No Regrets

Life, and John and Mike had been even more eclectic in their choice of cigarette brands: Pall Malls, Marlboros, and Kool Lights.
    Kari’s nylons were on the floor of the backseat, and her Nordstrom’s sweater, turned inside out.
    John Martin and Mike Hutson were taken first to the Sierra County Jail in Downieville, and later transferred back to Solano County to be booked into jail there.
    Whatever John’s and Mike’s grievances against a cruel and uncaring world had been
before
they abducted Kari, they had escalated their troubles through their bumbling, obviously unchoreographed kidnapping. Even so, they were infinitely dangerous, the way a vicious dog is—just because they were so unpredictable. Had Kari Lindholm not taken a chance and run away from John in the campground that was far away from where she was kidnapped, they might well have killed her.
    She would always think of what
might
have happened if the hunters hadn’t stopped for lunch at precisely the time she and her kidnappers were at the campground.Sober, John and Mike went back and forth about what they would do to her. Drunk, they had looked at her with different, colder eyes.
    Deputies took Kari to the Sierra Nevada Memorial Miner’s Hospital in Grass Valley for an examination to establish that she had been raped, and to glean what physical evidence there might be. Doctors there brought out a rape kit, and took swabs, washings, and combings from her pubic area and her vaginal vault. They retrieved dark pubic hairs—not her own—and preserved some nonmotile sperm cells. They would help to convict John of raping her.
    It was hideously ironic; Kari and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for months without success. And now she was afraid she might be pregnant from the rape.
    “If your next period is late,” the ER doctor said, “I think you should take an early pregnancy test.”
    She felt sick.
    There was no effective antipregnancy pill at the time, and what if she was pregnant with her husband’s baby and didn’t know it yet? If she should prove to have conceived, and chose to have an abortion, she might be killing the baby they had both longed for.
    She also dreaded that she had contracted some sexually transmitted disease. The doctor wrote a prescription for a heavy dose of antibiotics just in case. “Keep taking them,” he warned, “until they’re all gone. And, of course, you’ll have to be tested for a number of diseases.”
    The meds made her violently ill, and she vomited often. (Long after Kari had recovered somewhat from herinitial shock, she continued to have nausea from the prophylactic pills. But when she asked why her rapist couldn’t be
tested
to see if he had any disease, she was told that wasn’t possible because that would “rob him of his rights to privacy!”)
    Back in the world that had seemed safe only the day before, Kari found that everything had changed. She couldn’t go back to the job she loved at Sancho Panza. She was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so severe that she had to go on disability. She had really never known fear before, but being in the big old house that was Sancho Panza triggered too many memories.
    Kari had not become pregnant after being raped, and that was a tremendous relief. She kept taking the meds that would fight STDs and, eventually, got a clean bill of health. John Martin was never tested—which would have saved her months of nausea from the antibiotics.
    When Kari failed to conceive, she learned about a baby that might be available for adoption. “That one good thing happened, though,” Kari remembers. “I wasn’t pregnant and I couldn’t get pregnant with my husband. One of the alumnae at Sancho Panza was about to have a baby that she could not keep. We adopted him. He had his problems; he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome because of her drinking, but we never regretted adopting him. We felt blessed to have him. He’s a wonderful boy who overcame so much.”
    Unfortunately, Kari and Ben’s good marriage gradually disintegrated, too often one of the tragic aftermaths when a wife has been raped. Some men can cope with it, andothers cannot get it out of their minds. Even though they understand intellectually that a forced sexual attack is nothing their wives wanted or caused, some husbands can’t deal with it emotionally. Ben and Kari Lindholm were divorced after eight years of marriage.
    “My being raped was a large part of the problem,” she