True Grit : One Woman’s Triumph Over the Nightmare of Random Violence

THE DAY

FOOTSTEPS WERE dancing down the mountain, out of sight, 20 yards ahead. I glanced at my watch, as if time provides insight, and clocked the hour at 9:05. Neatly tailored blue shorts and a red polo T-shirt loped toward me, a young man in his 20s gently jogging his way down the trail. He seemed Indian, from either North or South America, if genealogy can be read with any certainty; his cheekbones were high and broadly spaced, and heaps of healthy brown-black hair combed a la John Travolta framed his olive-skinned face. A blue backpack, sparkling clean or perhaps it was new, embraced a muscular middleweight frame. The blue of his high-toppers matched the blue of his shorts. He was neat. He was upright. He was graceful.

I wished him good morning as I passed on the right.

“Morning,” he said, and he was gone.

I had arrived at the Y, the split in the trail that led to Inspiration Point. Hugging the mountainside, I chose the right arm sweeping up to the top .

The trail became steep and arduous, requiring muscle to maintain an even pace. I walked steadily, evenly, long, confident strides. Fifty yards up and only 50 to go, and then a park bench with an ocean view! I felt good. The sun was shining. The sky was blue.

Footsteps again, this time from behind, someone else heading for the point. I glanced over my left shoulder and saw him, my Indian friend, the red-and-blue kid, trailing by 20 yards. Hunched, deeply curled in a starter’s position, sprinting up the incline, his face was drenched with that intensity of purpose that afflicts the sporting world. He hugged the mountain, as I had done, the easier route in an unnamed course, and seemed to be racing against himself, squeezing the distance between us. I turned away from him slightly to adjust my position and give him the right of way.

And suddenly I felt it. I felt a bash to the right side of my skull, and it was prickly and buzzing and warm. What the hell is that? What the hell is happening? I turned in the direction of the blow. He was there, the young man, standing on a diagonal, just above me, outlined against a vibrant blue sky. He was poised, feet apart, his hands together above his head, holding something dropping behind his back. Something long. Something half-hidden and hard to discern. I hadn’t seen him pass, I never saw him pass. He was just there, and it was beginning again.

He hit me, he hit me a second time. What the hell is happening? What’s happening? I bobbed and weaved, a prizefighter against the ropes, my hands palms up, palms down, my hands butterfly-flitting about my skull, trying to fend off the blows.

No! No! No! echoed my brain, I’d not made a sound--backed up to the mountain and nowhere to run.

He’ll follow! He’ll catch me! I can’t escape! He hit me a third time, then a fourth. Unrelenting, consistent, three-second intervals, striking head, striking hands that protected my skull.

What’s happening? This can’t be happening! I was conscious, my mind was racing. I turned to face him--perhaps the challenge might work. I pivoted, he bashed me at the top of my skull, and the gravel of the trail scattered every which way under my shifting weight. I slipped and fell backward into the ditch lining the base of the road cut. Ditch cradled spine as both legs karated upward, catching him midsection. Let him fall, somehow stop the onslaught!

And he stopped. He had stopped the action.

Our eyes met in the pause, his face speaking surprise that I fought back even now. He stood rigid, head held high, arms raised overhead, the heroic worker pictured in a ‘30s mural, a 3-foot sledgehammer pointed skyward in his hands. He was perfectly balanced. My kick had meant nothing. We did not speak. It began again.

The sledgehammer arced in a downward motion. Where’d he hit me? Didn’t feel it. Doesn’t matter. I get it, what’s happening--he wants to kill me. This is about murder. I must die for him. I must die for him right now.

I stopped fighting and rolling and shielding my head and slumped on my side in the ditch. It stopped, he stopped, and it was silent and still and I was limp, a dead weight, my eyes closed, play-acting, and alive, conscious, listening.

I heard the sounds of gravel crunching under footsteps and felt two hands around my ankles pulling outward. He was straightening my legs and turning me face upward and pulling me over the road. Brush scraped my back and then combed through my hair, tree limbs crackling in front of my face. I’d levered to the sun and now lay flat on my stomach, head downward toward the ravine. My right cheek was pressed against the earth, my head twisted back to my shoulder.

I felt hands, gentle hands, tug at my pants, and I cracked my eyelids to see. He was squatting by my thighs, pulling down my sweats.

Does he see that I see? Does he see me?

