Salvation (3 page)

But there weren’t just three Albanians in this house. A fourth man came from behind Gideon, coming into the room before I even realized he was there, and hit him hard on the head with the butt of another gun.

Gideon grunted and went down. He hadn’t even had the chance to turn the gun around and use it.

He wasn’t knocked unconscious, though, and the third man—the one I’d hit with the heel of my boot—grabbed Gideon’s arm and twisted it around his back.

I heard the sound of bone cracking. It was the most sickening thing I ever heard in my life. My stomach almost heaved as Gideon roared from the pain.

A man from outside the door snapped out a terse comment. Maybe a reminder that he wasn’t supposed to be killed. It got a reaction because the third man let Gideon’s arm go.

Gideon wasn’t done yet. He was trying to straighten himself up when the fourth man kicked him hard in the gut. He released a choked huff and went down the floor. The man kicked him again. On the third kick I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I threw myself at him in a mindless attempt to tackle him. Or something. Anything to keep him from kicking Gideon anymore.

I’m in decent shape but not very tall, and there was no way my physical strength could accomplish anything. The third one grabbed me from behind and held me helpless.

I struggled futilely for a minute, but all it did was make the man holding me laugh.

He
laughed
.

Gideon wasn’t getting up.

And it was happening. The nightmare was happening. The thing I was supposed to be saved from. The thing so many stories taught me would be stopped at the very last second.

There was nothing to stop it now. I looked back at Gideon as the man dragged me out of the room. He wasn’t moving.

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t
right
. It wasn’t the way I’d always understood the world to work. There was something brutally wrong with it. That this good, strong man couldn’t protect me. That he’d given everything he had. There was blood all over his face. I’d heard his bone crack. And it hadn’t been enough.

Somehow, it made it even worse.

Despite what Gideon told me, I fought at first. I couldn’t help it. When they tear off your clothes, when they bend you over a table, every bone-deep instinct in your body will tell you to resist.

It started with the third man. The one who I’d jabbed with my heel. He was angry, and he took it out on me. But Gideon was right. I could tell he got off on my resistance, so I made myself go limp.

I tried to follow Gideon’s advice about sending my mind somewhere else. I sent it to the world I used to know. The one where Gideon had gotten the gun turned around in time and shot every one of these men dead. The one where the sirens came—signaling order and protection and safety—before this horrible man had gotten my pants down. The one where I was smart enough and strong enough to find a way out, to slip away from all these men and run to another house to call for help for me and Gideon both.

That was the place I went to in my mind—imagining stories of my being saved over and over again—while these men did what they did to me.

It wasn’t over with the one man. There were several men in the room, but not all of them took their turn. Maybe they weren’t interested. Maybe they were worried about the orders not to hurt me. There was conversation going on, but none of it I understood.

In the end, there were three of them.

You get to the point where the mind just disconnects from the body. I suppose it’s a way for us to protect ourselves, to convince ourselves that what happens to our bodies doesn’t really matter.

Everyone with any sense knows we are more than just our bodies, but we are our bodies too. The Greeks were right about a lot of things, but they were wrong about this. Our bodies are part of us—a true part of us—and what happens to them can change the whole of who we are.

Sending your mind away doesn’t really make it better.

I don’t even know if I was conscious the whole time. Maybe it’s a bitter blessing—not to be aware of every detail, for the world to become a nightmare blur.

Afterwards, they dropped me back into the room. And it was the strangest thing. That I was back where I started—in this cold, gray room, waiting for the morning when I would be ransomed and when some nameless boss would come to kill Gideon.

He was still there, still lying where I’d last seen him.

It didn’t really take that long. For the bottom to fall out of the world.

I managed to fasten my pants and pull my torn shirt closed over my chest. Then I crawled over to Gideon.

Even in the dim light of the room, I could tell he was in terrible shape. Blood was dripping and smeared all over his face, and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

It was hard to feel anything—anything at all—after what had just happened to me, but I was aware of a glimmer of
something
that wanted Gideon not to be dead.

“Gideon,” I managed to say. My throat hurt with the one word. I reached out to touch his bloody face.

Slowly, he opened his eyes. He made a grunting sound that might have been a question, but I couldn’t understand the word.

There was a torn piece of my shirt sleeve that was hanging on by a thread so I tore it all the way off and used it to try to wipe the blood off his face. Some of the blood was drying and I had no water, so I wasn’t really successful.

“What...” This time, his grunt took the form of a comprehensible word.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I knew I should care. I did care. He was a good man, and I wanted him to be all right. I just couldn’t make myself
feel
like I cared. I couldn’t make myself feel anything but numb.

He was still out of it, his mind not really working. “Did they...” he began, clearly trying to focus on my face and make his brain function clearly. He was starting to shift, assessing his condition.

“Yes.”

That was all I had to say. I saw his expression change. If he’d said he was sorry or asked if they’d hurt me or told me I could get through it—if he’d said anything at all—I would have hated him.

He didn’t say anything. He struggled to sit up, and it was obviously hard for him. I helped him mindlessly, mostly because it was a thing to be done.

“How hurt are you?” I asked, still trying to wipe blood off his face, after he’d gotten to a sitting position against the wall.

“I’m fine.”

That was obviously a lie. “How hurt are you?”

“Arm broken. A couple of ribs cracked. A concussion.” He spoke tersely, but he wasn’t angry. I’m not sure I would have minded if he was angry. I don’t think it would have broken through my numb stupor.

I kept trying to wipe the blood away, frustrated when some of it was too dried to come off.

“You don’t have to do that,” Gideon muttered, closing his eyes for a moment and breathing deeply.

I didn’t stop.

He reached up and gently lowered my wrist.

I wanted to do it. It was a thing to be done. So I briefly fought his hand.

