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A House in the Sky: A Memoir
A House in the Sky: A Memoir
A House in the Sky: A Memoir
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A House in the Sky: A Memoir

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BREAKING NEWS: Amanda Lindhout’s lead kidnapper, Ali Omar Ader, has been caught.

Amanda Lindhout wrote about her fifteen month abduction in Somalia in A House in the Sky. It is the New York Times bestselling memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most remote places and then into captivity: “Exquisitely told…A young woman’s harrowing coming-of-age story and an extraordinary narrative of forgiveness and spiritual triumph” (The New York Times Book Review).


As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself visiting its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.

Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark.

Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is “a searingly unsentimental account. Ultimately it is compassion—for her naïve younger self, for her kidnappers—that becomes the key to Lindhout’s survival” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateSep 10, 2013
ISBN9781451645620
Author

Amanda Lindhout

Amanda Lindhout is the founder of the Global Enrichment Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports development, aid, and education initiatives in Somalia and Kenya. For more information, visit AmandaLindhout.com and GlobalEnrichmentFoundation.com.

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Rating: 4.186900862619809 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A House in the Sky, Amanda Lindhout’s account of her capture by Somali jihadists and of being held 460 days for ransom, is extra-ordinary in the literal sense of the word. Her book is not the fruit of a prudent decision. But I tell you, it is a tale worth her telling and our hearing.Listen to her, afterward:“I choose to forgive the people who took my freedom from me and abused me, despite the fact that what they were doing was absolutely wrong. I choose also to forgive myself for the impact that my decision to go to Somalia had on family and friends at home. Forgiving is not an easy thing to do. Some days it’s no more than a distant spot on the horizon. I look toward it. I point my feet in its direction. Some days I get there and other days I don’t. More than anything else, though, it’s what has helped me move forward with my life.”The “abuse” of which she speaks, by the way, encompasses just about all that word can mean.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    4.25 starsIn 2008, Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout travelled to Somalia with Australian photographer, Nigel Brennen. While there, they (along with 3 Somalian escorts) were kidnapped and held for ransom. Amanda and Nigel were held for over a year before their families, with the help of a professional negotiator, came up with part of the money the kidnappers had originally asked for to get them released.Amanda not only tells her story in the book; she narrates the audio. As the book was coming close to the end, I marveled that she was not only able to write her story, but she is able to narrate it! The book started a bit slower, as she told of her life growing up in Alberta, Canada (fairly local to me!), before she caught the “travel bug” and she wanted to travel all over. She tells stories of some of the places she travelled before deciding to head into Somalia to hopefully write a story to “make” her career. But, the pace of the book just picks up more and more as the book goes on. At the start of the book, I was ready to give it 3.5 stars, but it quickly went up to 4 stars. At the end I might have given 4.5 stars, but I wanted to take the entire book in account for my rating and settled on 4.25, as I feel like it does deserve higher than 4.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is on the CBC list of 100 True Stories that Make You Proud to Be Canadian. One of the authors, Amanda Lindhout, is a Canadian who was held for 460 days in Somalia beginning in August 2008. She was subjected to starvation, rape, torture while her captors negotiated for ransom money from her family and that of her fellow captive, Nigel Brennan. The Canadian government refused to pay ransom money and their negotiators advised Lindhout's family not to pay any either. Eventually Lindhout's and Brennan's families raised enough money to allow a private firm to negotiate their release. In part, Amanda survived by going to her "house in the sky" in her mind whenever she was raped or tortured. Amazingly, Lindhout has started a charity that gives aid to Somalis both inside Somalia and in other countries. She has also stated that she has forgiven the people who took her captive and abused her. She may finally get to face one of them in court. The man she knew as Adam, who was the chief negotiator, was arrested when he came to Canada and his trial should occur shortly. This is one of those books that make you ask yourself "What would I do in these circumstances?" I'm pretty sure I would not have lasted being captive for any length of time and, if I did last, I'm pretty sure I would be mentally traumatized for the rest of my life. Lindhout has had treatment for Post-traumatic Stress but in the interviews I have seen of her she seems to be centered and focused on bringing something good out of this horrific experience.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Good Stuff I think this is one of the hardest reviews I have ever had to write. How do you critique someones harrowing life story when you have no writing ability, and have not been through anything even closely related. This fiercely strong women has opened her heart and showed her pain and suffering to complete strangers. I don't want to do a disservice to her story with my inadequate words or trite commentary. Please forgive me for my inadequacy and just do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this harrowing, yet beautifully told book. Amanda, I admire you and at the same time wish I had the power to make the rest of your life blessed to overcome the violence you faced. Your strength of will and of character is to be admired and your courage and ability to forgive is something we should all strive for. You give me hope for the future. I am so sorry when we met that I knew nothing of your past. I would like to go back in time and just hug you - I know that isn't much, but I am not a hugger by nature if that means anything. deeply personal no holds barred Inspirational Couldn't put this down Never a moment of poor me - she speaks frankly about her background and her ordeal, without ever putting blame on anyone Haunting - this book is still with me eventhough I finished it early June Fascinating and informative Inspirational Hope and Forgiveness are the main messages she want to get through to the world Takes what happened to her, and instead of letting it take hold and bring her down, uses it to try to bring around change and to help this from happening to others SPOILER - The chapter dealing with her attempted escape sickens me. However, the sheer courage of one of those involved who tried to help does a least give me a little hope but at the same time breaks my heart for her probable fate This will win awards my friends. The collaboration between Ms Lindhout and Ms Corbett is seamless and perfectThe Not So Good Stuff Had to find something to put here - would have liked to know more about Amanda's life since the ordeal Cover is sorta blah (not sure if that will change for finished product) This is hard for me to say, but I have to be honest, whenever I read tales like this it makes me think even more poorly about that part of the world, and this makes me feel horrible. I am the type of person who wants to believe that there is good in everyone. I truly don't understand how someone who believes in a God, can treat a fellow person this way and than think that a God would not only approve, but reward them for it.Favorite Quotes Passages "It was as if we were poise at the edge of a witch's cauldron or sat at the prow of a great ship in the center of an otherworldly ocean. I had seen this place in the magazine, and now we were here, lost in it. It was a small truth affirmed. And it was all I needed to keep going.""The Kuchis reminded me a little bit of the First Nations people back in Canada, independent and unintegrated and pretty much worse off for it.""I made peace with anyone who might ever have been an enemy. I asked forgiveness for every vain or selfish thing I'd done in my life. Inside the house in the sky, all the people I loved sat down for a big holiday meal. I was safe and protected. It was where all the voices that normally tore through my head expressing fear and wishing for death were silent, until there was only one left speaking. It was a calmer, stronger voice, one that to me felt divine.It said, See? You are okay, Amanda. It's only your body that's suffering, and you are not your body. The rest of you is fine.""For one split second, I knew his suffering. It had assembled itself and looped through me in a rush. Its absolute clarity made me gasp. It was anguish, accrued over the brief span of his life. It was rage and helplessness. It was a little. This was the person who was hurting me. His sadness trenched beneath mine."Who Should Shouldn't Read This may be a difficult read for the more sensitive Other than those who are extremely sensitive, you must read this!5 Dewey sI received this from the charming and fun Felicia at Simon and Schuster - thanks for the heads up Captain Awesome
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you only read one memoir this year, make it A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett. Amanda Lindhout is from Alberta, Canada. As a young child living in a turbulent household, she collected and cashed in bottles. And what did she spend her money on? Old National Geographic magazines. Amanda escaped into the pages,dreaming of one day visiting the exotic places pictured. At nineteen she has saved enough money from waitressing to make those dreams a reality. Her first trip abroad is to Venezuela. "I had seen this place in the magazine, and now we were here, lost in it. It was a small truth affirmed. And it was all I needed to keep going." Lindhout repeats the cycle, earning, then travelling. She visits most of Latin America, India, Burma, Ethiopia, Syria, Pakistan, Sudan and dozens more. Her joy in exploring and experiencing new places and people is tangible. But, each trip she takes is a little further off the beaten path. And finally, she's travelling to some of the most war torn countries in the world. In Kabul, Afghanistan she begins a career as a fledgling freelance /journalist/photojournalist - with no formal training, associations or contacts. With some success under her belt, she heads next to Baghdad, Iraq to work as a reporter for Iran's Press TV. Moving on from there she decides to head to Mogadishu, Somalia in 2008 - bigger stories might help her career take off faster. She wonders if an old flame, Nigel Brennan, an Aussie photographer wants to join her. He does.......and four days after their arrival in Somalia, they are kidnapped by insurgents from an Islamic fundamentalist group. And, they are held.... for 460 days. "It was here, finally, that I started to believe this story would be one I'd never get to tell, that I would become an erasure, an eddy in a river pulled suddenly