I counted down the days until I could escape from Florida. New York, with its eight million residents, beckoned. I knew the city from my visits to Aunt Charlotte’s home. It was a place where a young woman with a complicated past could start anew. Songwriters composed passionate lyrics about it. Authors made it the centerpiece of their novels. Actors professed their love for it in late-night interviews. It was a city of possibilities. And a city where anyone could disappear.
On graduation day that May, I donned my blue robe and cap. Our college was so large that after the commencement speeches concluded, students were divided up according to their majors and awarded diplomas in smaller groups. When I walked across the stage of the Education Department’s Piaget Auditorium, I looked out into the audience to smile at my mother and Aunt Charlotte. As I scanned the crowd, someone caught my eyes. A young man with red hair, standing off to one side, away from the other graduating students, even though he also wore a shiny blue robe.
Maggie’s brother, Jason.
“Vanessa?” The dean of our department thrust my rolled-up diploma into my hand as a camera flashed. I walked down the steps, blinking from the light, and returned to my seat. I could feel Jason’s eyes boring into my back for the rest of the ceremony.
When it ended, I turned to look at him again. He was gone.
I knew what Jason was telling me, though. He’d been biding his time until graduation, too. He wasn’t allowed to come within a hundred yards of me at school. But there were no rules about what he could do after I left campus.
A few months after graduation, Leslie emailed a newspaper link to a few of us. Jason had been arrested for drunk driving. The ripple effects of what I’d done were still spreading. A tiny selfish burst of relief went through me, though: Maybe now Jason wouldn’t be able to leave Florida and find me.
I never found out more—whether he went to jail or rehab or was simply let off with a warning again. But about a year later, just before the doors of my subway car closed, I saw a slim frame and shock of red hair—someone was hurrying through the crowd. It looked like him. I burrowed deeper into the cluster of people on my subway car, trying to hide myself from view. I told myself that the phone was in Sam’s name, that I’d never changed my driver’s license to a New York one, and that since I was renting, he wouldn’t be able to find a paper trail that led to me.
Then, a few days after my mother surprised me by placing an engagement announcement in my local Florida paper that listed my name, Richard’s name, and where I resided, the phone calls began. No words, just breathing, just Jason telling me he’d found me. Reminding me in case I’d forgotten. As if I could ever forget.
I still had nightmares about Maggie, but now Jason entered my dreams, his face twisted in fury, his hands reaching out to grab me. He was why I never listened to loud music when I jogged. His was the face I saw the night our burglar alarm blared.
I became acutely aware of my surroundings. I cultivated my sense of gaze detection, to avoid becoming prey. The sensation of static rising over my skin, the instinctual lifting of my head to search out a pair of eyes—these early-warning signs were what I relied upon to protect me.
I never made the connection that there could have been another reason why my nervous system became exquisitely heightened immediately after my engagement to Richard. Why I obsessively checked my locks, why I started getting hang-ups from blocked numbers, why I’d pushed Richard away so hard when my loving, sexy fiancé had held me down to tickle me on the night we watched Citizen Kane.
The symptoms of arousal and fear can be muddled in the mind.
I was wearing a blindfold after all.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
I exit Saks for the last time, avoiding the security guard’s eyes when he checks my bag, then I begin to walk to Emma’s apartment. I try to tell myself that it is also for the last time. That after this, I will leave her alone. I will move on.
Move on to what? my mind whispers.
Ahead of me on the sidewalk, a couple strolls hand in hand. Their fingers are interlaced, and their gaits are in sync. If I had to make a snap determination of the quality of their relationship, I would say they are happy. In love. But, of course, those two feelings are not always intertwined.
I consider how perception has shaped the course of my own life; how I saw what I wanted to—needed to—during the years I was with Richard. Maybe being in love carries the requirement of filtered vision; perhaps it is so for everyone.
In my marriage, there were three truths, three alternate and sometimes competing realities. There was Richard’s truth. There was my truth. And there was the actual truth, which is always the most elusive to recognize. This could be the case in every relationship, that we think we’ve entered into a union with another person when, in fact, we’ve formed a triangle with one point anchored by a silent but all-seeing judge, the arbiter of reality.
As I stride past the couple, my phone rings. I know who it is before I even see Richard’s name flash.
“What the fuck, Vanessa?” he says the moment I answer.
The fury I’d felt earlier when I looked at Duke’s photo comes roaring back to me. “Did you tell her to stop working, Richard? Did you tell her you’d take care of her?” I blurt out.
“Listen to me.” My ex-husband bites off each word. In the background on his end, I can hear honking. He obviously just received the photograph, so he must be on the street outside his office. “The guard told me you tried to deliver something to Emma. Stay the hell away from her.”
“Bought her a house in the suburbs yet, Richard?” I can’t stop goading him; it’s as though I’m letting out everything I was forced to repress during our marriage. “What are you going to do the first time she makes you mad? When she isn’t your perfect little wife?”
I hear a car door slam, and suddenly the background sounds on his phone—the city’s ambient noises—cease. There’s a hush, then a distinct voice I recognize as one that runs on a loop on New York Taxi TV: “Buckle up for safety!”
Richard is adept at being a move ahead of me; he must know exactly where I’m going. He’s in a cab. He’s trying to get to Emma first.
It’s not even noon; traffic is light. From Richard’s office to Emma’s apartment is maybe a fifteen-minute drive, I estimate.
But I’m closer to it than he is; my trip to Saks took me in the direction of her place. I’m just ten blocks away. If I hurry, I’ll beat him. I quicken my pace, feeling for the letter in my purse. It’s still there. A breeze tingles across the light perspiration on my body.
“You’re insane.”
I ignore this; those words from him no longer have the power to derail me. “Did you tell her you kissed me last night?”
“What?” he shouts. “You kissed me!”
For a moment my pace falters, then I recall what I said to Emma the first time I confronted her: Richard does this! He confuses things so we can’t see the truth!
It took me years to figure that out. Only by writing down all the questions that were battering my mind did I begin to see a pattern.