I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag Page 4

  Rachel and I had been thick as thieves when we were little kids, right down to our matching bathing suits. I was ten and Rachel was seven when my youngest sister Marissa was born, and while we competed for our parents’ attention when Marissa came along, we stayed attached at the hip. By the time I got to high school, though, we had drifted apart, both of us trying to find our own way through adolescence. I’m sure I became the classic bitch of an older sister. She followed me to the University of Vermont, but we had different groups of friends, and at most we’d wave to each other in passing. When Rachel came home from college after my attack, she had her own summer plans, and they certainly wouldn’t have involved taking care of me. But she stepped in to take turns with my dad sleeping near me every night. Constantly shocked awake by my thrashing and screaming, she comforted me through my sweaty night terrors. During the day, she stayed with me in the house because I couldn’t stand to be alone. If she had to run an errand when my parents were out, she took me along with her, never once complaining. She stepped in where my parents couldn’t. She didn’t even look at me like I was crazy when I flinched because someone walked too close to the car.

  There was one other person who seemed to understand instinctively what I needed. Laura and I had been friendly in college, but we hadn’t been exceptionally close. When I went to London we wrote letters back and forth, and then after the attack she came to visit me at home. In her body language, her facial expression, her words, everything she did and said, she was completely different from anyone else (no doubt this was at least partly thanks to the fact that she was getting her master’s in social work). There was something about the way she approached me that instantly made me feel that it was okay not to be strong, that it wasn’t my obligation to feel lucky to be alive, and that she wasn’t there to compare what had happened to me to other traumatic events. She was just there for me, and she didn’t bother with eloquence. After she heard what happened, I think her exact words to me were, “That just sucks.” And it was as if for a brief moment I wasn’t delusional. Yes, it did suck! It really, really sucked.

  Months later, I’d often sleep over at Laura’s apartment in the city. I was still terrified of sleep, so at bedtime she’d come down from her loft and she would pat me on my back. That was her goodnight to me, and her inoculation against the terror that nighttime always held for me—pat, pat, pat. I was still in survival mode in those years, ready to fight or flee, and I hated to be touched. Her pat, pat, pat was about as much as I wanted or could handle; it was my protective covering for the night. Laura became one of my best friends, and one of the very few people—numbered on fewer than the fingers of one hand—for whom I didn’t have to pretend. It shocked me that a new friend could care for me in this way, when people I’d known for years seemed at a loss around me. I guess it was her inherent wisdom, because twenty years later, she would become Dr. Laura Berman, a leading expert on relationships and intimacy.

  Nearly my entire group of close friends—including Nicolette and most of my high school six-pack—were still away in London and Europe. I would have turned to them more if they’d been home, but it was torturous to try to tell them my story on a transatlantic call. One of my very dearest friends, Deanna, didn’t find out about the attack until months after, because she was traveling in Italy and I had no way of reaching her. Another close college friend, Amanda, was stateside and could have come to see me right away. After college and before I’d left for London, Amanda and I had spent one of the best summers of my life, sharing a house with a bunch of guys in Nantucket and supporting ourselves making sandwiches. I called her after the attack, but she just couldn’t handle it. She never called me again, and never came to see me.

  When Andrea visited me after I came home from the hospital, she burst into tears. She said she was sorry. I loved her, I told her that I didn’t blame her, and that it wasn’t her fault. I reassured her that none of us can know what we’d do in such a situation until we’re in it.

  Other friends and family who heard about the attack were horrified by Andrea’s actions that day. They would ask me how she could have hidden behind a locked door while her friend was screaming for help on the other side. In Andrea’s defense, I would always say the same thing that I’d told her: “None of us can know what we’d do in that situation.”

  Of course I would have hoped for someone to help me, especially one of my best friends, but I knew she couldn’t help her actions in that moment; it’s just how she reacted to panic. So I rushed to make Andrea feel better. It was the only conceivable choice for me. If I hated her, or blamed her, I’d lose her as a friend, and I couldn’t allow that to happen—I had already lost enough.