flat. I began to feel certain that, hidden inside Somalia, inside this unknowable and stricken place, we would never be found." A House in the Sky is Amanda's recounting of those 460 days. She is beaten, starved, chained up, kept in the dark, raped and tortured. These are the facts. “There are parts of my story that I may one day be able to recover and heal from, and, to whatever degree possible, forget about them and move on. But there are parts of my story that are so horrific that once they are shared, other people’s minds will keep them alive.”How she survives is a story that had me tearing up, putting the book down and walking away from it so many times. It's a difficult read, but is such a testament to the human spirit and will. Amanda names each of the houses they are held in - Bomb-Making House, Electric House, Tacky House and more. But it is the House in the Sky that had me freely sobbing - at the worst of times she builds a house in her mind, filled with the people she loves and the memories she treasures, the future she dreams of. "I was safe and protected. It was where all the voices that normally tore through my head expressing fear and wishing for death went silent, until there was only one left speaking . It was a calmer, stronger voice, one that to me felt divine. It said, 'See? You are okay, Amanda. It's only your body that's suffering, and you are not your body. The rest of you is fine.' " The journey to their release is gut-wrenching, incredibly powerful and impossible to put down. I stopped many times to look at the smiling author picture of Amanda on the back, wondering how in the world she survived. Survived and forgave. And as I turned the last page, I just sat. Sat and thought. This is a book that will stay with you, long after that last page. Read an excerpt of A House in the Sky. Amanda Lindhout is the founder of the Global Enrichment Foundation - "a non -profit organization that supports development, aid and education initiatives in Somalia and Kenya
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I find it difficult to rate a memoir... to separate the writer's personal experience from the telling of it. I flipped back and forth in this book between really disliking this naive, self focused girl and then feeling such compassion for her. She seemed to not have a shred of common sense but the price she paid for that was huge.I give this book 4 stars, not because it was an excellent book, but because I was so compelled to continue reading. Does that make sense?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an important book about a Canadian journalist (Amanda Lindhout) who was kidnapped in Somalia and held for over a year. She tells about the treatment (including torture and sexual assault) that she endured, where and how she found strength, and how she survived both physically and emotionally. It is a very honest portrait, well written and worth reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When Amanda Lindhout was a child she dreamed about the faraway places she saw in National Geographic magazines. As a young adult she began to travel to some of those countries, working for several months and then traveling several months on savings. After a few years she tired of backpack travel and decided to try her hand at freelance journalism. She thought in this way she could earn enough money to travel more comfortably. She was particularly interested in Africa and thought she could find places of interest, write about them, and sell the pieces to small travel publications. Rather quickly she decided to go to Somalia, talking a former boyfriend (Nigel) into going with her. Experienced journalists strongly advised her against Somalia, telling her she was at high risk for kidnapping. For some reason she thought the professionals were jealous of her so their opinion didn't slow her down, off she and Nigel went. They were in Somalia just a matter of days when the car they and 3 security guards were in was stopped by gunmen. They were pulled from the car and taken to a hiding place. It was more than a year before they would be free. The book covers Amanda’s life from childhood until she is rescued from the extremists holding her. It’s a frightening story but at the same time spellbinding.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lindhout's book is beautifully written about her traumatic experience held in captivity for 15 months in Somalia. At times, the details were difficult to read but through it all her hope and strength were uplifting.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I am still haunted by this book. So beautifully written; so horrifying what she went through; so incredible that she was able to write this at all. I hope it was therapeutic - it seemed so.But the horror of it will never leave me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed this book. I felt it was well written and very compelling. I can't even imagine how she survived for that many months in those atrocious conditions. She must be an incredible person as a result of this experience.Her story is horrible and heart wrenching, however it was difficult at times to feel badly for her given that she was given advice that she ignored and put herself and her traveling companions in this situation. I hope that by sharing the extremely awful details of her captivity that people will heed travel advisory restrictions and not make the make same mistakes by going into dangerous areas. Traveling is a beautiful experience but doing it with reckless abandonment is foolish.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A memoir of being held captive for ransom by jihad extremists in Somalia. A young canadian woman Amanda and her travel companion Nigel from Australia take a daring trip to Somali as freelance journalists and photographers and get kidnapped and held for ransom. The ordeal that lasts over 460 days is explicit and heart wrenching. An detailed account of what Amanda endured and experienced at the hands of the armed young muslim men and the total disrespect for her as a woman shed light on the culture that is beyond a westerner's imagination. Wishing you Amanda & Nigel "Many Good Things"
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Canadian Amanda Lindhout was the typical young person of her day, backpacking as many countries as possible, in her case, inspired by reading thrift store copies of National Geographic. She earned money to pay for the travels from waitressing tips, working to save enough to travel and returning to work when funds were depleted. When she decided to try and earn her way as a freelance journalist - meaning without qualifications or affiliations - she lost carefree backpacker status and entered "the most dangerous place in the world" ignoring the risks. She admitted that it was naive. She and her photographer partner were captured after just three days. What followed was 460 days of being brutalized and tortured, with more severity for Lindhout, because she was a woman. Her ability to to mentally remove herself from the savage atrocities by building an imaginary house in the sky and other such mind games helped her through the nightmare. Her experiences in this book helps to partly understand the mindset of the captors although it’s a long way from understanding how a group of men can justify these actions. She is to be thoroughly praised for her sense of forgiveness and for creating the Global Enrichment Foundation offering, among other benefits, university scholarships to women in Somalia. I'm sure her recovery will require a lifetime but Lindhout shows a capacity for the human spirit that is inspirational. It is difficult to rate memoirs at the best of times and in this case more so because of the subject matter. The second half of the book relates the time she was held hostage and is well-written without becoming emotional or sentimental in any way. However, the first half of the book describing the minutiae of early travels was a tad long.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lindhout became a lover of traveling the world as a backpacker starting in safe countries such as Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, and Honduras. As her positive experiences led her to become more confident and daring, she moved on to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and then as it was so close, Afghanistan.It was in Afghanistan and Iraq that she became a photojournalist which led her to ignore all warnings about the dangers of Somalia, her next stop. Only there three days when she and her friend Nigel Brennan were stopped by armed men on the side of the road and held for the 460 days as captives. What followed for her was a period of mental and physical torture including multiple incidents of rape, starvation and threats of marriage to one of the men holding her which would have guaranteed her vanishing from sight. Nigel was also abused but less severely apparently because he was a man.The title refers to the imaginary house Amanda built in her mind to which she fled while she was being tortured. A powerful book which again demonstrates the evil man will do to another human to gain power of financial reward.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was an incredibly thought provoking book. Next I plan to read her friend Nigel's account of the same situation. Many readers seem to feel no sympathy for Amanda because of her naivete that landed her in such a terrible situation. I get her though. We all have faults and it isn't always easy or possible to change them. I, too, can tend to be lacking in common sense and the need for self-preservation. The part of the book that moved me most was actually thinking about it from her mother's point of view. I am trying to use that to be wiser about my own choices by asking myself how I would feel if one of my kids did ----
