Girl in the Woods: A Memoir Read online

  I took a big breath, consciously released it. I told her, speaking slowly, that I would like to send a letter out. I told her I had composed it from the forest and that it was for everyone we loved. It told them about my rape. It asked them for their support in the form of donations to RAINN. I would feel better no longer carrying my shameful burden: the secret.

  She listened to me in silence without interrupting. Then we were both silent. I waited, shaking. She spoke and told me, flatly, “No.” She said that I could not tell our entire family that. I couldn’t ask my uncles and aunts and cousins and grandmothers for money for that. It would kill them to know. If I didn’t tell them, she said, she’d donate $1,000 herself: “More than you could possibly raise.”

  My mother was a tireless public defense attorney who represented abused and neglected children. She financially logistically literally and completely supported me—her defiant nineteen-year-old daughter—her baby—on this insane pilgrimage through wilderness. I had believed that her tremendous assistance was meant to show me that she supported me not only in shoes and money, but in her solidarity too. That she still loved me, just as fully.

  Sitting on the bed that her money had bought me, in a room filled with the expensive healthy foods and running shoes Mommy had lovingly sent to fuel and carry me, I couldn’t reconcile her support of my walk with this awful offer.

  She told me to read a legal article she’d written about blame-the-victim mentality, told me she could send it to me if I wanted to understand.

  “Are you still there?” she said loudly, after I’d been wordless. “There’s a blame-the-victim culture in this country,” she repeated. My left foot looked pink and bloated. My shoulders were sore, aching, and I could feel my pulse knock-knocking in my palm. My mom wanted to donate money to help raped girls on the condition that my family—the people I most trusted and most loved—not find out that her own daughter was raped. She was afraid my secret shame would shame our family.

  Through the dirt-framed window of my motel bedroom, I saw a little girl scramble up to the top of a mound of rocks. Her face was sun-lit, and church bells bonged the hour. My phone felt hot. I closed it without saying okay.

  I couldn’t sleep that night, though the bed my mother bought me was comfortable.

  In the morning I was ready to leave Etna and disappear into wilderness.

  It was hot, a cloudless Sunday morning. I stood outside the empty ice-cream parlor, stuck my thumb out. There was not a car on the road, though this was Main Street, and it was ten o’clock in the morning, a very reasonable time to be driving. I let my arm fall, gave it rest. No point aching for no one.

  After a long time of silence, a huge commercial truck screamed down the road, into town—past me. It didn’t stop. And then another rattled through, deafeningly loud; minutes later, another. Thirty minutes passed, another thirty, the sun was high now. The ice-cream parlor was open. Three kids with their mom wandered inside, out with huge white and pink glistening scoops dripping.

  I got myself one. It was creamy and sweet and cold, just what I wanted, just what I needed here alone in the sun in Etna, California, where no one was picking me up, where there was nobody here for me at all.

  Tears dripped into my ice cream; I licked them. I could taste the salt.

  An hour passed, then three, the sun was high, hot, I was gleaming with sweat, only about six cars had come through, and no one wanted to pick me up. In the three months I’d been walking this trail, hitching into and out of little towns, I’d never had this much trouble.

  But time passed on. It was a Sunday morning; it was an early Sunday afternoon. Etna was a damned town, I decided; it was tiny, terribly backwardly religious. And then it occurred to me, after all those hours in sunlight: it was a Sunday. Almost nobody was driving; they were praying. Etna’s residents were filed inside the town’s row of white and pale buttercup and brick churches.

  I was about to give up, call it quits and finally after four hot hours of standing on the sidewalk of this sad town, being ignored and passed by, begin walking the ten miles up the highway back to the place the PCT crossed Etna Pass myself, when suddenly there was a white speck. It was a Ford pickup truck, and I stuck out my thumb and it slowed and glided to a stop on the street beside me. A man was driving, alone, about thirty, and he was handsome, though his eyes were blocked by shades.