  The manhunt for the attacker dragged on throughout the summer. Meanwhile, I chewed the inside of my cheeks while I slept, and I’d wake up with the taste of blood in my mouth. I couldn’t keep food down and threw up regularly. When we traveled back and forth into the city for the police interviews and composite pictures, I hid under my blanket in the back of the car, certain that the attacker could be anywhere, and I was a walking target. I was afraid of New York, of every stranger I encountered. I was afraid that I wouldn’t know when I was in danger. Potential threat surrounded me—it hid, it lurked, and I didn’t feel safe anywhere.

  For the most part my father drove me into the city, because my mother felt oddly antagonistic toward the police, as if they were prolonging our agony. Finally, toward the end of the summer the police called to say that they’d picked up a suspect, and they wanted me to come in for a lineup. We were all brought in—Andrea, the other women who were in the apartment, and the two men who’d been outside fixing their motorcycles—although they kept us separate.

  When I was taken in for the lineup, I saw that there was a one-way mirror looking out on the room where the suspect would be, and no amount of rational reassurance could convince me that the attacker couldn’t see straight through that glass. I hugged the back wall, I was so terrified, as if every panic response I hadn’t felt during the attack was seizing me now. Just the knowledge that I was in the same building with the person who could have been HIM—much less on the other side of a thin layer of glass—petrified me.

  They brought the men in, and each of them had a large bandage completely covering his eyebrows, and a hat on to conceal his hair. I had been told the attacker had tried to disguise himself by shaving off his eyebrows and hair completely.

  I knew the attacker’s face—it was in my mind—and my memory of his hairline and eyebrows had been strong. I’d described him to a T to the police artist whose composite drawing had appeared in newspapers and posters around the city. But there standing right in front of me, months later, were eight men. They were all the same height, weight, and complexion, with no eyebrows and no hair to see. How could I know for sure? In the room with me were policemen, detectives, probably a few lawyers, but as far as I was concerned it was just me and those men on the other side of the glass. I was shaking from the pressure. I scanned the row, and two faces immediately jumped out at me: I thought, Number four, or number seven. No, number four . . . That was the man who’d tried to kill me; at least I was pretty certain.

  These are the thoughts that went through my head in that moment:

  What if he’s staring at me when I put him away?

  What if he knows who I am?

  What if that’s not him?

  What if he’s still out there?

  Why are they making me do this?

  I believed the attacker was number four, but I debated. It’s a wonder I didn’t throw up on the nearest officer and run from the room. I told the officers that the attacker was number four or number seven. A detective asked me, “If you had to pick just one, which number?” Then—overwhelmed, claustrophobic, desperate to get out of that room—I picked number seven. Right afterward I told the detective that I thought I’d chosen the wrong person, that it was really number four.

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nbsp; I was unsure, but it turned out that the police were not. They had plenty of evidence to revoke the parole of number four, who had murdered a woman years before. Someone who knew him from his job at Street News—a paper sold by homeless people on subways and street corners—and had recognized him in the composite pictures based on my identification had reported him to the police. He’d skipped two recent meetings with his parole officer, so officially they picked him up on a parole violation. When the new charges against him went to the grand jury, there was enough evidence to deny him bail until the trial—an event, I was told, which would likely not occur for another three years. Until then, because of the attacker’s parole violation, he was sent back to prison to serve out the remainder of his sentence for the murder of another woman.

  After the suspect was arrested and sent to prison, almost everyone expected me to breathe an audible sigh of relief and go on with my life. But no one knew the degree to which I was just pretending to be okay. I wasn’t totally convinced who was in that jail cell, and I wouldn’t have that peace of mind either way for many years, until the trial.