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The memoir of a young Canadian woman abducted in war-ravaged Somalia and held captive for 460 days, primarily in isolation, while being repeatedly tortured and abused. An incredibly potent account of resourcefulness, inner strength, and the power of hope.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A House in the Sky is Amanda Lindhout’s personal account of being held hostage in Somalia for 15 months under brutal conditions. I went into this memoir well aware of the criticism of Lindhout and her motivation for traveling to war-torn Somalia despite warnings, and it certainly influenced my impression of her. Rather than add my voice to the backlash though, I have decided to use her experiences as an impetus to learn more about Islam and about conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, and to better understand what life is like for people, especially women, living under these regimes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A House in the Sky is the ghost-written account of Canadian Amanda Lindhout’s 450 days in captivity in Somalia in 2008-09. Possessed by a wanderlust which began in childhood, 24-year-old Lindhout quits her job as a cocktail waitress in Calgary to become a war correspondent. Problem: she has no experience, no contacts, and no education to quality her as a journalist. Thus she’ll need a breakthrough which is uber-impressive in order to make her name. Emboldened by vacations through South America, Southeast Asia, and India – she misses the point that these are not really the same as living in a war zone – she decides to travel to Pakistan, and then Afghanistan, and then Iraq. No surprise that in professional journalistic circles, she is desperately ill equipped and desperately out of place. Still, her arrogance (at this point, I am well past naivité) prompts her to make the ill-fated, foolish decision to venture into Somalia, a mess of “raging war, an impending famine, religious extremists.” (Ch 12) Lindhout is “glad for the lack of competition” there, which she figures will allow her “to do stories that mattered, that moved people—stories that would sell to the big networks. Then I’d move on to even bigger things.” (Ch 12) Incredulously, for reasons which wholly escaped me, ex-boyfriend Australian photographer Nigel Brennan agrees to join Lindhout.Four days into her “work” in Somalia, Lindhout, and Brennan along with her, are kidnapped and held for ransom. She is brutalized in every way imaginable over the next fifteen months: starved, beaten, tortured, and raped. Having no possible way to raise the exorbitant ransom demand, her family is also terrorized –harangued and threatened almost daily by Lindhout’s Islam captors to fund their terrorist operations with Western affluence. Naturally, countless public resources are also spent by the Canadian government seeking to free her. Eventually, a deal is brokered, and both Lindhout and Brennan will live to tell their stories. The novel was an interesting experience for me: first, it was admittedly a page turner; I just did not want to put it down. And undoubtedly, Lindhout’s determination to survive in the face of grave danger is astonishing. That said, the more I read, the less I able I was to excuse her absolute arrogant stupidity as youthful exuberance. Did she deserve what she was forced to endure in Somalia? Of course not! But I don’t think the consequences of her actions were terribly surprising. If it was a name for herself she was after, she certainly found it – at one hell of a price.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Another book I might not have picked up, except that my book club was reading it. I found it depressing to learn that people can be as mean to others in their power as they are shown here. It can be claimed that Amanda would not have had these terrible things happen to her if she had stayed out of Somalia and not behaved as a naive or entitled girl. Since this is not a claim that would be made if Amanda had been a Andy, I discount it. The desire to travel, to find a place that we feel at home in, to see what is on the other side of the mountain is deep in our consciousness. She was doing what she needed to do to be true to herself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read several reviews earlier today chastising Lindhout for traveling to Somalia and being surprised when she is kidnapped. These reviewers found her naive, arrogant, and uneducated. Other reviewers agreed that Lindhout was naive, but that was the point- she wanted to share her story of naivety and how she has grown since. I'm only through Chapter 4, but I will say, thus far, I am agreeing with the latter reviewers. Chapters 3 and 4 were clearly written as foreshadowing- clear indication that she was naive, and her conscience was trying to warn her, but her young, curious heart was craving more of the new world around her.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An account of a young woman's struggle to survive while held captive in Somalia. As I have never traveled to the regions of the world that she did, I found her story to be facinating. In addition, provides a look into a Muslim world from the angle-female point of view. While I tried to keep an open mind, it was difficult to understand the behavior of her captors. I would highly recommend if you like true stories and can handle a somewhat difficult read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This books made me feel many different things. Horror, disbelief, the power of wanting to live and the strenght of some people towards adversity. I was horrified reading of the torture inflicked on the hostages during their incarceration. Whenever I read these type of books, I feel like the luckiest person in the world living in Canada.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A harrowing read that tells the compelling story of Amanda Lindhout, a young woman freelance photojournalist traveling some of the most hostile places on earth, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Somalia, where she was kidnapped and held hostage for over 400 days. The memoir traces her hardscrabble childhood of poverty,chaos, and domestic violence; her escaping the poverty by becoming a well paid cocktail waitress at night clubs, which funded her increasingly adventurous world wide journeys as a backpacker. She eventually manages to cobble together a freelance career of sorts, falls for a married man, and together travel to war torn Somalia, On her fourth day in Somalia, the pair get kidnapped and the rest of the book describes their efforts to stay alive. The memoir grows increasingly grim and difficult to read as Amanda pretends to convert to Islam, is moved from terrible houses to worse houses, and eventually falls prey to abuse, beating, rape, torture, and betrayal from her traveling companion.Amanda survives through sheer grit and mental strength, and escaping in an imagina house in the sky. That she doesn't lose faith in humanity and even finds herself feeling compassion for her tormentors is truly remarkable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Amazing true story, beautiful, horrific, courageous. I couldn't stop reading.This book will take your breath away. From an abusive household in Alberta, Canada as a child whose escape is found in old National Geographic books, Amanda has no idea how much she is learning about escaping into her mind or how much she will need this in her future. Her future as she sees it is travelling to the many countries she reads about. After she and her brothers move with her mother to a safe house, she starts planning for a future to include this travel.Amanda Lindhout's memoir is a masterpiece of how the mind can change itself whenever it needs to, how it compensates, over-rides, and deals with the worst kinds of trauma to keep lifeblood flowing. But not to get ahead of myself, first Amanda finds a way to earn enough money to finance a trip to South America. The first of many trips interspersed with coming home to work for more money. As a cocktail waitress, she has advanced through the ranks until she is in a place to earn high tips, enough to make a trip every year. This takes her to countries in South and Central America, Asia and Africa as what she considers a beginning to many more amazing places. The writing in this stage of the book is absolutely wonderful, bringing to mind all those National Geographics, while she backpacks her way through these countries, we feel we are seeing what she is seeing, experiencing what she is experiencing. She makes us feel what she is feeling, and it is consistently beautiful. Some countries like India and Pakistan she visits more than once, but then she begins to expand her horizons: Afghanistan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Ethiopia....Between trips she turns again to cocktail waitressing, but her need to be somewhere exotic takes over every year, and each trip she gets deeper into dangerous territory. She travels fr a time with a freelance photographer, decides that next trip she wants to show the world to everyone. She becomes a freelance photojournalist, occasionally selling photos and stories to various papers and magazines. She has teamed up with Nigel, another freelance photographer, an Australian. When she decides to head into war zones, she asks him to join her and he semi-reluctantly does. Here the book shifts dramatically. It is 2008 and she has chosen to go into Somalia.Once in Somalia, known as the 'most dangerous country in the world,' everything changes. Although at first she and Nigel are enjoying the relatively 'safe' city of Mogadishu, on the fourth day she, Nigel, and their drivers are abducted by extremist Muslims. Assuming that all North Americans are rich, their abductors set an impossibly high ransom, which their parents are unable to even come near to paying and their respective governments have no intention of paying. Thus begins their ordeal which will last for 463 days of captivity and isolation. Kept in one room at first, they pretend they want to convert to Islam as a way of staying alive. They are visited sometimes by their captors wanting to learn English, and to teach them the Koran.As time goes by and their captors' demands are not met, they are moved from house to house, always in the dark. Nigel and Amanda escape from one of the houses and are recaptured. From that point on, the two are completely separated and are shackled; Amanda gets the brunt of punishment as a woman, which includes rape, beatings and torture but she is able to separate herself in her mind from what is happening, a product of her childhood days. She is kept in complete darkness, later she is also bound and gagged. As fever takes over, beatings and rape continue almost daily but she is now living in her mind and guided by a calmness brought on by what seems to be a voice and is able to use different approaches to this separation of her being and her mind. Her mind's eye sees a beautiful house, one that she constructs room by room, floor by floor, until it reaches the sky. A focus for survival.When finally rescued, neither Amanda nor Nigel are able to comprehend the fact that they are free. They can't comprehend that the food they are given is meant for them, they are fearful it will be taken away or they will be beaten. Both are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and it will take a long time to learn how to handle that. It may never be gone. But Amanda has built that inner strength from her ordeals and although the fear is always with her, she becomes forgiving of many things, including forgiving herself. In the Epilogue, we learn that she founds a non-profit organization, the Global Enrichment Foundation to help provide and support education in Somalia, and partnering with other groups, funding scholarships to thirty-six Somalian women attending university, among other projects. This book is gut-wrenchingly real, powerful, and well-written; although the memories and fears of the atrocities are obviously very much a part of her, she has chosen to move on with her life in a positive way.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Gripping memoir of the kidnapping of photojournalist Amanda Lindhout by Islamic extremists in Somalia.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Riveting,nailbiting , drama.I couldn't put the book down on the last two days of reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Amé la enseñanza de Amanda, que para mí se resume en preguntarnos ante un desastre no "¿por qué?" sino "para qué?".
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    heroic, painful, beautiful, funny, incredulous, inspiring. I could not put it down.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the best travel books I have read in a while. It kept me interested as well as captivated. I read this book in three days - I couldn't stop reading it! A good book to read if one is planning on travelling, especially to Somalia!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow! Amazing book... With every page I read I couldn't put this book down. It brought me to tears. Amanda is such a brave woman

