A Journey into Conversion - Part VI

Continued from Part V

This is a true story – mine. This is the sixth part of many.

A Journey into Conversion
Part VI

Helen and I rushed over to the hospital to find Joe in a neck brace with tears in his eyes. Helen began a contained wail and comforted him.

To my surprise, the nurse was a grade school chum. He told me Joe was ok, that he wasn’t seriously hurt. He turned to Joe and let him know that he knew me, told him “I was a nice girl” and that he’d be ok with me.

Well, nice girls can turn into suckers easily. My nativity it would turn out was the perfect fence for Joe.

Joe was released from the hospital the same day but experienced a back injury and the pain that goes along with it.

Joe would go to his doctor’s appointments and come home upset. I started making phone calls on his behalf because he was complaining of not being treated fairly. I saw his pain at home and decided I would go with him to his appointments.

At one of these appointments the doctor asked Joe to walk across the room. I couldn’t believe how much he exaggerated his gait, wincing and moaning in pain. He never did this at home. I said nothing in front of the physician but when he left, I asked Joe what he thought he was doing? He had to exaggerate the injury he told me, or else they wouldn’t believe him.

Shortly after his accident the phone calls started. My phone would ring at least three times a day or more, everyday for weeks. Sometimes there would be a man without an accent claiming he was Joe’s friend Mohammed and he was looking for him or else they call, wait for me to answer, then hang up.

I questioned Joe about the calls. Any of his friends named Mohammed had accents. The calls were starting to bother me and he seemed concerned so I wanted to call the police. “No!” he exclaimed I wasn’t to do that.

There were times I was sure someone was peering into my apartment through the back door window. On another occasion Joe would report to me that he saw a young guy in a hooded sweatshirt walk through the side yard and up my back stairs. I was insulted when he assumed this guy was a “new boyfriend” and started to question his motives for making the accusation. Was he starting to cover up something?

Finally, his best friend confirmed that the phones calls and spying was probably from the insurance company who hired a private detective to check up on Joe’s injuries. They just do that he assured me. But the phone calls continued.

*****

In another of our coffee house conversations, Joe told me about Lebanese in London Ontario who would steal cars, repaint them and sell them as used. This wouldn’t click in for me until years later when I bought a car from an Arabic guy in London.

On our trip back from Niagara Falls, Joe and I stopped for coffee. Some guy had locked his keys in his car and was trying to retrieve them. Joe was watching and decided to help out. Just as he was sticking something in between the top of the window and the lining to push the lock open, a cop car pulled up. The cop noticed how quickly he opened the car and said so. I noticed too but figured he was just helping the guy.

About three months after the accident Joe and Helen decided to move. By this time the insurance company had settled with Joe and he got a new car. Weeks before he had been lying in bed with back pain and miraculously the day they moved he was moving fridges and stoves. I watched him. What is he doing I asked myself?

He was also talking about going to Detroit to work for cash because he couldn’t find work in Canada. (This is true. Finding a good employer in Ontario is hard enough for Ontarians but even harder if you’re a visible minority.) It was at this time Joe casually mentioned marrying an American woman to get his Green Card.

I knew Joe had been talking to his ex-girlfriend because he would tell me about their conversations. He thought it was necessary to let me know that she “would do anything for him”. I understood “anything” as a conversion to Islam or giving in to questionable sexual practices that he tried to force on me one night but stopped because of my screaming. I didn’t realize that my terror of what was actually happening could have landed him in jail if I made the effort to go to the police. He didn’t attempt it again.

Though Joe had suggested we “see other people” he was still keeping an eye on me. Cabs were following me if I left to go out or else that they were constantly driving by my apartment. The phone calls were continuing to my place after he left but by this time they were hang-ups and not so frequent.

*****

Before Joe had moved to the other house with Helen, he wanted to go to Toronto to get his visitor’s visa to get to the United States so he could work under the table. We left in a rented van and decided that we would go to visit my son while we were there.

The wait was long so I decided to wait in the car. I got bored and left a note for Joe that I was going for a walk. We had been arguing about something earlier, I think that he didn’t want me to stay in the car by myself but that I didn’t feel like waiting in line for hours.

I found a library at one of the buildings nearby. After about an hour Joe showed up. I couldn’t believe that he found me because I didn’t even know the library was there before I left to take my walk. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew how to find me like that, but he always was perceptive.

We visited my son at a friend’s house while Joe spent the night in pain. On the way up we were arguing about cultural stuff and he seemed to be in a depressed mood.

On the way home I drove part of the way, I noticed he tore a piece of a coffee cup up and began to write in Arabic on it. He wouldn’t tell me what he was writing. When we stopped for gas I noticed he threw it in the garbage but I retrieved it.

When Joe drove it was erratic. On one point of the 401 but when there were no cars around I noticed that he had turned the wheel of the van sharply and it swerved towards the shoulder. There was nothing in our path to make him swerve. He was doing it deliberately.

I wanted to know what he was doing but he ignored me. I decided I would move to the back of the van because I felt he was trying to kill us or at least get us pretty smashed up.