It’s mid-May, and after a long slog of last-minute client requests and petty politics in the office, tax season is finally over. Tomorrow is my chance to fly away to a five-day vacation with no schedule and no responsibilities. Double tall mocha in hand (including whipped cream), I find my gate and practically dance down the concourse to board a late morning non-stop, Seattle to Philly. Tonight, I’ll meet my friend Louise and after visiting overnight with her husband and twins, the two of us are off to a three-day splurge in New York: museums, a play, window shopping, bargain hunting, and dinner with an old friend in Brooklyn.

Puffy white clouds suffuse the sky as I settle in next to a middle-aged man and his cute, pig-tailed daughter, who clutches a well-worn teddy bear and rests sleepily against his shoulder. Just behind them, a woman comforts a younger toddler, his pale blond head buried deep in the belly of an identical, albeit somewhat fluffier bear. I tear open the complimentary airline blanket, cover myself lightly, and fidget to find a good position for sleep despite the narrow, uncomfortable seat. At least it’s on an aisle. I drift off to the sounds of the safety video describing how to use the seatbelts and life vests, where to find the exit locations, and what to do in case of a water landing. 

Groggy, dozing, I feel warm, especially warm in my groin. I can’t figure out why, or even if the weird, spidery sensation is real. I dismiss it nonchalantly and relax back into a foggy limbo, halfway between waking and dreaming. I stir, nod, fall asleep again. There’s recurrent warmth, more movement between my legs, hardly discernible, then nothing, then something again. Wondering if I got my period while sleeping, although the timing is odd, I squeeze my legs together, and that’s when I discern the shape of his hand. Out of my fog, I realize that the sandy-haired, argyle-sweatered father sitting next to me snaked his hand beneath the blanket, crept up my thigh, and cupped my vagina, even as his other arm cupped the small shoulders of his sleeping daughter. I wrench away, twisting in my seat.

I’d eased into sleep in ease and seeming security. There wasn’t a warning in the safety video about this kind of emergency, but now I’m flooded with self-doubt. Did I do something suggestive? I was hardly awake. I never said a word to him. I pull the blanket tight around me like a sealant, hold my breath to slow things down and try to claim control of my racing heart. The assault was public but invisible, personal but anonymous. I’m not sure what to do. Scream? Confront him? Summon the flight attendant with the overhead light? Get up and go to the flight attendant in the rear of the cabin where we’d have privacy? How could he do this with his little girl sitting next to him? With his wife and son in the row behind us? 

I sift through the facts. In this position, he can’t reach me, and any public action would humiliate his wife and confuse or terrify the kids. I’m dubious about what remedy the flight attendant could even offer. Find me another seat? The plane is full. Make a report? It’s over, and I’m safe. I decide not to make a scene, but for the rest of the flight, I stay encased in the blanket, my back to my assailant. On the ground, the departure bell sounds. Passengers remove their seatbelts and begin to deplane. I leap up, grab my carry-on, spring forward several rows before others even stand to take their places in the aisle. I never look back. But on the train ride into center city to meet Louise, I can’t stop interrogating that split-second decision to keep silent: the cost to his family of not telling the flight attendant, the cost to me of holding it in. I wonder about my first instinct to meet his indignity with my dignity. What if I had been direct, angry, loud in-his-face instead?

It’s scarring into a riddle I can’t stop trying to unravel. I’m hugging Louise. We’re walking into her favorite Italian restaurant. She’s pouring wine, catching me up on work and family, but I can’t focus on our conversation because drum beats of reproach are hammering my brain. What did I do wrong? What else should I have done? “Do you feel ok,” Louise asks. “You seem distracted, and you’re pale. What’s wrong?” Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, the drum throbs louder, then bright, hot tears burst and rain down my cheeks. We’ve planned and looked forward to this moment for so long. I feel guilty hijacking it, crying in the restaurant, falling asleep on the plane. Louise takes my hand, walks me to the ladies’ room, and wipes my eyes and forehead with a cool, damp towel. I hug her tightly and start decanting my chaos in a flood of snot and half sentences.

My friend grasps both my hands again and looks me straight in the eye. “You know I still glance back over my shoulder every ten minutes when I’m walking in the city alone. Especially down these narrow streets and especially at night. Sometimes I feel a twinge of pain where my bone broke. I’m not sure if it’s the aftermath of lifting or carrying too much or just another one of the ghosts from the assault.”

“What are you talking about, Louise?”

“I never told you. I couldn’t tell anyone when it happened. Not for a long time.”

