4

Turning Point

Colorado 2004

The phone rang and I picked it up to hear my sister’s normally boisterous voice quietly say my name. “Hi, Shan.” My instincts pricked. Something was wrong.

Holding the cordless phone close to my good ear, my right one being nearly deaf after an accident canyoning in Austria when I was twenty, I paced the wooden floor in my living room as I heard phrases thud my consciousness. Last night. Walking home. Campus. Attacked. Raped.

I sat down on the black steamer trunk in front of the windows that looked out the back of my house into the open expanse of beaver ponds. My mind struggled to process what I was hearing. Snow still covered the ground, despite the onset of spring, and I wondered how much longer winter could hold on at ten thousand feet.

Larissa said she hadn’t seen a doctor yet but had called the campus police with her roommates. There was a strange twist to her story, something about a man pretending to be a police officer coming to her door and asking for evidence after the episode. All of it confused me, worried me, and I felt a dull ache in the pit of my stomach as I listened. She was scared but safe, and she wanted to finish out the last few weeks of school to get through her finals.

We hung up with a promise I’d call her back after talking with Mom and Dad. Someone needed to go down to the college and be with her. Adams State was in the small town of Alamosa, three hours south of Breckenridge. Immediately, my parents offered to fly down, but I insisted on going instead. I was closer, I could leave in the morning, and I wouldn’t try to take over. I was also much too familiar with this story.

I stared mindlessly out the window, my gaze unfocused, my mind blank.

“Shan?”

I refocused and looked around. The phone was still in my hand. Pete was in the kitchen, looking at me from across the counter. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

“That was Ris.” Ris, Rissa, Lis—all pet names used by my family for my younger sister, Larissa. “She’s been attacked. She was walking home, across campus. Some guy attacked her.”

“Jesus, is she all right?”

“Yeah, no. Not so much. She was attacked. Raped.” I stood up and walked over to the brown leather couch and wished the fire was going in the fireplace. It was so cold in this big house. I was always cold, but this was much worse. “I don’t understand the details.… I don’t know if even Ris understands them yet. It doesn’t make sense. But she’s with her roommates now. I think she’s called campus police. Mom and Dad want me to go down. She needs one of us.”

“Do you want a cup of tea?” he said, filling the kettle.

“Yeah, sure,” I said distractedly. Tea, I thought, the British symbol of comfort. Or perhaps the British proxy for therapy. Right now the warmth and the distraction were welcome. My mind was reeling.

A long pause, then, “Would you be all right with that—if I drove down to Alamosa to see her, I mean? She needs someone to take her to the police station tomorrow, and I should be there.”

“Doesn’t she have her roommates who could help out?”

“Of course, but she should have family there. Mom and Dad want to check in on her. Make sure she’s coping, has everything she needs, you know—how is she dealing? Plus she’s got finals coming up and wants to stay to finish the end of the school year.…” I trailed off. “But she’s pretty freaked out. So am I, frankly.”

Pete poured water over two bags of PG Tips. He looked across the room at me, before turning to get the milk out of the fridge. “So what happened exactly?”

I wanted to ask him to say something more than just a series of one-sentence questions. It felt so cold. I wanted him to leave the tea, sit down, and hold me, and have a real conversation about what was going on. Why couldn’t he just wrap me up in his arms, ask if there was anything he could do, or just ask how I was? My tolerance of his British reserve was wearing thin. I needed some emotion, some reaction beyond a cup of tea, some love.

“Exactly? I’m not sure. Other than she was attacked walking home across campus. The asshole raped her, and left her there, and she was able to get back to her apartment. The creepy thing is that a fake police officer showed up at her door asking for evidence.”

“Fake? What do you mean?”

“Well apparently he showed up in uniform, said he’d been sent over by campus police to collect evidence. She gave him her underwear in a plastic bag and he asked a few questions and left. Apparently, the police never sent anyone to her, and if they had and the officer had collected any evidence on site, then protocol states using a paper bag, not plastic. It means ‘he’ knows where she lives, or that there are a couple of guys working together. It’s beyond creepy.”