Book preview

A House in the Sky - Amanda Lindhout

Prologue

We named the houses they put us in. We stayed in some for months at a time; other places, it was a few days or a few hours. There was the Bomb-Making House, then the Electric House. After that came the Escape House, a squat concrete building where we’d sometimes hear gunfire outside our windows and sometimes a mother singing nearby to her child, her voice low and sweet. After we escaped the Escape House, we were moved, somewhat frantically, to the Tacky House, into a bedroom with a flowery bedspread and a wooden dresser that held hair sprays and gels laid out in perfect rows, a place where, it was clear from the sound of the angry, put-upon woman jabbering in the kitchen, we were not supposed to be.

When they took us from house to house, it was anxiously and silently and usually in the quietest hours of night. Riding in the backseat of a Suzuki station wagon, we sped over paved roads and swerved onto soft sandy tracks through the desert, past lonely-looking acacia trees and dark villages, never knowing where we were. We passed mosques and night markets strung with lights and men leading camels and groups of boisterous boys, some of them holding machine guns, clustered around bonfires along the side of the road. If anyone had tried to see us, we wouldn’t have registered: We’d been made to wear scarves wrapped around our heads, cloaking our faces the same way our captors cloaked theirs—making it impossible to know who or what any of us were.

The houses they picked for us were mostly deserted buildings in tucked-away villages, where all of us—Nigel, me, plus the eight young men and one middle-aged captain who guarded us—would remain invisible. All of these places were set behind locked gates and surrounded by high walls made of concrete or corrugated metal. When we arrived at a new house, the captain fumbled with his set of keys. The boys, as we called them, rushed in with their guns and found rooms to shut us inside. Then they staked out their places to rest, to pray, to pee, to eat. Sometimes they went outside and wrestled with one another in the yard.

There was Hassam, who was one of the market boys, and Jamal, who doused himself in cologne and mooned over the girl he planned to marry, and Abdullah, who just wanted to blow himself up. There was Yusuf and Yahya and Young Mohammed. There was Adam, who made calls to my mother in Canada, scaring her with his threats, and Old Mohammed, who handled the money, whom we nicknamed Donald Trump. There was the man we called Skids, who drove me out into the desert one night and watched impassively as another man held a serrated knife to my throat. And finally, there was Romeo, who’d been accepted into graduate school in New York City but first was trying to make me his wife.

