Finding Me (11 page)

Once we got down there, it was pretty dark. He shoved me down the last steps and threw me on the floor. There was just barely enough light for me to see that I was on top of a big pile of dirty men’s clothes. The pile was right next to a fat pole that went all the way from the floor to the ceiling. After he turned on a ceiling lightbulb, I could see better. “Stay right there,” he told me. He went to another part of the room. That gave me a minute to look around at the place where I might wind up being murdered.

The whole room was covered with junk. A bunch of rusted chains were strewed everywhere. Piles of dirty clothes were all over the place. There was a big sink with a puddle of water on the floor underneath it and an old washing machine right next to it. I saw a couple of cabinets, one blue, one white. Tools and pipes were scattered all around. Boxes were stacked up almost to the ceiling. And whole lot of videos.
That must be his porn stuff,
I thought. The place smelled like rot and mildew. There was a very small window on the same side of the house as his driveway. You couldn’t see out of it because it was covered with black dirt; no light came through. On the basement door were a bunch of alarms. There were so many wires sticking out from the alarms that I figured he had rigged them up himself.

At that moment the dude leaned down and picked up two rusty chains. They were the longest ones I’d ever seen, at least eight feet. Even though he was holding up a big section of them, a lot of the links were still piled up by his feet.

I was crying uncontrollably, like a baby. My eyes were almost swollen shut. “Please, please—just let me go!” I screamed. But he didn’t bat an eyelash, and I was too far under the ground for anyone to hear me.

“How do you think I’m supposed to trust you if you keep making that kind of noise?” he said. I kept right on sobbing. “Sit over there by the pole!” he shouted. I scooted over to it. He pulled my arms behind me and put some kind of twisty bands on my wrists. After stuffing another sock into my mouth, he pushed me against the pole and started wrapping the huge chains all the way around my stomach, my neck, and the pole.
One circle. Two circles. Three circles. Four
. On the fifth time around the chain went right into my mouth. It tasted like an old penny.
Click. Click
. He locked the two chains together behind me.
This is the end
, I thought.

“Now we have to make sure nobody can hear you,” he said. He walked over and picked up something from a table. It was a motorcycle helmet. He raised it up and rammed it down over my head. I could barely breathe—and that’s when everything went black.

I
HAD
NO
CLUE
what day it was when I woke up. It was totally dark. All I knew was that the dude was nowhere in sight—and the house was real, real quiet.
Is it day? Is it night?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. But somehow I was still alive—or at least halfway alive. My brain was pretty groggy because it was very hard to get much oxygen under that heavy helmet. But I wasn’t too out of it to look for a way to escape. I started moving my hands.
Maybe I can get these ties off
. They wouldn’t budge. But with every bit of strength I could find, I kept trying. And trying.

Those bands were cutting into my wrists, and after working for about two hours, I was ready to give up. That’s when a miracle happened: suddenly one of the twists felt a little looser. I couldn’t believe it.
Maybe I can get loose!
I worked my hands like crazy, and the twisty band came all the way off. Quickly I used my free hand to undo the other twist.

Even though my body was still chained, now I could take off that nasty helmet. It was amazing to be able to breathe freely, even if it was the stale air of the filthy basement. I rubbed my arms to get some feeling back into them. I looked around, but there was nothing nearby that I could use to try to cut through the chain. I reached behind the pole and felt for one of the padlocks.
If I can just work it free
… I tried to jiggle the top part up and down. It seemed to give a tiny bit.
Oh my God—I might actually break out of here
, I thought.

Frantically I wiggled the lock. The only trouble was that even if I got this chain off, the other one was still around my stomach, and if I got that off, I would still have to get past the door alarm. I pushed my back against the pole as hard as it would go, and the chains loosened a little. I yanked and yanked on the lock. Then I heard the sound of a truck pulling into the driveway.
He’s back!
Quickly I put the helmet on my head and tried to wrap the twisty bands around my hands again, the way they were before he left.

Not even two minutes later the dude’s footsteps pounded down the stairs. He flipped on the light. “Why did you take off those bands?” he shouted. “I thought I could trust you, but now you’re gonna have to be punished.” He picked up a pipe and waved it in my face. “If you scream,” he told me, “I’m gonna shove this right down your throat.” I didn’t make a sound. He unlocked the chains, took off the helmet, and ripped off my shirt and underwear.

What happened over the next three hours is still hard for me to think about. He didn’t just rape me the way he had upstairs. He murdered my heart—or at least the small part that was still left after what I went through when I was a girl. He forced me to do things that are too painful for me to describe, things that I had never done and would never do again. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t pray. I couldn’t even ask God to help me get back to Joey. I was in so much shock and fear that all I could do was lie there like I was dead. In a way, I think a part of you has to die in order to get through a thing like that. It’s the only way a person can survive it.

