A Deeper Love Inside (16 page)

The car was pulling over now. The speed dropped, and we went from a smooth highway type of ride to driving over what felt like rocks or pebbles. Then we came to a complete stop.

There was a too-long pause, say three and a half minutes. Inside that time, terror gripped me. What if Riot was gone, and I was left alone with some stranger? What if it was more than one of them, and they tried to do me like Choo-Choo? What if they kidnapped me like how they done Tiny, marked my skin up, and slashed me a few times? I didn’t have no weapons. I began feeling around, telling Siri, “Let’s look for something, a knife, a screwdriver or wrench or even a spray can, so I could squeeze the nozzle and blind ’em.”

The trunk popped opened as I was crawling in the limited space, lifting up the rug below the blanket, bout to grab the black iron tool that was pressed inside of a small wheel.

“Santiaga!” Riot said. “Put the jack down. It’s alright.”

I was relieved to see her standing there. I was relieved to be breathing better now that the trunk was wide open.

“Everything good?” a male voice asked from a short distance.

“Porsche, pull your skirt down, your butt is showing.” Riot laughed. “Hurry up, jump out!” She turned back to business.

Soon as I was standing on my two feet, I peeped a green-eyed white boy in a hoodie with the drawstring pulled tight and a bandanna running across his forehead. Less than a half second later, Riot was tightening a blindfold around my eyes. “This is to protect you,” Riot said.

“If anything goes wrong, just blame me. I give you my permission. Tell the police and the authorities that I forced you out. You don’t know nothing. You couldn’t see nothing. This way you won’t be lying either,” she said.

“I’m not no snitch,” I told her. “You should know that by now.” I was red, but I wouldn’t fight Riot. I loved her, too.

“I know you’re not.
But you are my son.
If you knew too much, the authorities would target you to snatch up all the Needles. You don’t have enough experience to deal with them head up,” she said as she put what felt like a knapsack on my back, and one hand on my shoulder. She pushed a little, and we began walking.

She trusted me. I could tell. She didn’t tie my wrist, and I could’ve easily yanked off the blindfold. She didn’t tie my ankles to prevent me from running. If I wanted to I could’ve bolted easily. As we walked I listened to hear the car that we arrived in pull off, but I didn’t hear nothing but what Riot had once described as “country quiet.”

We weren’t walking on level ground. It felt more like a dirt path. I could feel one or two sticks cracking beneath my cheap shoes, and an occasional rock pressing too hard against my soles. Riot moved me with her hands as a guide, pulling my shoulder left or right when she needed me to move even slightly in one direction or another.

“Step over,” she would say when a boulder was in our path, or “duck down,” when I was about to walk into some dangling branches. I didn’t have to be too smart to know we were walking in some woods. I had never been deep into the woods before in my little life. I’m a city girl other than the big back yard at my Long Island, New York, palace.

Fuck it, we were hiking. It couldn’t have been a little cut-through. We had been walking almost a half hour. Riot was quiet. I could hear the birds singing their songs and Siri had been humming the whole
way, her pretty voice calming me down some. I was sweating. The bandanna was soaking it up.

Forty-five minutes in, Riot said, “Stop.” She began untying my bandanna.

“Water,” I said.

“It’s in your knapsack. Sip it slow,” she warned.

When I stopped gulping instead of sipping, I looked around.

“It’s an orchard,” Siri said. “It’s so pretty. Let’s play.”

We was surrounded by beautiful, tall trees. A powerful sunbeam slid through an opening and spread light. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a gang of white butterflies, birds diving, squirrels dashing, and little small creatures scurrying.

“Chipmunks,” Riot said when she saw my eyes following one of them as he moved about. In the distance I saw a deer. All my breath left me. The long-necked animal had the biggest, darkest eyes and a stare that captured me. I did not feel any fear. I don’t know why I started crying. I was mad at myself because of it.

“I’ll be back,” I told Riot. “I gotta pee.”

“Don’t go too far. You can pee anywhere,” she called out. Then she said, “I’m a pee, too.”

Peeing out here in the wilderness felt different than peeing as a prisoner. It didn’t feel like my vagina muscles were fighting me dropping out only a few droplets or splashing out uncontrollably. Now a steady stream of warm piss was coming out and taking its time. It kept coming, till finally it finished.

