Colonie’s Wolf Road is one long supermarket aisle of familiar brands: Arby’s, Chili’s, Cheesecake Factory, all aglow with fogged plastic signs lit by a hundred fizzing bulbs. It’s the kind of strip-mall road so familiarly American, so boxy and uniform, that it fits like a thin, flat Lego piece over the memory of similar roads. When you’re on it, you know exactly where you are, and after you’ve left, you forget you were ever there. Convenience, you might call it.
Once upon a time Wolf Road bisected a rural residential community on the outskirts of downtown Albany, comprised of family-owned farms and blue spruce driveways. But in the midsixties developers began to descend, staking billboards in sand dune lots and replacing the once stately country club with an indoor shopping center.
By the eighties and nineties, the weeds of mall culture extended along Wolf Road. A Stop & Shop, a Chinese restaurant, and a family-style grill bled into new franchises—Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse.
In 1993, the area was Albany’s rest stop—an assortment of cheap hotels, family-style restaurants, and shopping outlets. A collection of commercial cul-de-sacs and parking lots. Twenty-three years later, the drive-through dazzle is brighter, the signs have changed, but the architecture remains largely intact.
The Lexington Grill where Gary spied on the Mother and the Daughter is now a jewelry store. The Sheraton where Gary pushed a wheelchair toward his victims on a Friday night is now a Best Western. The Turf, where Gary checked in after his failed abduction attempt, is now a Radisson. And the Calico Corners, where Gary shot himself, is now a day spa called Complexions.
The map of his last hours—dodging from one parking lot to the next across the lanes of Wolf Road—is still a perfect parallelogram.
Even the floor plan of the Best Western, where I book a room, is the same as it was in 1993, when it was called a Sheraton. It is motel style with a front desk and lounge area, a dining room where the complimentary breakfast is served. The two-story track of modest rooms are built around an indoor pool, the color of a Midori sour and the odor of stale cookies.
In room 164, overlooking the pool, police found a portion of Gary’s belongings.
Property Report 1: A Wilson Quick Fire tennis racket, a roll of brown tapes, a child seat locking clip, 7 Tic Tacs, a T-shirt marked “Gary’s Girls,” blue Prince jogging pants, a blue-and-green Prince bag containing toiletries, 2 empty Kmart bags, Macy’s bags, CVS bag, Victoria’s Secret bag with wrapping, a blue-green Swatch watch, 3 wigs, a beard and a mustache, 1 large garbage bag, two handwritten notes, 1 large garbage bag, a cassette tape marked “Favorites.”
The old Sheraton’s white, shale-like walls are still the same, as are the two exit doors that lead to the back of the motel and the parking lot, where Gary’s attack took place.
The back lot is lit only by the flickers of headlights on a nearby highway. To reach the front desk, you have to cross rows of parking spaces and a broad, dark corner of Dumpsters, before the entryway pillars are even visible.
The Mother had wrestled Gary Wilensky away from the Daughter and lifted her body up and off to the side, freeing the Daughter to run to the front of the hotel and scream for the desk clerk’s help.
After the desk clerk arrived in the parking lot and Gary fled, the Mother and the Daughter were taken to a local hospital and treated for head wounds. Nineteen stitches for the Daughter. seventy-one for the Mother. It was there, when asked about possible suspects, that Gary Wilensky’s name was first mentioned. By then Gary was already frantically shaking out his belongings in the parking lot across the street from the Sheraton. Less than forty-eight hours later, they were discovered by a local resident walking his dog.
Property Report 2: 1 pair of clear glass lenses. 1 Smith & Wesson blue steel model .38 caliber loaded with 5 rounds, 1 pair of black scissors, 1 black piece of plastic, 1 black blindfold, green and white sweatbands, 1 black strap-on penis, 44 photographs (marked to be turned over to the victims), letters, notes, audiotapes of letters, papers, correspondence, 3 paperback books.
I take a hard right outside the old Turf Hotel onto Wolf Road, and then another right into the parking lot of the day spa that was once Calico Corners. The parking area is short and dead-ends at the border of an overgrown lot—a land swamp at night, empty enough that the eye passes over it, scanning for something more concrete. There is a red neon sign for a local newspaper sizzling with the words Times Union, and then beyond that, a space in the sky where the moon should be.
