The Other Beat Of Her Heart

Bombs were going off almost daily. Iraqis were dying. They blamed the Americans. This is not what they had imagined when they imagined democracy. There was no distinction made between the American press and U.S. soldiers and contractors who had promised electricity and had not delivered it. They felt occupied, and I was part of that occupation.

I saw the helicopters blaze in the sky coming out of the prison, while the Marines followed on foot, pointing their weapons and shouting at the crowd. I didn't hear anything at first but the sound of my own voice, which had grown hoarse from my mantra: Washington Post! Washington Post!

Once the men who grabbed me saw the Marines, they let go, and everyone scattered. Bassam came running as the crowd parted. He had been trying to get a better look at what had drawn the people. But he had not seen me. Please, my bag, I mimed to Bassam, as the Marines led us back inside Abu Ghraib.

I balled up my head scarf and threw it on the dirt. "It didn't even work!" I yelled. I was furious that something about me -- my walk, my body, the way I carried myself -- had tipped them off that I was a foreigner. I leaned against a concrete barricade inside the prison, folding my hands in my lap to stop them from shaking. My entire body convulsed. I looked over at Bassam. "When we get back to the office, you tell them I didn't cry. Tell them," I insisted until he agreed. I needed them to know. I had not buckled. I had not broken down. I was intact.

When I called Jenny later, my voice shook. "These guys tried to kidnap me!" I exclaimed. I had already talked to my editor back in Washington, had heard myself begging: "Please, do not make me come home. I want to stay. Please, do not call me home."

Although I could tell Jenny the truth that I could not tell my editor -- that I was rattled but also resigned -- I did not tell her that I had pleaded to stay in Iraq. I did not want her to know that I had gotten so close to terror, so far from her, and yet I could not bring myself to come back, so that I could take away her own fears.

* * *

In the book, Jenny Spinner, an English professor, writes about getting Jackie's call about the attempted kidnapping.

I always knew it was her before she said anything, my "hello" met by a long pause, then the "click click" of the satellite phone as it attempted to shrink the miles between us. Sometimes I waited for her to speak; other times, I shouted eagerly into the phone, "Jackie? Is that you, Jackie? Can you hear me?" When she left for Iraq, she promised to call me as often as she could. We usually talked every few days, taking advantage of her journalist's access to the world outside Iraq. When she couldn't call, we e-mailed, often several times a day. As far away as she felt to me, it helped that I rarely went half a day without communicating with her, and we both understood what a privilege that was. But it also made her journey to Iraq seem closer, easier, than it truly was -- at least for me. As long as I could reach her, she was within my grasp.

This phone call, though, was different -- the pause longer, heavier, before I heard her voice. "Jenny," she whispered.

"What's wrong?" I asked, leaning into the kitchen counter where I had been cleaning breakfast dishes, steadying myself for whatever dark and unimaginable news she was about to share. I recognized that tone, the way she wrapped the letters of my name around a barely contained gasp. "Somebody tried to kidnap me," she said.

My world heaved. "Say that again," I said, even though I heard her the first time. Say it again and again and again. Say it until I begin to reconcile the bright Connecticut morning, happy and oblivious, with your world in Iraq. "I fought like a dog," she said, the narrative steadying her shaky voice. "I kicked and screamed until the Marines finally rescued me."

I tried to picture it: my thin sister, on the ground, her hands digging into someone else's dirt, scrambling for freedom.

"I don't understand," I stammered.

"I'll be okay," she said, shifting into protective mode. "We left the prison and are -- " She stopped, interrupted by a loud voice. "Oh, no," she said, before the phone clicked and went silent.

I stood at the sink, unsure what to do, how to go about the morning, the day, the rest of my life.

It would be hours before she would call again, and by then she was a new self, resolved, distant, yes, farther away than ever before.

Adapted from "Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss, and Survival in Iraq" by Jackie Spinner. Copyright 2006 by Jackie Spinner. Printed by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., N.Y.