Closed eyes once more, blind eyes, birds chirping, bathed in silence, covered with brush.

It’s about rape, that’s what it is. This is all about rape!

No hands. No touch. No tugging. My eyes opened.

He was gone.

STAY CONSCIOUS. . . stay conscious. . . . Think your way out of this. What time is it now?

I lay face down in the brush, arms up, stick ‘em up arms, twisting my left wrist slowly, slowly, not to make a sound, not a leaf must crunch, twisting my wrist slowly, as I had done before, how many minutes before?

Nine twenty. Five minutes. Five minutes since then. I’d looked then, when he left, marking the moment. I’d lain “dead” for five minutes, never moving, hardly breathing, listening for him. Listening for nothing.

I was bleeding from my mouth, or my head or my ear. Five minutes alone. Five minutes without him. It’s not good to be bleeding from your head upside down. Gotta sit up. Gotta chance it. Now!

I swiveled and faced the back road below. My sweats were at my knees. I pulled them up. My hands hurt. They were swollen. Turning colors. They still worked. They were shaking. My sweats were all baggy. Falling down. Tieless baggy. Doesn’t matter. Next?

Next move. Keep thinking. Next move. What’s next? No move. Maybe he’s waiting. Got to keep thinking. Got to stay conscious. Bleeding. Blood. What to do about bleeding? I tied a wool leg warmer around my head.

I heard sounds. Voices. Cutting through silence. A woman. A man. Where? Do I dare?

I stood up into space, open space, killing space. I saw over there a man and a woman, walking and talking.

“Hello,” I waved. “Hello” again.

They walked on. Pretending. They were old, frightened. I knew they’d ignore me. I knew they wouldn’t come.

I was running through the brush, down the mountain to the Y, where they were headed. “You have to help me. I’ve been attacked. Please help me!” I said.

When I asked Jimmy, at the park stable, what had happened to the old people, I wasn’t surprised to hear they’d disappeared. The woman had been terrified, the man mesmerized, but eventually he had taken my arm. Of course, I had no idea what I looked like.

“Like, there was blood all over your face,” Jimmy said later, “and this is what scared me, a clot of blood about like a tablespoon just laying on your sweat shirt, a clot. I mean, you know the difference between just blood and a clot. You had blood everywhere, but there were no open wounds ‘cause the big one was under your hair, which we found out later. So I thought maybe it came out of your mouth ‘cause there was blood on your pants but mainly on that sweat shirt. And in your hair and your face. All over your arms and hands.”

I wasn’t hurt. That is to say, I wasn’t feeling any pain. I was hunched, bent over like Quasimodo because I was very busy holding up my sweats so they wouldn’t fall down, as well as holding my head in some sort of fixed position, on the off chance of cracks, in case of concussion. A person, I thought, ought to be cautious.

They’d walked me--all tired and limp and bone-melting drained--into the office, the one in the barn at the park. That’s when Jimmy began to ask me questions, and I wanted to tell him every detail of the story so that they might catch this man, this person. But really what I wanted was to capture the story, because I couldn’t find a place in my head to put it. It had happened and I could tell it, but it couldn’t possibly have happened because those things can’t possibly happen. I felt I wasn’t in the room when I was telling the story. But pretty soon a lot of people were in the room and I was telling them the story--police, paramedics, all those people who come.

And I would go to the hospital, see my doctors, clean up real good (everyone said so), only left with mini-fractures and black-and-blue bruises and the need for a touch of surgery some time in the future. The drama was over. I could go home. I would hold myself hard and sleep through the night.

THE FIRST WEEK

IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER and I was stunned. My girlfriend had left--she’d spent the night--my daughter had car- pooled off to school, and I sat alone in my kitchen drinking decaf espresso.

I was stunned. I’d gotten my period. Right on time. I was stunned by the fact, by the very insistence of that life force within me. It was oblivious to circumstances that included sledgehammers. That seemed miraculous.

I was alive . I had lived and not died. I’d survived the encounter. I had known something I hadn’t imagined I’d know, something in me, not in the world, something unseen that might inform my life. I needed to talk about it.

Les, my everyday doctor, made time for my ramblings over the phone.