Twenty-three years ago, Gary Wilensky parked right in this spot, propped the base of a rifle on his khaki pants, and leaned into the barrel.
Behind him in another vehicle, Ric Easton, a local news cameraman on a police ride-along, had pulled out his camera to capture what happened next. A screech as the white Lincoln careened off the lot into the marsh. Easton followed the police to the car, capturing the moment they opened the driver-side door and shining his camera light on the body they found slumped inside. The ammunition still perched on Gary’s lap, next to his open palm, which was coated in a dark orange fluid.
“Let’s roll the tape,” said Maury Povich two weeks later. His soft gray suit, padded at the shoulders, matched his gray swoosh of hair, which matched the gray, fog-lit night Ric Easton shot his footage. Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and Hard Copy vied for the video, while one upstate newspaper decried the bidding war between networks for pictures of the gore.
But before all that, before Gary was buried in a small service in Long Island, before his gadgets were auctioned off, before the footage of his death was released, officers removed a room key registered to the name Joseph Jeffery, from Gary Wilensky’s soiled denim jacket. When they opened the door to room 161 of the Turf Inn, they found a phone off the hook and a duffel bag with more supplies.
Property Report 3: Two firearms, handcuffs, night vision equipment, disguises, paperwork involving a lease of property on Cemetery Road.
At five in the morning, when the highway is still dark, I drive farther north toward the cabin. By the time I reach Warrensburg, the sun has already gone through its early purple phase and is starting to seem familiar again. Straight along one numbered route, left at another, through towns and the absence of towns. Then down into North Creek, where river rushes over rocks and the trees form a cave around you.
As the car climbs up Cemetery Road, the narrow gravestones look like the willy-nilly guffawing of old teeth. A gang of wild turkeys fan out on the road. One turns to me with a fierce eye. The only address I have to follow is from a copy of the lease Gary signed. It reads “off Cemetery Road.” All that is off Cemetery Road is a gravel path crackling with ice and broken branches, shaded by trees.
I look at the picture of the house from the ripped page of the old New York magazine and then I look at the house in front of me. They are close, though this one appears slightly bigger, slightly greener in color. Perhaps an addition was added, or the wood was replaced.
Even now, there is something cruel about this house. A ruthless industrial quality that evokes images of canisters of syrupy gasoline, axe blades, preparations for an ending.
Was that even the right house? I’ll wonder later.
Back in Colonie, Steven Heider meets me at the entrance of the police station. He is heartier, taller than I imagined him to be.
“Good to see you, Chief,” says the officer at the front desk. Everyone still calls Heider chief, even though he’s recently retired. He is dressed like my father in dungarees and a blazer, with the same brush-needle mustache. It’s the costume of a man who doesn’t wear costumes, a man who earns the admiration of other men without working for it.
That was never Gary Wilensky’s strong suit. I try to imagine a meeting between the two of them. Gary hunched forward, twirling in his seat, while Heider leans in with the alpha body language. Gary the delinquent.
“Patty,” Heider says when we walk into an office with a large round table and a woman seated at a desk behind it. “This is Piper Weiss, who I talked to about a year ago. She’s doing a story on Gary Wilensky. You remember Gary Wilensky.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember well,” she says. She looks to be in her fifties, with blond, neatly trimmed hair, and a sturdy smile.
“So can we interrupt?”
“Of course, you’re still the chief.” There is a practiced ease to their rapport. It almost feels staged on my behalf.
Heider is all meat and muscle, straight-backed. He carries himself with the casual pride of a man who’s seen enough in his life to know which seat he belongs in. He sits facing Patty, so I sit facing him, with my back toward her.
“I got an eight-pound Yorkshire terrier at home with a small bladder,” Heider says, to let me know our interview has a time limit. And then he tells me about his recent vacation, in which he witnessed some kind of explosion. “I’m an interesting guy,” he says. “Bad things follow me.”
He tells a good story. Restraint is required to land enough unanswered questions that the retelling is more interesting than the actual event. His calloused hands are planted on the table, inches from a slide carousel situated hors d’oeuvre style between us. Now it’s down to business.
“I know specifically the town attorney said no videos, no pictures. So that’s why you got what you got,” he explains.
“What’s in there?” I nod to the carousel.
Heider cups it with his cigar-sized fingers. “Pictures,” he says.