“So, when are you thinking of going down there?” He set a mug of milky tea on the kitchen counter for me and took a sip of his, still standing in the kitchen, the horrible pink-hued wooden cabinets behind him. Who put pink wooden cabinets in a house like this? I couldn’t help my mind from wandering as I digested what I had just heard.

“I was thinking tomorrow morning first thing.”

He sighed. “Do you have any money to make the trip?”

I took a sip of tea, my gaze lowered to a familiar pattern of exposed knotholes on the surface of the table. I absently took one hand away from the mug, and with my fingernail I scraped out some of the dust and food particles that always gathered in the deeper crevasses. My heart sank a little with the disappointing turn this conversation was taking. Was this really the priority for every discussion we had? This wasn’t the time for logistics or finances. This was the time for emotion, for compassion, empathy, love. I retreated further inside myself.

“No, not really, would you mind helping? My father said he’d cover the costs, but it’s a little silly to ask him for something like this. It’s just gas, and a night or two at a hotel to get her back on track and give her some support.”

This was a recent and ongoing bone of contention: money. More precisely, the disparity of income between the two of us, despite having been married for six years.

I stood up from the table and went to our bedroom to pack a bag, and Pete walked upstairs to finish some work in his office. As I packed, I couldn’t help but feel rage building at the injustice of what I was processing. My only sister, nearly ten years younger than me, brutally violated. Deeply buried thoughts clawed at the edges of consciousness, but I refused to acknowledge them. Now was the time to focus on Larissa, but my mind kept wandering backward over a decade earlier.

Eleven years had passed and not once had I talked to Larissa about my own attack. Now here we were. She had just turned twenty. I had been eighteen. The similarity of the situations, our ages, nearly a decade apart, was disturbing. I hadn’t talked to anyone about what had happened to me so many years ago, and now it was bubbling just underneath the surface, threatening to boil over. I crawled underneath the covers, exhausted and scared.

*   *   *

The next morning, I awoke feeling as if I had a wicked hangover, despite having drunk nothing but a mug of tea the night before. A glass of whiskey may have been a better choice for once, perhaps deadening my thoughts and allowing a modicum of peace in what was a restless night wrestling with my own nightmares and imagining those of my sister’s. The reality was, I was pregnant. We had found out only last month, and I wasn’t even showing yet. Pete and my family knew but it was still so new that I hadn’t processed it yet.

I made a bowl of oatmeal and boiled the kettle for tea and sat down at the table, my attention focused on the same knothole from the night before while my mind was elsewhere. Pete came in to make some cereal, and after a few strained pleasantries, went upstairs to work. I grabbed my bag from the bedroom and got ready to leave with the weird tension still between us. He didn’t think I really needed to go. I knew that I did but was scared to. I looked up at the ceiling as though I could will him to come back down and thaw the ice that was forming. Instead, I sighed and shook my head as though my feelings and thoughts functioned like an Etch A Sketch. I walked down the stairs to the garage below, still shivering in the chilly house.

Pulling into the small town of Alamosa, I was struck again by how grim this corner of Colorado was. Colorado was known as an outdoor playground. Snowboarders, skiers, mountain bikers, kayakers, and hikers all streamed into the state. Amateur photographers swarmed the trails, inspired by the stunning beauty of the mountains. Yet a few hours south was a flat, barren land of strip malls and alligator farms that made you wonder if there were any architects in the entire forty-mile radius, or zoning codes for that matter. When my father encouraged my sister to attend Adams State in southern Colorado three years prior, thoughts of Durango or Crested Butte came to mind—charmingly rustic mountain towns with a cool college campus vibe mixed in. I was psyched to visit her the first time to see where her formative years would be spent, getting a taste of something different than what she would have experienced had she stayed in the Midwest. But as we drove in, on a lonely road, more akin to rural North Dakota than Colorado, past an alligator farm and numerous forlorn homesteads with rusted-out cars and kitchen appliances in the yards, I gulped and hoped against hope that Alamosa was an oasis, or at least a diamond in the rough.

