabbergasted. “I can’t believe that conversation,” he said.

  I had always been thankful that everything I told the police as a fourteen-year-old girl had been believed, and never more so now. I stood silent, so crushed inside I was afraid to speak. Thomas began to think out loud. “It’s not her denial of the facts that is bothering me. It’s her emotional reaction, or lack of it. It’s just wrong. I’m so sorry.” He was saying it like it was my whole childhood he was sick about. “I want to vomit,” he said, talking more to himself than to me. And then he came over and hugged me. I felt the tears, in fact, my face was wet with them, but I was afraid if I opened my mouth, if I sobbed, I would go to pieces.

  “Deb, do you understand this is no longer just about Charles Goodwin? This is now also about your parents?”

  “We should just leave it,” I said. I was feeling scarily disconnected from anything real. This had started so we could allow my delusional mind to rest, by reassuring me this man was not anywhere near me. And now, after six months of vacation—Mom was back in my head again.

  I had always thought my police statement was irrefutable because it was backed up by evidence. And it was because of that, I never had to go to trial. But now, my mother suggested Mr. K was never charged for kidnapping. I felt sick at the thought this man never served time for the terror he had inflicted on my father, on my family when he threatened my life, for the threat he had made me witness in that phone booth. He was lucky there was no charge filed for attempted murder.

  And yet, surprisingly, I realized that I did want to know. I wanted to know if he had been sentenced for kidnapping, and that my work that night with the police had been helpful. I told Thomas I’d appreciate it if he could contact the FBI.

  He suggested I try to get some sleep while he made the call.

  In Which I Make a Grand Exit

  Omaha, 1979—It wasn’t memories of the kidnapping that returned as I lay on our couch. Instead, it was images from the days that followed, specifically my last night in Omaha.

  The night before we left for Iowa, my friends threw a going-away party for me at Ben Norris’s house. Around eight P.M., a group of us stepped outside to start a chugging contest. We’d never had spirits before, but someone had managed to get vodka. I won by downing half the bottle. Not long after, I began to feel dizzy and my legs buckled.

  The next thing I knew, I woke up in a strange bed, wearing a hospital robe. I was damp. And then I realized with horror it was the mattress that was damp, my sheets; I had wet myself. Slowly, I made out that I was in a hotel room, and the curtains were drawn. I panicked. My first thought was that Mr. K had somehow found me, had left me in this place, and would be coming back. Then I saw the phone, picked it up, was relieved to get a line, quickly dialed a close friend. He picked up the phone and I started sobbing, describing where I was, tried to piece it together. He asked me to slow down, I could calm down, it was okay. And with a heavy heart, he asked if I remembered anything from the party the night before. The room was almost too fuzzy to bring into focus, let alone recall the night before.

  He explained my parents had checked us into a hotel because the movers had packed the furniture from our house. We were leaving for Iowa that day. He recounted the details of the guzzling contest a group of us had. It was a haze, but now I remembered, yes. I had memories of being dizzy as we walked through the snow back to the house. I passed out within an hour and they couldn’t wake me up. The mother of the boy who had hosted the party, who was also president of the Parent Teacher Association and had helped with the reward fund, called my father to tell him to come pick me up immediately. When he arrived, I was unconscious. He tried to revive me by slapping my face, but I remained unresponsive. Someone called an ambulance.

  I could hear my friend was choking back tears. He had to pause between sentences. He said when the ambulance arrived and they were loading me on the stretcher, he apologized to my father for supplying the alcohol, and Dad took a swing at him, tried to punch him in the face, but missed. I had a sudden flash of being in the emergency room, of having a tube shoved down my throat.

  Just as he was finishing the story, and the horror of the whole night was sinking in, I heard someone put a key in the door. My mother walked in and turned the light on. She told me to hang up the phone, then threw a pile of clothes at me. Told me to shower and change. She drove me back to our empty house in silence. I could hardly stand without my insides setting to work once again at convulsions. My father and my sisters were nowhere to be seen.

  Mom opened the car door and told me to get out, that I wasn’t getting out of cleaning, we were leaving the house later that day. She told me to go up to my bedroom. She appeared five minutes later with a toothbrush and told me to scrub the baseboards. As soon as she was gone, I lay my face down, the smell of that shag carpet up my nose, and thought, I’m not doing too well.

  That evening we headed out of Omaha. It wasn’t late, it was just dark, no doubt my fault for slowing things up. My parents took the lead in a van, and my three sisters and I followed behind in the station wagon. Genie, sixteen years old now, was driving.

  It was snowing hard as we took the Mormon Bridge over the Missouri River into Iowa, on Interstate 80. After an hour, we turned north onto the county highways. Banks of snow lined the single-lane roads. At times it was like motoring through a white canyon. Every once in a while, we’d get a clear opening, and I’d catch a glimpse of snow blowing in great gusts across the fields. Ten miles outside Laurens, the weather was so bad that Dad had slowed down to twenty miles an hour in front
of us. We were all bored, tired, and nervous about the move. Jenifer and I were in the back, Gayle with Genie in the front.

  To pick up the mood, Genie began singing a show tune, ramping up her performance with a few thrusts of the arm. Instinctively, I grabbed the back of the seat.

  “You’re scaring us,” I told her. “Do us a favor and keep your hands on the steering wheel.”

  “Oh, really?” she responded. And then, in a show of respect for my back seat driving, she pulled a harmonica out of her pocket and started to play it. “You want me to stop?” And she lifted both hands and let the white nose of the Chevy coast, not dangerously, but with leisurely purpose, straight into a ditch.

  “Happy now?” she said, turning to me.

  I saw Dad pull the van over and, in the red glow of his flashing taillights, saw the worry on his face. Genie rolled the window down.

  “Are you all okay?” he said, panting little puffs of steam from his mouth.

  “Oh, we’re just fine,” Genie responded, bitter at being put in a position of charge. And then she told him she wouldn’t drive if I was in the same car. Dad didn’t have time to pick it apart, just told me to get in the van and then set about digging the station wagon out.

  I trudged over to the van, rolled back the side door, and climbed in behind Mom. We sat in silence for a couple of moments. And then she looked up and adjusted the rearview mirror so she could look at me without turning around.

  “You know, no one in this town is going to know you, or your past. Very few people get a chance to start over with a new reputation.”

  Honestly, I just wanted to sleep. I was still exhausted and nauseated.