Finding Me (27 page)

Jocelyn came running back up the stairs. She was talking so loud that we could hear her over Ne-Yo. “Mommy,” she said, “Daddy went to Mamaw’s house!” Mamaw was what Jocelyn called the dude’s mother. She had actually met his mother a few times.

This might be our chance
, I thought.
Or it could just be another test
. A few times before, the dude had told Jocelyn he would be gone all day, knowing she would probably repeat it to us. A few minutes after that, he would unlock our door and stick his head in to give us a creepy grin. “I just wanted to see if I could trust you,” he said. I realized that Jocelyn’s announcement was probably another trap. And besides that, we didn’t hear his van pull out of the driveway. So we stayed right on that bed.

This is why I had that weird feeling
, I thought.
This was a test that could get us all killed
. Amanda and Jocelyn started playing in their room, and Gina and I sat there minding our own business. Jocelyn ran up and down the stairs a couple of more times, playing, singing, and chatting up a storm. After I finished the bouquet of red roses for my huggy bear, I put down my pencil and notebook.

“I’m kind of bored,” I told Gina.

She started searching through the radio stations. She found a song she liked, and I got up and started dancing around the room in my bare feet. I didn’t feel too good, but then again, I never felt that good.

Right then we heard Jocelyn come running back into her mother’s room. A minute later I heard Amanda’s door open. Two sets of footsteps went down the stairs.
The dude must be in his cubbyhole
, I thought. The three of them often chilled downstairs together, and he would usually send Jocelyn up to get Amanda. I kept on dancing.

About fifteen minutes later I suddenly realized something: I didn’t hear any voices talking downstairs. Just to be sure, I asked Gina to turn off the radio. She did. The main floor seemed completely silent.
Did the dude take Amanda and Jocelyn somewhere?

The next thing we knew there was a very loud noise.
Pound! Pound! Pound!
It was coming from the front door of the house. It sounded like someone was trying to break down the door! I nearly crapped in my pants.
This is a bad neighborhood,
I thought
. We must be getting robbed
.

The pounding stopped, and I tiptoed over to the door and reached for the knob. Gina watched me.
Is it locked?
I thought as I slowly turned the knob. It wasn’t. I opened it a little ways. Then all of a sudden, we heard a
Boom!

“Hide!” I hissed to Gina. As fast as I could, I ran over to the radiator and tried to crouch down behind it. I was totally freaked out, imagining some drug dealer or robber breaking into the house, finding us upstairs and murdering us. After everything we’d been through, I didn’t want to go like that. I couldn’t wedge myself behind the radiator, so I ran over and hid behind the dresser and turned off the light. Gina was breathing hard on the other side of the dresser.

“Shhh,” I whispered. The house got very quiet again.

We heard heavy footsteps—two sets of them.
This is it
, I thought. My whole body shook.
They’re gonna find us and kill us.
I had been so scared when I heard the noise that I’d left the door halfway open.

My throat got tight. I balled up my fist.
What was that? Who’s here?

“Police!” a woman’s voice yelled out. “Police!”

Gina and I couldn’t see each other in the dark. “I don’t know if it’s really the police,” I whispered. “Anybody can say that.”

I don’t know what Gina was thinking, but I knew I wasn’t planning to move an inch until I found out what was happening.

As the steps got closer I heard some sounds from a walkie-talkie. In the pitch-black I crawled over to the door and peeked out. I thought I could make out a dark blue sleeve.
Could it really be the cops?
I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t tell who it was, and I didn’t want to take a chance in case it was someone
pretending
to be a cop to trick us into coming out. We’d been tortured and held captive for so long that in that moment it was hard to imagine being rescued.

Still feeling terrified, I pulled our door closed. “I’m going in here,” I whispered to Gina, but I couldn’t tell if she heard me. I then crawled through the connecting door into Amanda’s bedroom. I hid behind her TV cabinet. The whole time my heart felt like it was pounding out of my chest and right through my T-shirt.