“Listen,” I said, “I’ve been thinking and I don’t know why I’m still alive. I’ve heard of women who when they see their child under the wheels of a car summon up the energy to lift that car. Or people who don’t feel needles and nails driven into them, and I think that’s what happened to me. My positive energy to live was as strong as his negative energy to kill, and that’s why I lived , that’s why I didn’t die. Because I knew in that moment, when I knew I must die in order to live, I knew in that moment that I knew everything. I just knew, like an animal knows. I had to belly up or die.”

“Carol--,” Les said.

“The urge to kill is in the confrontation. It doesn’t occur when faced with passive resistance.”

End of thought.

End of miracle.

“What do you think, Les?” Now he could speak.

“I think you’re right. You were strong and ready, and listen, Carol, nothing that anybody ever throws at you again can get to you, do you understand? Don’t let this get you, throw you back, beat you.”

I didn’t understand, not a word he was saying.

THAT EVENING one of the ladies who’d cried the day before when I called and told her what had happened dropped by with flowers and Chinese food. My daughter was out--a sleep-over date. We two would watch the Olympics alone. Curt Gowdy and Jim McKay stopped talking about how much snow there was in Sarajevo. The downhill was canceled once again. It was late by the time I walked my friend to her car and watched her disappear down the circular drive.

And then I couldn’t breathe. And then I was shaking. I was alone in the middle of the night and I ran into the house and locked the doors and turned up all the lights inside and out and screamed for the dogs and put them on leashes and forced them to run with me everywhere, run with me past all the French windows, his face staring at me through the French windows and into my bathroom and he was there, too. I saw his face staring in at me through the window and then into my bedroom and thank God it was shuttered, and the dogs hugged my sides and tried to cuddle, and I closed my eyes and he was there inside staring in at me through the lids of my eyes but I held my dogs and breathed deep breaths and fell asleep without his staring eyes.

I did not cry.

Six thirty. It was early the next morning, Thursday morning, and I was sobbing. I must have been sobbing for some time in my sleep because my pillow was wet. Drenched. Slippery. The dogs were nuzzling the bed. That’s what woke me up. Probably. I couldn’t stop sobbing. It had nothing to do with bad dreams. I hadn’t had a bad dream. It had to do with my forgetting something. What? I’d forgotten an appointment with the detective “on the case.” He’d called the day before, on Wednesday, and asked if we could meet at my house this morning. He would bring a sketch artist who’d make a face based on my description of the man who’d bashed me. I didn’t know this detective. I had an appointment this morning at 9 o’clock with two strange men who were coming to my home. I was alone. I didn’t trust them. I couldn’t let them in. They might hurt me.

I sobbed as I called Mary, my friend in New York City. She was a therapist. I told her I was frightened. I couldn’t let them in. Call a friend, she said. I hadn’t thought of that.

I would make it through the dark each night for a week. He would come and I would win by thinking of roses and animal babies. And the Olympics helped. So did the Scotch. He stopped visiting me in my bed when I let go completely after surgery, a week and some after Valentine’s Day.

“Did you really believe that I’d be in the hospital for just 24 hours,” I asked my surgeon later.

“Well, I thought, you know, from the surgical standpoint, you’d probably only be in the hospital 24 hours, but that was an assessment I made taking into account only the physical injury--you know, the cheekbone fracture. I really didn’t count on the disintegration of the defense mechanism. . . .”

I’d collapsed in a heap. Four days of Demerol and saltwater tears, all of my rage swaddled in pain.

THE NEXT EIGHT WEEKS

I WAS wondering why.

My ex was straight out about it. “I couldn’t help thinking, my God, I wonder if in some way, you know, does a woman in some way provoke this? This goes through your head, it just does.”

The line goes “she must have been asking for it.”

I was wondering about it, too. I hadn’t before now, but now I was wondering about it. Now that I was out on the streets again, passing men and women on the streets or sitting near them in restaurants or talking to them in shops. Because anything can happen. Any one of them might attack me. Particularly the men. Only the men. And I was wondering why.

I decided that an 8-foot radius was the shortest distance tolerable when passing a large man. I had known large men to be the gentlest of people. Now I despised their size and potential power. Apes. All of them. Even the short ones. If they went for me now I would shoot them in the head.

If I had a gun.

The line goes “she must have been asking for it.”

What had happened to me?

Why had I been chosen, an Auschwitz victim. And why my shame? Why had he picked me?

