Ovenbirds
Maybe I'm brushing my daughter's hair and I see it on her neck, curved, white, like a small smile under her skin. Maybe I'm washing dishes and I see a blue Lincoln framed in the window, the geraniums on the sill perched momentarily on the car's hood as it glides innocently up the block. Maybe my husband touches my thigh absently, and I feel his fingers drawing heat from the pinched, discolored skin.
#
He took me from the mall. I wasn't supposed to be there, but I was. Brenda needed help choosing a prom dress, and Brenda's demands took precedence over my mother's. Brenda was popular. She couldn't drive me home because she was meeting her boyfriend at Louie's and didn't want to be late. Maybe if she hadn't left her credit card at Sak's, or if we didn't stop at Farrell's, or if I were going to prom and had to try on dresses too. What I'm getting at is this: Timing is everything. That was his mantra. That was the first thing he said to me when I came to in a cabin somewhere in the Catskills. I was lying on a cot with my ankles bound by what I later learned was an electrical cord. My mouth felt wet and raw, and when I moved my jaw I heard a popping sound that could have been an explosion a thousand miles away. I touched my mouth first--my hands were not bound, but they were bloody--and my lips were swollen, like balloons. When I gasped, I swallowed hard bits like Chiclets, like eggshells, like pebbles before knowing that they were my broken teeth.
"Timing is everything," he said to me then. "I'm a very lucky man."
#
You may think that I'm very lucky, too, to have lived to tell this story, and on most days I'd say you're right. But I'm lucky for lots of other reasons, not the least of which was giving birth a decade later to a healthy baby girl, one who may grow to hate me more than I hate the man who abducted me because I won't let her walk to school or ride the bus or go to the mall alone. Maybe you think this is impossible, my daughter hating me more than I hate my abductor. But it's not. Why? Because he could have been worse. When I came to, tasting blood and swallowing teeth and wondering why I couldn't feel my feet, I wasn't staring at a 200-pound man in a black mask waving a sickle, or a group of drunken bikers with chains and grudges. I consider that when I'm pushing my daughter on a swing, or when I'm kneading the knots out of my husband's back after he's threaded his way through a house thick with flames. What if my abductor had sent pieces of my body to my parents over the course of a week, a month, a year? Sometimes late at night I try to tally up the parts of the body, to figure out how many days my captor could have kept occupied with slicing, wrapping and mailing. It's comforting that I don't think like a lunatic, that I don't know if he'd count the lips as one or two items, the eyelids, the nostrils. What if he had been a desperate man who'd just lost his wife and, in his incomprehensible loneliness, held me forever?
But my abductor was dark-haired, blue-eyed, handsome, and he wore an Orioles baseball cap and jeans. He always said he was a lucky man, and he always said timing was everything, especially in the beginning. I don't know how many times I passed out that first day, or that first week, and I don't know if I really passed out or if I thought I passed out. You get disconnected somehow, unplugged, and your life becomes a collection of events that seem random, isolated, broken loose from the constraints of time and space. Waking and dreaming ran together early on, and I wondered if that was what it felt like to die. At first I wasn't scared. I wasn't anything. Maybe I was amazed that fate, or God, or whoever was in charge had such a dramatic conclusion in store for me, a nondescript suburban girl with a high IQ, a bad attitude (which today strikes me as pretty standard for a 16-year-old) and parents who loved her more than she deserved. I suppose that's an easy thing to believe, knowing now what I didn't know back when my abductor burned the skin on my thighs with his Zippo or yanked out my infected teeth with pliers: that my parents posted photos all over the neighborhood, harassed the Kingston County Police Department until four detectives were put on the case, cried openly on national television. When I watch the tape today my mother looks haggard and desperate, resigned and broken. When I watch the tape today, my mother looks like me.
#
My abductor spoon-fed me tomato soup after he pulled out four of my teeth. He stroked my matted hair and hummed an unrecognizable tune into my ear, and this frightened me more than when he burned my legs. I thought of my parents then, and I thought of them for the first time as Jean and Eddie. And I wondered if this was how death began, with the dissolution of formal ties so that parents became, simply, people with their own lives, lives that would go on without yours.