It wasn’t. It was the rough without the diamond. The small campus of Adams State just off Main Street was the only thing that looked encouraging in the entire town. Alamosa was essentially one long main street with a series of hotels and strip malls, and it was immediately obvious that the town was financially dependent on the small college, the students, and their families that came to visit.

Nothing much had changed since that initial visit to watch one of her college soccer games three years prior. I drove through town and past the campus to the Hampton Inn on the edge of town, and I waited for Larissa to get out of class. I paced the room, nervous to see her.

She was quiet when we met up. Her long hair was in its soccer-chic messy bun, her face typically devoid of any makeup. I smiled when I saw her and gathered her up in a big hug. We had always laughed that we were built so differently as sisters. I was five nine, weighed 125, and built like a lanky boy. She was five six and curvaceous, with D cups and hips. She was the powerful soccer player, and I was the ex-ballerina. She looked like Rissa. I didn’t know what I’d expected to see. There was no visible damage, thank God, but I knew what lurked beneath the surface. I was at a loss of what to say or do. Act normal? Cry? Rage?

Eat.

“Do you want to get some lunch first?” I asked, thinking a little downtime together would be nice before we headed straight to the police station.

“Sure,” she said. She smiled, but her voice was wavering.

We had lunch at the local Chinese restaurant Hunan, and talked a bit about her classes and upcoming finals.

Then I asked the key question that was bothering me. “So what’s the situation with the fake police guy at your door? That’s just so weird.”

“I know. We found out from the campus police that it’s apparently been done in a few different college towns. Basically, the person who attacked you, or someone working with him, follows you home and knocks on your door pretending to be the police and collect the evidence. Pretty smart actually.”

“Pretty fucking scary. How do you feel about staying there for the rest of the term?”

“My roommates and I made arrangements so no one is ever there alone, and it’s only a couple of weeks until we are done for the year.”

“But do you feel safe there?”

“No. But I don’t know if I’d feel safe anywhere.”

I looked down at my plate. I knew exactly how she felt. I paid the bill, and we both stood up, bracing ourselves for the next step. “Okay then, let the fun begin,” I said sarcastically. “Where do we need to go?”

“Just head back to the campus and I’ll direct you from there. Let’s get this over with.” We got into the Subaru and rode a few blocks in silence.

We pulled up and stepped out of the car in front of a small police station off a side street. The officer on duty was expecting us, having already talked to Larissa and my father on the phone. He asked us to sit down in his office and went over her report again. He then asked her if she would try to look at a few faces in a book of mug shots. She flipped it blankly. Page after page, she flipped, the faces blurring together, indistinct to the casual observer. Nothing.

The officer then asked if she would work with a police artist to attempt to reconstruct the attacker’s face. Larissa agreed, and I watched silently as the artist asked her questions to start the sketch. “Is his nose large or small? Pointed or rounded? Straight or crooked? Did it look like it had been broken?”

Larissa answered in a monotone the best she could.

“Were his eyes close together or set apart? Do you know what color they were? Big or small?”

It was soon apparent that Larissa was overwhelmed and unable to describe her attacker’s face in any way that could lead to a picture of him. Sitting there listening, I realized how hard it would be to describe my own mother in such terms, much less a man who attacked me in the dark and who I would much rather forget.

Leaving the police station, I had a feeling of helplessness and déjà vu. There was little to no chance that her attacker would be caught, much less identified. It felt like a useless exercise that kept the policeman informed but did little to bring justice to the situation. Larissa seemed to feel more frustrated than anything else.

In an effort to lighten the mood and create a distraction, we drove to Dairy Queen the next town over. The warm weather and sunshine was a welcome change from the current winter storms in the mountains that I’d just left, and I rolled down the windows, letting the warm breeze breathe new life into the car. I hadn’t gone to DQ in years, decades maybe. Memories of walking to Dairy Queen with my father on warm summer nights when I was growing up entered my thoughts. He’d put on his flip-flops and we’d walked the four blocks down Washington Street to get an ice-cream cone dipped in cherry, or a lime slushy, and then walked through the park across the street, mosquitoes buzzing through the evening air around us. It was always warm, and slightly humid, and we could hear crickets and mosquitoes. It was definitely one of my best and strongest memories of him from growing up.