Five times a day, we all folded ourselves over the floor to pray, each holding on to some secret ideal, some vision of paradise that seemed beyond our reach. I wondered sometimes whether it would have been easier if Nigel and I had not been in love once, if instead we’d been two strangers on a job. I knew the house he lived in, the bed he’d slept in, the face of his sister, his friends back home. I had a sense of what he longed for, which made me feel everything doubly.

When the gunfire and grenade blasts between warring militias around us grew too thunderous, too close by, the boys loaded us back into the station wagon, made a few phone calls, and found another house.

Some houses held ghost remnants of whatever family had occupied them—a child’s toy left in a corner, an old cooking pot, a rolled-up musty carpet. There was the Dark House, where the most terrible things happened, and the Bush House, which seemed to be way out in the countryside, and the Positive House, almost like a mansion, where just briefly things felt like they were getting better.

At one point, we were moved to a second-floor apartment in the heart of a southern city, where we could hear cars honking and the muezzins calling people to prayer. We could smell goat meat roasting on a street vendor’s spit. We listened to women chattering as they came and went from the shop right below us. Nigel, who had become bearded and gaunt, could look out the window of his room and see a sliver of the Indian Ocean, a faraway ribbon of aquamarine. The water’s proximity, like that of the shoppers and the cars, both comforted and taunted. If we somehow managed to get away, it was unclear whether we’d find any help or simply get kidnapped all over again by someone who saw us the same way our captors did—not just as enemies but enemies worth money.

We were part of a desperate, wheedling multinational transaction. We were part of a holy war. We were part of a larger problem. I made promises to myself about what I’d do if I got out. Take Mom on a trip. Do something good for other people. Make apologies. Find love.

We were close and also out of reach, thicketed away from the world. It was here, finally, that I started to believe this story would be one I’d never get to tell, that I would become an erasure, an eddy in a river pulled suddenly flat. I began to feel certain that, hidden inside Somalia, inside this unknowable and stricken place, we would never be found.

1

My World

When I was a girl, I trusted what I knew about the world. It wasn’t ugly or dangerous. It was strange and absorbing and so pretty that you’d want to frame it. It came to me in photographs and under gold covers, in a pile of magazines, back-issue National Geographics bought for twenty-five cents apiece at a thrift store down the road. I kept them stacked on a nightstand next to my bunk bed. I reached for them when I needed them, when the apartment where we lived got too noisy. The world arrived in waves and flashes, as a silvery tide sweeping over a promenade in Havana or the glinting snowfields of Annapurna. The world was a tribe of pygmy archers in the Congo and the green geometry of Kyoto’s tea gardens. It was a yellow-sailed catamaran in a choppy Arctic Sea.

I was nine years old and living in a town called Sylvan Lake. The lake was six miles long, a Pleistocene gash in the vast brown prairie of Alberta, Canada—well north of the Calgary skyline, well south of the oil rigs scattered around Edmonton, a hundred or so miles east of the Rocky Mountains, a solidly in-between place. In July and August, tourists came to float on the lake’s calm surface and toss fishing lines from the docks of their cottages. There was a downtown marina next to a red-topped lighthouse and a small amusement park where vacationers bought tickets to ride down a giant spiraling water slide or run through a play maze made from brightly painted plywood. All summer long, the sounds of laughing kids and the buzz of motorboats floated through town.

We were new to Sylvan Lake. My mother, having split from my father a few years earlier, had moved my two brothers and me there from Red Deer, the small city where we’d always lived, fifteen minutes down the road. Russell, her boyfriend, had come with us, and so had his younger brother, Stevie. His uncles and cousins and other brothers and second cousins often dropped in on us for payday parties and ended up in our apartment for days, camped out in our living room. I remember their faces hoisted in sleep, their slim brown arms hanging from the sides of our chairs. My mother referred to Russell and his family as Native, but around town, people called them Indians.

Our building was a white stucco fourplex with a pitched roof and dark wood balconies. The recessed windows of our basement apartment were small and narrow and let in next to no daylight. A green municipal Dumpster sat in the gravel parking lot outside. My mother, a fan of all things bright and tropical, hung a teal shower curtain in our new bathroom and draped a brightly patterned spread over her bed. Out in the living room, she parked her exercise bike next to our old brown sofa.

People always looked at my mother. She was tall and lean, with dramatic cheekbones and dark permed hair she kept fluffed up around the ears. She had limpid brown eyes that suggested a kind of vulnerability, the possibility that she might be easily talked in and out of things. Five days a week, she put on a white dress with red piping and drove back to Red Deer to work a cash register at Food City. She returned with whole flats of generic-brand juice boxes, bought with her discount, which we stashed in the freezer and ate after school using spoons. Sometimes she came home with a plastic tray of bakery leftovers, Danishes and éclairs gone sticky after a day under glass. Other times she brought video rentals that we never returned.

Russell worked only sometimes, signing on for a few weeks or occasionally a few months of contract work as a tree trimmer with an arbor company called High Tree, cutting limbs away from power lines along narrow roads. He was thin as a whippet and wore his dark hair long around his shoulders and feathered on the sides. When he wasn’t working, he dressed in thin silk shirts in colors like purple and turquoise. Etched on his left forearm was a homemade tattoo, a blue-lined bird with broad wings, an eagle or a phoenix, maybe. Its outline had begun to fade, the bird’s details washed into a pale blur on his skin, like something belonging on the body of a much older man. He was twenty-one to my mother’s thirty-two.

We’d known Russell for years before he became my mom’s boyfriend, since the time he was thirteen, our families knit together by some combination of bad luck and Christian largesse. He had been raised on the Sunchild First Nation Reserve. His father had disappeared early; his mother died in a car accident. My mother’s parents, who lived about an hour’s drive from the reserve, ran a Pentecostal summer camp for First Nations kids and ended up taking in Russell and his four younger brothers as foster children. My mother and her siblings were long gone at that point, and the Native kids offered my grandparents a kind of second go-round at parenting.

My grandfather was a welder, and my grandmother sold Tupperware—more Tupperware, in fact, than anybody in central Alberta, with regional sales records and a company minivan to prove it. For many years, they hauled Russell and the other boys along to church and prodded them through high school. They drove them to track meets and hockey games and to weaving classes at the Native Friendship Center.

When the boys brawled, my grandmother sighed and told them to go on outside and get it all out. She forgave them when they stole money from her. She forgave them when they cussed her out. The boys grew into teenagers and then into young men. One made it to college; the rest ended up somewhere between the reserve and Red Deer. What nobody banked on, what Jesus himself might never have foretold, is that somewhere along the way, coming home to her parents’ farmhouse for visits and holiday meals, my mother—with her three little kids and imploding marriage to my father—would fall for Russell.

*

She called him Russ. She did his laundry for him. She liked to kiss him in public. Every so often he bought her roses. Early in my childhood, I’d thought of him like a sideways cousin, but now Russell—having moved directly from my grandparents’ house into mine—was something different, a hybrid of kid and grown-up, of kin and interloper. He did kickboxing moves in our living room and ate potato chips on the couch. Once in a while, he bought stuffed animals for me and my little brother, Nathaniel.