#
Sometimes at night when my husband is at work I sit beside my daughter's bedroom door with a carving knife, praying an intruder will finally come to end my long, insufferable wait. I understand that any altercation with someone who means to do harm will be long, bloody, strenuous. That is the way my abductor has changed me: I have violent thoughts. Not about him, but about strangers who stare too long at my daughter in grocery stores or call late at night when my husband isn't home. Violence has consumed me, and I weave it into my thoughts as absently as one might yawn. When I am finished with the man who has pulled my daughter from her carousel horse, he is sometimes decapitated, and even the clear vision of me kicking his head into the gutter doesn't pull me from my reverie. Sometimes after a man has dragged my daughter into a car I chase it down the road, my sandals slapping the pavement like war drums; I catch the car, I tear off the door, I drag the man out and force my thumbs into his eyes until they are pressed to the hilt into his skull. Only the thought that my daughter, the subject and trigger of these rescues, will witness and be scarred by my attacks pulls me back to the present, to the tomato plants or the fabric softener, the gas pump, the ironing board.
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The cabin was rough hewn (that's what the newspaper articles said, rough hewn), and that is something else I think about: how funny the words rough hewn sound, like a foreign language, like the name of a mythological character, like a charm. The articles also said that in the rough hewn cabin I was burned, beaten and violated, as if burning and beating weren't violations. What the articles didn't say is that I didn't always mind being violated because afterward my abductor untied me, fed me, treated me like I was human. I'd never had sex, although I'd lied about it to Brenda, who shrugged as if already quite bored by the whole business. When my abductor violated me, I wondered if I was being punished for lying about having sex, or for hating my parents, or for being foolish enough to approach a strange man who was asking for what? I don't even know.
Between beatings and violations and tomato soup, I blamed myself for my predicament, and that's when it became bearable. That's when I said goodbye to everyone, bequeathed my tapes to Brenda and Hap, my books to Moira, my locker to Deb. Later I took the locker back, figuring no one would ever want that first-floor locker again.
#
So, the rough hewn cabin, the rough hewn cabin, the rough hewn cabin was very small, one room, I think, with a dingy shower curtain separating the beds where we slept, my abductor uninterrupted and free, me bound and chasing dreams that melted into reality so seamlessly I was never certain where I really was. There was an outhouse about thirty yards from the front porch, dwarfed by red pines and invaded by skunk cabbage. I wasn't able to use it until my ankles healed, and so for an eternity I lay in my waste and wondered how my abductor tolerated the stench and refuse to which he contributed his ejaculations; sometimes I grew embarrassed, although now I find that hard to fathom.
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My husband's back grows into a wall of flame at night, an impenetrable barrier, and only then do I feel safe enough to sleep. I often believe he is made of fire, having lived in it for years, having sucked its black smoke into his body and bent it to his will. Now he can tame fire, as he can tame my fears, and his back, a constellation of scars etched by falling embers, bursts into flame just for me. You don't want this, I told him when we first met, I'm not who you think. But he wanted it, wanted everything, wanted to save me the way he'd saved snarling dogs and trembling women and shrieking children tossed from upstairs windows. Tell me, he said, let me help you carry it, and I started, The rough hewn cabin, the rough hewn cabin, the rough hewn cabin...
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Timing is everything, my abductor said the day the sun slashed through the window over my cot and the birds sang just like I remembered them singing in my former life. Then he snapped the shower curtain across the rusted pole, something he'd never done before nightfall, and the tears came before I even knew, the tears came because he was doing something different, something that made the tears come without a reason. The thump was loud and hard, and the boxsprings whined and the force of it sent his bed skidding across the floor. The newspaper articles said she was a bartender in her forties, last seen at Micky's Tavern. What the articles didn't say was that she must have known more about life than I did, because she screamed and thrashed and called him names I'd never heard a woman say before, and my abductor did the only thing he could think of to shut her up: he tore open the curtain. Omigod, said the woman, and she saw her future then, and she clawed at him with her bloody hands and later when she was in the trunk of the Lincoln he smiled at me when he said that I would go along the next time, too. There were no landscape features I could memorize, no gnarled trees or scorched fields, no waterfalls or logging roads as we circled farther up the mountain to bury the woman who had called my abductor a pin dick, a cocksucker, a child fucker.
#
"Do you hear that?" my abductor asked as he stared into the flame of his lighter, the early sun blinking through chinks in the wall, the cot listing where he sat on its metal edge. "It's an ovenbird." I imagined the bird wheeling overhead, splashing in the updraft, crying out simply because it could. My abductor then blew out the flame and turned to me. "It's saying teacher," he laughed, and when I didn't look at him because I never looked directly at him, he put his lips to my left ear and squawked, "Teach-er! Teach-er!"