I flash on a Facebook image of Maddie’s and Erica’s first birthday party about four years ago. Louise is cutting her daughters’ bright pink cake with her right hand and sporting a cast of the very same hue on her left forearm. At the time, she chalked up the spiral fracture to a nasty fall on a slick path during her evening commute through Salem Park. I remember that her shoulder froze up, too, and the physical therapy and rehabilitation took over six months, but she never recovered full strength and mobility. Now it’s my turn to hold my friend. I encircle her waist and guide her back to our table behind Tulio’s bar where we shelter inside the palm of a dark leather booth. With cover from the low lights and another chianti, we share secrets never divulged to anyone before, some even unacknowledged within ourselves. 

We’re two solitary figures passing one another between the tall oaks: me heading east toward home, him heading west towards the university. Snow’s still falling lightly, but the park’s main trail has been cleared by dozens of joggers, snowball fighters, dogs and their walkers crisscrossing its paths over the past eight hours. It’s so peaceful now, just after sunset. Three-inch caps of snow top the streetlights, and the trees wear long lacy gloves of shimmering ice. I’m enjoying this beauty, hunting customary landmarks obscured in the blanketing snow, and counting down the minutes to reach Jay and the twins. Almost immediately after he passes, the stranger’s footfalls stop. I peer back to find him paused, surveilling the path I’ve come from. A yellow flag, a question mark rise in my throat, but I keep walking. Reversing direction, the stranger heads back towards me, then past me again. He stops and turns to face me. I no longer have questions, only fear and the focus to reach for the can of mace in my backpack. He wrenches my arm and drags me into the woods. I’m hunched down on my knees on the cold, wet ground, in agony on my left side, heart and head aligned on getting back home as the only thing that matters.

Louise made a police report and used a rape kit, but they never found her attacker. Following a year of therapy, she forced herself to walk through Salem Park again, but only in the daytime and only with her mace at the ready in her pocket. We hold each other’s sweaty hands as new confessions roil in our guts and leak from our dry throats: how hard it is to talk about sexual assault, with anyone, especially loved ones. “I still feel shame,” Louise admits, “despite knowing rationally how crazy it is to blame myself in any way.”

“I get it. The decision I made in the plane to keep silent is looping over and over in my head. The faster it turns, the more doubt I feel, the more self-recrimination. As calm as I was in that moment, I’m choking with panic now.”

Jay’s messages bring us back to the quotidian of our cozy booth, the lingering scent of garlic, waiters serving coffee and resetting tables with fresh white linen. An adorable selfie—the three chefs in their chocolate-spattered kitchen—is accompanied by a note letting us know that the twins baked cupcakes, and tried, but couldn’t stay awake any later. Jay signs off: Expect a grand tea party in the morning, and please be careful coming home. Just after sunrise, I hear shuffling, whispers, and giggles outside my makeshift bedroom. Outfitted in matching footy pajamas, Maddie and Erica pad into the study to present me with pink-iced chocolate cupcakes on a polka dot plastic tray. Louise follows with a steaming pot of Earl Grey tea. “Just ten minutes, girls. Then it’s time to get ready for school,” Jay calls from the kitchen, and when he reappears with two tiny backpacks ready for daycare, the girls twirl and dance into his arms. I clap and grin, but erupting in my brain is the terrifying image of my assailant’s young daughter nesting in the comfort of her father’s embrace. She was just Maddie and Erica’s age.

This roller coaster ride–delight plunging to alarm climbing slowly back to level–persists throughout our time in New York. We’re admiring Italian Renaissance paintings at the Met and remembering how hard it was to endure three-hour art history classes when we all we wanted was to be outside that dark, stuffy auditorium away from those dark, stuffy paintings. “So let’s bolt,” Louise teases, a glint of mischief in her eyes. “No one’s going to test us on the Botticellis.” We bust out into a radiant Central Park, tulips and blossoming cherry trees all around. But in just ten minutes, Louise defers to the resurgent fear that accompanies her every walk in any park since the rape. Glancing back over her shoulder, she bows her head. “I’ve always been proud of my boldness to take risks, to pursue adventure. I hate second-guessing myself all the time now.” 

