I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag Read online

  The ambulance came, and I was strapped to a gurney. As I lay in the ambulance, I remember the face of the paramedic looking down at me. I thought: I’m going to die. I was one hundred percent certain. I said, “Tell my family I love them.” I told myself that I had lived a good life. The paramedic’s face was just inches from mine, and he said to me over and over, “Hang on, Jennifer, hang on, honey.” I was fighting unconsciousness.

  I was pushed through the doors of St. Vincent’s Hospital, and five doctors surrounded me, running alongside the gurney as I was rushed through the halls. I saw the lights overhead and their faces looking down at me and I heard a voice saying, “Multiple stab wounds. Stat.”

  I was alone, in deep shock, and convinced that I was dying, but somehow I knew that I had to stay focused and awake long enough to tell the doctors what had happened to me. They were afraid to undress me for fear that the attacker had gotten my internal organs and they’d open up a gushing wound on my torso. The doctor said, “Can you tell me where the wounds are?” I said, “Everywhere. My face, my back, my legs, my stomach.” When I’d finished telling him all the places I’d been stabbed, he said, “Okay, honey, we’re going to take care of you.” I looked at him and said, “I’m gonna go now.” And I was out.

  This is what people said to me after the attack:

  At least he didn’t get your face.

  At least you’re alive.

  At least you weren’t raped.

  I learned that this is what “at least” means: Move on. Get over it. Let’s not talk about it. It could be worse, so it must be better.

  This is what I asked myself after the attack:

  Why did I miss my stop?

  Why did he follow me?

  Was it something about me, how I looked, how I was dressed?

  Did I smile at him or say hello?

  What if I had turned around and seen him, gone into a store, told some big man on the street that someone was following me?

  What if I had seen him in that window when I checked out my outfit?

  Why didn’t I notice I was being followed?

  Why didn’t I notice he was right behind me?

  Why didn’t I notice?

  What terrible thing have I done in my life that I deserved this—have I not been a good enough person?

  In what universe is it okay for this to happen to someone?

  The questions ran around and around in my head, a constant series of mental laps. Did I do something? Did I not do something?

  There was a sharp, medicinal smell, and I opened my eyes to bright lights overhead. I was awake, which meant I was alive. Oh my God, I was alive. The doctor saw that I was conscious, and the first words I could think to say to him were, “I’m here.”

  I was silent and calm while they finished sewing me up. I don’t know exactly how many stitches it took. Most of my wounds were punctures. I was told I was lucky that the attacker had used a screwdriver and not an ice pick or a knife—if he had, I’d be dead. As it was, the screwdriver sank into me, but didn’t slice on its way out. But the force of those punching wounds was like being beaten as well as stabbed. If I had to guess, I’d say there were something close to forty stitches—at least fifteen of those to sew up my neck. They used surgical glue for the puncture wounds. For weeks after the attack, I’d need to use a walker.

  I remember the first time I saw my parents after the attack. I was already out of the ER and in a hospital room, and I must have been in a tremendous amount of pain. The nurse had pulled a curtain around my bed, so I heard my parents’ voices before I saw them. I’d been so alone, so convinced that I was going to die. I’d been ripped to shreds and somewhat sewn back together. Andrea had told them that there were only a few scratches, and now they were about to see their daughter bleeding through the hospital sheets. They still didn’t know that someone had tried to kill me. So the first words I said to them—the first words it occurred to me to say—were: “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  Chapter Two

  Turn the Channel

  This is the moment that I realized my life had become surreal: it was three days after I was attacked, and I was with my mother in my parents’ living room. My puncture wounds would take months to fully heal, and they were still seeping and bleeding through the bandages, so I sat on a thick towel to protect the sofa. My mother and I were watching General Hospital, and when it ended, the familiar face of the local news anchor popped on the screen to do a quick promo for the evening’s top story.

  I have very few concrete memories of those early days after the attack, but I remember that promo: “Screwdriver-wielding maniac loose in New York, details at five.” Later, when the news came on, I watched a reporter interview people who were in the apartment building when I was attacked. One remembered how I’d screamed, “Oh my God, he’s stabbing me, call the police.”

  Watching that news report, I froze. I peeked at my mother without turning my head, surreptitiously gauging what my own response should be to seeing this on television. Then she shuddered, picked up the TV remote, and turned the channel without saying a word. Her face was unreadable and focused on the screen. The whole scene was surreal. I didn’t blame her for turning the channel, but I remember thinking, Did all of this really happen to me? I truly thought I was losing my mind.

  Every second while I was being attacked I had been doing something—kicking, yelling, calculating my next move. But watching that newscast, I was speechless, unable to do or say anything. I just stared in paralyzed disbelief at what my life had become. I had become a top story—the headline that made people gasp and turn up the volume on the TV a little louder, or shut it off altogether. The irony was that while people all over New York were talking about me, my family was living in silence.

