06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 Read Free Page A

of her, pushing her head against the corroded metal of the van’s filthy floor. Pinning her arms above her head and pressing against her with one knee, he shoved up her dress, then yanked down her panty hose. She could hear the rhythmic beat of Latin music pounding in the distance and smell the stench of liquor on his breath. “I was crying, shouting, ‘Stop it. Stop it,’” said Linda. “I couldn’t believe what was happening.”
    It was over in minutes. She crouched in the corner of the van as he smiled down at her, zipped up his fly, and cinchedhis belt. When she asked why he had done it, he simply laughed.
    Linda returned to the club in tears. Her mother’s friend asked what happened, but she didn’t answer. In her bed that night, she cried herself to sleep. By morning, she had decided not to tell anyone about the rape. Her mother had enough of her own problems keeping the family together, she reasoned; why burden her? In the glare of daylight she faced the sobering reality of how it had happened, and concluded it must have been—at least partly—her fault. Why had she followed him outside? Into the van? For a picture? Shouldn’t she have known better? “Could I have stopped it?” she pondered. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, I was to blame.”
    More than anything, Linda wanted to put it out of her mind, to bury it forever. But she couldn’t. From that night on, the horror in her nights was no longer her father but the man who had raped her. The nightmares were terrifying. She could hear the music, smell the alcohol, and relive the pain in her loins when he forced himself inside her.
    For months after the rape, Linda drifted, unable to concentrate or care about much of anything. In her junior year, she dropped out of school. Without a high school diploma or a car for transportation, she spent long hours at home, occasionally picking up a job baby-sitting. Later she applied at a nearby McDonald’s and was hired to work the counter part-time. When it came to the preoccupations of most girls her age, Linda had little enthusiasm. Especially when it came to dating. “I pretty much stayed off boys completely,” she said. “I stayed yards away from them.”
    The truth was that Linda was never quite the same after the rape. It seemed her natural enthusiasm would be evermore underlaid with cynicism. “I felt like men wanted one thing from any woman—sex,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t trust them, any of them.”
    That didn’t mean that men weren’t attracted to her. Lindahad developed into a desirable woman, and there was always one man or another expressing interest in her.
    Finally, as months and then years passed, Linda relented. She did enjoy men. She enjoyed their company. They couldn’t all be bad. Assessing the situation with the same logical approach she employed to plot a way out of her family’s violence, Linda concluded the solution was really quite simple—she needed a chaperone. Her choice was easy. Her older brother, Gino, had already married and left the house. From then on, Daniel, three years her junior, became her protector. Every time she agreed to a date, she insisted on bringing her little brother along. “She’d say, ‘Come on with us. I don’t want to go out with this guy alone,’” recalled Daniel. “She was real skittish around men. She was real particular about who she saw.”
    It was in January of 1984—when she was twenty—that Linda first heard the name James Bergstrom. A family friend who worked at Devoe—the same factory where her father once worked—said he wanted to introduce her to a shy co-worker. “He’s quiet, real quiet and gentlemanly,” Caesar told her. “You’ll like James.” One of Caesar’s relatives was celebrating a quinceañeras the following weekend, and he suggested they make that their first date.
    It had been almost four years since the rape, but the nightmares still haunted her sleep, so—despite her friend’s