Here lies the additional evidence—photographs of the cabin when it was discovered by police. A few were released in 1993, but many more were not. The attorneys who approved my FOIA had concluded that these visual components should remain private out of respect for the victims. I’ll have to file new forms and appeal that decision, Heider explains, if I want to see the photos inside the carousel.
It feels like a psychological study, where a researcher places a cookie in front of a child and says someone else might suffer if she eats it. The stacking of personal satisfaction against moral consequences to be used in arguments over whether humans are essentially good or evil. Which one is it?
“No, I don’t need to see it,” I say, and I wish saying the words would make it true. I’m a sniffing dog, hungry for scraps. I would leap on the table and eat off the dinner plate if I wasn’t so tamed by the consequence of shame. And I already feel the shame, the fact that the victims must be protected—no longer from Gary but from me.
“Can you tell me what it looked like when you found the cabin?” I ask.
“Shackles on the beams,” says Heider. “All the windows were boarded shut. Video cameras in all the windows, video cameras in the woods—in case somebody drove down the driveway, he’d be able to see him. He had wires strung a hundred yards in the trees. The windows—some had wood or heavy blinds with cameras pointed out. And then he had six TVs, six little screens to watch the footage from the security cameras.”
All of it, spoils from his SpyWorld $10,000 shopping spree.
In a clearing down a narrow gravel path, a half mile off Cemetery Road, detectives found a small one-story cabin, the stain of driftwood, iced with vertical window frames and a sloped gray roof. A tangle of wild-haired birch and spruce trees guarded the property, reaching over the roof, needle to needle, creating a top layer of protection from anyone who might be looking down at the area from above.
Ice patches, the last remnants of a brutal winter, soaked into the yellowed dirt. Their deterioration observed with vigilance by camcorders stacked on tripods inside the house. The three-legged cyclopes were placed at each window, peering through partially boarded-up glass when the officers arrived on April 24, 1993, to dismantle them.
There were other cameras, some affixed to the trees, more surveying the cabin’s interior. A trail of wires snaked through the rooms and united at a collection of monitors flickering with real-time footage of the driveway, the living room, the bedroom, and the four-poster bed, neatly made with brown-striped sheets and matching shams. There was a long, thick silver chain that ran across the headboard, tightened around two wooden pillars, and another horizontal chain tied to the ends of the footboard. They were presumably intended to be clamped to handcuffs on a human being.
A pulley system had been installed on the ceiling, one that could be linked to shackles found inside the house and allow for a hostage’s limited range of movement.
Inside the fridge were wine coolers. Elsewhere were ammunition, a carving knife, an assortment of shackles and handcuffs, pornography on VHS, a flashlight, scissors, wigs. One was red and loopy, another straight and black, another gray with tight little bobby-pin curls. There was a white mask with uncanny features—pursed lips, a sharp nose with nostrils, delicately indented smile lines, painted-on eyebrows, and two black holes to look through.
When an officer opened an overhead storage space, he thought he’d discovered a hostage, but when he felt her skin and pulled her from her hiding space, she flopped down like a crumpled shower curtain and looked at him with blue acrylic eyes, not understanding. A rubber sex doll found in the cabin.
“In my memory, he had cameras arranged so he could film the bed and what was happening,” says Patty, from the desk behind me. “He was checking angles with himself in the bed making sure the angles were right.”
Heider jumps in: “Obviously he’d been up there for days, putting it all together and then following her around when she drove upstate. We know the father of the victim found some surveillance equipment on his car at one point.”
He leans in, with a slightly raised eyebrow. “But what was he going to do after he got her?”
“What was he going to do if he failed?” adds Patty.
“Gary had no plan B,” Heider says. “He didn’t even try to leave the area. He drove back across the street and into the middle of a police dragnet. My guys were stunned at the time. There was that white Continental.”
“If Wilensky had jumped back in his car and driven to Manhattan, we wouldn’t have known about the place in North Creek,” he continues. “It wasn’t until the victims were at the hospital that they mentioned his name, but still, we’d have had to track him all the way back to New York City and prove he was up here. This was before the days of GPS, before the days of E-ZPass, before there was digital evidence tracking someone’s whereabouts. So all he had to do was say ‘I wasn’t there.’”
Instead he scattered his letters and photographs around the area as if they were his own ashes.