A few seconds later Amanda’s door creaked open. Two sets of black boots walked in. “Is anyone in here?” said the same voice I’d heard before. I didn’t say a word. I looked up to see a man and a woman in full police uniforms. They each had guns on their hips. The second I saw their silver badges shining in the dark, I came out from my hiding place—and I leaped right into the woman’s arms! I wrapped my arms around that policewoman’s throat so tight that I almost choked her.

Gina was crying when she came out. She looked over at me, then back at the police, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A river of water came pouring out of her eyes.

“Is anyone else up here with you?” asked the guy cop.

“I don’t think so,” I told him through my trembling lips. I wasn’t sure where Amanda and Jocelyn were. I just knew they weren’t up on the second floor.

The woman cop tried to put me down, but I clung to her neck. I had to be sure I would make it out of there alive, especially because I had no clue where the dude was or if I was really safe from him.

“Are there any weapons in the house?” asked the guy cop.

“There’s a gun someplace,” I told him. “But I don’t know where it is.”

“We’re going to search the rest of the house,” the female cop told me.

That’s when I finally let her put me down. Another male cop in a short-sleeved blue shirt came up the stairs. “Everything’s okay now,” he told us. I’m sure he could see how scared we still were. “Get your clothes. I’ll wait for you right here at the top of the stairs.”

We went back into our room and changed out of our T-shirts and shorts; I put on some sweatpants, a pink sweater, and some socks and shoes. My hands shook the whole time, and my head felt like a whirlwind had just gone through it. I was delirious. “Gina, can you believe it?” I said. “We’re free!”

She changed out of her sweats and into a white top and some furry pants with cheetah spots. Crying and laughing at the same time, we started gathering up our notebooks. But when the cops came back in to check on us, they told us to leave our journals there.

“We’ll grab those for you later,” said the guy in the short sleeves. “Let’s go downstairs.”

He didn’t have to tell us twice! We practically ran over to those stairs. With each step I took, I thought about all the years that had gone by since the dude had tricked me up those stairs by promising me a puppy. I thought of the hundreds of days when his dirty boots pounded up there to rape me. I thought of when he threw me down those steps, trying to kill my baby. Some of the most horrible moments of my life had happened on those steps. And now, at age thirty-two, I was walking down them for the very last time.

When I got to the last step I didn’t look back. I wanted to get the hell out of that place forever. I had to get back to my Joey. I looked around for Amanda and Jocelyn, but because they weren’t downstairs, I assumed they were already with the police.

A police officer opened the front door. I walked through it. It was the first time I had ever been out on the front porch. The sun felt way too bright. After my eyes got used to the light, I glanced down at my arms. They were ghost-white. I looked out to the street. An ambulance was parked in front of the house.

“Come this way,” the policeman said.

The back doors of the ambulance were open. Inside I saw Amanda and Jocelyn.
Was she the one who called the cops?
I thought.
Did she call 911? How did the two of them get out? And where was the dude?
I was still so confused about what had happened. Amanda was holding Jocelyn and bawling her eyes out. The cop helped us get into the truck.

“Juju, are you okay?” asked Jocelyn. I nodded my head and started sobbing. Amanda reached toward me and took my hand. She squeezed it. “We’re free now!” she cried. “We’re going home!”

After Gina got in, we all hugged and cried like babies. Our years in hell were finally over.

A bald guy who looked like Kojak asked me my name.

“I’m Michelle,” I whispered. “Michelle Knight.”

He then put an oxygen mask on me, and that made my heart suddenly drop ten feet. The paramedics laid me down on a bed and hooked me up to an IV. “She looks very ill,” I heard one of them say. “She’s very pale.” I was the only one who got a mask and an IV. Someone closed the back doors, and we sped off to the sound of the sirens:
Weee-yooo! Weee-yooo! Weee-yooo!
We made it to the hospital in less than two minutes. The paramedics helped the other girls get out.

A medical crew wheeled me into my own room, and doctors and nurses started coming at me from every direction! “I’m going to examine you,” one of them said. She reached out and touched my leg—and I pulled it away. I was embarrassed because the hair on my legs was as thick as a bush. I hadn’t been able to shave in years—it was gross. When the nurse saw me moving away, she said, “It’s okay, sweetie,” and rubbed my arm.