A funny little family was what my grandmother called us. My older brother, Mark, put it differently. A fucked-up little family was what he said.

I’d been to the Sunchild reserve a couple of times to visit Russell’s relatives, always over the protests of my father, who thought the place was dangerous but no longer had any say. Russell’s cousins lived in low-slung tract homes built along dirt roads. During our visits we ate bannock, a sweet, chewy fry bread, and ran around with kids who never went to school and drank cans of beer out of brown paper bags. Every house, as I remember it, had walls cratered with fist holes. I recognized the shape because Russell sometimes did it to the drywall at our house.

My mother’s life with Russell might have been viewed as a kind of screw-you directed at all the white kids she went to high school with in Red Deer, most of whom still lived around town. My mother had left home at sixteen and gotten pregnant with Mark at twenty. Russell gave her an odd new cachet. He was young and mildly handsome and came from a place that people considered wild and unusual, if also dirty and poor. My mother wore beaded earrings and drove around town in a little white hatchback car, a feathered dream catcher fluttering from her rearview mirror.

There was also the fact that my father, her early-twenties sweetheart, the man holding her babies in the delivery room photos, had recently announced that he was gay. A fit young guy with a big smile and a neatly trimmed beard named Perry had moved into my dad’s house. When we visited, Perry took us swimming at the rec-center pool, while my father, who had never cooked in his life, made us bachelor-style dinners. He rolled lunch-meat ham into cylinders speared with toothpicks and surrounded them with a few slices of cheese and some celery, adding a piece of bread on the side. He laid our plates on the table—all four food groups duly represented.

My father had begun building his new life. He hosted dinner parties with Perry and enrolled in college to become a rehab practitioner and assist mentally disabled people. My mother, meanwhile, worked on her own resurrection. She read self-help books and watched Oprah on her off days.

In the evenings, Russell poured rye whiskey from a big bottle into a tall plastic cup. My mother sat with her feet resting in his lap on our sofa in front of the TV. More than once, he pointed at the screen, at the moment’s hot cop or tidy-haired young dad. He’d say, You think that guy’s good-looking, don’t you, Lori?

It was a flicker we all recognized.

I’ll bet, Russell would continue, his eyes on my mother, you wish you were with someone like that.

A pause. The TV man’s face would seem, in an instant, to melt and reshape itself into something more aggressive and leering.

Right, Lori? That’s what you’re thinking?

My mother responded gently. He’d broken some of her bones before. He’d hurt her badly enough to keep her in the hospital for days. As the rest of us stared hard at the television and the air in the room grew electric, she’d reach for Russell’s arm and squeeze.

No, baby, she’d say. Not even a little.

*

Mark was thirteen and on the brink of a lot of things. He had a scraggly mullet, blue eyes, and a washed-out denim jacket he rarely removed. He was a solitary kid, given to roaming, the devoted owner of a slingshot made of hard plastic. Nathaniel, meanwhile, was six years old and had a cyst on his lower-right eyelid, giving him a baleful look. My mom and Russell doted on him, calling him Bud and Little Buddy. At night he slept in the bunk beneath mine, clutching a stuffed rabbit.

It was Mark I followed around, trailing him like a dinghy behind a boat.

Check this out, he said one day after school as we stood in front of the green Dumpster outside our apartment building. This was several weeks after we’d moved to Sylvan Lake, a warm afternoon in early fall. I was in fourth grade, and Mark had just started middle school. Neither one of us had many friends. The kids in our new town instantly had read us as poor and uninteresting. Mark planted his hands on the lip of the bin and boosted himself upward, slinging a leg over and dropping inside. Seconds later, his head bobbed up again, his face flushed, his hand wrapped around an empty Labatt bottle. He waved it at me. Come on, Amanda, he said, there’s money in here.

Our Dumpster served as an openmouthed repository for the whole neighborhood’s trash, collected by a town truck every Wednesday. It became my brother’s version of a country club swimming pool. The interior, even on the crispest days of October, was soft and damp like an old leaf pile, smelling like sour milk. The two of us slid between mounded bags, their skins greased by leaked liquids and loose trash, our voices ringing tightly off the walls. Mark ripped into sealed garbage bags, pitching cans and bottles out onto the grassy strip in front of the apartment, rooting up lost quarters, old lipsticks, pill bottles, and Magic Markers, most of which he stuffed into his back pocket or tossed in my direction. Once he held up a fuzzy pink sweater, just my size, and gave a little shrug of outrage. Jeez, what’s wrong with people?

We loaded the empties into plastic shopping bags and, smelling like old food and malt, carried them to the bottle depot in town. Twenty cans equaled a dollar. One Food City bag usually held fifteen cans. One bag x fifteen cans x five cents = seventy-five cents. A dollar-fifty for two bags; three bucks for four. And then the sum total divided in two—half for Mark and half for me. No fourth-grade math lesson could compare. The real money lay in what we called sixties or sixty-pounders—terms gleaned from Russell—the hefty sixty-ounce liquor bottles that got us an easy two dollars from the bottle depot man. These were our gold.

Over time, Mark and I began to travel, a few blocks north and south of our street, over to the cul-de-sacs where single families lived in bungalows instead of apartments, visiting five or six garbage bins regularly. Better real estate, for the most part, meant better garbage.

You’d be surprised at what people throw away, even poor people. You might find a doll with a missing arm or a perfectly good videotape of a perfectly good movie. I remember finding an emptied-out wallet, brown leather, with a delicate gold clasp. Another time I found a pristine white handkerchief with smiling cartoon characters embroidered on it. I kept them both for years, the handkerchief folded up neatly inside the wallet, a reminder of all that was pretty and still to be found.

*

I almost always blew my bottle money in one place, at a thrift store by the lake. The store was underlit and arranged like a rabbit’s warren, selling old clothes, porcelain knickknacks, and the literary detritus of summertime tourists—fat Tom Clancy thrillers and everything by Danielle Steel. The National Geographics were kept on a shelf in a far corner, their yellow spines facing outward and neatly aligned.

Lured by what I saw on the covers, I took home whatever I could afford. I snapped up the mossy temples at Angkor and skeletons brushed free of volcano ash on Vesuvius. When the magazine asked ARE THE SWISS FORESTS IN PERIL?, I was pretty sure I needed to know. This is not to say that I didn’t, in equal measure, rummage through the Archie comics sold new in a different corner of the store, studying Veronica’s clingy clothes and Betty’s pert ponytail, the sultry millionaire’s daughter versus the sweet, earnest go-getter. Theirs was a language I was only just starting to understand.

I kept the Archies in a drawer but put the National Geographics on a table in my bedroom. By Thanksgiving, I had accumulated probably two dozen. Sometimes I would fan them out like I’d seen on the coffee tables at the homes of some of the fancier kids from my old school. My uncle Tony—my father’s brother and the richest person in our family—was a subscriber. At night, in my top bunk in Sylvan Lake, I went through the magazines page by page, feeling awe for what they suggested about the world. There were Hungarian cowboys and Austrian nuns and Parisian women spraying their hair before going out for the night. In China, a nomad woman churned yak yogurt into yak butter. In Jordan, Palestinian kids lived in tents the color of potatoes. And somewhere in the Balkan Mountains, there was a bear who danced with a gypsy.