We walked a little on the gravel path past the Dairy Queen, eating our blizzards in quiet thought.

“How’s Dad dealing with all of this?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t really say much.”

“He doesn’t really know how, probably. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about my attack.”

“I didn’t even know you were attacked until last year.”

“Really?”

“Well, I was only eight or nine when it happened, right? I remember I heard you guys talking about it at the kitchen table and you were crying, and when I asked what was wrong, they told me you had been mugged in Minneapolis. It wasn’t until last year that I found out. I remember I was so mad at them for not telling me.”

“Well you could be mad at me, too.… It’s my fault, too. I just never ever talked about it after it happened, still haven’t really, so I never thought to bring it up to you once you were old enough. Not even when you came to visit me last year in Germany. The safe-sex talk, yeah, condoms, college and career, sure. But not the rape. That’s just not something I’ve even thought about sharing.”

“’Til now?”

“Well, yeah, ’til now. Makes me kick myself that I didn’t tell you about my experience. Like somehow it could have helped prevent it happening to you if you had been more aware. Like you would have had better radar, or been extra-cautious, or some such nonsense. Why didn’t you confront me when you found out?”

“I didn’t want to bring it up if you didn’t want to talk about it, and I think I was just mad I didn’t know. Like it was hidden from me. But regardless, it’s not an easy topic to bring up when we only see each other once a year.”

*   *   *

Larissa came back to my hotel room to hang out and do her homework so that she could be with someone until her roommates were home. We sat on the two queen beds, watching random TV while she studied and I worked. A strange mood hovered over both of us. I worked on my laptop, but was thinking of my parents.

They had two daughters, born nearly ten years apart. No sons. Both daughters were raped. That must have been devastating. The saddest part is I remember my mother being strongly against my move to Minneapolis. She sat on the edge of my bed, and told me how worried she was that something bad would happen. I assured her with all of my seventeen-year-old invincibility that she was being silly—I’d be fine. I was almost embarrassed that she was making such a fuss about it. How much guilt I harbored in the years that followed, that I’d proved her protective instincts right.

I talked with my mother several times throughout the trip. I was having a hard time believing that it had happened to Ris. I was trying to find proof it hadn’t happened, because it couldn’t have really happened to her. Months later I was so mad at myself for not being more comforting, more mothering. Instead I had felt almost scared to get too close, and kept her at arms’ length. The wall that had protected my emotions was becoming a wedge between us, and I felt it and yet couldn’t do anything to lower it. I was simply unable to comprehend that my only sister could have been violated in such a way.

*   *   *

A year and a half later, I found myself announcing to my family over Thanksgiving dinner my plans to start an organization to be called Mountain2Mountain. Devon was not quite two years old, my sister graduated college in the spring, and I wanted a change. Haunted by what had happened to my sister and immersed in Devon’s development, I felt a pull to change my course. Despite the success I had in my career, I didn’t feel challenged or fulfilled as a sports trainer. I didn’t care about training individuals or preventing injuries anymore. I was sick of the apathy I saw in the world. I was sick of the violence, some of which had affected both me and my only sister. I was tired of the status quo. What would the world be like for Devon? I could spend the rest of my life ranting about the injustices I saw, or I could step up to the plate and do something about it. How could I raise Devon in a world that I wasn’t fighting to make a better place, be it for her, or for her counterparts?

Pete once said after we separated, “Fund-raising for CAI isn’t going to be enough is it? You’re going to go over there.” “There,” being Afghanistan. I pooh-poohed him, suppressing the urge to say, “Yes. I have had enough of men treating women like they are disposable playthings they can just abuse and leave behind. Why can’t you understand that I want to do more? I have to do more. What if this was Devon?” It was bad enough that it was Larissa, but Devon, too? Perhaps I felt I needed to pay some sort of karmic penance to ensure that this couldn’t happen to anyone else I cared for. As much as I hated to admit it, Pete knew me better than I knew myself at the time. He saw what I was afraid to voice. I was too afraid he’d say no, or laugh, or worse, try to talk me out of it. I wanted to change the world and nothing was going to stop me from trying. The stakes were too high.