Inside the hospital I didn’t get to see Gina and Amanda, although I wanted to. Someone said they went home the next day. From what they told me, I was way too sick to leave the hospital that soon. I hadn’t felt great that morning in the house, but I had gotten used to feeling horrible. I had no idea I was practically at death’s door.

Over the next few days I got every test you can imagine. I cried through most of them. They must have put a dozen different needles in my arms. And I didn’t want any of the male doctors or nurses to come near me. I only felt comfortable with women. At one point a nurse asked me to step up on a scale. When I went into the house I had been about 130 pounds. That day I weighed less than 84.

I had a long list of health problems. My jaw was severely injured from the many times the dude punched me in the face. Once he had socked me in the jaw with a barbell—that’s why some of my words come out sounding funny. I also had major nerve damage in my arms; they shake all the time. But the worst injury of all was a bacterial infection that was literally eating away at my stomach. It was a miracle that I was sitting in that hospital.

I learned that a whole lot of folks must have been following my story, because dozens of flowers, balloons, and gifts started pouring in. Every counter in my room was overflowing with stuff! After feeling invisible for most of my life, I felt overwhelmed to suddenly have so much attention. But I was very grateful. People who didn’t even know me were showing me more love than I had ever felt in my entire life.

Once I was allowed to eat solid food, my first meal was a cheeseburger (no mustard!) from Steak ’n Shake, plus a cheesecake blizzard from Dairy Queen. For once I wanted to taste a hamburger that wasn’t rotten. One of the police officers went out and got me the food himself. When I bit into that big fat burger, it was like going to heaven! Some of the juice dripped down my chin. The blizzard was just as good. I hadn’t had ice cream in years—it felt so cold going down my throat.

It was explained to me that I would need a lawyer, and some people quickly helped me find one. My lawyer told me that some people from the FBI would interview me on videotape
.
The next day, when she took me to meet with the FBI, I was so nervous!
What will I say? How will I explain everything? Will the other girls be there?
But it was just me and them. Two women interviewed me while some other people listened from behind a wall. I couldn’t see them, but they could see me. It was very nerve-wracking; I really hate talking to people when there are other people listening in.

The two women asked me a ton of questions about every detail of what happened in the house and what I went through every single year. They had all my notebooks, so I guessed the police had gotten them out of the house. At times I was like, “I don’t remember exactly when some of these things happened—some of the dates have run together in my mind. But I do remember what that sicko did to me.”

That first conversation lasted for hours, and I had to go back to talk to them over the next couple of days to give them more information. By the end of it I was wiped out.

Both of my brothers, Eddie and Freddie, came to visit me in the hospital. Eddie wasn’t able to come up to my room at that time, I think because of some kind of rule about the number of visitors. The second Freddie and I saw each other we both broke down crying. The last time I had seen him he was a teenager—and he had turned into a grown man.

“I missed you, sister!” he said.

“I missed you too!” I said. We hugged each other so tightly.

I was too emotional to talk to him very much. Also, I wasn’t ready to have a conversation about our parents. The memories of what I went through when I was a little girl were still too painful. Seeing them would remind me of all that. There was just one person I couldn’t wait to see—Joey.

“I’m going to need everyone to just give me some space for awhile,” I told Freddie. “I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do with myself when I get out of here.”

Freddie said that he understood. After a few minutes he hugged me again and then left. On his way out he gave me his cell number. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said, “call me.” I nodded.

That same evening I told the hospital staff that I didn’t want to see any more visitors—not even family. My heart couldn’t take it. I wanted my privacy and some time to start healing.

“Don’t you want to see the rest of your family?” my lawyer asked me several times.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” I told her.

Later on, my lawyer told me that the FBI had found an assisted living home for me. “It’s safe for you to stay there until you figure out what you want to do next.” She said it was the best thing for me, but I was sad that I didn’t have a real home of my own to go back to.