The world sucked the dankness out of the carpet in our basement apartment. It de-iced the walkway outside, lifted the lead out of the sky over the plains. When at school a girl named Erica called across the hallway that I was a dirty kid, I shrugged like it didn’t matter. My plan was to move on, far away from my school and street and from girls named Erica.

*

One evening just before I started fifth grade, Carrie Crowfoot and I went walking around town. Carrie was a beautiful Blackfoot girl, a year older than I was, and one of my few friends. She had long black hair and almond-shaped eyes and eyelashes that stuck straight out. She was related to Russell somehow and had moved with her mother and brothers from the Sunchild reservation to Sylvan Lake. She lived in a house a few doors down from the thrift store and never went to school.

At ten years old and with no money, Carrie still managed to work a brassy kind of glamour. She sassed the patronizing shopkeeper who sold us five-cent pieces of gum and bragged to me about various kids she’d beaten up when she lived at the reserve. When she came to my house, she never looked twice at our ratty furniture or Russell’s stray cousins lounging boozily in our chairs. I liked that she’d pronounced the dinner of crushed dry Ichiban noodles I’d served her amazing, that she’d recently enlightened me about what a blow job was.

We wandered along Lakeshore Drive, heading toward the amusement park. A cool wind had picked up over the water. It was early September. Tourist season was pretty well over. The sidewalks were empty; a few cars hurtled past. Carrie complained often about how dull Sylvan Lake was, saying she wanted to move back to Sunchild. She was jealous that I got to stay with my dad in Red Deer on weekends. I might have told her it was nothing to envy, but the truth was, I counted down the days. My father’s house had plush carpeting and thick walls. I had my own bedroom with a brown ruffled bedspread and a cassette player with New Kids on the Block tapes and a collection of new paperbacks, entire sets of the Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins series. I said nothing about any of it to Carrie.

At the marina, rows of powerboats floated in their dock slips. The amusement park lay dormant. The fiberglass waterslide stood drained for the night, skeletal against a pink sky.

You ever seen what’s in there? Carrie asked, kicking a foot against a shuttered ticket kiosk. I shook my head.

Before long, she’d found a way to pull herself up from the top of a garbage bin to straddle the high wall of the Crazy Maze, which zigzagged like a cattle fence around one edge of the park. Abruptly, she disappeared behind it. I heard sneakers hit pavement and then a laugh.

I was a frightened kid, almost all the time. I was scared of the dark and I was scared of strangers and I was scared of breaking bones and also of going to doctors. I was scared of the police, who sometimes came to our house when Russell’s crew got noisy in our living room. I was afraid of heights. I was afraid of making decisions. I didn’t like dogs. I was supremely afraid of being laughed at. And in this moment, I had a sure feeling about what would happen next: Not wanting Carrie to make fun of me, I would scramble up the wall, get dizzy, fall down, break some bones. The police would come—strangers, all of them—and they would bring their dogs. Naturally, this would all happen in the dark, and then I’d have to go to the doctor.

Which was why I almost turned on my heel and ran. But the way home was dark now, too, and I could hear Carrie calling from inside the maze. I heaved myself up onto the garbage can and boosted myself to the top of the wall. Then I jumped.

As I landed, Carrie took off running. In the dim light, her hair seemed to glint blue. The interior walls had been painted with bright amateur renderings of clowns and cowboys and silly monsters—whatever would amp up the joy and light terror of summertime kids running free.

Carrie Crowfoot and I would be friends only another six months. Her mother would move the family back to the Sunchild reserve sometime that spring. Before that, I’d start to get more interested in the kids I met at school and in school itself, getting chosen for an enrichment group for advanced students. Carrie would remain an outlier, uninterested in school and seemingly not required to go. A few years later, when I was finishing middle school, I would hear from my grandmother that Carrie had a baby. I wouldn’t know much more about how things went for her, because eventually, my family would purge all of them from our lives, Russell and Carrie and most everyone we knew during this time.

Inside the maze that night, though, she was impossible not to follow. We were fast, corkscrewing around corners, screeching to a stop when we hit an abrupt dead end. When I think back on it, I imagine we might have squealed as we ran, heady with the moment’s disorientation. The truth is, we were serious and silent but for the sound of our thwupping sneakers and the rustling of our jackets. Carrie’s hair floated behind her as she charged ahead, sidewinding through the alleyways, caught up in the split-second decision-making about which way to go next. Finally, though, we allowed ourselves to relax and feel giddy, forgetting that it was dark and we were trespassing, forgetting everything that scared or haunted us, lost in the playland we’d never before seen.

*

High Tree, Russell’s arbor company, was having a big holiday party at a restaurant in Red Deer. My mother had been thinking about it for weeks. After her shifts at the supermarket, she’d go looking at dresses in the Parkland Mall, flicking through the sale racks. At home, she announced she was on a diet.

We put up a Christmas tree in one corner of the living room, a raggedy pine that my mother had picked from the parking lot sale at Food City. She went to the Christmas Bureau in Red Deer, signed a paper attesting to the fact she had three kids and made seven dollars per hour, and picked up gifts for free. They’d been collected and wrapped by volunteers, embellished with colorful curling ribbons. I knew which two of the presents beneath the tree were for me because they were both labeled GIRL, AGE 9.

A few days before the party, my mother got a new perm. She’d found a dress, which was hanging in her bedroom closet. It was black and shimmery, and already I’d spent a lot of time touching it.

Now it was Friday night. Russell had showered and put on a pair of black pants and a collared shirt buttoned neatly up to his neck. He poured some rye and sat on the couch, pulling a squirming Nathaniel onto his lap. Stevie, Russell’s seventeen-year-old brother, was babysitting. We were waiting for my mother.

The blow dryer hummed from the bedroom. Mark and Stevie clicked cassettes in and out of our boom box, fast-forwarding to the songs they liked, while I did math homework on the floor. Nathaniel, holding his stuffed bear, had drifted over to the TV and pressed his face close against the screen, trying to hear over the noise.

Russell poured a second drink and then a third. He hooked one leg over the other and began good-naturedly to sing: Loooori LoooooRIIII.

When she walked down the hallway, we all turned to look. Her black dress was short in the front and long in the back, cascading in a pile of ruffles that brushed the floor. Her thin legs flashed as she walked. She wore new shoes.

As if following a script, Russell rose to his feet. My mother’s cheeks looked flushed, her eyes bright, her lips painted red. Her pale skin looked creamy against the black dress, which was so tight and shiny it seemed shellacked onto her body. We kids held our breath, waiting to hear what Russell would say.

Fucking A was what he said. You look awesome.

True enough, my mother looked like a movie star. She smiled and held out a hand to Russell. She kissed our cheeks to say good night. We were cheering, as I remember it, literally shouting with excitement about the grand time they would have.