“I always found it interesting his throwing all that stuff around. Sooner or later somebody would find it,” says Patty. “Why are you doing it? Because you want someone to know?”
The initial burst of coverage began with newspapers—the Associated Press, followed by the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the New York Times. The headlines were blunt at first. “Coach Kills Self After Kidnap Fails,” “Tennis Pro’s Dark Secret.” But soon, they resembled R-rated psychological thrillers. “Fatal Obsession,” “Little Cabin of Horrors,” “House of Pain.”
The Daughter, by then exposed in the press, was photographed in a baseball cap, flash-eyed, outside her school, while her father begged one reporter camped outside their apartment building for privacy. More reporters parked outside Manhattan private schools bombarding other students with questions, while whisperings of a made-for-TV movie landed in print.
“Word spread when we started making inquiries with the NYPD in our investigation,” says Heider. “The fact it involved New York City people—I think once we brought up the Brearley school—from there it went like a rocket.”
The crime had followed Gary from Colonie back to Manhattan, and soon Manhattan reporters were following Gary’s crime up to Colonie.
“It had to be a slow news week because we had camera trucks and trailer trucks here right out front until Friday,” says Heider, who landed on the cover of the New York Daily News, standing among a pool of chain links, electronic devices, and a white expressionless mask laid on the cabin floor.
“They called me Hollywood Heider,” he says. “I was on Hard Copy three nights in a row. My sister was on a trip in Puerto Vallarta. She wakes up and there I am on the news. At one point, this thing was on fifty-seven news channels around the world. It was just huge. Nobody had anything else to talk about.”
While Manhattan reporters hunted for Gary’s colleagues, friends, and family members, a local Colonie reporter learned that the part-time Sheraton desk clerk who helped ward off Wilensky’s attack had been fired from his second hotel job. He had overslept after fielding several interviews the night before, and missed his shift.
By Friday, a week after the incident, Heider put a cap on the media’s feeding frenzy with one last supper. Seventy reporters gathered at the station to hear Gary’s audio recordings, which he’d left behind the Turf. On them, he dictated the letters he’d written to the Mother months before his death.
“Dead silence,” says Heider. “The tape went off. End of story. They all walked out the door and I never heard from them again.”
Back in Manhattan, reporters asked psychiatric experts to elaborate on the term now associated with Gary Wilensky: stalker.
The concept was relatively new by mainstream standards, having surfaced in the media the prior year, when a sitcom actress was murdered by an obsessed fan. But by 1993, after David Letterman’s stalker and Amy Fisher’s act of violence, the term was trending.
Stalking behavior generally describes an individual acting on his obsessive fixations with another person, but because the motivations and features of stalkers vary widely, there is an ever-growing number of subtypes. For example, love obsessional stalkers harass victims they’ve never met. Simple obsessional stalkers are motivated by a severed relationship with someone in their lives, and more likely to become violent. Erotomaniacs are delusional stalkers who believe their (often famous) victim is in love with them. An expert suggested this as a possible diagnosis for Gary in a 1993 article, though I believe Gary falls on a spectrum between erotomania and simple obsessional.
Dr. Eric Hickey, a psychologist and criminal profiler, has described Gary’s condition as relational paraphilic attachment, in which a person’s unusual fantasies attach themselves to the concept of relationship that isn’t really there. His fantasy of a consensual relationship with the victim becomes his own reality, but when it begins to unravel—for example, when Gary was fired by the Mother—he becomes desperate to fix what he believes to be a legitimate romantic relationship. In this way, Gary was delusional but not sociopathic. Sociopaths don’t have attachments to their victims. Based on Gary’s letters professing his devotion to the Daughter, he did.
After his death, the Colonie Police Department reached out to Gary’s psychiatrist, but because of privacy issues, she was hesitant to divulge much.
“She basically said, ‘Yeah, he had his issues,’” says Heider. “He was in a time warp of age fourteen or fifteen. Wouldn’t you say, Patty?”
“Yeah. I think he was overly obsessed with her,” says Patty. “Usually those kinds of people, as they go into this kind of obsession, they tend to escalate. People who are off like that have ups and downs and they spiral. They start to become worse. He was really decomposing at that point.”