  My parents lived on the Long Island Sound, and there was a long dock off a pier just behind their house. In the last days of that summer, I remember sitting on the dock cross-legged, wondering what would happen if I just went into the water and stayed there. I never had any urge to kill myself, but I wanted to be gone, just the way everything I’d ever believed in was now gone. I felt stuck in a life with no God, no sunshine, no light. I was twenty-two years old, the best part of my life was over, and I didn’t know how I was ever going to be able to take a deep breath again.

  In early September, just over three months after the attack, my father said to me, “Let’s take a look at your résumé.” Whatever was left inside me—the little pile of ash that had been holding me up since the attack—was blown away at that moment. I emotionally disintegrated.

  I couldn’t go to work—I couldn’t even walk in the city. I still needed the trunk checked before I could get into the car. I still slept with the lights on. My stab wounds weren’t even fully healed. Moments like that, when everyone around me was going back to normal and wanted me to do the same, I felt like I was existing in a netherworld of fear and victimhood. I had no idea how to get out, and I was heartbroken that the people around me couldn’t see me down there, stuck in a hole with no ladder.

  I’m sure my father thought he was helping me to get on with my life. Maybe he felt work would be a good distraction for me. Whatever his motivations were, it was my cue that it was time to leave. I thought, I’m on my own here, they don’t get it. If I stayed, I would either totally lose my mind or push them all so far away that I’d really, truly be alone.

  I could no longer stand being in my parents’ house, and sinking into the Long Island Sound wasn’t an option, so I decided to run away. My college boyfriend had moved to Boston, and although we’d broken up after graduation, we’d stayed in touch. He wasn’t the most emotionally available man in the world, and that suited me just fine. Numbness was what I wanted. He found me a room in a house not far from where he was living on the outskirts of town.

  One day I was scared to be alone, and the next I was driving off by myself to a strange city to live with people I didn’t know. After spending three months as the stab victim, the girl in the newspaper, the daughter who needed to grow up and get on with it—it was time to disappear.

  Chapter Three

  This Is Not My Fabulous Life

  Marius and I started dating when I was a junior in college. He was in a frat that my sorority hung out with all the time, and my friends all dated his friends. So when I didn’t have a date to my sorority formal I decided to invite Marius. We kind of fell in together after that—there were no fireworks, but it was easy and fun. He was good-looking, athletic, and universally popular, the kind of man that everyone wanted to be around. He was always funny and flirty, and I loved his hazel green eyes and his crazy long eyelashes. I adored his family, and stayed with them often—he had four siblings and I became close to all of them, and I was especially fond of his father, who was a grumpy surgeon on the outside and total mush on the inside.

  Marius and his family were a huge part of my life for two years—which might as well have been a lifetime at that age—but we were never soul mates or passionately in love. He was a man’s man who loved to play quarters, while I couldn’t even stand the taste of beer. I never imagined a brilliant future for us, but he was a good person with a tender heart and I knew I could depend on him. We started out as friends, and we ended up the same way.

  After the attack, with most of my closest friends an ocean away, Marius was the first life raft I could think of. He was living in Boston, and God bless him, he was at my side the very next day after my parents called him. When most people saw me they’d cry, while I quietly pretended to be fine. With Marius, I gave in to the tears, and he raged at what had been done to me. Maybe that was why I felt safe when I was with him. His anger made me feel sane. At the end of that long, terrible summer—when I just had to get away from my parents and their talk about résumés and moving on—it made a crazy kind of sense for me to run to Marius. I can only imagine the panic he must have felt when his scarred, traumatized ex-girlfriend showed up in Boston. He was agonizing about his own future, and here I was on his doorstep dragging my load of personal troubles behind me. Good times.

  Boston is such a blur to me now that I can’t really remember what I did all day while I was there. It was just a place to go—a place where I could be anonymous and just breathe. The house where I lived was a shingled four-story home on a shabby, nondescript street in the farthest reaches of the city. A bunch of students and recent grads rented rooms, as well as one cop who was studying for his law degree. I remember him really well, and how his presence gave me a little comfort. I rented the gabled room at the very top, and I still couldn’t bear to sleep alone, so mostly I slept at Marius’s. Sometimes he slept at my place. At some point I had sex with Marius for the first time after the attack, just to prove to myself that I could. I so badly wanted to feel normal, and to know for sure that the attacker hadn’t stolen away any pleasure I could feel from being touched by another person. That first time, I cried my way through it. Poor Marius probably needed a few stiff drinks just to get through it himself.