Why were my tears still streaming? I asked myself. Siri said, “You’re crying because we are so lost. You’re crying because we are hungry and we have been hungry for years. You are crying because we have left nothing behind and we have nothing to look forward to.”

“I have Momma, and Winter and Lexy and Mercedes,” I murmured.

“You know better. We promised not to ever expect to see them. It hurts you too much when we do. We promised to only believe it when they were standing right beside you and even then, only after you reach out your hand and felt their skin to be sure they were really there. We gotta keep that promise because that’s the only way we made it this far.”

“I remember, you’re right, Siri,” I said, wiping away my tears with a piece of my thin T-shirt.

When we skipped back to where we had parted with Riot, I didn’t see her. I stood still, spinning only my eyes over each leaf and space looking for her. Next I spun my whole body around in a complete circle checking for her. Then I heard her laughter. “C’mon, we’ll follow the sound,” Siri said.

The trail led us to a wooden dollhouse with no glass where the windows were supposed to be. Riot was there inside, leaning on the wooden frame looking out at us.

“Come on in,” she welcomed us.

“I like it out here,” I told her truthfully. I was definitely curious about the dollhouse. I wish I had asked Poppa to build me one of these in our backyard at home. But I never got the chance.

“This house has a roof. If the hell-copters come, they won’t see me,” Riot said, convincing me and Siri to dart inside.

Inside she had her knapsack open. In it were a couple of bags of chips, and chocolate bars, some nuts, raisins, a banana, and her bottle of water, a flashlight, a candle, and a jar of something like Vaseline but not Vaseline. She also had a pocketknife and two books of matches.

“Somebody hooked you up,” I said, seeing all she had now that she didn’t have before. As I really checked it all out, Riot was wearing green cargo pants and a green T-shirt. Her hair was unbraided and yanked back into a long flowing ponytail. Each strand was crinkled like hair does when you unbraid it after it’s been braided for a long time. The two tied-together black bandannas that she had used to blindfold me were now wrapped around her forehead, headband-style. She definitely had been wearing the same fucked-up cheap miniskirt outfit that we were all wearing a few hours ago. Now, not only was she chilling, she even had a Timex on her wrist.

“Psyche,” she said. “No hell-copters should be coming out here. But I’m glad you came inside anyway. We should talk some.”

“It’s 4:15 p.m.,” Riot said with a bright smile stretched across her face. Her green eyes were glued onto her Timex.

“PANIC, walkie-talkies blaring. The volume pumped all the way up. Cell doors slamming shut. Guards scrambling, officers calling the
library, the clinic, the visitation hall, the commissary, the slop house, the gymnasium, the dormitories, the classrooms, the tower. Officers reporting ‘missing bodies.’ That’s us,” Riot dramatized with exaggerated body movements as she acted out the scenes described. Serious faced, she was reflecting on what she knew for sure was happening back at lockdown. Me and Siri got caught up in her storytelling. We knew it was dead on. Riot continued.

“It’s 4:18 p.m., First Officer calls the Captain.” Riot was using her fingers, pretending to be on the important phone call.

“It’s 4:20 p.m., Captain calls the Assistant Deputy Warden. He tries to keep it a secret, get to the bottom of it, gain control, collect more info.”

“Now it’s 4:30 p.m. Assistant Deputy Warden calls Warden Strickland.”

“It 4:30 and three seconds. Warden places entire facility on shutdown. No one leaves out. No one gets in. Shifts don’t change. The workers, officers, staff, and administration all feel tense, aggravated, imprisoned, angry.”

“4:35 Yellow alert.”

“4:45 Orange alert.”

“5:00 RED ALERT!”

Riot threw herself back on the dollhouse floor. She laid out flat next to her picnic items. Riot placed her hand over her mouth and screamed into her palms. “You motherfuckers! You assholes! You perverts, creeps, bloodsuckers, liars, cowards, punks! We fucking outsmarted you! We did it! We did it! We did it!”

Her face turned a pale pink with fury. She laughed. She cried. She shook.

I understood.

“Porsche, I couldn’t sleep last night. Now I’m exhausted. Forgive me if I knock out. I trust you. Watch over me while I rest. Don’t worry about the authorities. They won’t be coming here anytime soon, and probably never. We are on Seneca land. This place is not technically even America. We’re safe here. The New York State Police cannot even come here. Even the hell-copters won’t come here. And please
eat something. Me and you gotta start eating now that we’re gone from that nasty prison.”

