little bombshells and my nugget of strength

I can identify with the bravado Jack feels from staring at death. I faced death too, but no one waited at home for me with a yellow ribbon. Each of us has a silent source of strength. That thing that defines us, the one thing that gives us muscle and buoyancy.

And if you lost it all and you lost it, Well we’ll still be there when your war is over.

STARS

THE FIRST COUPLE miles pass with ease, and I stop to pee, motioning for Mira to go ahead. I shout to her, “I will catch up, Koreana!” which is my nickname for her, but really I want to run this thing alone.

Why haven’t I run outside with my friends in our months of training? My reason is fear. Fear of open road keeps my ass on the treadmill. Deep in my mind is a distant memory, the one thing I never told to anyone. The thing that tried to kill me is the very thing that gives me tenacity and courage. It’s the one thing I never told another soul in my life, not even Jack. Me, the girl who is incapable of secrets. Except one.

During Jack’s deployment to Somalia in 1992 to 1993, my attention to televised news was solely devoted to watching Christiane Amanpour report on the soldiers from Mogadishu for CNN. Local news held zero interest for me. If there was a psycho murdering rapist on the loose, I didn’t know or care. Stupid move, Hawkins. Never let your guard down. In all the years since, I still find myself about twice a year looking online for records or reports of a similar attack. Each time I escape to Sackets I wonder, Are you here? Do you remember me? The girl you wanted dead? The girl whose name you didn’t know? The idea that he wouldn’t know me and I wouldn’t know him overwhelms me, incomprehensible to experience my closest call with death with a person, evil or not, and not know who he was. Different, but similar to Jack’s possible brushes with death in combat. All very random. Impersonal.

Well past midnight and a little past drunk after a night of playing cards with friends in Sackets, I set out to walk the half mile of open space between my friend’s apartment and mine. I found a place on the curb free of snow to sit for just a minute to look at the brighter-than-usual moon and mull over whether or not to vomit. Just an open field on one side of me and buildings abandoned after World War II on the other. The sound of approaching footsteps barely registered in my mind. I didn’t hear the low rumble of the diesel truck. I wasn’t drunk to the point of being sloppy or incoherent, just introspective. Two and a half glasses of wine at most; I was a lightweight then. I sat and got lost in a moment of missing Jack. I raised my head from the cradle of my hands in time to feel someone shove me to the gravelly pavement and then fall on top of me. I didn’t feel pain, just felt shock. It sobered me right the fuck up.

MILE 3: I look up from the pavement and see the mile-marker sign along the road. Runners pass me, and I pass only a few. I’m relieved to be on my own for the rest of the race. The absence of the treadmill forces me to remember that night fifteen years ago. The night that kept me from running outside for so many years.

The man who pushed me to the ground didn’t rape or kill me like he planned. We were on gravel, and the cold was piercing and raw. I was facedown, I think. I think this because there were little pieces of gravel embedded in my left cheek afterward. And because I remember the sharp and larger-than-normal piece of gravel that dug into my chest. My right arm was pinned under me, and I remember gripping that rock, not hoping to use it as a weapon, but to keep it from digging into me. Some of the details are crystal clear twenty years later; others almost nonexistent. I never saw his face. I never saw him. I knew he was going to kill me. He had green army tape; I remember seeing the roll lying there after he tossed it presumably from his pocket. I recognized it and knew it was meant for me. His car or truck, whatever it was, was still running. I lay there recalling a self-defense expert on Oprah who said, “Never allow an attacker to take you to a second location.” We could have been there five minutes; it could have been an hour. I remember that he smelled vile: BO, bad breath, cigarettes, even shit. To this day I tighten around stinky people. Maybe it was the shock, but I didn’t feel pain. Just the overwhelming horror and surprise. I don’t remember screaming, but the next day, I couldn’t speak. A result of the choking or endless screaming, not sure which. Again, I knew he was going to kill me when he was ready. I was not ready.

MILE 4. I watch the other runners, wearing their Wounded Warrior hats, and shirts custom-made to let everyone know they are running in memory of a KIA soldier. I feel petty for my secret, and even worse for using it as a source of strength.

He was not much larger than me, a small man, judging by the feel of him on top of me. My new husband of just a few months was over six feet and very muscular. This man was small and chubby. Weak but determined. It occurred to me that I could get the upper hand. I didn’t have to die. I was athletic and fit, a runner and an aerobics instructor, an aging acrobat. But I was a little drunk, and he was on top of me, grabbing, punching, and choking me. Struggling, both of us.

I heard the deep whirrrr of the military-grade hundred-mile-an-hour duct tape, and felt his weight shift off my back so he could flip me over. I hear you, Oprah, I won’t go to a second location. That’s where he will chop me into a thousand pieces and dump me into the lake. Justice is home waiting for me. She will starve to death before anyone even notices I’m missing. It must have been the perfect shot with the rock in my right hand, no idea where exactly it landed. Maybe his nose. His weight shifted off me for just a second when the sharp rock hit him, and in that second, I got up, as if someone lifted me, and I ran faster than I’d ever run. I heard his footsteps for just a few seconds behind me, then the loud slam of his truck door. I went around the grass polo field buried in snow; I heard the engine of his vehicle. I was so close to home. Too close to him to run for home. But I didn’t know where to go, how to get there. I was disoriented and finally feeling the pulse of pain and blood, from the gravel, from him. There were two fields and a tall tower between me and our empty apartment. Empty but for Justice. I crouched behind a bush and snow bank and listened for the engine. My mother’s voice rang in my head. A year or two earlier, there was another unsolved murder of a young woman in our isolated community. Her legs were found on the highway in the spring thaw. Her head in the lake. My mother had warned me about this woman, who was supposedly also a lieutenant’s wife. “Ang, be careful in Sackets all alone. I worry about you. Remember that young wife. No one even knew she was gone, because her husband was deployed.”

