Finding Me (12 page)

A couple of hours after that he usually came down to the basement wearing a flannel shirt and jeans. He often smelled like rum or beer or weed. He smoked a lot of marijuana: I could smell it all over the house. When he got to the bottom of the stairs, he sometimes had his jeans unzipped and his junk out. He was usually hard, like he had already been playing with himself. If all of these things happened one right after the other, I knew it had to be after work.

Nighttime—that’s when he always did the worst stuff to me. At the end of the day, whenever I heard his boots coming down the stairs, I tried to prepare myself for the next three or four hours of torture, but there’s really no way to prepare for hell. The only way I could get through it was to pretend it wasn’t happening.

At night or on the weekends sometimes he showed up with a little more food. It could be anything, but it was usually something that had sat around, like dried-up pizza, spoiled beans with hard white rice, warm runny yogurt, or a stale taco. It was all total crap.

“If you wanna eat again today,” he’d say, “then you’d better do what I tell you.” Before I could even take a bite, he would unlock the chains, jerk me over to the pile of dirty clothes, and do the most disgusting things to me. As he did, I tried to switch my mind over to something that made me happy.
Anything
. Sometimes I thought about the Christmas when I got Joey the football. Or the day when Roderick gave me that pretty scarf. Or that time when my cousin, April, and I had so much fun roller-skating. Or how much I missed the taste of french fries from Arby’s. I also thought of music I liked. “The wheels on the bus go round and round … round and round … round and round,” I sang softly. Singing it made me remember Joey’s sweet smile and his cute button nose. Other times I hummed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” or “Angel of Mine,” that beautiful song from the gospel choir at the Baptist church I went to when I lived under the bridge. The dude was so busy torturing me that he didn’t even notice the noise I was making.

On a lot of nights I ran out of good stuff to sing or think about before the pounding stopped. After he zipped up his pants, he usually sat down and started talking trash. “Nobody is even looking for you,” he told me with a cruel smirk. “There ain’t been any fliers put around the neighborhood, and nothin’s been on the news. I can do whatever I want to you. No one gives a crap.”

I tried to act like I wasn’t listening, but his words shattered me into a million pieces. I hated him for saying what he said. I hated it even more that I had a feeling he might be right.
Was
anyone looking for me? Lots of people in Family Dollar would have seen me leaving with him; if my family put fliers around the neighborhood, why didn’t anyone recognize my picture and tell the cops I’d gone with him in his truck? It made me feel even worse, if that was possible, that maybe no one
was
looking for me.

Every week I had one more clue about which day it could be. One time, while he was drunk and talking too much, he told me that he was in some kind of Spanish band with some other dudes.

“I play the guitar. The band is really good.” He smiled like he’d won a Grammy or something.

I wanted to scream, “Do I look like I give a damn about your stupid band?” There I was, chained to a pole in a nasty basement in dirty, bloody clothes, red marks all over my body from the chains, my arms and legs tattooed with bruises from his beatings—how could the bastard think I gave a shit about his freaking band? But I just shrugged my shoulders.

Then one evening a couple of weeks later, he said, “The guys in the band are coming over tonight. You’d better not make a sound.” I’m pretty sure that was a Saturday because, after five days in a row of wearing his bus driver uniform, it was the first day he didn’t have it on.

Later that night I heard Maxine barking in the yard. She always went crazy whenever someone came near the house. Then I heard voices—probably around five or six, but I couldn’t be sure. It sounded like the men were saying stuff in fast Spanish. Then, after a few minutes, I started hearing music. It sounded like they were playing the drums, a tambourine, and a guitar. They all started singing real loud together, also in Spanish. Even if I could have let out a scream from under that helmet, there was no way any of those guys could hear me. The music was way too loud, and I was too far away from them. As best as I could tell, those guys came over just about every Saturday. That’s another way I could tell it was the first day of the weekend. But to be honest, it didn’t really matter that much which day it was. All my days ended in the exact same painful way.

W
HAT
DO
YOU
DO
after you spend so many hours alone in the dark? You start to go a little crazy, that’s what you do. Sometimes I would talk to Joey like he was right there in the basement with me. “How are you doing, my little huggy bear?” I said. “Come give Mommy a kiss.” A lot of the time I wracked my brain for ways I could get out of the chains, but after the first day, when I got the twisty bands off, the dude made sure I couldn’t get them off again. So there was nothing I could do but sit there in the dark and try to keep myself from going crazy. I slept for many hours. If I thought he had gone to work, I pounded the back of my helmet against the pole and rattled the chains, hoping a neighbor would hear the noise and call 911. In between, I prayed a lot—like, for hours on end. I remembered the Bible verse the minister in the Baptist church often read:

Although I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …

If the neighbors can’t hear me screaming, maybe God can,
I thought. But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, I began to wonder if God had forgotten me too.

H
E
KEPT
ME
DOWN
in that basement for what seemed like months. I tried to keep a count of the days in my head.
One day. Seven days. Thirteen. Thirty-three. Sixty-one. Ninety
. It went from wicked hot days to much colder days. And because I was only eating once or twice a day, I lost a lot of weight. Every week he had to tighten the chains.

