The Abduction - Chapter 1

He stuck a knife in my face, said move over, then hopped in the car and drove out of the parking lot, west onto Dempster Street.  Then deciding on a directional change, he turned right on Waukegan Road, heading north in the direction of the home I had left just half an hour earlier to buy graph paper for a homework project in accounting class.

            I was completing my freshman year, 1978, at DePaul University in Chicago.  Why was I taking accounting classes, why did I choose DePaul; these were my decisions and they were not my decisions.  My parents never asked me where I wanted to go to college.  They never asked what my plans were, for my future or the next day for that matter.  They never asked me anything.  They told me a whole bunch of other things, though, in very loud voices.  “You may not [fill in the blank].  You are not [fill in the blank].”  Most of what they told me included “not”,  “no” or “hell, no.” 

            The daughter I was, the woman I was minutes before this man with the disco handlebar mustache and dark wool suit coat stepped up to my open car window and brandished his shiny blade,   I was replaced by a new variation of that woman in those first seconds of my horror realized.   This new rendering of me would now reside next to the former version my parents never bothered to understand.  They would have to deal with the two of me from now on.  This was not going to be a surprise for the mother who was convinced my angst and loud mouth were the effects of a personality disorder.  Did I leave the window open in defiance of my mother’s constant reminders to lock up her precious gold Cadillac with the champagne leather interior and park it as far away from other vehicles to insure its unblemished exterior remained unblemished?

that woman was instantly changed.

            My boyfriend, Steve, was studying law at DePaul.  My plan at the time entailed making enough money to go as far away as possibly possible from this crazy land I had lived within for 18 years.   I had to become a corporate mogul, a top female executive in any area that would let me in.  So DePaul presented an option to explore my escape.  Dad’s reply to my college request, “Why do you need to go to college?  You’re just going to get married and have kids,” left me wondering if I had been transported back to 1950.  After the guilt trips, the screaming and constant nagging, my efforts elicited a “yes, we will pay for school,” from my mother.

            That cash cow died first semester.  I would never get credit for accounting, which had prompted the trip to Walgreens that Sunday afternoon after church, placing me in the desolate parking lot, far from other cars, with the defiant open window.  Now, a strange man, brandishing a seven-inch   The familiar, rancid odor of stale alcohol (like Dad’s) wafted in my direction as he breathed in short fast inhales followed by long scraggly exhales.

blade in my face, was driving me in the direction of my home, the last place I wanted to be on earth.

            Did my parents put him up to this?  The thought flashed across my brain.  They would think of some cruel act like this to keep me in line.  They had done it before:  the matches to my fingers, a failed attempt to keep me from biting my nails; the brain scans they forced our MASH-trained Dr. Ackley to perform on me after a bleeding ulcer put me in the hospital for a week, thereby proving or attempting to prove I had a brain disorder.   There had to be some medical reason why they could not successfully control my verbal outbursts and me.

            Many thoughts and memories flashed before my eyes as we drove past Golf Road and the home my father built with his bare hands, lone contractor, only to have Ma, soon after moving in, decry it as unacceptable, too small, too anything she could think of, in order to get him to build her another.  “It’s not big enough.  I want it bigger.”  He took to the bottle that evening and never looked back.  Nor did he build her another home.

            I thought about the dream I’d had not too long before that day.  It had been eerily similar to my current predicament, complete with the same streets, the same man.  Had I willed this to be?  Desperate measures call for desperate actions.

....stay tuned for chapter 2.....