Finding Me (21 page)

What was that all about?
I thought.
Why the heck would he let anyone in his family know that we’re up here?
I figured maybe taking a risk like that gave the dude a sick thrill, like the way he flaunted it that he was smarter than the cops and hadn’t gotten caught. But I didn’t really care why. All I cared about was that someone had finally seen us, even if it was just a little kid.

After a while we heard the people leaving the house. Gina and I were excited. We’d be rescued now, for sure! The kid would tell his mother or others in the family, and they’d come to investigate. We could hardly sleep that night for thinking of what we’d do when we got out. She couldn’t wait to see her family again. I couldn’t wait to see Joey.

“Social services is going to be my first stop, once I can make a phone call,” I told her.

But no one showed up the next day, or the next. A couple of days later I was chained up in his cubbyhole while he was in the kitchen, having a conversation on his phone. It seemed like he was talking to someone in his family. “No, the house ain’t ready,” he told whoever it was. “I need to clean up.” Although the person seemed to be insisting on coming by, the dude continued to say no. And then finally he said, “Maybe you can come by in a few days. Just let me get some stuff cleaned up.”

As soon as I heard him say that, something clicked. Kids are smart—and that little boy was definitely smart enough to know that something was wrong. I wondered whether he had told his mom or other family members about meeting us. If so, maybe that made Angie, or whoever was on the phone, suspicious. Maybe she wondered whether something was off with her dad and wanted to come by to check it out for herself.
Maybe
.

That night I could hardly sleep for hoping we were about to be rescued. I fantasized about seeing Joey again. I imagined what it would be like not to have these chains biting into my flesh twenty-four hours a day. I thought about taking a long, hot shower, eating food that wasn’t spoiled. Surely we were about to be set free! But again in the following days nothing at all happened.

About two weeks later the dude came upstairs and unlocked us. “You’re going down into the basement,” he told us.

I didn’t say anything to Gina, but I’m sure the look on my face told her everything: the thought of going back down into that dungeon scared the crap out of me. And there was another surprise that day: he made
all three
of us walk down those old dusty stairs together. He chained all of us to the pole by our necks and stomachs. He then crammed a filthy sock into each of our mouths and wound duct tape around our heads.

“If any of you makes a sound,” he said in a low voice, “I’ll shoot all three of you.” I guess by “sound” he meant moaning, because we were gagged. He then turned off the light. After he left I could hear him padlocking the door.

This was the very first time the three of us were in the same room alone together, but we were chained and gagged. It was frustrating not to be able to communicate. I was back where I’d started on that filthy basement floor, chained with my back to the pole. I tried to work the sock out of my mouth, but the duct tape was too tight.

Not long afterward I heard voices from upstairs. I think it was the dude’s family—it sounded like the same group of voices I heard on that day the grandson met us. I don’t know for sure if Angie was there, but I definitely heard her little boy. My heart nearly stopped beating and I held my breath through the dirty sock.

“What’s down here?” I heard a woman’s voice say. “Can you unlock this?”

There was a long pause. “I can’t,” the dude said. “It’s messy down there. There’s water all over the floor. I’m doing some work down there.”

I let out all the air through my nose. There was no way in hell the dude would ever open that door.

But whoever was there, why didn’t they call the cops right at that moment? Didn’t the person’s gut tell her something seemed fishy? When I think about it now I am so furious. We came
this clos
e to being found, but because someone didn’t call the police, we were still held prisoner in that bastard’s house.

Eventually the voices upstairs stopped, and I figured they’d left. I also thought they would go home and call the police, because they decided not to do it right then. Later the dude came down and removed our gags, gave us a little food, and then went back upstairs.

“Amanda, how are you doing in here—are you okay?” I asked after he left.

“I’m okay, I guess,” she said softly.

Gina and I took turns telling her the stories we had told each other—how we got kidnapped and what kinds of terrible things the dude had been doing to us.

“What about you?” I asked her.

She told us a little bit about how she was kidnapped. The dude offered her a ride home from her job at Burger King and then forced her into the house. When we confided in her about what the dude had done to us, she just said something like, “Yeah, same here.”

I figured Amanda was too scared or exhausted to talk. I felt sorry for her. “Well, all I know is that I don’t want to die here,” I finally said. I began to cry. I couldn’t stop myself—the water just came pouring out. “We’ve all got to be friends to each other. We have to find a way to get out of this rat hole. Now that we have each other, we have to stick together until we’re rescued. Maybe whoever was upstairs is calling the cops right now to come check it out.”

But yet again, no one came. And for about two weeks the three of us were chained together in that basement. The dude eventually loosened our chains a little and moved the piss bucket closer. If he wanted to have sex with one of us, he came down and took one of us back upstairs. In between all that, we talked a lot. We tried to think about ideas of how we could get out of there. We didn’t really have any great ideas; it’s hard to get free when you’re always chained up. Still, we tried to be imaginative about it. At least it helped to pass the time.

After more than two weeks of being stuck in that basement the dude finally took us back upstairs. Gina and I were still chained together in one room, and Amanda was in her own room. It seemed like we were back where we started before his grandson saw us. I just couldn’t believe someone hadn’t come to set us free.

I want to celebrate my homecoming, not my funeral. I still have so much I want to say and do. Life is too short not to live it right … from this day forward I will embrace everything good and desecrate all that is evil. I’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime now. I want the good in life without worrying. To be with people who are caring, smiles that last for miles, and love that’s forever lasting, a home that I call my own, not a prison. I may be defeated and beaten down, only to get back up again, to stand tall with head held high and my pride not shaken. Only to survive this horrible nightmare with my heart still attached and my soul not stolen and walk away without a scar on me.