I can’t stop thinking about my assault, replaying every detail. It’s like running my tongue over a diseased tooth unable to resist testing the depth and dimension of the pain. “Do you mind me asking what you would have done if it had been you in the plane, Louise? Would you have made his assault public? Would you have confronted or reported him?” I apologize for my obsessive brooding, for putting my friend on the spot, but Louise sharply dismisses my guilt, insisting that I give myself grace instead. She says that discernment is hard work and insists I’m doing exactly what’s needed to process the assault and resecure my sense of self. Looping it over and over could spiral into an echo chamber of fear if it goes on too long. But it just happened. Louise claims reviewing it now is essential for my healing, as it was for hers. She doesn’t know what she would have done in my place. She doesn’t think anyone can know in theory how they’d react and resents deeply when women are criticized about what they could or should have done in self-defense. “But if you ask how I’d want to respond,” Louise looks up, eyes bright, voice clear and strong, “I see myself calling him out, not yelling, but talking to his wife, talking to the flight attendants, using my power to make it visible.”

We head to the Lower East Side to scavenge buttons and ribbons for Erica and Maddie’s art cabinet. I add a bouquet of peacock feathers for the twins, and Louise finds a green paisley bowtie for Jay. We munch on salty soft pretzels and buy identical lilac berets from a street vender on Houston Street. “I guess I’ll never feel as free again,” I confess over a nightcap at the hotel bar on our final evening together, “but thanks to your love and advice, I feel ok. I’m ready to get back on that plane.” We rise early: Louise to catch the 8:05 at Penn Station and I to catch an Uber to La Guardia. Suitcases and shopping bags in hand, we hug goodbye in the hotel lobby and whisper softly into each other’s ears, I cherish you and please be careful going home. 10-C is an aisle seat in a blessedly empty row. I’m hyperalert as the flight attendant reads the safety warnings, but then quiet and cocoon into the work of discernment Louise prescribed. I hate losing my first inclination to trust people. I hate scrutinizing every man’s awkward gesture as a potential threat. Women travelling alone always navigate risk. Confusing gestures, experienced as threats, but never meant to be malicious. Actions deployed to intimidate. Seemingly safe spaces and situations that are really not safe at all. As we lift off into the cloudy grey sky, I loop back through Louise and my conversations and these twinned, unresolved questions: what is the cost of my mistrust and what will take to be safe.

—

My flight arrives thirty minutes late, so I grab my bag from the overhead bin and scoot down the aisle feeling guilty about holding Louise up. She texts that they were late getting started themselves and just arrived at the parking garage ten minutes ago. We’ll see you in a few. The girls insist on meeting you at baggage claim. Had Maddie and Erica not been accompanied by their mother, I may not have recognized them. Still little girls when they vacationed in Seattle three summers ago, the six-foot twins striding together in step now command the energy and space around them. Maddie has green braids, high-topped Cons, and a Serena Williams t-shirt. Pixie-haired Erica sports a vintage Chanel suit jacket and pearls over ripped jeans with matching Cons–bright pink, of course.

Baggage claim is buzzing with women clustering in twos and threes and sixes and sevens. There are long-time friends delighted to undertake this pilgrimage together along with new acquaintances bonded instantly in common purpose and commitment. Scattered among them stand largely ignored red-capped Maga arrivals here for the presidential inauguration. Unlike the massing women, they wait for their baggage silently and exit the airport quickly. The women linger, marking and celebrating the growing scale of new arrivals from across the country. Where are you from? How many people are here with you? In the disaster of Donald Trump’s election, this energy is festive and rousing, like the warm-up to a blockbuster concert. Just before we head out to the car, I buy four pink pussie hats from a vender scooping them out of stacked cardboard cartons.

Louise, the twins, and I huddle over pizza in our rented apartment, just a thirty-minute walk from the Washington Mall. We’re lettering our signs for the National Women’s March: I’m with Her; My Body, My Choice; This is What Feminism Looks Like. “Have you seen the Access Hollywood tape, Maddie asks me, outrage in her voice. “How could any woman, for that matter any man, vote for that creep,” and Erica instantly adds that Trump’s the one who should be locked up, not Hilary. Louise and I exchange a furtive glance, full of wonder at this transition from the raw, tender wounds we shared a decade ago to the solidarity and strength we share with these fierce young women. The following morning, we rise without the need of a wake-up call. The twins are showered and dressed, urging us forward. At the end of the block, we see others walking, carrying signs, snapping selfies. Soon we’re floating in a stream of women, then a river, then finally, at the Mall, a mighty sea. My eyes fill with bright tears as I grab Louise’s hand, squeezing tight. “Look back over your shoulder now, my friend,” I say with joy and thanksgiving. “There are about a hundred thousand women behind you.”

– Diane Douglas

Author’s Note: “Over Her Shoulder” was inspired by stories shared before, during, and after the 2016 Women’s March in Washington, D.C.