Come on now, what happened, what happened? I’d skipped math, I’d read all of Tolstoy, I was on intimate terms with Camus and Martin Buber, and I was senior class president at Sarah Lawrence College. If I couldn’t crack this, what the hell good was I? What had happened to me?

A man had committed assault with a deadly weapon.

A man had tried to kill a woman with a 3-foot sledgehammer (could it be that it was rape?), and it wasn’t a crime of passion and it wasn’t an act of war and it wasn’t a paid assassination, but rather it was a vicious, brutal, unfathomable act of violence, and the spoken and unspoken question in everyone’s mind (including the victim’s), the vicious, brutal, unfathomable question formulated in everyone’s mind was, “What did she do to elicit the attack?”

She must have been asking for it.

(Is that what happened?)

Must I be a “good” girl and wear a veil?

What had I done?

I had taken a walk in my neighborhood park at 9 on a bright Tuesday morning. I’d left the dog at home. I had been alone.

I’d passed a young man while I was walking up a hillside, and I’d looked into his eyes and said good morning. I’d spoken. I’d acknowledged the day and his being.

And I was attractive. A womanly woman.

The line goes “she must have been asking for it.”

I’d send back the B.A.

Nothing helped.

I was terrified.

What had happened to me?

I’D BEEN sent a script. I’d have to audition. I’d have to dress. I’d have to drive to downtown Hollywood. My body began to shake and my mind went fuzzy.

I considered myself a professional’s professional. I would stand on my head and spit wooden nickels up and down Fifth Avenue if that was required to make a scene work. Concentration was a given. That’s what I was paid for. That was The Method. That’s what I’d been taught in Strasberg’s classes, a variety of tools that allowed one to focus in the midst of disaster, in the eye of a hurricane, in the middle of a theater, or in Harry Cohn’s office.

I knew the director. The producer knew me. And we were in Harry Cohn’s old office.

“Let’s do it,” I said and rose to my feet.

I heard words come out of my mouth. I heard spaces of silence before lines of words that came out of my mouth. There were spaces and sounds and a garble of words. I couldn’t link up the words to my mind. I couldn’t force-focus the story line. I couldn’t remember the beginning of a sentence. I’d slipped inward somehow. My body had left. False moves. Contrived. Amateurish.

I wept my way home. Humiliated. Exhausted. Very exhausted. Impotent. Crippled. The freeways work well for self-flagellation.

Why did you go? I demanded of me.

How did I know? was the answer.

You knew damn well!

I felt fine at home.

But not with people. Never with groups. I was dumb and dead and stared off into space when any demand was put upon me.

I know I know I know--so what? I’ve got no time for these lingering symptoms: I’d lost a copy of my will that I had had in my hands. I’d lost a trust deed placed in my purse by my lawyer. I’d lost my favorite sweater and forgotten its color. I’d lost a pair of reading glasses and four sets of house keys, although my friend who’d been raped said that was pretty good, better than wrecking two cars in two weeks, which is what she’d done.

But I’d written of the moment the man had hit me. I’d remembered, relived it, and I was still breathing!

Still my nerves were stretched pino-string raw.

Still my body disobeyed me.

It was beginning to occur to me that I’d been wounded somehow and I should lie in some corner and lick those wounds. It was beginning to occur to me this wasn’t a scary movie like “The Stepford Wives” or “The Fury,” movies I’d done and roles I’d been paid for.

It was beginning to occur to me these symptoms were me. I was a victim. That word meant me!

The police referred to me as the victim from Will Rogers.

My therapist worked at the victim center.

My medical bills would be processed through the L.A. City Attorney Victim Assistance Program.

I was a victim. It made me sick to my stomach. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with that person.

I looked up the word in Webster’s dictionary. “A living being sacrificed to a deity or in the performance of a religious rite.” That sounded good.

I couldn’t work as an actress for more than a year.

TWELVE MONTHS LATER

AND SOON it was Valentine’s Day 1985. I knew I must hike the mountain again and relive it and meet up with the him I was sure would be there and change the outcome of the day. If I could round up the courage to face the bastard. I felt terrified, and I’d felt that too long.

Why my 6-foot-5 journalist friend John should call the Monday of “memorial week” was one of God’s mysteries and a numerologist’s delight. He’d remembered the anniversary only after dialing the last two digits of my telephone number.

“If you need someone to go with you, I will,” he said.

