Locked Down, Locked Out by Maya Schenwar

Author:Maya Schenwar [Schenwar, Maya]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2014-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Telling Stories

“We need to trust people to be the experts on their own lives.”

—Domestic violence survivor interviewed by the StoryTelling & Organizing Project

Although Angelica’s entrance into the world undoubtedly ranks as my family’s most significant event of 2013, followed by Kayla’s reincarceration, the loss of a dearly loved inanimate object nears the top of my Big Deal list. On a sleepy late summer evening shortly before my sister gives birth, I’m ambling across the parking lot of a Seattle restaurant late in the evening with two old friends. We’re relishing the warm breeze and chatting about the possibility of ice cream.

But one of my companions stops short, two feet from my car.

“Oh my God,” she says, low. “The window.” The back window has been shattered through the middle, as if by a bowling ball. Glistening shards are still dropping lightly onto the back seat.

My heart thuds, pushes me forward. I plunge my hand through the hole. “Where is my laptop?” I say, patting the shard-covered seat, then pounding it. The sharp bits stick to my palm, which emerges wet and red-slitted. The laptop—along with the uncom fortable shoulder bag in which it was kept, which also contained my only pair of glasses, an assortment of tampons, and a notepad filled with embarrassingly moonlike self-portraits sketched during a PowerPoint presentation at a recent conference—is nowhere. The back seat is empty.

One hundred thousand words of the book I’ve been researching and writing for the last eleven months, about prison and prisoners and, well, “crime,” are stored inside that computer. It also contains millions more cherished words—stories, articles, notes, humiliating diary entries from my early twenties, passwords “hidden” in the guise of other files—and all the music I’ve acquired since 2004. My many un-Facebooked photos. My book, my book.

“Do you have it backed up?” my friend’s voice floats into my ear, as if traveling down from the tree. No. I have an external hard drive—I’ve had it for seven months. I just haven’t yet removed it from its packaging.

You aren’t supposed to leave your laptop on the car seat. I have never left my laptop on the car seat, always stowing it away securely in a corner of the trunk. But tonight, I did.

I think fleetingly of the person who bashed in the window. I wonder what they must have been thinking in the act of bashing, whether they needed money, whether they were just teenagers trying to be badass, whether they had thought of me, whether they were thinking about me now. In the background, someone murmurs something about a police report. Calls are made on a cell phone, the name of the restaurant given, the make and model of the car.

“They’ve got your phone number,” I’m told. “We gave them the info about your case, so they’re on it.” In my head, a page from the book I’ve lost reads itself to me, slowly. One sentence asks, “Before you call the police, think, are they really going to help—and who

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.