Finding Me (22 page)

T
OWARD
THE
END
OF
2004 we started getting a little more freedom to move around the house as long as the dude was right there with us. He would take us downstairs to make dinner, always carrying his gun. A couple of times I thought about trying to make a run for the back door, but I was too afraid he would shoot me from behind and then kill everyone else. I also remembered the times when he would leave a door unlocked to see if he could catch me trying to get out. He seemed to always be testing us, ready to pounce if he caught us even looking at the door.

The kitchen was as much of a hot mess as the rest of the house. The stove had stains all over it from spilled food that he never cleaned up. There was a stack of old pots and pans on a chair next to the stove. Gina did most of the cooking. Even if I wanted to cook, I couldn’t reach the cabinets, so he made me stand over in a corner. A lot of times, while Gina and I were down in the kitchen, the dude would sit at the dining room table with Amanda and talk to her in a low voice. I could just imagine what kind of idiotic things he was saying.

The meal was almost always the same: rice and beans. The beans could be any color: black, red, pink. They all came from Goya cans. The white rice was the cheap junk, the kind you pour out of a box. Every now and then I saw little bugs in the rice.
Gross
. After Gina and I ate and cleaned up the mess, Amanda had to cook her own beans and rice while we sat in the kitchen. I don’t know why he had us eat separately sometimes; only God knows.

After everybody was done eating, the dude would keep us downstairs for a while. He often gave us a bunch of Coronas or some shots of rum. When I first came into the house he had tried to give me liquor. I didn’t take it back then, wanting to keep my mind clear. But by the time the other girls got there, I
needed
a drink. I didn’t even really like the taste, but at least it was
something
to blot out the pain. It was one of the only ways I could make myself forget about the horror I was living through. Why try to stay sober when you feel like you’re dying?

I knew he wasn’t giving us alcohol to be
nice
to us—no way. He just wanted to get us so drunk that we’d loosen up and do all kinds of nasty things with him. Gina and I often talked about how we could wait until he was too drunk to stand up and then escape while he was passed out on the floor. Unfortunately, that never happened. Even after he had a lot to drink, he would sit there calmly, always watching us.

One night, when we’d all had too much beer, he handed me his gun. “Shoot me,” he said with a straight face.

I didn’t move. I wondered if there were really any bullets in the gun.

“That’s a retarded game,” I finally said. I was pretty sure this was some kind of sick trick. Then he snatched the gun out of my hand and put it up to my head.

“Don’t do it!” I yelled. “Please don’t shoot me!” My whole body started to shake. He went to pull the trigger, but before he could fire, I knocked the gun out of his hand. It flew across the kitchen. When it landed on the floor, a couple of bullets came spilling out.
Oh my God, it really was loaded!

I was so frightened that I fainted right there onto the kitchen floor. When I woke up from my blackout, I found myself back upstairs, chained to Gina. I wasn’t surprised that the dude put the gun to my head. After Amanda and Gina got there, I had turned into the most hated girl in the house. He started treating me worse and worse, if that was possible. He would constantly push me down the stairs, beat me and punch me, or cuss me out. And every time he was done making me bleed, he would remind me, “You’re such an ugly bitch. You’re the one I can’t stand to look at.” And then he’d add, “At least I didn’t kill you.”

He also abused Gina and Amanda. I don’t know exactly what he was doing to Amanda, since she wasn’t in our room, but I’m pretty sure he was forcing himself on her too. Sometimes I could hear it happening. But even though we all got treated horribly, I got hit upside the head the most. And I was raped two and sometimes even three or four times a day.

I felt so low and dirty. Other than Joey and maybe my brothers, I couldn’t think of anyone who probably missed me all that much.
Even if I escape from this bastard,
I often thought,
what kind of life will be waiting for me in the real world?
After this mess is over, who will really be there to love me?
The answers to those questions sometimes made me want to curl up, fall through the floor, and vanish forever.

If I was dead or alive, you wouldn’t care as long as you fucked over my life and not yours. To hurt someone is not going to help the situation or the destructive path that you are taking ... My life is too precious for you to think you can hold me captive like my life is worthless, to live to destroy all my hopes and dreams, then take what pieces of my heart that I had left and toss into the trash like yesterday’s garbage, along with everything that I held close to my heart. It’s gone, and I hope that I can get back everything that I lost in life. I try to hide the hate that burns inside of me … I know it’s wrong to think evil, but I live in a world surrounded by evil people and I can’t help the way I feel inside. If you went through what I went through, then you might just know how I feel … Being treated like trash, that will never change, and I’ll never be the same.

O
VER
THE
NEXT
FEW
WEEKS
in our room Gina and I spent a lot of time whispering about one thing: What was the dude saying to Amanda when he was with her? When he took her to his cubbyhole, sometimes I heard him laughing on the way down the stairs, like he was having a good time. And when we were all in the kitchen, he would find a way to be with her separately, even while he kept an eye on Gina and me. If we all sat down at the table to eat, he would sit next to her at the other end. It almost seemed like he was trying to chill with her and enjoy her company. His behavior creeped me out and made me worry about what he was planning.

20
______________

Hard Labor

I know somewhere out there, life can be beautiful and there is someone who cares about you. We just have to wait for all the black and gray clouds to go away so we can see the beautiful rain that’s behind the clowns that are laughing at us …

I had to taste the bitter sweetness of life and face the pain on my own, then rise and fall. I’ve got to seize that one moment in time to be free for eternity.