The stables were empty. The day was hot and clear and crystalline blue, just as it had been the year before. I looked up toward the point as I scanned its perimeter. My man was nowhere. He’d not yet arrived. My man was elsewhere. He was not to be seen.

I glanced over my shoulder as we started the climb. Perhaps I might catch him following somewhere. My watch read 8. I’d made an early entrance. He might hang behind. He might wait for the sun to shift its position, wait for time to edge closer and full-circle the year and so sanctify the moment by precise re-enactment.

The road was deserted. No one had trailed us. At least no one seen. I looked off toward Catalina.

“I’m scared,” I said.

Twigs crackled in the wind. My heart froze in my chest. A remembrance of that moment when the man had left me and broken the silence and crawled out of the brush.

I’d forgotten that moment. It, too, was now with me.

A yuppie-like creature sporting an Afro appeared out of a deep twist in the trail, a yuppie wheeling his bike down the road.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning,” he said, and he passed without nodding. The day was on replay, the words recycling.

“He’s not my man,” I whispered to John.

“There’s somebody else,” John announced. “A man with a dog walking ahead.” Man and dog were pointed toward Inspiration Point. The man appeared to be stocky and in his 50s. They vanished to the right. A road cut had grabbed them.

We were 10 yards into that twist in the road where I’d passed my man and said good morning, where we’d suckered each other in a casual glance.

“This is it, the Y, where I turned right,” I said as I weaved to the center of the bend. I no longer knew where to walk. If I followed my natural inclination, I’d shoulder the road cut, the easier distance; if I shouldered the road cut, I couldn’t see what might be coming above or below, dervishing toward me. I would be trapped.

The rim of the mountain beckoned me, the ledge where the mountain falls into the canyon, the rim over which he had dragged my body. I would tightrope the ledge to that X in my brain.

We were there. At the spot. I couldn’t stand still. I knew he was there. I knew he was with us. I knew he was watching and gauging the moment. I knew he ‘d climb out of the brush below, rush out at me now, and drag me down with him. I knew he ‘d drop out of the clouds to my right, pinned to the sky, high on the rise, sledgehammer in hand draped down his spine.

“Are you scared?” I asked John.

“No,” he said. He stood with his back against the mountain. He stood where I’d stood the year before, he stood in the ditch, and looked up at me.

“But I know how important it is for you to do what you’re doing.” John spoke very slowly. “To come back and find out it’s no longer here.”

“Let’s go. Let’s get to the top.” I hadn’t the nerves for an overview.

We had reached Inspiration. My eyes scanned 360 degrees of empty, open, flat-footed space. He had nowhere to hide. I almost felt safe.

WRITING HAD kept me from madness. For four to eight hours of every day I re-created events and in the doing made them mine, a part of my system. I buried my rage on bits of paper, shallow graves, unmarked, dotting my desk, and slowly fit together the slivers of violence so to grasp the whole picture and acknowledge a chaos. The rest of each day was spent in tears.

“Rage is an anathema, a plague, . . .” I wrote. “Far better to spend time collecting evidence, clipping, filing, assembling data, the proof positive of what we know already, that sane or insane, temporary or otherwise, Hitler, Stalin, Eichmann and less celebrated killers in everyday America, Messrs. Manson, Bianchi and the guy who smashed me must die for their crimes, for the ripping of earth’s sanctity. SOCIETY OWES THEM ZIP. THEY OWE SOCIETY. “ I spent months researching human instincts. All media events that addressed the issue of criminal responsibility were taped and catalogued on a regular basis. Newspapers were scanned for articles examining California’s death penalty. Libraries surveyed--how do various species handle threats to their survival? I retyped my notes and stored the clean copy.

My files were useless. I dozed off when I read them. Rage would wait to be resurrected.

A YEAR AND A HALF LATER

IN THE spring of 1985 the police first suspected at least four unsolved murders had been committed by a creature hiding in the dark.

This creep was indiscriminate; he didn’t play by the rules. He liked to kill all kinds of people, every way and anyplace. Everyone was “it” in a gory game of tag. Tremors of victimization shook all the people, inklings of what it felt to play war for real.

“Do you think the Night Stalker could be your man?” my brother asked.

Lots of people were asking. They called to ask about it. “That composite picture looks a hell of a lot like him, like your composite picture,” my brother said. I kept my composite on my desk in the bedroom next to the Polaroid of my daughter as a baby.

