Finding Me (26 page)

Broken

You make my head fill with agony and pain from all the things that you pounded in my brain. I have a story that needs to be told. I can see you crystal clear and everything you stole … the devil just reaps your soul.

T
HE
DUDE'S ALARM
clock went off every morning as usual, but around November 2012 I stopped hearing him get out of bed. He still made his way upstairs with bits and pieces of crappy food, but he showed up a few hours later than he always had before. And he wasn’t dressed in his bus driver uniform. That’s how I figured out that he wasn’t working. He had been around the house all day for a week when I heard him telling Amanda about it.

“You lost your job?” she asked him one afternoon.

“Yep,” he told her. “I got fired.”

Now that he was home all the time he assaulted me at all hours of the day and night. As the radio DJs started talking about the holidays and playing holiday music, I could feel myself dropping into a depression. Christmas was on the way. It would be my eleventh Christmas in that prison. Throughout the year I thought of Joey, but at Christmas he took over my brain. I had missed so many years of his life. If I saw him again, I might not even recognize him! By the end of 2012 he was thirteen—a teenager. I wondered if he was as tall as his dad. I wondered if he still went crazy over sports. I wondered whether he even remembered I was his mother. He was probably nothing like the little toddler I last lifted into my arms. I cried for both my children—the one I hadn’t seen in over a decade and the one that was now growing in my stomach. By then I was about almost three months pregnant. The dude hadn’t been able to starve the baby out of me.

The only good thing about Christmas was Jocelyn’s birthday. In December 2012 she was six. I know it might sound crazy, but every year the dude hosted a party for her. It wasn’t a regular birthday party with other kids; it was just for the four of us who were trapped in that house. Amanda and Gina put up streamers in the living room and a big banner that said, “Happy Birthday.” They blew up a bunch of colorful balloons, and the dude had bought a cake from a store. But we ate the same damn rice and beans. And, of course, he blasted his sucky salsa music.

For some reason the dude wouldn’t let me come down and help decorate; he only let me join the party toward the end. I loved Jocelyn and wanted to make her feel special, but I was also feeling so hungry and tired that I could barely make it down the stairs. He finally came up and got me.

“You ain’t really part of this,” he told me.
So why the heck did you force me to come down here?
I thought. I’m pretty sure it was to taunt me, to remind me of all the birthdays I didn’t get to celebrate with Joey. “Just sit on the steps and watch from here.” I flopped down onto the bottom step.

The dude videotaped the party, but he would only allow Jocelyn and Amanda to be seen on the tape. I don’t know why he was retarded enough to let Amanda be in the video. For years Amanda’s face had been all over the local news, and in the video she was recognizable as the girl who had been snatched while she was leaving Burger King.

“Happy birthday to you,” we all sang, “happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Jocelyn … happy birthday to you!”

Jocelyn looked up at her mother with a huge smile on her face. We clapped. As horrible as I felt inside and out, it was nice to see her happy.

Once the party was over, Amanda, Jocelyn, and Gina went back upstairs.

“You stay down here,” the dude told me.

I thought he was about to take me into his cubbyhole or the backyard; I was sure throwing his little party had made him horny. But he pointed toward the basement stairs. “Go ahead,” he said. I took a step and he followed me. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
What is about to happen?

When I got to the third step he pushed me from behind. I tumbled forward, all the way down to the bottom of the stairs. When I landed, my stomach hit the edge of a bookcase.

“It’s time to deal with this!” he shouted. “I’m gonna fix you so you can never have a kid!” Doubled over with my face to the ground, I could hear his boots on the bottom step. Then he kicked me right in the stomach.

“Stop it!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Please don’t kill my baby again!”

But he wouldn’t stop. He swung his heavy boot right into my midsection again and again. “Before you leave this basement,” he screamed, “that baby had better be gone!” He slammed the side of my head with his open hand.

As he pounded back up the stairs, I lay there sobbing. “God, help me!” I cried. “Please help me!” I wrapped my arms around my stomach to try to make the throbbing go away. He’d turned up the salsa music upstairs. My hysterical screams mixed in with the singer’s words. As I cried out over and over again, I tried to stand up, but before I could make it to my feet, he returned.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “If you don’t stop screaming, I’m gonna really kill you!” He then grabbed me by the back of my shirt and pulled me up the stairs and then up to my room.

Four days later I started to bleed. The dude came into the room and dragged me downstairs to the bathroom. “You’d better hope that baby is dead,” he said. He slammed the bathroom door and left.

I crawled over to the toilet and pulled down my sweatpants. I got myself onto the seat and held my face in my hands. A red flood rushed down into the bowl. I couldn’t breathe or speak. I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. I had cried so much that my face was numb.

“Hurry up in there!” he shouted. A couple of minutes later something splashed into the water. I stood up and stared into the toilet. I reached down and scooped my baby out of the water. I stood there and sobbed.
Why didn’t God and Gina let me die?
I thought.
Death would have felt better than seeing my own child destroyed.
I looked down at the fetus in my hands.

“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” I wailed. “I am so sorry. You deserved better than this!”

The dude barged in. “I told you to hurry the hell up!” he said. He looked down at my bloody hands and smacked me across the face hard enough to make me drop the fetus.

“It’s your fault,” he said. “You aborted my baby. I should go get my gun and blow your head off right now.” Then he rushed out and came back with a garbage bag. He picked up the fetus and dropped it into the bag. A few seconds later I heard the back door open.