  My attack—and the attacks of two other women by the same man—spurred a regional manhunt. Guardian Angels handed out composite pictures on street corners all around Manhattan. These days people are inured to news of violent attacks splashed across newspapers, TV, and the Internet. But in 1991 my attack was shocking—and massive—news. It was the headline of every paper, and there were daily recaps of the search for the attacker on the evening news. Although my name was withheld, I still felt deeply exposed.

  One day not long after the attack the telephone rang, and I answered it to hear a strange voice on the other end. The caller’s first words were, “I’m looking for Jennifer Gilbert.” I stayed silent, in shock. He spoke again. “I’m looking for Jennifer Gilbert, the victim of the subway attack.” He said that he was calling from a newspaper. My pulse raced, but I calmly said, “There’s no Jennifer Gilbert here. You have the wrong number.” It was only after I hung up the phone that I started to hyperventilate.

  After that, news vans began camping outside our home. The only way for me to get out of the house without being seen was if one of my family members pulled the car right up to our front door. Then I’d have to dive in and hide in the backseat under a blanket.

  That kind of publicity around a personal tragedy would have been unwelcome under any circumstances, but in my case it only added to my feeling of being under assault. I lived in constant terror during that time. Irrational or not, I thought that the attacker might come and find me to finish the job. I had thrown aside my purse during the attack, and I was gripped with an unshakable paranoia that he might have seen my identification—that he might know who I was and where I lived. If the reporters had found me, why not him?

  I was a physical wreck as well. I had bandages on my face, and I could barely open my jaw because I had been hit so many times. In addition to the puncture wounds all over my butt and legs, there were more on my hands, neck, and one side of my head. My muscles were so traumatized from clenching my legs together while the attacker had tried to pry them apart that I couldn’t walk unassisted. I was paralyzed inside and out. I couldn’t make it up and down the ste
ps to my own bedroom, so I slept on a pullout sofa in the den downstairs.

  My physical discomfort would have been enough to keep me awake at night, but I dreaded the night for other reasons. The only way I could rest was if the lights were on, the door to the room was open, and my father was sleeping outside. Even then, I had horrible, screaming nightmares. I was always being chased, always fighting for my life. I was running, falling, running. There was a person chasing me, sometimes an outline, sometimes a face—the face of the attacker. I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid to dream. In the twenty years since the attack I’ve recovered in almost every other way, but I still don’t sleep well.

  I developed strange phobias after the attack, things I had never been afraid of before. They always involved situations where I didn’t feel in control of my physical surroundings.

  I was afraid of flying in airplanes. I love to travel, so despite my anxiety, I swallowed my terror and flew in a lot of planes.

  I used to sweat and get heart palpitations when I drove through tunnels. On bridges over water I had to roll all the windows down, because I was afraid that if the bridge collapsed I wouldn’t be able to get out and I’d drown. I live in New York, so I had to force myself to drive over a lot of bridges and through a lot of tunnels.

  I had a fear of elevators. If I was alone on an elevator and someone else got on—someone who got my adrenaline pumping and the hair standing up on my arms—I had to get out at the very next floor.

  For three years after the attack I lived with those phobias, and I hid my fear. Finally they all faded away.

  Now that I have children, I’ve developed two new phobias. I have a terror of my kids drowning or choking. When that fear comes over me, it’s as if my body remembers what it was like to be under attack. My ears close, and my rational mind competes for control with my body’s panic response. I know already that these new phobias are never going away. So I make sure my children get swimming lessons, and I swear I’ll cut up their grapes until they go off to college.

  In the weeks following the attack my parents drove me wherever I needed to go, and indulged me by checking the trunk to make sure no one was hiding inside. My mother suffered through police visits, and she sat beside me while I described the attacker for the police artist. She refused to allow the police to take pictures of me after the attack. She wasn’t about to let some stranger strip her daughter naked and take photographs—or, God forbid, risk having the photos released publicly, plastered all over television newscasts and newspaper accounts. Instead my mother sent my father out to buy a Polaroid camera, and then she carefully, painstakingly took the pictures herself to have on file for any legal proceedings should the attacker ever be caught. She made sure that they were all close-ups, revealing as little of me as possible. Other than the hospital staff, she was the only person who saw all of me after the attack. Even I don’t remember what I looked like—but she does.

  My parents were always physically nearby during those days, but neither of them was able to talk to me about what had happened. For my mother, the worst-case scenario—that I might have died—was too horrible to imagine. So her internal mantra became, “Thank God my daughter is alive, and let’s not speak of this again.” She wanted to lock the whole thing out. My father—a man so tender that my mother would tease him about it—never once let me see him cry.

