Plans for a life can change in one moment. A rainy road, a van coming toward a small car at the wrong place and the wrong time. A man with a knife who decides you are the one. Change comes even when you try, so hard, not to be changed.
A few weeks after Amber died, a friend invited Bill and me to a Christmas party. Sparkling white-light tree, wine, small talk with people I didn’t know. Eventually, our hostess made her way to us. “How are Amber’s parents doing?” she asked.
The glass of wine I’d had rose to a tightness in my face. “It’s really hard for them,” I said. “Nothing can make it better.”
We’d been with Jeff and Patti through phone calls and funeral home, choosing an urn and sorting pictures and picking music. The funeral. Patti saying, “What do I do now? How do I go on without her?”
Her new life without her child.
My friend put her hand on my forearm. “And you?” she said. “How are you doing?” Her hand was warm, and I wanted to feel its comfort.
I wished I had the right answer. There was nothing simple in it. Amber was gone. Her parents had to face this loss, and Bill and I wanted to help however we could. It would be a marathon, not a dash.
In the face of their loss, I felt ashamed that the tears caught in my throat weren’t only for Amber or her parents. A hollow place had been left in me when the child-wanting had finally gone. Like an old habit, I kept reaching for the longing. But it wasn’t there.
A memory had come back to me on the night of Amber’s accident while we waited in that small waiting room. A memory over twenty years old. The caregivers had come in one at a time, each delivering more news. A nurse, doctor, a social worker. The social worker spoke in a low voice, and her movements were slow, like we could all be startled away by anything too loud, too sudden. She offered what might be offered. Coffee, blankets, directions to the cafeteria, instructions for dialing out on the phone, help finding answers to questions we might have.
Watching her, I remembered something I’d lost. A loss big enough that I’d buried it. Before the rape, I’d applied for an internship for the last step of my schooling. I wanted to be a medical social worker. I wanted to be a calm presence for people during terrible times. When I got an interview for an internship at the local hospital in Eugene, I thought I was on the way to my future.
But, three days before the interview, I was on an examining table in the hospital, covered by a thin blue gown. A detective, and a forensics technician stood nearby while a doctor searched for hairs and fibers and semen and fingerprints on my body.
On the following Tuesday, I’d gone back to the hospital. My plan to keep going forward, to not be changed by the rapist, meant I would keep the appointment. I would have the interview; I would get the internship.
The head social worker invited me into her office. She gestured for me to sit in the guest chair in front of the desk and she took her seat behind the desk. She opened a folder and looked at a paper. I figured the paper was something the internship coordinator had sent over about me. The woman asked how I was.
“Fine,” I said.
“I understand you were in here on Saturday morning.” She leaned toward me. The light came through the blinds behind her, silhouetted her body. “Your name came up on our report for people to follow up with. I thought I could do that while you’re here.”
I kept my face completely still and tried to hide the heat underneath.
This was another kind of ambush.
I was here for a job.
“I’m okay,” I said, showing her my strength.
“It’s a horrible thing that you went through.”
Whatever words I might’ve had about what I wanted to do for work, or how I felt about a man taking my safety, or about this woman prying into me, jammed up in my chest. I sat there, as quiet as I’d been that morning of the rape. My careful plans taken.
She didn’t tell me about the job, or ask what I wanted from the internship or my goals once I finished college. She told me about resources and asked if I had anyone to talk to. She gave me a list of counselors. Told me what I might expect in these days so soon after being raped.
She didn’t offer me the job or call me later to offer it. I must have felt disappointed. Angry. The unfairness of it. But whatever I felt got shoved down with all the other feelings I was working so hard to quiet after the rape. Even this memory got shoved down, until the bitter rush of it came on and mixed with the grief of what had happened to Amber.
I’d needed an internship to finish my degree. Time was running out. I took a placement working with drunk drivers. A job that led to years of work in chemical dependency treatment, which I found fulfilling. That job led me to my current career in human resources. But it wasn’t what I’d planned. And, because I needed to not be changed by the rape, I forgot to remember what I had planned.
I didn’t want to be a medical social worker anymore. That was a memory, an unfair cost of being raped. And the human resources work I was doing constricted me now, like a once-pretty dress shrunk two sizes too small.
For years I’d been distracted by baby wanting. The dream child had fed an imagined possibility for some other kind of happiness. I didn’t want a baby anymore.
Bill listened while I cried, while I talked about this new feeling in me. This unnamed longing.
“Are you tired of this?” I said. “Do you remember when I was happy? When everything was easy with me?”
“I remember,” he said. His eyes did look tired. “You’re going through something now. Stay with it, see what it’s about.”
What I loved about him. The ways he encouraged me to know myself.
“I wish I could quit work,” I said. “I want some time to figure out what to do next.”
“Jackie,” he said. “We’ve talked about this.”
We had. Once, twice, twenty times over the past year. Me wanting to quit, him wanting me not to. The money, the plans he had for retirement, which included me working until at least fifty. That meant I’d need to stay another eight years in a job that paid too well for me to look for another.
He said, “You keep wanting things, new jobs, going back to school, like it’s something out there that will make you happy. I’m worried you’ll quit and still be unhappy. I don’t think this is about the job.”
What I hated about him. The all-knowing that I couldn’t seem to speak against.
A friend said, “I look at your beautiful garden, your house, even the way you dress. It seems like something is trying to rise up in you.”
The walls in our home were painted in warm colors and hung with art and photographs of all the people we loved. The shelves were decorated with vases and figures from our travels, arranged to tell a story.
Every spring, our garden presented a new canvas to shape. I’d learned what plants preferred to be where, how to amend the soil, what colors and textures drew the eye.
Maybe my friend was onto something.
She said, “Maybe you could explore the creative part of you that drives all that.”
I’d never thought of myself as creative.
“There’s this book,” she said, “The Artist’s Way.”
Another self-help book. But I was still a searcher. And I was desperate.
I bought the book and dove in.
The primary task in that book was to write daily pages. Like the good student I’d always been, having an assignment pushed me. Each day I started with a word and no intention about where it would go. Another word followed. Words that led to sentences about being a child, about being a girl and then a woman. I wrote about love and sadness, joy and resentment, and the day-in-day-out job that no longer fit me.
As can happen with writing with no intent other than to be open, unfinished business showed up on the pages. What happened to me when I was twenty and a man broke into my life and raped me came to me again.
The fear and anger and sadness I’d pushed down all those years ago rose up. Took my breath. Stunned me. What I had gone through. Some days, as I wrote, I cried. Some days I stopped writing because it was too much to remember. Some days the pages went on and on.
Even though I hadn’t wanted the rape to change me, it had. I began to make the connections. One thing had led to another, and I was changed without ever knowing it was happening. My cleaning and control of my body, the way I startled more than others, the pushing away of compassion, nightmares of intruders, the continual awareness of death, the stepping away from pleasure that sometimes happened when Bill and I made love.
Here, with the distance of time and the safety of the life I’d created, the writing released what had been held.
One sentence became a hundred, then a thousand. Pages became notebooks of pages that took me on a path to somewhere new.
Looking up after hours of writing, time gone by, I felt the ache of sitting too long, of being lost in work that took all of me. I didn’t know what I was doing, and the writing wasn’t yet good. But this felt like something I would do forever.