  It all happened so quickly. He asked if I was hiking. I’d been waiting four and a half hours, and I was tired of it, maddened by it, hot and dehydrated and feeling terribly slighted, and I told him Yes, he said Get in, and I did, thoughtlessly breaking the single hitching rule I’d made in an effort to keep myself a little safer. For three months it had been my policy never to hitchhike with a single man, only to get into cars with couples and families and, occasionally, groups of friends. But he’d seemed so nice, letting me in, and I had been waiting so long.

  As soon as I got in I heard the truck doors click—lock—and he pulled a U-turn and began accelerating away from where I was going, where I wanted to go, the Pacific Crest Trail shockingly receding.

  I was scared, frantic; I acted confident. “I’m going up the pass, back to the PCT,” I said.

  “I’ll take you there.”

  “You will?”

  “I will.”

  I thought: what should I do, what should I do. Should I call him on the fact he’d turned around? He knew he had, so no, I decided. He’d lied to me already. He might be capable of worse things. I shouldn’t offend him. I calmly twisted and pointed back the way we’d come and asked him, “Hey? I think the trail’s that way?”

  He seemed distracted, gazed straight at the road ahead and slowly rhythmically nodded, chin down, chin down, chin down. He said, “Yeah, we’re just gonna run a couple errands first.” It was a statement; he wasn’t asking. We were getting farther and farther away from the trail, and I was scared.

  I said, speaking slowly, matching his cadence, that he could let me out and leave me here on the side of the byway, and, after his chores, pick me back up and drive me back the way we’d come, up Etna Pass, back to the PCT.

  He removed his sunglasses. He glanced directly at me. “It’s okay,” he said, “we’re just picking up some clean laundry from the Laundromat out this way. It’ll take ten minutes.”

  He was not letting me go.

  I studied my captor’s face. Dark shades removed, his face unblocked, he was uncommonly handsome, I could see. His hair was thick, chocolate brown and neatly combed, and his eyes were sage-green, squinting, very light. His goatee was trimmed neatly, and he was older than he’d first seemed, middle-thirties maybe, maybe older than that. What he was doing scared me, but he didn’t look like a bad man.

  But now we were on the highway, coasting in the opposite direction of the way I should be going. I didn’t know where we were going, and I didn’t know what I should do, or if I should do anything at all.

  After ten minutes of silence driving in the car with him, he pulled off the highway and onto a gravel side road, I stiffened, I reminded myself to breathe, and we stopped short. I couldn’t move or see clearly, I was so scared.

  Then he hopped out. “You can wait here, or come in if you want,” he said.

  I looked up. I laughed, relieved. We were in the gravel parking lot of a Laundromat. He wasn’t lying. He hadn’t lied at all.

  “I’m running in getting my laundry,” he called back and jogged inside.

  I was sitting in the truck at a juncture. He had left me alone, the truck doors unlocked, my escape easy. I had the choice: I could wait for him to come back and trust that he would take me back to the trail, or I could get out of his truck here, twice as far from the trail as I’d begun, outside of town, on a gravel road through pine trees, in the woods, literally, and start hitching all over again, though there were even fewer people out here, and in some hours it would be dark.

  I thought about it. I was afraid if I got out, he’d see me and get mad.

  And he had n
ot lied, it was true. He hadn’t lied.

  But I was scared of him, he had driven me away without asking, and I shouldn’t stay with someone who’d done that.

  I sat there. I did something purely irrational. Rather than making a decision, thinking or leaving, I pulled out my cell phone and called my father.

  And he picked up. “Hello?” he answered. His voice sounded surprised to hear from me. I realized it was the middle of the day, and they usually didn’t hear from me until nighttime.

  “Hi Dad,” I said. “Just want to say I love you.” It came out sounding stilted, though I meant it truly.

  He was quiet for some seconds. It was a strange thing to call to say. I imagined it was worrisome to hear. He told me that he loved me, too, but his voice drifted high at the end, and it sounded like a question. Then he asked me, “How’s the hike going?”