19
 
The Van

I love life … My son is the most precious to me. I will give up anything to be with my son at home where I belong … Life changes from good to bad … in a blink of an eye your whole life can change, so you should live life like it’s your last days on earth because you never know when tragedy might strike. … Some people don’t have a family to turn to in time of need ... I can’t wait for this nightmare to end so I can wake up and be me again.

A
COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER,
one morning before the sun was even up, the dude dragged us down the stairs.

“I’m moving you into my van ’cause my family is coming over here soon,” he told us. His family had been to the house before, of course, so I figured he wanted to get us out of the room so he could show them around again. He probably wanted to prove to Angie, or whoever had been in the kitchen, that nothing strange was going on.

He had a large burgundy van parked in his backyard, one I’d seen there a few times before. He pushed us out the back door and into the yard. I looked around, hoping someone would see us, but no one seemed to be around this early in the morning. As soon as we climbed in, it was pretty clear he had planned this. The inside was big enough for about twelve people to sit. He had chains looped around the bottom of the seats in the middle. The two backseats had been removed, and there was a place to lie down. It smelled really bad in there. Under the rearview mirror hung a little sign that said “Puerto Rico,” the country where his family was from.

He locked up Gina and me together on the seats, and he chained Amanda by herself in back. Our chains were just long enough so we could use a portable pot he put in there, but they weren’t long enough to allow us to stand up and look out of the tinted windows. Before he shut the door he said, “If I hear a sound, I will come out here and kill all three of you.”

It was hotter than hell in that van. I passed out a couple of times from the summer heat. Most of the time I just slept. The dude didn’t let us have our notebooks or pencils, so I couldn’t even draw or write to Joey. My T-shirt was so wet with sweat that you could see through it. But then again, I was grateful to have a shirt on to soak up the sweat. I thought about all those days when I had laid dirty and naked on the basement floor. As bad as this was, that was even worse.

We stayed in the van for five days. On the first day the dude kept checking to make sure we weren’t trying to get loose or calling for help. And he gave us a little food and water. I was surprised and relieved when he didn’t make any of us have sex with him or take anyone back into the house. In the house he often forced himself on me twice a day, but that week he left me alone.

Early in the morning of the fourth day I heard him get into the van. I pretended like I was asleep, hoping he would just leave. He stayed in the back and whispered to Amanda for a while. I could see a bit of what happened next, but then I closed my eyes real tight. The only thing more horrible than being raped is watching it happen to someone else.

I didn’t know if the dude’s family ever came to the house. But he checked on us often, and I knew he had the gun. I thought about screaming, trying to attract attention from a neighbor or someone passing by, but he was in and out of the van unpredictably. He had me convinced that if he heard us yelling, he’d get to us and shoot us before anyone could find us. And by that time, after being chained up, raped, and beaten constantly for over two years, I thought he was capable of anything. I definitely believed he would shoot all of us in cold blood, even if help was on the way.

Sometimes I almost thought that dying that way would be a relief, after what I’d gone through. At least it would happen instantly. And sometimes I felt like God had abandoned me. But then I would think of Joey, and I’d know there was a reason I was still here. And I didn’t want to do something that would get Gina and Amanda killed. So I suffered through those sweltering days in the van without screaming for help. I knew he could be out the door and in the van with his gun in seconds.

When the dude finally unchained us, he took us back inside the house and upstairs to our rooms. It was still a prison up there, but at least it was a prison that included spiral notebooks, pencils, and
Everybody Loves Raymond
. And although it was hot upstairs in the rooms with the boarded-up windows, it wasn’t quite as sweltering as it had been in the van.

During TV commercials Gina and I fantasized about all the different ways we could try to escape. I remembered that he had a guitar in his cubbyhole. “Maybe we could tie him up with one of his guitar strings while he’s asleep,” I said, ignoring the fact that this would be pretty much impossible to do because we were chained to the bed. Gina just looked at me. Okay, so that probably wasn’t the greatest idea. “Or how about trying to stab him?” I continued. “Maybe if he fell asleep, I could sneak into the kitchen and get a knife.”

Gina nodded. “Then after you did,” she said, “we could get Amanda loose and finally get out of here.” A minute later, when our show was back on, we went back to watching TV. Deep down inside I think we both knew our plans were not going to work. How could we even dream of getting away when he kept us chained up 99 percent of the time? But I had to keep thinking of new plans for escaping. It was one of the only ways I could keep myself from going crazy. You have to have something to hope for.

Mirror hanging on the wall, you don’t see my true reflection at all. If you did, you would know that I was the loneliest girl of them all, walking on fire while I stand alone in the mirror of a life that isn’t mine … having the thought of never going home so deep within my heart, while waiting for my world to stop falling apart.

Even though my heart isn’t made out of glass, my heart still fills with pain and shatters into pieces like my heart was made to break … I’m the one who’s lost. I know you will be so quick to break me fast. I feel my heart beating when I think about the past. I wish I could throw these broken thoughts in the trash, to never be thought of again … If I can make everything feel right again, can you imagine how my story would end? Then I can mend my broken wings so I can finally feel the sweetness of life instead of the bitter taste of sin that lurks around, waiting for their next victim to strike down.