The entire time I was in the basement I never got to wash up or take a shower. When my period came, he’d throw a few paper napkins on the floor in front of me. “Use these,” he said. I tried to roll them up and turn them into something like a tampon, but he never gave me enough, so I had brown blotches of dried blood all over my body. I also had so much of his dried semen in my hair that when I touched it, it was hard as a rock.

The whole basement smelled like a toilet because the dude hardly ever emptied that green bucket. I still had on the same T-shirt and underwear that I was wearing on the day he kidnapped me. My panties were so filthy that when he did turn on the light, I couldn’t see the beautiful butterfly print anymore. I was just barely alive on the outside, and on the inside I was cracking apart.

Off and on, I was so exhausted that I’d fall asleep. Sometimes I’d dream about Joey, and it was always the same dream. He’d be taking bouncy little steps toward me, but suddenly someone would grab his arm and start pulling him away. I’d try to reach out for him, but I was paralyzed, unable to move. As he was pulled from me, he began fading away, like he was going to disappear. I’d start to scream his name—and then I’d wake up.

And every single time I woke up reality smacked me in the head all over again. I’d open my eyes and remember that I was in the dude’s basement. I’d feel the chains biting into my flesh. I sank into despair when I tried yet again to work my hands out of the bindings and realized that I couldn’t get free.

My stomach growling; I’d have fantasies of eating my favorite foods. I’d picture a large order of Arby’s fries with hot sauce, sizzling hot and smelling like heaven. In my mind I’d take my time, nibbling little bites of each long, delicious fry until the whole container was gone. Or I’d go back to some of those meals at the church—the creamy mac and cheese melting on my tongue, the crunch of the crispy chicken skin between my teeth. Or those buttermilk biscuits, soft as a pillow, with a golden yellow pat of butter dissolving in the middle.

In my imagination I’d get so into the food that when I opened my eyes, it took me a minute to realize I wasn’t in the basement at the Baptist church, surrounded by all those nice ladies offering me a second helping. Instead, I was in the filthy basement of a sicko who was worse than any of the villains I’d read about in those horror stories.

In fact,
I realized,
I’m
living
in a horror story
.

11
______________

Lobo

“I’
M
TAKING
YOU
upstairs today.” The crazy dude stood over me in the dim light of the basement. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, so I figured it must be the weekend. I had heard him coming down the stairs as usual that morning, and I thought he was there for the routine—giving me some food. I was still half-asleep inside my helmet, so when I heard him speak, it caught me by surprise. He unlocked my chains and ordered me to stand up. Pins and needles prickled my legs as the blood rushed to my feet; I felt queasy and grabbed onto the pole for balance.

“Follow me,” he said.

I started to get excited.
Is he going to let me go, after all?
He’d mentioned letting me go at Christmas; had I been there longer than I thought?
Maybe he finally trusts me,
I thought
. Maybe I can make it out of here after all!

“Get moving,” he said, grabbing my arm and jerking me away from the pole.

I could hardly budge after being chained up for so long, but I managed to take one step forward. He didn’t say a word about why he was suddenly moving me, and I knew it would be foolish to ask. His hand gripping my arm, I followed him to the stairs, wading through the balled-up fast food wrappers and greasy tools. Then I followed him up the steps, holding onto the wall for balance.

When we got to the top of the stairs, he opened the door.
Sunlight!
I put both of my hands in front of my face. When you see daylight for the first time after a long time in the dark, it really burns your eyes! I stopped walking for a minute once I stepped into the kitchen, and for some reason he let me stop. Everything was pretty blurry, and I felt dizzy at first, until my eyes got used to all that light. It was warmer in the kitchen too, after the cold of the basement. I rubbed my arms in my thin T-shirt.

“We’re going up to the bedroom,” he said. He pointed toward the staircase, and I got scared, thinking about what could be waiting for me up there this time. I figured if he was going to kill me, he’d probably do it in the basement, but the dude was such a whackjob that nothing he did made sense. My teeth started to chatter as he pushed me up the stairs ahead of him.

We went back to the pink room, where he’d strung me up on the first day. The poles were gone, and an old mattress was in the corner. On the side of it was a bucket with a piece of cardboard on top; I knew what that was for. A very long chain with a padlock was on the bed. It looked like he had drilled some holes into the wall near the top of the bed and put that huge chain through it.

“Get over there,” he said, pushing me down onto the mattress. He wrapped the chain around my body several times and then attached it to the radiator near the bed. The chain was so tight around me that all I could do was sit up or lie down—but not stand.

“This is where you’re gonna be for a while,” he told me. I wanted to spit in his face, but I knew that that would get me sent right back to the basement. At least upstairs I had light.

After checking the chain, he yanked down his jeans and raped me again.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked, sobbing and trying to push him away. “Please stop! You don’t have to do this! Please let me go!”