  “Fine,” I quickly lied.

  He waited while I breathed. He said, “That’s good Debby.”

  Then I said ’bye, and he said ’bye, and I closed my phone, and I wished I’d said something different, I wished I’d said more; I could have hopped out and taken a picture of the white truck’s license plate, even if I ran the risk of the man catching me and getting angry. I could have not taken this minute to senselessly call my father as I waited in a stranger’s truck for him to come back and to find out if he’d hurt me.

  Even then I knew I was in a really bad situation. I wished I were a fighter, but I wasn’t; I was paralyzed.

  I wished I weren’t the same girl who’d been raped.

  What I should have done was run.

  The man came back with laundry. We started driving down the highway, in the correct direction. I thought maybe I’d been being paranoid. He asked me a few questions about the trail, and I answered them, and everything I said was super interesting to him, and I was wary. He told me about himself, that he was recently divorced. His eyes were watery. He seemed legitimately and earnestly bereft.

  He told me that he had built his own lake. He had dug it himself out of the stony ground.

  I said, “Wow.” All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I’d walked, the pain I’d felt, the beauty I’d drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I’d taken, would all add up to nothing. They’d be stolen. They’d vanish like the teeth children lose when they get hit. Only after the blood was washed away would I see that they were gone.

  Then it happened. We crossed out of sleepy Etna. I saw the lot at the top of the pass where the road meets the PCT—and we drove past it. The pass—my trail—was gone, we sped, I had no motion, and then he turned hard, jolted, onto a dirt road that quickly became a snaking gravel road. Dark pine trees smudged. He told me he was going to show me the lake he’d made on his ranch.

  My vision blurred, trees blurred, seconds minutes, my hands, body and years. I was back to my new room at college, the smell of dank red clay mud, the smell of rust, back to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s mint leaves and afternoon thunderstorms braved safely huddled inside the ranch house among old clocks.

  The man was talking. I was hollow, elsewhere—hurt: rejected by my mother, bloodied and ruined, wounded and acting out. Entirely worthless, listless, distant and isolated, numb numb numb to the wind, the sun, the wilderness I was entering, the man who was taking me deeper into a forest I didn’t ever want to know.

  “Okay,” I heard my voice saying, my mind waking, not knowing what I was answering, realizing we were parked. “Sorry,” I said, “what did you say?”

  He repeated that his daughter was inside.

  “You have a daughter?” I asked. For a moment I relaxed.

  “Sixteen years old.”

  “Oh wow.”

  “She’s inside the house. You two will hang out.”

  I looked around. There was a house and also a lake, dark blue and perfectly round like a velvet hole. We were on his land, at his ranch house. He had driven me miles and miles into a forest on a gravel road I hadn’t wanted to go down, he had lied to me again, and now this time we were on his property and I couldn’t merely just get out, away. I was still sitting in the pickup, it seemed like the safest place left, trembling. But there was no place left to hide there. I climbed down.

  I didn’t know where to go.

  The man led me toward the house.

  I thought clearly as I could. I was a girl in this man’s woods. Taken. He had told me he had a daughter; she was sixteen. He looked middle-thirties, there was a small chance he was forty; the math was easy. It was biologically possible, but he was a liar. This was his vehicle, his town, his home, I didn’t know anything; I felt completely vulnerable—stupid. Weak and exhausted. I had stuck my thumb out on Main Street at ten o’clock in the morning, and now it was almost four in the evening, and I didn’t know how to get back, away from him, I was terribly dehydrated, I would be losing light soon.

  We were inside. His place was nice, a tidy one-level ranch house with tall windows and sliding glass doors. The wood was real, fresh-cut and painted white. The TV was on in the other room, I could hear it, see its light’s color changing, changing on white walls. He told me he was going to go check on his daughter. “Sit,” he said, and I did, up on a high kitchen stool.

  He went into the room with the television, came out almost immediately. I could see through the door’s gap. I could see no girl was in there.