He didn’t let me shower. So when I got back upstairs and saw Gina, I was still a bloody, teary mess. The dude threw a pile of white napkins down on the mattress and blurted out, “Use these to clean yourself up.” He then stormed out and locked the door. To this day the sight of white napkins makes me feel sick—they remind me of what I went through.

“Oh my God, what happened?” Gina said, rushing over to my side of the mattress.

I began to cry again. “He made me lose the baby,” I finally said through sobs. “It’s over, Gina.”

She got real quiet. “I know you wanted to keep it,” she finally said, hugging me, “but sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way.”

That evening the two of us lay there, side by side on the mattress, which was still covered in plastic. We stared up at the ceiling in total silence. I could hear her breathing. I’m sure she could hear me breathing too. Some experiences are just too painful to even talk about. This was one of them.

T
HE
SPRING
OF
2013 seemed colder than the ones before. On March afternoons, when the dude took me out into the backyard to pin me up against his van, I could feel a chill in the air. One day, when he finished with me, I turned toward the door.

“Hold on,” he said. He went over to another part of the yard and picked up a shovel and some gloves. “You’re going to help me do some work back here today. I’m putting in a garden.”

A garden? Since when did you start gardening?
I thought. But I knew better than to ask questions. I just stared at him.

“We’re going to dig a big hole,” he said.

Why would you need a big hole for a garden?

“Let’s start digging right over there,” he said. He pointed to a grassy area in the back. I put on the gloves and stuck the blade of the shovel into the frozen dirt. The big shovel was so much taller than me that I could hardly hold it up, but I somehow managed to sink it into the ground.
Dig
.
Dig
.
Dig
. A little bit at a time, I lifted the dirt and tossed it over to my side.

After a couple of minutes of watching me work, he grabbed another shovel and started digging right next to me. “Make it deeper,” he barked at me. So I shoveled. And shoveled. And shoveled. By the second hour sweat was pouring from my armpits. My throat was dry. My wrists ached. The hole was getting deeper and deeper, in spite of the fact that the ground was so hard.

That’s when it hit me—this wasn’t a garden. This was a grave. This dude was planning to bury someone in his yard! Why else would he need such a huge hole? It was definitely big enough for a body.

“Keep digging, bitch!” he kept telling me. “It’s not deep enough yet.”

Each time I picked up a load of dirt, my pulse raced faster and faster.
This could really be the end
, I thought. The psycho had already murdered my children. Now he was going to murder me.

After three hours the dude put down his shovel and told me I could stop digging. I peeled off my gloves and wiped away the sweat from my forehead.

“That’s it for today,” he said, breathing heavily. “Maybe we can finish it up tomorrow.”
Tomorrow
—a day I feared I might never live to see. But although he mentioned having me dig some more several times after that, to my relief, he never followed through on it. Maybe it was just another one of his crazy mind games, or maybe he was just biding his time until the ground was less frozen.

They say time will heal the pain, but I don’t think that rules apply here . . . I don’t think I’m going to recover from this nightmare.

25
______________

Found

You will always be in my heart. I’ll always be there for you when you fall, to put you back on the ground and make you strong again. I’ll always be there to help you through the journey called life. So when you’re feeling like life is over, call me and I’ll be there to help you through thick and thin, then you can mend the pieces of your life back together.

O
N MAY
6, 2013, I opened my eyes at around ten o’clock. Gina was already up and drawing in her notebook. We weren’t chained on that day; as I mentioned earlier, the dude had threatened us so many times with his gun and beat us up if we did anything he didn’t like, that we were pretty much afraid to try to break out. We knew that at any minute he could be hiding in the hallway or downstairs, just waiting to see what we’d done so he could make our lives even more hellish. I felt like for me in particular, he’d use any excuse to punch me in the face or choke me.

“Good morning,” I said to Gina as I yawned. I covered my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Hey,” Gina answered. She was so focused on whatever she was drawing in her notebook that she didn’t look up at me. I grabbed my blue spiral notebook and flipped through it to find the empty pages. There were only a few left.
What should I draw today?
I thought.
Flowers
—
I’ll draw some flowers for my Joey
. I sharpened my pencil and began sketching out a bundle of roses. I imagined they were red. As I drew the petals on a rose, I said, “I don’t know why, but I have this funny feeling in my stomach.”

Gina laid down her pencil and looked over at me. “Why?” she said. “Do you think you’re pregnant again or something?”

“Nah, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “I don’t know why, but there’s a pit in my stomach. Maybe it’s this heat.” It was hot, even though we were only wearing tank tops and shorts. We both went back to drawing.

About an hour later I heard Jocelyn giggling. “Daddy, Daddy!” she yelled out as she ran up and down the stairs. It sounded like she and the dude were playing a game. A few minutes later we heard Jocelyn go into her mother’s room.

“Hi, Mommy!” she said. She seemed so full of joy. A moment later I heard Amanda’s outer door open. It must have been unlocked because I didn’t hear any lock unclicking. At first I thought the dude had come up, but I heard Jocelyn skip back downstairs alone, laughing and singing the whole way.

Gina looked over at me. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” she said. I nodded; I wasn’t in the mood to hear him having a good time.

“Up next,” announced the DJ, “we’ve got a hit single from the R&B singer Ne-Yo!” A second later one of my favorite songs, “Let Me Love You,” filled our bedroom. I began tapping my foot on the floor and softly humming along with the words. Gina started moving her shoulders around to the beat. I motioned for her to turn down the radio a little because I didn’t want the dude to catch us listening to a black singer. We both kept drawing and enjoying the music.