I don’t know how long I waited there, crouched and stunned. Too shocked to be terrified, I wouldn’t feel the terror until a few hours later. The reality of what I’d escaped, the possibilities of what I’d escaped. I waited next to my building for silence, for the sound of his engine to fade. I remained motionless until I heard nothing, then I went around the back of my building and into the door with the glass window. My key was under the mat. Justice, my soul mate in the form of a four-legged creature, was waiting there at the door. Normally she slept like a log, but the floor was covered with her drool and she was pacing and whining. How did she know?

I didn’t stop to hush her but ran straight for the bathroom, turned on the shower, and vomited. I had enough sense to keep the lights off. I immediately got into the shower, again hearing the voice of the Oprah expert warning me that I was destroying evidence. I imagined calling 911, imagined the mayhem of chaos. The uniformed men who would look at me like I was a stupid, irresponsible girl. Would Jack come home? Would his commander just walk slowly into his tent and say, “Hey, Jack, I have some kind of bad news. It’s about Ang. She’s okay, but something happened”?

I didn’t give a shit about that man. Who he was and bringing him to justice. I got away. No one needed to know; I didn’t need this following me around for the rest of my life. The time I got a little tipsy and decided to sit on a curb and ponder my existence. Over the years, maybe because I never told anyone, the details became less and less clear. Eventually I wasn’t sure what of my memory was real. But at MILE 6, it came screaming back.

I stayed in the shower, sobbing through hands that covered my mouth and scrubbing until the hot water ran out. Even my scalp felt sore to the touch. Once I was in my house, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Yes, that’s weird. But I had Justice with me there. I don’t know why I didn’t think he might know where I lived. My sense that his choice of me was random and opportunistic was certain. I did not call the police. I did not call my parents. I couldn’t explain this to anyone. I hadn’t seen him enough to identify anything except the way he felt and how he smelled. I didn’t see his truck, just heard the diesel. What I remembered was the sound of the tape and the feel of his pudgy, soft body. I washed him off me and vowed to never tell a soul. Actually, I don’t think I decided this then—that I would carry the secret with me for the next fifteen years. Then, I only knew I couldn’t call the police. The rest I played by ear.

My physical wounds were painful and sore looking, but superficial. Easily hidden by winter wear. The bruises low on my neck and knees didn’t fade for weeks. I covered the few gravel marks around my chin and one side of my cheek with makeup.

The next morning just as dawn hit, I could see enough from a streetlight shining through my bedroom window to pack a small bag. I took the bag and Justice out to my car, which was buried in snow, and I drove away. I didn’t even take an extra minute to let the cold car warm up or scrape the snow. I let it fall behind me as I drove away. My neck throbbed as I turned my head to look behind me, just to be sure. I barely stopped, only to refuel and let Justice go to the bathroom in the ten-hour drive to Virginia, to where my parents were living. Surprise! I missed you guys. No, no reason. Justice and I just got lonely. Sure, Red Lobster sounds great.

“Oh, Angie. I’m glad you came home.” Like Virginia was “home.” That’s a very army family thing to say; every place is home, and no place at all. “I worried about you up there in no-man’s-land all by yourself. That place is so desolate in the winter. And that lieutenant’s wife. You know, I don’t think they ever caught the guy who did that to her.”

Did it change me? It changed me. But it didn’t fuck me up, at least not much. I think if I’d gone to the police, gone through the process of being labeled a victim, a stupid one at that, it would have fucked me up much more. People would have seen me differently. What he did to me and stole from me was my own private hell. I didn’t need to share it. It was my own intimate companion. What it did was change my perspective. It gave me an irreverence and fearlessness that I didn’t have before. I beat him. I got away from him. I won. I stopped following rules. I drew on the memory of that night from time to time for strength. That might be fucked up, but it’s the truth. What he took from me was my ability to run outside and my tolerance for tight necklaces. With my wedding dress, I was supposed to wear a chic one-piece pearl necklace that would be looped into a double-strand pearl choker. Instead, I wore the pearls as a single strand that hung low below my throat. So in some ways, I gained far more than I lost. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to explain this to anyone else, especially Jack. Even though Jack was the one who needed to know.

Over the years, it left me with resolve and determination. The Belinda Becks and Eeyores of my life be damned. The same for deployments. Small potatoes. Like the night I drove myself to the hospital in the middle of a heart attack instead of calling 911; I handled it myself.

MILE 7. The first few years, the memory of the night haunted me, and eventually it faded enough and became irrelevant. Or so I thought. But it defined me in undeniable ways like my fear of running outside, unguarded.

It defined me in good ways, too. And that realization hits me as I see the sign MILE 8. I’ve used that night to my advantage. The attack has given me my buoyancy. In an odd way, overcoming that horrific experience on my own and keeping the secret all these years have afforded me my feeling of impervious strength.

MILE 9. What is Mira’s buoyancy? What is Eeyore’s buoyancy? Does Audrey-Jill, the Delicate Cajun, have buoyancy?

I cross the finish line at last; Mira, the perfumed turds, and me. Each of us struggling with demons uglier than the hard pavement pounding under our shoes. Some of us nearing the end of the fifteen months and knowing our normal will again change into another new normal of welcoming strangers back into our homes and beds. Our time together as our own family of just women is winding down, and while we feel relieved to be nearing the end, we are sad to see our routines and our rituals together end.

But this day, all we care about is beating the race, winning against something. We’ve kicked the ass of that ten-mile race, each of us—a victory when we’ve had none for so long. Maybe everything else in our days is shades of gray, but this day is black-and-white. We won; it lost.