  Marius was biding his time working at a hotel parking cars, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Meanwhile, I scuttled around his existence waiting for him to come home—something that was so not me that even now I have to shake my head. I was just hiding and waiting, waiting and hiding. Given what I’d been through, no one would have blamed me if I’d fled to a silo in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa—but that wasn’t any kind of life I’d ever imagined for myself. I was the girl who was going to take Manhattan by storm, who was going to wear hot suits and fierce shoes and go to the best parties. Instead, while Marius was at work, I returned to my sad little room in a house full of strangers.

  I have a vague recollection that maybe I worked in a shop, but my overarching memory of that time is silent paralysis—me under that gabled roof trying to hold it together, my thoughts spinning and spinning with no place to rest. I had a few cousins living in Boston at the time, and I remember that I met them a couple of times for drinks on Newberry Street. They knew what had happened to me, but we didn’t talk about it. By that point the dressings on my stab wounds were gone and the stitches were out, so I looked normal on the outside. The worst of my scars were tucked away under my clothing—hidden and unacknowledged, just like all the mess inside me.

  Marius was incredibly kind to me, and I felt protected when I was with him. He had too much to deal with in his own life to help me with my problems. But he formed a shield around me and carved out a little space inside where I could safely and quietly lose my mind. With him, I could just exist for a while, free of intervention and the need to explain myself
to anyone. Marius didn’t give me anything emotionally, but he didn’t ask for anything, either. My time in Boston got me away from the alternate universe of pretending that I now associated with home, and the constant noise of people talking at me, talking about me, stepping around me—compelling me to worry about their feelings and take care of them when what I really needed was someone to take care of me. When I fled to Boston, it was like I put on headphones. All external sound was blocked, and I could try to think again.

  One gray day just before Thanksgiving, after I’d been in Boston for two months, I woke up alone in my room. Marius had left, and the house was quiet. It was a weekday, and I looked at the alarm clock and realized that everyone had gone to school or work. They were all off living their lives, but what was I doing?

  I was just lying there, waiting for someone to walk through the door and make my life better. But no one was coming. And if I stayed in that tiny room, in that insulated, joyless existence, then I really had died that day in May. I certainly wasn’t alive. I was miserable and empty, and my past was like a dream of some long-gone era. I imagined the old Jenny Gilbert—the girl who’d hitchhiked in Sicily and backpacked in Portugal. Where was that girl, and why had she given up? I had let the attacker frighten me out of the city I loved, and into a deep hole that I had dug for myself to hide in. This was not my fabulous life. This wasn’t why I had fought so hard to survive that day. If I was going to be afraid to live, then that man might as well have killed me. I was lost and alone and scared, and I was headed down a road of not just feeling nothing, but being nothing.

  I woke up for good that day, and I made a choice to stop hiding. I stopped looking back, and realized something that’s been my mantra ever since: “You can’t move forward if you’re staring in the rearview mirror.” It was time to go home and get a job and make my own way in the world.

  But first I had to take all the stuff that was dragging me into that hole—all the fear, grief, sadness, and uncertainties—and put it away. I wouldn’t pretend to be okay when I got home (or so I thought). I would be okay. I would bury that junk so deep, lock it away so tightly, that it would never get out. So I envisioned putting it all in a box—every thought, feeling, and experience I’d had during those dark days. I closed the box and taped it down. Then I carried it down a long corridor in my mind. I opened up the last door in that hallway, and went into a room with a closet. I opened the closet and put the box on the top shelf. Then I locked the closet door and bolted the door to the room. And I walked back down that hallway and instructed myself never to look back.