  Emotionally, I was still in a state of numb shock and disbelief, and not talking about what happened only made the whole thing seem that much more impossible ever to comprehend. I knew that I would never be the same again, that my life would forever be divided into a before and an after. But with no one around me acknowledging that—because why on earth would they want to?—I was left unable to grieve for the happy-go-lucky Jenny Gilbert that I’d been before the attack. I couldn’t mourn for her, or admit (out loud, anyway) that even though my heart was beating, my soul was dead.

  I don’t remember looking in a mirror for at least eight months. I’m sure I must have, but I have no recollection of the face that looked back at me. I do remember that every time friends and family looked at me in the weeks after the attack, the expression on their faces was a mixture of pity, horror, and sadness at what had been done to me. Often they’d cry.

  Their emotional responses always made me nervous—upset that I’d upset them—and I’d rush to tell them that I was fine, exactly the way I’d done when my parents first came to the hospital. When the visitor inevitably asked me what happened, I’d go into a rote recitation of the attack, almost like I’d been split into two different people. From a distance, the Jennifer sitting in my parents’ living room described what had happened to that other Jennifer who’d been attacked. If things ever got too emotional, my parents would step in and change the subject. I never spoke about my night terrors, or about how I felt empty inside, or about my conviction that nothing good would ever happen to me again. I never spoke about how frightened I was that the man who attacked me was still out there somewhere.

  I received hundreds of letters from family and friends, and although I was barely holding myself together, I (insanely) wrote a thank-you note for each one. Neighbors dropped off food, pies, and cakes. The cards and casseroles filled the house like condolences, and it felt as if I had died. People came to visit, perching on our living room furniture like they were sitting shivah for me, only I was right there. I formed sentences, I ate and drank, but I was just going through the motions, imitating the movements of a living, breathing human being.

  Every terrible loss has its own shape and color, and I don’t blame anyone for not knowing how to respond to mine. I knew the people who called or came to visit were trying to reach out to me, it’s just that they had no idea how to do it or what I really needed. What we all want is to make people feel better when they’re suffering, and we think the best approach is to encourage fortitude, and focus on the positive. Over and over I was told:

  Thank God you’re so strong, you’ll be able to get through it.

  God only gives you what you can handle.

  Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  I’m sure this was meant to be encouraging. But the message I received was that I should feel lucky to be blessed with such resilience, and that they expected me to bounce back, just as good as new. Meanwhile, I couldn’t imagine leaving my house without an armed escort.

  Some friends wanted to reach out to me by sympathizing with what I’d been through. They’d tell me stories about terrible things that had happened to other people, in the hope that I wouldn’t feel so alone in the terrible things that had happened to me. They’d say things like:

  I know just how you feel, because I was mugged.

  I know just how you feel, because my friend was robbed at gunpoint.

  I know just how you feel, because my sister was in a car accident.

  Even in my fog of disbelief, I recognized that no one actually knew what I had gone through. I had been picked—targeted, followed, and attacked with the express intention of murder. It hadn’t been an accident. And while I was being almost-killed, I’d also been abandoned. And I hadn’t only been battered physically; I’d had my entire worldview altered. I’d learned that the universe had nothing good in store for me. I’d been marked with a big V for victim, and if something so terrible could happen to me once, why couldn’t it happen again?

  I’d nod when people told me they knew how I felt, but they couldn’t possibly know. We all have our own histories and our own unique ways of absorbing pain. No one else was inside my body, and no one could feel what I felt—either during the attack or while I was coping with its aftermath. In the end, all the failed attempts to reach out to me broke my heart. I wanted so badly to be reached, but none of it worked for me. There was no solace to be found in other people, I concluded—I had only myself. My unabating pain became my own little secret.

  I felt physically exhausted by the emotional effort of
trying to hold myself together for everyone around me. Of course there were people who urged me to go to a support group. But I didn’t want to hear about other people’s horrendous experiences. I didn’t want to feel better about my situation because someone else had it worse. And I couldn’t imagine how it would help me to know that there were lots of other victims out there who had terrible things happen to them—I didn’t want to hear all the other ways in which the world was not a safe place for me.

  I didn’t come from a family that ever turned to therapy, but things got so bad that summer that I gave it a try. What I really needed was a crisis therapist—someone to get me through the immediate trauma of surviving a near-death attack. But instead I was given a referral to a family therapist. During our first session, he decided that my parents needed to be present and suggested we have a session with all four of us—him, my parents, and me. It was a huge mistake. I went in still trying to protect my parents from the pain I was feeling, and he was challenging that dynamic. It quickly deteriorated into guilt and recrimination, the last thing that any of us needed. I needed to preserve whatever relationship I did have with my parents at that moment. Exposing all the old hurt just made the new hurt more unbearable. No amount of blaming my parents was going to bring back my joy, or resuscitate that optimistic girl I’d been on May 30, before I walked into Andrea’s apartment building. So that was the end of therapy for me.

  There were two people who gave me some sense of relief during that time, and I would never have expected it from either of them. The first was my sister Rachel, three years younger than me and just home from her junior year in college.