The story took another turn when, days after the incident, the Daily News reported that this wasn’t Gary’s first illegal act. In 1988, he was arrested for stalking two young boys and a little girl over a period of a month. The mother of one of the victims claimed she alerted the private schools about Wilensky, but said her warnings went unheeded. (“I feel like I’m going to be sick,” she told the News after Gary’s death.) Later, the two boys, teenagers in 1993, sat on a stage with their mothers and described their 1988 encounters with Wilensky on an episode of Geraldo.
The first boy says he spotted a man in a mask filming at his bus stop, and recalls how he’d follow them in his car to their next stop and continue to shoot them. The second boy had first believed Gary to be just a “New York neighborhood guy,” but looking back is “horrified that I let it last for so long.”
After Gary’s arrest and the retrieval of his stalking tapes, the victims provided depositions and their families hoped to press charges, but the district attorney had other plans. A representative from Robert Morgenthau’s office did confirm to the media that the case was dropped, but didn’t elaborate.
As I understand it, since stalking wasn’t a felony in the late eighties, Gary’s record of community service and his willingness to seek court-appointed treatment made for a quick conclusion to a comparatively small case in a city reeling from a crack epidemic and rising homicide rates. When I spoke with Gary’s then lawyer, he didn’t immediately recall the case or his former client.
But in 1993, news of Gary Wilensky’s stalking past—which coincided with him coaching children—made him in death a sudden poster child for more stringent antistalking laws. Only a year earlier, California had instituted the first in the country, and several states, including New York, followed suit, but there was now a public call for tighter protections and nationwide mandates.
In the fall of 1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, which criminalized crossing a state line “with the intent to injure, harass, or intimidate that person’s spouse or intimate partner.” The act was expanded two years later to include all victims of perpetrators. While stalking a child in New York became a misdemeanor in 1992, it wasn’t until 1999 that the state upgraded the charge to a class E felony, punishable by imprisonment.
“One of your questions was about other victims,” says Heider. “We know he was stalking a bunch of people, whether or not they were at his school or on his tennis team, or strangers in Manhattan we don’t know. I mean the two boys he stalked in 1988, they didn’t know him at all. But we found a lot of pictures on Manhattan streets.”
In order to determine if there were other victims, the NYPD briefly made the photographs available to the public, so that those who recognized themselves could come forward. Nobody did.
“Are those pictures still available?” I ask. These are the images I want to see, the images Gary took of other girls he was stalking, an image of me.
“I don’t think so . . .”
I dig a nail into my skin to distract my facial muscles from revealing an emotional response, but it’s a failed tactic.
“Look,” says Heider. “He obviously had an infatuation toward a number of people. This was the only one, we determined, this was the only one he acted on.”
Heider explains that child predators like Gary use their authority to create a pipeline of potential victims so that even if his interest is centered on one child, there are others he’s grooming as backup. “They make it so they never feel like they’re alone,” says Heider. “I’m sure there was a favorite in every one of his lesson classes. And his version of crossing the line wasn’t necessarily sexual—more psychologically controlling. He became in control of their parents. He dictated when their kids came to practice. He dictated how long they stayed. The parents were on the outside. But the victims weren’t having it. They finally told him off, and that’s what started the whole process. I take that back: the Daughter was the first one who went to her parents to say he was getting a little crazy. Other girls had not done that.”
He might have been most infatuated with the Daughter before he was fired, but losing her triggered his exclusive fixation and desire, as Hickey had suggested, to rectify the fantasy relationship he believed they shared.
In the end, his abduction plan was as deranged as the strategy with which he executed it.
“Why use a cattle prod to attack them when he had a gun under the blanket of his wheelchair? Why not use that?”
“I don’t think he wanted to kill anybody,” Heider says.
But another predator might have wielded the gun swiftly to force his victim into his car. Gary, whose thoughts were so disorganized at the time of the attack, and his impulsiveness so unrestrained, lost sight of his own plans, and unleashed a violence less calculated than any he might have fantasized about or strategized around.
“He was smart enough to effect a ruse that worked,” says Heider. “And if it wasn’t for them fighting him off, Lord knows what would have happened.”
He pauses and leans in closer, palms flat on the table. “He just never figured on the Mother fighting back.”
The Mother. It was her sheer presence in that parking lot that might have thrown Gary off. And she was the one who physically thwarted his attack on her daughter.