• • •

I wanted to talk to her. I had a slew of questions and plans I wanted to make. I already decided when I was lying in that trunk, thinking, that I was gonna change my relationship with Riot. It had to even up somehow. I didn’t want to be kept in the dark on the most important matters anymore. I felt like a fool seeking out each Diamond Needle and offering my candy tributes while they were doing big things, serious schemes, making dangerous and necessary moves.

And what is “Seneca land” and is it possible there is a place that was a few hours from lockdown that wasn’t in America, where cops couldn’t come? That shit blew my mind. If Riot had gotten us to such a place, she deserved to sleep well, word.

I knew that Riot didn’t know about my eating matters. The psych on lockdown called it my “eating disorder.” I didn’t give a fuck about anything the psych had to say. I knew what I was doing and why. A person gotta have rules for themselves, I think. If other people don’t understand another person’s rules for themselves, it doesn’t matter and shouldn’t affect them. I don’t have no eating disorder. I just don’t like to eat around people who I don’t trust. I don’t like to eat food prepared by people who I don’t trust. I don’t like to eat any food that anyone offers to me. I want to get it myself, choose it myself. I’ll eat it if it’s random enough. Otherwise I’m stubborn enough to starve.

Siri was right. I was hungry and I’d been hungry for years, at least for all the years that I been away from my home. I always knew that I was hungry. I ignored it cause not trusting was heavier than hunger.

So in that moment, I ate. I didn’t touch any of the things that were in my backpack. I ate the candy bars and chips and the honey bun that Riot had. I chose those foods cause they were not given to me. I chose them for myself, right or wrong.

Chapter 14

Garlic. I didn’t smell like myself. I woke up naked in a warm bed in a wooden room, covered by a pink sheet. The sunshine was pouring through a window. “A window,” I thought to myself. The dollhouse doesn’t have glass windows. This room didn’t feel familiar like a prison or hateful like a hospital where they forced tubes up my nose, needles in my arms, or cuffs around my ankles locking my feet in one stiff position. I lifted each leg, exhaled, and laid them back down. I rolled left, then right, testing my freedom. I was rolling over something beneath me. I reached in and felt around the sheet. When I pulled my hand back, I was holding pieces of garlic. Garlic like in Poppa’s famous black beans, which he liked to eat. I put my head beneath the sheet and looked around. I opened my legs and pushed a finger between my thighs and into my opening. It was still closed. I exhaled. I pulled my fingers up to my nose and smelled the moisture. It smelled the same way it did whenever I performed a pussy check to be sure no one had fucked me in my sleep.
For three years I’ve been nervous about sleeping,
I thought to myself. I knew it was a time for anyone who wants to take advantage, to do things to me that I never agreed to. I had promised myself that no matter what happened, and even though they stole me from my family, and traded me around from place to place before throwing me into a cage, no one would fuck me if I didn’t agree to it. I had zero plans to agree to it anytime soon. So normally, I fought sleep and never would until either I collapsed or they drugged me. So they say I have a “sleeping disorder.”

Eating disorder, sleeping disorder, anger disorder. Eating disorder,
sleeping disorder, anger management problem, and those were nice and simple words. Oh, they had long ones like
Skitzo-frena-paranoya
, but I never listened to people who purposely try to talk over my head. I knew that it’s a slick way to make themselves seem smarter and better than me while making me feel dumb.

I peeled back the sheet. My stomach felt nervous, but I didn’t feel captured. I knew well what that captured feeling feels like. Sitting up straight now, my eyes roamed the room looking for my clothes. It took seconds to remember “my clothes.” Not the baby-blue jail jumper or prison pajamas, but the skimpy, cheap jean skirt and baby T that read touch me. They weren’t here. There was another bed a few feet away from the one I was in. I wanted to believe that Riot had slept there, cause I could see that somebody had. I got up walking softly on the pretty polished wood. I was used to cold cement and rock floors.

I pushed in a wooden wall that led to a closet stuffed with lady things. Relieved, I stood on my tiptoes and grabbed the first thing I could reach that my fingers touched. It was a dress made of soft silk. I smelled it, then slid it over my head.