There was no fight in me, though. I wasn’t sure if there would ever be again.

I whimpered and hugged my arms to my belly. I kind of rocked there for a minute.

Gideon sat in silence and watched me. I could tell he wanted to say something, to do something. At one point, he reached out to touch me, but he pulled his arm back even before I shrank away.

Eventually, a kind of darkness closed in. A darkness I wanted, one that swallowed up everything that hurt. I didn’t really pass out but I lost the edges of consciousness and ended up slumped over Gideon’s lap. It didn’t feel like he was touching me, and it was a little softer than the hard floor. Even with his broken bones, he didn’t try to rearrange me.

They found us like that a few hours later, when the FBI located the house and burst in to save us.

Just a little too late.

T
he days afterwards are just as fuzzy as those final hours in the row house.

I was in the hospital for a while. I talked to the police and the FBI and counselors and psychiatrists and volunteers from women’s groups. I had pregnancy and STD tests, which all came back negative. For days it went on. And I could do all of it because I was still numb, because nothing had unfrozen inside me yet.

This was me. Going through the motions. Pretending to be human.

My dad has a sprawling estate outside the city, and I went there afterwards. My mom died a few years ago—I don’t think I’ve mentioned that yet—but my dad tried to be there for me now. He even took a week off work, something he’d never done in my entire life.

He felt guilty, I’m sure, since what happened to me was because of him, but I couldn’t be angry with him. I couldn’t feel close to him or comforted by him either, but the part of my mind that could still make reasonable connections recognized that he was trying.

The justice systems moved the way it normally does. Slowly and not very satisfactorily.

They rounded up the entire Albanian gang, mostly thanks to Gideon’s work undercover. The Albanians aren’t like the Italian mafia, with a clear, organized hierarchy. It’s more like loosely related clans, often connected transnationally. Gideon’s operation was able to take down the U.S. network of one of those clans.

I’m explaining this for clarity—not because it mattered to me at the time. I didn’t care about any of the nuances of Albanian gang culture or about the success of any of the FBI’s organized crime initiatives. The only thing that mattered were the specific men who had hurt me.

Those men pleaded out on the rape charges, with minimum consequences because they were needed to testify against men higher up the food chain.

That’s how it works. If you want to take down an organization, you have to overlook smaller criminals to get to the big ones. The men who raped me would go to prison, but a U.S. prison would be a cakewalk compared to what they’d probably lived through growing up in the Balkans when they did.

I’m not sure anything that could happen to them would be bad enough to make me feel better.

There didn’t seem to be any feeling better for me. Just the hope that numbness would continue to cover over the pain.

In the hospital, I’d asked about Gideon—because I really did want him to be all right. They told me he was pretty beat-up but he would be fine, and that he was going through a required, extended debriefing, which I guess was pretty intense.

He’d been undercover with the worst kind of men for eight months. I’m not sure how that would affect you, but I’m sure he needed some recovery and orientation time afterwards.

When I was out of the hospital and at my dad’s place, he started to call me.

I didn’t recognize the number the first time, so I didn’t pick up. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I hadn’t seen any of my friends since it happened and I hadn’t gone back to work, so I wasn’t about to talk to someone on the phone whose number I didn’t recognize.

He left a brief message on my voice mail, saying he was just checking in to see how I was doing. He gave me his number and asked me to give him a call when I felt up to it.

Hearing his voice did something strange to me. It broke through the safe numbness that had wrapped me up for so many days. Just a crack, but it was enough to send a surge of panic shooting through me.

I remembered details about that room, about what happened when they’d dragged me out, about how it had felt when they raped me. I didn’t just remember. I
experienced
it all again. And that brief moment of re-experiencing it was so intense and so horrifying that it was like demons had taken possession of my body.

I didn’t call him back.

He kept calling. Not often enough for it to be creepy but enough so I couldn’t forget about him. Sometimes he left messages, and sometimes he didn’t. After a while, there was an edge to his tone. Not anger or even frustration but almost desperation.

I didn’t understand. I appreciated everything he’d tried to do for me. I really did. But he was never a part of my life before, and it was ridiculous to think that such a horror should somehow make him a part of my life now.

He made me remember the horror more vividly—his voice caused demons to rise—and that’s what I couldn’t let happen.

It happened anyway. However safe it feels, that numbness just can’t last forever. And then it’s nothing but the pain.

And eventually it feels like the pain is everywhere, everything—like you’re nothing more than how much it hurts.

Some women are strong and they can go on with life, despite the pain. I’m not strong, and I couldn’t.

For two months, I put on a pretty good act. My dad worked most of the time, so I could fool him when I saw him. I’d known the couple who kept his house since I was a baby, and they were incredibly kind. But they were domestic staff, so I could keep my distance. I talked to my friends on the phone as often as I could stand, and they seemed to think I was starting to heal. I hadn’t gone back to work, but my boss said I could take all the time I needed. He’d hired some temporary help. To prove to everyone else that I was getting better, I even started spending some nights alone in my old apartment.

Those nights were the worst.

I couldn’t sleep unless I took pills, but even then I would wake up with nightmares. I didn’t tell anyone about those.

I know I wasn’t dealing. I wasn’t getting better. I wasn’t taking the help I was offered. I wasn’t doing anything I should have done to heal.

The thing is I didn’t even want to. It was too long and too hard a journey out of the darkness. I just wanted not to hurt.

So, one night, I was alone in my old apartment, where all my once-loved antique furniture mocked me with their triviality, their meaninglessness.

I might as well have been sitting on the cold, concrete floor of that empty basement room.

I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t stop the world from hurting me. And I was holding in my hands a way to make the pain end.

A brand new bottle of the pills I’d been taking to sleep.

It felt like someone else was sitting on my bed, opening the bottle.