In early 2004 a strange thing happened: the dude started saying that Amanda was his wife. I figured that as messed up as he was, in his sick mind, he must think it was true. I didn’t spend too much time focusing on what the dude called his “marriage” because it sounded completely ridiculous to me. I kept thinking that if we all ignored the whole thing, it would just fade away. But I couldn’t ignore what started to happen next.

Everything changed after the dude claimed that he and Amanda were together. For one thing, he started spending a lot of time downstairs with her. I often heard their two sets of footsteps going down to the main floor. Gina and I could hear him watching cable TV in his room. I had no idea if he still had her chained up or what. On those evenings, when we were all in the kitchen, he had her sit with him, either at the other end of the table or in the living room on the couch, where he could still keep an eye on us.

Around that time the dude started taking me outside a lot more. He would tell me, “You’re coming into the backyard to do some work with me.” He called it “hard labor,” stuff like lifting and moving bricks, cutting wood, and changing the oil on one of his vehicles. Once we got back there, he only made me do those jobs for a little while. Before I knew it, he had me pinned up against the side of his burgundy van. One day he ripped my clothes off and raped me right there in broad daylight.

“Stand still,” he whispered, unzipping his jeans. “I’m gonna fuck you real good right now.” There were no bushes around the house; anyone passing by could have seen into the backyard if they’d been looking. And after the dude announced that he and Amanda were “married,” the rapes outdoors happened way more frequently. This made me wonder if, in his twisted mind, maybe he thought he should try to hide from her all the sex he was still having with me. He kept on raping Gina too, but I felt like he didn’t do that nearly as much as he did it to me.

It seemed to me that in his sick mind the dude really thought he and Amanda were a couple. When he was with me he often talked about it. One time, when he had me out on the back porch, he said to me with a straight face: “I called Amanda’s mother.”

What?
I felt like throwing up. Not that there was anything in my stomach—I was starving.

“I told her that her daughter is my wife now, that she’s okay because she’s with me. Then I just hung up.” He laughed like that was some kind of a funny joke. “One day,” he added, “I’m gonna make you my second wife.”

I already knew he was insane, but when he said that, I was sure he must be a demon straight from hell. I wanted to hit him right in the head. I looked down at my feet and cursed him under my breath. Thank God he never brought that up again.

Around that time something else changed in the house: we started getting fewer privileges. The dude had been feeding Gina and me twice a day, but suddenly we were lucky if we got one meal. He stopped giving us alcohol downstairs. Sometimes Gina and I would get just one slice of pizza to share. I eventually got so thin that I could feel my bones; my stomach was always growling. The dude had to tighten my chains because they were practically falling off. I was so starving that I would try to go to sleep, just so I could forget about how hungry I was. Then I’d dream really detailed dreams about food. I’d dream about the kind of fried chicken I had at the Baptist church. I’d imagine that I was having a big piece of chocolate cake. Then I’d wake up to my stomach aching painfully from always being empty. It was awful.

But one change was more terrible than all the other ones: he stopped giving us spiral notebooks.

“You don’t deserve it,” he told me and Gina one day.

His words felt like a knife slicing right through my heart. I had written on every inch of the notebooks he had already given me; in one of them I drew a skull that had an open mouth, like a dead person who was constantly screaming for help. I felt like I
was
that skull. Desperate for paper, we started writing on the backs of burger wrappers on the floor.

Every now and then he still gave us a couple of sheets of paper, but not an entire notebook. On a lot of days I ran out of places to write down my words, my pictures—my feelings. I couldn’t put together letters to my Joey. I couldn’t draw my wolves, my butterflies, or my teddy bears. It was like being thrown back down into the basement, where I almost went insane from the terrible fear and boredom. We still had that raggedy TV, but if he got mad at us about anything, he would even take that away for a while. On the last empty page of one of my notebooks I wrote this entry:

Behind these concrete walls you let me fall hard. I truly believe no one cares for me. I feel like I’m dying in here. Sometimes I feel powerless to the pain and destruction. I find myself paralyzed. I’m going out of my mind thinking about if I’ll ever get home to see my lil’ angel. I’m sitting in a prison with no windows and waiting for someone to come rescue me. I’m lying here cold, shivering, but I am still not totally broken.

One of the hardest parts about this time was that it seemed to me like the dude treated the others better than he did me. Amanda had that good color TV in her room, and sometimes she would talk back to him and say things like, “I don’t have to listen to you!” Although I wasn’t always in the same room, I never saw him smack her for it. But if I said anything at all to him, I got whacked in the face or stomach. It wasn’t like he was
nice
to either of them—far from it! But I felt as if I was the prisoner who got beat down the most. And my perception was that on some days I was the only one he had raped. It was like being on death row.

I knew that wasn’t their fault. Only one person can ever be blamed for what happened in that house of horrors—the sick jackass who brought us there in the first place.

In addition to that, over the years that followed, I got pregnant four more times—five in total. Every time, the maniac blamed me for it and made me abort the baby. Every time, I felt like I was dying in my body and my mind.

Death seems like a quicker solution to my problem … hopefully it don’t come to that because I have so much to live for … so much I haven’t said and so much I haven’t done that I need to accomplish before the end comes … We obey because we have to, not that we want to. This isn’t our own life, it’s someone else’s fantasy world that we are living in. It feels like I’m a prisoner … in the end it was your life to begin with, and you are the one who was wrong, not me … someday I will live my life like it’s my last breath.