Notes from My Captivity(60)

I hold Vanya’s warm hand and let him guide me around rocks and over tree limbs, watching my footing, making sure that I am safe. Occasionally we stop and kiss, and he brushes my hair away from my face. I wonder if I look half-savage now. My hair is tangled; my skin feels dry. My hands are thin, the knuckles pronounced. My fingernails are chewed. My eyebrows, overgrown.

“I need a mani-pedi,” I say.

“What is—?”

“Nothing.”

I’m so tired of waiting. So tired of going hungry. So tired of hoping. I’m going to make him tell me today if I have to wring it out of him with my bare hands. He knows the secrets of this world. Of the afterworld, and I’m not going back to the cabin before I know them, too.

Hours pass. Vanya finally leads me away from the river, up the hill. The leaves on the trees are turning yellow. They must still be green in Colorado. My mother loves the colored leaves of fall. It’s hard to picture her face. She seems caught in another dimension. When I imagine her voice, it is vague and ghostlike. Maybe it’s a trick of the mind but here, in these woods, my father is more alive than she is.

We plunge into a thicket of larch. The forest is dense and overgrown here. We stop, and I gather some berries nearby while Vanya draws nuts and slices of dried potatoes from a sack tied around his waist, and we eat in silence.

Here the trees are three feet in diameter at the base. The forest looks like it’s been standing undisturbed for centuries.

It’s time to bring up my father, but Vanya brings him up first, surprising me.

“Your father,” Vanya says.

“Yes?”

“How did he die?” It is something, over the years, that I learned not to talk about, once I realized that the counselors were not doctors and talking healed nothing in me, just made it real all over again, and that well-meaning friends could hear the story but not feel it, and that I had to disguise everything to tell it, the black despair and the terrible, unrelenting rage so pure and so immediate that the sight of a sorority bumper sticker would make me lose my breath.

So I shut up.

There was a peculiar satisfaction I got from keeping the story to myself because whatever reaction I got was not the right one. Maybe there was no right one.

And now, telling Vanya meant I had to explain so many things first. What my father meant to me. What a district attorney was. What a car was. What a sorority girl was. What an ICU breathing machine looked like. What a court of law was, and what it meant to have a justice system fail you.

There’s no way I can make him picture these things. So I keep the story as simple as I can. Using words and gestures and a stick that was worn down to the nub before I was done drawing and redrawing things in the dirt, I tell him about my father. I say his name. William Cahill.

“Moy otets.”

My father.

“Moy drug.”

My friend.

As I get further into the story, my voice begins to rise, thinking of how he died because of someone else’s stupidity and carelessness.

I draw a car.

“Devushka. Glupaya devchyonka.”

Girl. Stupid girl.

I imitate drinking.

“P’yanaya.”

Drunk.

He nods, but does he really get it, not having ever been drunk, not having ever driven a car or even seen one before in his life, does he get how stupid, how utterly selfish it is to do both at once? I lapse into English now.

“My father was jogging down the road, minding his own business, and she mowed him down like he was just some animal, some thing, do you understand, Vanya? How she took his life? How she took my life? My life was over then. I had to make a new life and the new life is nothing like the old one. It will never be like the old one, does anyone understand?”

I get more and more angry, throwing the stick into the trees, pounding on the dirt meant for drawing, because I am mad, furiously mad, ragingly angry, still just as angry as the moment it happened. And everyone has wanted me to experience that rage, tell them of it in the context of moving on from it, like talking about how much I love my home while I’m packing to leave. I still can’t say the girl’s name because I don’t want to see her as a person, know her a person. I don’t want to believe she has an identity beyond a faceless drunk driver.

I scream and he screams too. He hates her too, hates her purely and with intensity. Finally someone hates her, too, because of what she took from me, because her story beat mine in the courtroom and in the press. Because she still has a father and I do not. I kick trees. He kicks them too. Birch bark crackles and falls, collecting like paint chips at our feet. I scream at the clouds and he screams with me. He hates this girl too, this girl I cannot and will not ever name.

Finally I can tell the story that no one wanted to hear stripped of its politeness and religion and context and civility.

Finally it’s mine.

I lose energy and sink to the ground. He lies next to me, puts his arms around me. He feels the story, the gravity of my loss. He has lost people too, and maybe he can’t name what took them, either.

We turn to face the sky, watching the clouds drift by together. He doesn’t have to tell me he’s sorry. He doesn’t have to talk about the people he has lost. We’ve both lost people. We both wonder why. I’ve never thought of him this way, really, someone who knows me more than my own friends who still have their dads, their brothers, their sisters. Who haven’t known loss. Right now, it just feels right to watch the clouds together, and remember.