“Yeah,” I said, “except it doesn’t.

I’d clipped and collected the Stalker’s face to be stacked underneath my composite drawing. Every day there was a story with a picture in the paper. Every morning I’d cut and staple and stack and focus feeling and feed my rage. I cherished the obsession and found it repellent.

Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend, the police made a move that shook my fixation. I reached for the paper, rolled off the band and lifted the folds that unveiled the first section. He was there, of course, staring at me, but he wasn’t a composite--he had a real face in a photograph and it wasn’t the face of my man. But he might be my man, I’d never be sure. I stared down at the face of Richard Ramirez.

My God, I thought, the cops must be scared. I didn’t think they released this kind of stuff.

Richard Ramirez stared at me.

Richard Ramirez. I’d make him my man.

Later that day I brunched in Malibu. I’d been invited to the home of friends. We sat out in the sun under striped umbrellas.

“They got him, you know!” My host was speaking, a treasured friend of 20-odd years.

“Who?” I asked.

“The Stalker,” he said. “Found him and beat him in East L.A.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “When did that happen?”

“This morning,” he said, “in East L.A. The early edition didn’t carry the story. They saw him and chased him and beat him with a steel rod after he’d tried to steal someone’s car.”

“The people. Not the cops.”

“Yeah, the Latinos.”

“He’s a poor soul, a poor tortured creature.” The lady of the house was ever charitable.

I said nothing. I loved her too much.

We moved into the house to escape the heat.

“I really want to see him,” I spoke in a pause. “I really want to see Ramirez hurt and bleeding. Can we watch the news? I’m sure it’s on cable.” No one objected.

Just as my host rose to adjust the big screen, the doorbell rang at the gate.

“Who’s that?” my host said.

“I don’t know,” said my hostess. “No one’s expected.”

“Don’t open the door!” My host was speaking.

“I won’t,” she said. “I’ll talk on the intercom. Hello!” she sang out as she pushed the button.

“A package from the shelter,” an accent staccatoed.

“What package from the shelter?” One of her charities?

“A package, senora.”

“I’m not expecting any package from the shelter. Just leave it by the gate!”

“Where, senora?”

“Right there, by the gate.”

There was a silence.

“Don’t answer the door,” my host hissed. His face was rigid.

“No, I won’t, darling. Please! Oh, the package!” she said. “Now I remember.”

“Wait till he leaves before you get it.”

We turned back to the screen and the image of Ramirez being led to a car, the cops having cuffed him, his head swathed in gauze.

“Damn! We missed the beatings. We missed the crowd! I wonder if they’ve got it on film!” I said. “I wonder if CBS will show that tonight.”

No one spoke. I continued.

“Jesus, I’m glad he was bludgeoned by his own, that the people on the street beat the hell out of him and not some screwed-tight white guard standing in a shack checking out the entrance to Malibu Colony. That would have been bad. This is really great!”

And in that moment I remembered another, a moment high up on Inspiration, a moment I’d lost, a moment I’d eaten and crammed down my gut and left there to block my life, a moment between the third and fourth bash when I realized someone was trying to kill me, the moment I wanted to kill the bastard, to smash him and claw him and tear him apart, the moment of rage at the violation, the moment before I gave in to survival, becoming his victim and praying for mercy, betting on the scam, that he’d believe my lie: that I’d died and that he’d won. The moment before the will to live conquered fury.

Now I could feel. Now I was strong. Now I wished he was dead. I wanted to kill him.

THE BUREAU OF Investigation was closed on Labor Day. It wasn’t until Tuesday, three days later, that I phoned my detective and told him that perhaps the Night Stalker was my man.

“I’d like to be part of a lineup,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I never forget you, Carol,” he said. “Whenever anything comes in I think of your case. But this isn’t it, it just doesn’t fit--not his height, not his weight, nothing about it. I’m sorry, Carol. I won’t forget you.”

“God, I wish it were him!”

“I know,” he said.

I WAS LEFT with my rage. I felt whole again. I may have been scarred, but I had survived. Like Jacob’s struggle with the angel, I hadn’t let go until I was blessed. Oddly I learned to love life all the more.

THE MAN on the mountain has not been found. Carol Rossen has attempted to relearn to take walks.

Peter Darley Miller / Visages ; hair and makeup by Kimberly Briggs for Cloutier.