Russell put down his cup, found my mother’s dress-up coat, an ill-fitting mink number she’d inherited from my great-grandmother, and then he whirled her out the door.

*

That night we watched movies from our video collection. We watched Three Men and a Baby and then the new Batman. I made popcorn in the popper and passed it out in bowls. Somewhere in Red Deer, my mother was dancing with Russell. I imagined a ballroom scene with glittering pendant lights and wide-mouthed glasses of champagne. I dipped in and out of sleep until it was late and I woke up with a jolt. The TV screen was dark, the apartment silent. I pulled Nathaniel from his spot on the floor and guided him to the room we shared, nudging his sleepy body onto the bed. I climbed up into my bunk, a trace of holiday sparkle still lit in my head, and went to sleep for real.

There was a surreal quality to what came next. There always was, if only because these things—when they happened—almost always happened in the middle of the night. My mother’s shouting would tunnel into my sleeping mind, gradually stripping the scenery out of my dreams, until there was no more clinging to unconsciousness and I was fully awake.

Something crashed in our living room. There was a shriek. Then a grunt. I knew these sounds. She was fighting back. Sometimes I’d see scratch marks on his neck in the morning. The words were streaming out of Russell, high-pitched, hysterical, something about cutting out her eyeballs, something about blood on the floor, so much of it that nobody would know who she was. You cunt, I heard him say. Then a big thud, also recognizable: the sofa being flipped.

I heard her run from the kitchen to the living room and down the hallway. I heard her panting outside our door before he caught her and threw her against it. I could hear him breathing, too, both of them seeming to gasp. In the bunk below me, Nathaniel started to cry.

Are you scared? I whispered, staring at the dark ceiling.

It was an unfair question. He was six years old.

We had tried before to stop it. We had dashed out of our rooms and started yelling only to have the two of them, their eyes dark and wild, run to their bedroom and slam the door. If my mother wanted our help, she wouldn’t show it. Sometimes I’d hear Stevie in the hallway saying Hey, cool it to his brother. C’mon, Russ. But he, too, grew meek in the face of their fury. Eventually, a neighbor would call the police.

A few times my mother had gone to the women’s shelter in Red Deer. She’d made promises to my grandmother and grandfather that she’d leave Russell, but before long they’d be back together. At the women’s shelter, there were shiny linoleum floors, lots of kids, and heaps of good toys to play with. I remember my father looking crushed when he came there to pick us up.

The holiday-party fight wound down pretty quickly, my mother and Russell stalking back into each other’s arms, my popcorn strewn across the living room, the couch frame broken, a fresh hole in the wall. I knew how these things went. The next morning Russell would weep and apologize to all of us. For a few weeks, he’d be repentant. He’d sit in the living room with his head down and talk to God, looping through the language we knew from our grandparents’ church—dear Lord our savior in your name blessed be your son please save me from Satan yours is the way and in Jesus Christ thank you and amen. In the evenings, he’d make a big show of going to A.A. meetings. My mother, for those weeks, would have more power. She’d order Russell around, telling him to pick up his clothes and run the vacuum cleaner.

But the needle on some unseen inner gauge would start to quiver and creep back toward red. The contrition would slip away. My mother would blithely go out one afternoon to get her hair cut and come back, by Russell’s estimation, late. He’d be waiting on the couch, his voice a flipped blade. What took you so long, Lori? And Who were you meeting, all whored up like that? I’d watch my mother blanch as it dawned on her that the jig was up, that before long—maybe tonight, maybe three weeks from now—he’d go nuts on her again.

I couldn’t profess to understand it. I never would. I just tried to move past it. By the time the lights were off and all the bodies had settled, I was gone, launched. My mind swept from beneath the bed-sheets, up the stairs, and far away, out over the silky deserts and foaming seawaters of my National Geographic collection, through forests full of green-eyed night creatures and temples high on hills. I was picturing orchids, urchins, manatees, chimps. I saw Saudi girls on a swing set and cells bubbling under a microscope, each one its own waiting miracle. I saw pandas, lemurs, loons. I saw Sistine angels and Masai warriors. My world, I was pretty certain, was elsewhere.

2

The Drink

When I was nineteen years old, I moved to Calgary. For any kid from central Alberta, Calgary is the big city, a beacon of possibility, ringed by busy highways, its glass towers rising up from the plains like a forest. It’s also an oil town, a boom-and-bust headquarters for stock traders and energy executives working to extract and sell the huge reserves of oil sitting beneath the soil. I arrived in 2000, when times were especially good. Oil prices were on their way to doubling, and before the year was out, they’d triple. Calgary was flush with wealth and new construction. Glitzy restaurants and shops were opening at a frenetic pace.

My boyfriend, Jamie, moved with me. He was a year older than I was and had grown up on a farm south of Red Deer. We’d been dating for about eight months. Dark-eyed and brown-haired, he was handsome in a Johnny Depp way, with narrow shoulders and strong hands that helped make him an excellent carpenter. The two of us liked to trawl through thrift shops, putting together outfits we thought of as edgy. Jamie dressed in cowboy shirts with cloudy mother of pearl buttons. I wore anything that was sequined, along with the biggest earrings I could find. He could play any instrument, from the harmonica to the bongos to the violin. He strummed love songs on his guitar. He worked construction jobs when he needed money but otherwise spent whole days drawing pictures or playing music. I was totally smitten.

I thought that in Calgary, Jamie could record a CD, maybe get some sort of deal. For me, too, the city would be a new platform—though for what, I wasn’t exactly sure. We found a one-bedroom apartment in a dirty downtown high-rise. Our bed was a mattress on the floor. Jamie painted the bathroom walls yellow. I hung pictures and set houseplants on the windowsill. My life felt instantly urban, adult. But the city was expensive. I got a job at a clothing store, a different branch of a national chain I’d worked for in Red Deer during high school. Jamie found work washing dishes at Joey Tomato’s, a trendy restaurant in the Eau Claire Market, while looking for a job in construction. Between the two of us, we could barely make rent.

On a bitingly cold afternoon not long after we arrived in Calgary, I put on my winter coat, a vintage brown leather jacket with an enormous fur collar, and went out walking with a pile of résumés tucked in a manila folder. I wanted to try my luck as a waitress. I had never worked in a restaurant, but when I saw the girls who worked at Joey Tomato’s, I was both jealous and awed. They glided around in high heels. Jamie told me they made a lot of money.

*

The first place I walked into, mostly because I was cold, was a nice-looking Japanese restaurant with a glossy black sushi bar and hanging lamps styled to look like lanterns. It was the post-lunch lull. Techno music pulsed quietly over the stereo, while a couple of strikingly beautiful waitresses set tables for dinner. In a far corner, about six men were having some sort of lunch meeting, papers spread out in front of them on the table. I sheepishly handed my résumé to the willowy Japanese hostess and stammered a few words about having just moved to the city. I thanked her and turned toward the door. It was clear I would not fit in.

Hey, wait a second, somebody called.

One of the men from the corner table followed me to the entry. He looked to

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