When he was finished, he kicked me over onto my back. He threw some more dollar bills at me. “I’ll be paying you for your time here,” he said. “I’ll keep it for you in there.” He pointed toward the washing machine. Then he stood and looked down at me for a long time. My lips were trembling. My eyes were puffy. Sweat and blood were pouring from me. I turned my head to the wall so I didn’t have to look that monster right in the face. After a few minutes he finally spoke.

“This is where you’re going to stay until you show me I can trust you,” he told me. “Then maybe you can move upstairs.” He chained me to the pole again and pushed the helmet over my head. On the way out, he turned off the light. In the pitch black I just sat there. Broken. Alone.
I’m going to die down here. I’ll never hold my Joey again.

I was so beaten up and exhausted that I was fading again. I leaned against the pole and tried to breathe a little better in the heavy helmet. I prayed this was all a horrible nightmare that I would soon wake up from.

I
OPENED
MY
EYES
to the sound of footsteps.
Pound. Pound. Pound
. Through the thickness of the helmet I could hear the dude come into the basement. After those first hours, I never used his real name again. I didn’t think a monster deserved to have a real name, so I only called him “dude.”

Roughly he yanked off the helmet. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and some raggedy sweatpants. I figured it might be morning because he didn’t have on those same filthy jeans he did before. He was carrying a plate of food and a glass. He put them down on a table and came closer to me. He smelled like rotting fish.

“You’ve gotta eat something or you’re gonna die,” he said.

So
now
you’re worried about me dying?
I thought.
What a moron!

“I know you don’t want to eat the food I’m bringing you, but I’ll prove it’s okay,” he continued. He stuck the plate of food under my nose. It was spaghetti with red sauce on top of it. “My mother made it,” he said. “See, look—I’ll eat some first.” He used his fork to pick up some pasta and stuffed it in his mouth. “See,” he said, chewing with his mouth wide open. “It’s okay.” Some of the sauce spilled out of the corner of his mouth. I thought he was trying to play a trick on me. But I was starving. How many days had it been since I’d eaten that toaster pastry the morning I’d left for my appointment?

When he put the fork up to my mouth, I took a little baby bite. It actually tasted decent. When he saw I was eating it, he put a lot more noodles on the fork and shoved them into my mouth. I chewed it up slowly at first, but then faster. He gave me more and more until I cleaned the whole plate.
Maybe I’m going to die
, I thought,
but at least I’m not going down on an empty stomach
. After the food was gone, he got the glass off the table. “Here’s some water,” he said, holding it up to my lips. I drank it so fast that I almost choked.

This time before he left, he undid my chains and made them a little looser so I could reach the toilet. By “toilet,” I really mean a green bucket. He put that bucket down close to the pole. “Use this when you have to go,” he said. He walked around the basement for a minute and came back with a piece of cardboard. He threw it down on top. Maybe he thought that was supposed to keep the smell inside. But I was still glad to have some way to go to the bathroom. After your life is stolen from you, even the most basic stuff makes you grateful.

W
HEN
YOU
’
RE
LIVING
in the dark, you lose track of time.
Is it Monday? Friday? Tuesday? Sunday? How many days have I been here?
Because you can barely see a thing, everything you hear and smell becomes a clue. When I heard the dude’s phone alarm go off upstairs, I figured out that it must be morning, because right after that I could smell coffee. When I first got into the house, I wasn’t sure where he slept, but I could hear his alarm, so I knew it must be on the main floor. On my way in on the first day I thought I’d seen a little room just off the kitchen. That could have been his room. Every now and then I could hear the water come on in the pipes, like he was taking a shower or washing up. I don’t think he did that very often; maybe about once a week. He always stank.

The next sound I heard was the back door closing and his truck backing out of the driveway. About twenty minutes after that, the truck returned, the basement door swung open, and he came pounding down the stairs. He didn’t say too much to me—he just fed me an Egg McMuffin and made me drink some OJ. On some days that was my only meal.
So when he leaves out of the driveway
, I thought,
he must be going to McDonald’s
. He went there on most mornings. That’s how the basement floor got covered with yellow wrappers.

Most of the time when he came downstairs in the mornings, he was dressed in a uniform: a burgundy shirt, black pants, and black combat boots. I remembered that Emily had told me her dad was a school bus driver, so whenever he had on that uniform, I knew he must be on his way to work. Soon after, I could hear him start the engine of the van. From that tiny window in the basement I could always hear what was happening in the driveway. Several hours after that I heard the van pull back in and the house door open, so he was home from work. Not long afterward I heard the sounds of people having sex, and I figured out that he was watching porn. Other times he blasted Spanish music. In both cases, he put the volume up really loud.