  “She’s sleeping,” he told me, as if I were blind. He sat next to me, up on a high stool, too. He leaned slightly toward me with his shoulder. “But you can ask about her.”

  He was suggesting the girl he’d taken ask him questions about his almost certainly hypothetical daughter. It was an insane game, but I tried to play. I asked the first thing I thought of: “Where is her mother?”

  He looked at my face. He said flatly, “She’s dead.”

  I blinked back at him. My lap was getting wet. Something was dripping. I had to think to realize I was crying.

  I walked out his kitchen door, outside. I grabbed my knapsack, which was on his porch. He jogged after me. I faced him squarely and demanded, “Take me back now.”

  I watched him as he bent to pick a weed that was growing in a thin gap between the porch’s wood planks. He controlled what happened. I stood steadily, inhale; now exhale.

  “How comfortable are you on the back of a motorcycle?” he asked me.

  This was ridiculous. “Not very!” I said. I had never been on the back of a motorcycle, and we were standing within view of his pickup truck.

  “I want to take you to the trail,” he said, “on my motorcycle.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  “It will be the greatest experience of your life,” he said.

  I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. “It’s a pocketknife,” I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I’d snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, “The truck works.”

  And so it did. He shuffled to the truck and got in, and I got in, and we drove wordlessly up the dirt road until it became gravel, which became the highway in the right direction. Finally up at the top of Etna Pass, where the PCT crosses the byway, he slid to a stop.

  I hopped out, pack slung over my shoulder, and walked the fuck away.

  He called after me, “Hey wait!”

  I didn’t.

  “Wait!” he yelled.

  I spun. From a distance I called at him, “What is it.”

  He yelled that I’d forgotten my cell phone. It was true. I’d left my phone in the truck’s cup holder.

  The man whose name I’d never asked, who’d never asked my name, came down onto the ground and handed my flip phone back to me. I zipped it into my bag and walked away up to the trailhead, up the dirt trail. Away from him. I hadn’t unclenched my fist. My knuckles had gone white. In my fist I had a dead GPS battery. I hadn’t e
ver carried the pocketknife my father long ago gave me for when I was in the woods.

  I wouldn’t open my hand until his white truck was a black speck in the blue mountain dusk.

  I slipped quickly through darkness. A thousand unseen frogs were ribbetting and croaking, a symphony of primal night. I felt like an animal; I ran through the Marble Mountains to my home in the dark woods. The rocks were abrasive pumice, rough and hard like sandpaper, perilous, and yet I felt euphoric, much safer navigating them without light than I had in Etna, in the daylight. I was safe in this world. This was a place for creatures—I felt I had become more of a creature than a girl. I could handle myself in the wild.

  The path hit a black pool of water with rocks that were furry with moss, pumice wet and gleaming, breaking the water’s surface; I felt the desire to step into it. This was not a pool that a day hiker would swim in. I was braver. I submerged myself, waded—the dark water was fairly shallow, warm even at dusk. The water gleamed like an eye, cradling the moon.

  From the black pool I looked up to the starry sky, a million blinking specks. For all my life, I had been passive when faced with dangers. I was stunned as I swam to find that I had, for the first time in my history, asserted myself and been truly heard—respected. It felt monumental, I was buzzing with adrenaline. It was as if I’d become someone else entirely.

  I had escaped a kidnapper. It finally felt real. My body unclenched tension in the balmy pool.

  I was proud of the strength I’d found. I was the one who asserted he take me back; I caused him to listen. I was no longer a passive Doll Girl, trapped. This was me learning I could trust my voice—I’d used it, and it finally worked! I was triumphant. This escape showed me: I had grown, and grown vividly.

  I hadn’t asserted myself with Junior the way I asserted myself with that kidnapper.

  In glinting water I replayed the most fateful moment of the kidnapping, where the way things almost went had sharply turned: it was the moment I had told him, “The truck works.” My tone had shifted, I’d felt it happen; he had felt it, too. And in that moment, our positions flipped; he had become obedient to me.