#
What if I told you it was all a dream, a nightmare so real I tore at the sheets and cried bitterly, my tears mounting in waves that extinguished the flame of my husband's back? Sometimes I believe that to be true, but then there are the articles. Why have I kept them? Not because I need them to remember; I have memorized them all, and I know them better than I know the real thing that happened in the rough hewn cabin. I know that I was only a child, that I was seen traveling in the passenger seat of a sky blue Lincoln Continental, that my abductor had killed four women in his rough hewn cabin and buried their mutilated bodies deep in the Catskills.
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"Penny for your thoughts," my abductor said as he dropped into the driver's seat of the sky blue Lincoln Continental. On his face and his hands and his clothes--I told the police, my mother says I said these words--were all that was left of the woman, and this is something he must have said to me, something I couldn't have thought up myself. He left me alone in the car as he carried her off into the hemlocks like a caveman, and I sat there for a hundred years waiting for the man who had abducted me, the man who had pummeled my face with a paperweight, the man on whose shirt I might later be found. I waited for him like one who waits for the hurricane, the vendetta, the end of a long fall. Did I think about escaping? Not really. Why? I don't know, although I'm convinced I knew then. What was I thinking in those minutes, those hours that passed while my abductor stabbed into the club moss and uprooted bead lily, cutting a grave for his crime? Maybe I was thinking about Jean's Hummel collection, maybe I was thinking about Brenda's prom dress, or maybe I was thinking about nothing at all. When the man came back to the Lincoln after completing his dark task, after the chucked shovel ricocheted savagely off the rusted trunk walls, after Jean once again did not rush into the wilderness to decapitate my abductor, he said, "Penny for your thoughts." I shrugged because I had lost my voice, and I would experience an eternity of events before finding it.
#
The article said that the land abutting the cabin was old growth triple canopy forest set amongst gray sandstone peaks, and even today I think that sounds beautiful. But it is only the sound I find lovely, because the actual beauty of the mountains and the trees feels forever lost to me. After I read my daughter to sleep with fairy tale stories of magic mountains and happily ever after, dark forests and sleeping death, I lay awake teasing the flames from my husband's back, envisioning myself chained to a bed inside the gingerbread house until my husband thrashes through old growth triple canopy forest, hacks into the candy-coated cottage and forces my abductor into the flaming mouth of the stove. It can happen anywhere. Snow White's dwarfs, the three little pigs, Little Red Riding Hood never stood a chance against the evil weighed against them, and their survival, a triumph of innocence over strategic and cultivated darkness, could only occur in a tale.
#
My husband came in from the cold, he came in from the rain, he came in from the fire. He wept, and he trembled, and I understood that something had happened; I understood that he had been broken. And so I stroked his wet hair, and I hummed into his ear, and I spoon-fed him soup. I freely accepted the power that my husband's vulnerability had thrust upon me, and in that brief moment I saw through the eyes of the keeper, the captor, the tyrant: I knew then what my abductor had felt when I accepted, when I appreciated, when I needed him.
My husband told me the long, horrific story of the old Victorian writhing in flames, the cupola smoking, the small dresses crumpling like dead flowers. But his story ends the way every tragedy ends: He had her, and then he lost her.
#
That's the way my story ends, although my story never really ends. One day we drove down from the mountains, leaving behind the ovenbirds and the rough hewn cabin, although neither of us knew it then. He said he was feeling lucky; he even let me sit upright in the passenger seat. We pulled into a grocery store parking lot, and he left me alone in the car, and I waited a hundred years. Then I saw them, the candles flickering in the restaurant window next door, and I gazed at them until the sun fell into the faraway roofs and the night came on suddenly, like a shock. And then I gave up. I opened the passenger door, I stood up, and I walked. Why? Because I thought my abductor had abandoned me, because ten minutes felt like ten years, because I was mysteriously drawn to the heat of those distant flames. The article said that after 29 days I seemed to have sleepwalked out of the wilderness and into The Parthenon, where I was hidden in the kitchen until police arrived. Who could blame them? It seemed absolutely normal to me then, walking into the kitchen with the manager, past the spitting grills and the gleaming stoves, the bubbling pots, the burners ablaze. It may seem odd to hide a visibly broken, traumatized girl behind a towering wall of heating lamps, but I couldn't speak and no one knew what my captor looked like. There are no photos of me limping into the free world with my swollen face and my pumpkin smile, my blistered thighs and my ratted hair, my twisted visions and my night sweats. But there is a photo of my abductor alongside a dark, dark story, and for the first time I understand that he is ugly.