In a 1994 McCall’s article, the Mother penned her own account of the man in the trench coat and hat who approached them in the Sheraton parking lot and suddenly began beating her daughter.
She describes instinctively jumping on her attacker, tearing buttons off his coat in a desperate attempt to free her child. Then she recalls lifting her daughter’s crouched body, flinging her out of the line of attack, and screaming for her to run. As the attacker turned his rage on the Mother, her daughter ran for help. “I’ll kill you if you hurt my daughter,” the Mother screamed, even though she had become the focus of his violent assault.
“At the second I knew my child was in danger, I had no fear for my life,” the Mother wrote. This act of maternal heroism, which she humbly attributed to science and the production of adrenaline, ultimately saved both their lives and the lives of other potential victims.
Four years after her mother’s essay, the Daughter shared her own experience in her college newspaper. Her focus was not on the attack, but the scars that remained in the aftermath.
She feared he was still lurking—underneath her bed or behind the shower curtain. She felt unsafe closing her eyes to sleep. To help, her family made “rounds,” checking beneath the bed and in the shower every night so she could rest. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “I still like to check.”
To process their experience, her family shared their fears about what had happened, as well as what could have happened.
Back in 1993, news reports speculated that Gary could have taken her life with his own.
In a way, Gary’s fatalistic vision of romance feels very teenage. It’s a perversion of a pubescent fantasy—that pang of longing for the unattainable and the mistaken belief that if one’s feelings are requited, all will be resolved. A love hologram. I know it well. My bedroom shrines of books, posters, and carved candles, willing Jim Morrison into my own existence as a way out of the life I was living. My obsession was also conflated with another escape fantasy: death. Jim’s appeal was inextricably linked to his early demise, and I wondered if a shared ending could bring us together. “Love-death as the ultimate high,” Joan Didion wrote of Jim Morrison’s mystique in an essay in The White Album. Perhaps Gary was chasing that high.
But love is not obsession. Love is survival. It is the Mother and the Daughter fighting to save each other’s lives.
I came to Colonie in search of evidence—a photograph Gary took of me walking to school, a found letter referencing our conversation in his car. A reciprocation for this tedious, one-directional obsession I seem to favor. A confirmation of my place in his story, a love note from the afterlife. Instead, I’ve found nothing. That love means nothing.
“How are you doing?” Patty’s voice is soft on my back. Turning around, I see a sun shard cut through the window, breaking over her blond hair, turning it white.
I don’t know how to answer her question, or what exactly she’s asking. “I’m fine. I guess, for some reason, I just want to understand why he did what he did.”
Heider shakes his head. “You’ll never figure it out, because if you figure it out, you’re one of them.”
Patty nods.
“There’s a reason why you’ve probably put it aside for a number of years. Until you’re old enough to really handle it,” she says.
“He was a person of power, of trust,” says Heider.
“A person your mom or dad would let you be with because he’s a teacher, and let’s face it, that’s part of your mother’s feelings, too, because she let you go with him,” adds Patty.
“He knew what to say to them, he knew everybody wanted their kids to be the new Chris Evert and he made them feel you could be the new Chris Evert,” says Heider. “The money didn’t matter to him. That’s why he wasn’t charging your mother for those additional lessons. He would have done it for free just to have access to you.”
I am standing, gathering the paper where Heider drew a rough map of Gary’s last hours on Wolf Road, and shoving it into my bag. I am ashamed to hear them validate Gary’s interest in me, because I shouldn’t need it.
“One thing to keep in mind, as you go through this journey and you’re writing this book, is that it’s going to bring up a lot for you,” Patty says when I walk over to her desk to get her business card.
Beneath the Colonie Police Department logo, imprinted in gold, is her name and title: Patrice Lockart, Victims Services Specialist.
It occurs to me that Heider may have brought me into her room for a reason. Did I lead them to believe I was a victim? I’m not. I’m something else, but what?
“Remember,” says Patty, still seated at her desk, neatly covered with relics of a paper-clip era. “You were fourteen when it happened and that fourteen-year-old is still in there.”
Facing her, I can see the slight brushstrokes of her age, the slits at the corners of her eye sockets, the blueprints for two pillars between her brows.
“What happened—whatever confusion you had then—it’s still there,” she says. “And it will carry with you.”