#
What if my abductor had taken me ten years earlier? Ten years later? What if I had fought like the other woman? What if he hadn't left me in the car alone while he waited in line at the grocery store scanning magazines, seeking prey, feeling lucky? I don't know what happened any more than you do. I should, but I don't. Only once have I looked through the eyes of my abductor, have I felt empowered by weakness as it trembled against my chest and told a timeless, tragic tale, so I have to imagine my story ends like this: He exited the grocery store humming a tune I have yet to place, and his expression, one of shock and fury after seeing the empty car, turned into awe. And maybe as my abductor peered into the grocery bag, stared in wonder at the tomato soup cans nestled at the bottom, his awe at my bravery turned, fleetingly, into love. I don't believe he struggled like they said, and he never carried a gun that I saw. But the article said that he drew a gun, and then he was dead. In other words, our story ends like this: He had her, and then he lost her.
#
For a while I didn't hate my abductor because of the scars on his thighs, his bent and broken fingers, the seeds of fist and fury that were planted in him long before he understood what would grow. Then I had my daughter, and I hated him because I didn't know if what he planted in me would blossom into a dark, never-ending inheritance. And I hated him because I lost the person I could never know and never be, perhaps a woman with an easy openness and a carefree spirit, a mother who could teach her child to trust in herself, in humanity, in God. But then there's this: what if I had never been abducted and turned out worse? Sick, or drug addicted, or suicidal. Maybe my abductor rescued me from a fate worse than abduction. Maybe this is rationalization. But I'll never know, and this is something else my abductor has taken from me.
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There was a letter, and at first its words came to me as from a fog, from a place that slipped away when I tried to close my fist around it. So I opened my hand, and I read the letter, and it said I forgive you. It was tucked into Revelations of a bible found in the rough hewn cabin, and I thought my abductor was forgiving me for being who I was, for being a montage of attributes that generated in him the undeniable need to hurt me. But the letter was addressed to a woman made of fury and fire, one with an undeniable need of her own, one with an inventive repertoire of punishments for her only son. And there was a map, and on it the words, they are all sleeping in the mountains, and above those words five sites marked in red: four of them held the mutilated bodies of his other victims and the fifth, located on the eastern slope of Bearpen Mountain where it overlooks the Schoharie Creek Valley, was the place he had chosen for me.
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It's always this dream, on the quiet nights when sleep comes like an old friend and memories don't claw and scratch at my shuttered mind. The mountain cracks open, and four ovenbirds ascend from its craggy depths, and I watch them weave seamless patterns across the clean white sky. And in my dream I try to rise with them, to splash madly in the updraft, to cry out simply because I can, but I remain earthbound, voiceless, envious. In the morning the dream accosts me quietly, as if through a shroud or a fog, through the same murky curtain that veiled my eyes for 29 days. Only later, when I hear the sparrows calling overhead, or when I see newsreel of a volcano spitting its fiery glory skyward, or when I read about blackbirds baked in a pie does the dream step suddenly from the shadows.
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There is a scar--curved, white, like a small smile under my skin--on my neck from when my abductor burned me with a bottle cap. Maybe he held the ridged edge of the cap in his twisted fingers while heating the opposite side with his lighter, or maybe I flinched, or maybe he was killed before he could complete the circle. My daughter has the same smile on her neck, although my husband insists he can't see it, but it is there, just below her right ear, a survivor's smile, a sympathy smile, an inheritance.
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What can I do but be vigilant? Lightning doesn't strike twice, but even if it did, could I stop it? Is there any use in believing that we all sign on for something in this life, that we freely choose to enter a story we know will end in tragedy? I don't go to church; I don't beg God to watch over my daughter; I don't pray for the redemption of my abductor's soul. I believe in the small things, the things I can live in one moment or hold in the small of my hand: the thin strand of hair over my daughter's right ear, the stippled geranium pot on the kitchen window ledge, the strength of my husband's callused hand as it hovers, gently, over my thigh.
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