Finding Me (18 page)

I could tell the dude didn’t want us to spend time together. Even when he did have us in the same room, he made sure it was for less than five minutes. There were so many questions I wanted to ask Amanda: How did he get you into the house? Did he keep you in the basement with that helmet on when you first got here, and is that why I didn’t see you for a while? What kind of stuff does he do to you when he comes to your room? Are you as scared shitless as I am? And most important of all: Do you think we have a chance of getting out of this torture chamber?

That spring the dude never admitted to me that Amanda wasn’t his brother’s girlfriend. I don’t know why he told me that stupid lie after I told him I knew it was Amanda, and that I had gone to school with her. One night, when the dude took me down to his cubbyhole room, he turned on his cable TV. Amanda’s mother was on the news pleading for people to help find her daughter.

He laughed. “I’m smarter than those stupid cops,” he said. “You see that?” he added, pointing up in the direction of the stairs. “At least someone is looking for her. But who’s looking for you? Not a soul. That’s because you don’t mean nothin’ to nobody. I can keep you in here forever and nobody will miss you.”

I would have cried, but when you’ve been locked away for nearly a year, you sort of run out of tears. I wondered if anyone was looking for me, why no one from my family was on TV. Even though I’d been missing for a while, you’d think that Amanda’s disappearance would trigger questions about whether the same person had kidnapped me—that is, if anyone had ever made a big deal about me being gone in the first place.

15
______________

Pregnant

N
OT
TOO
LONG
AFTER
Amanda was brought into the house, I woke up feeling sick—wicked sick. I tried to eat a little bit of some leftover pizza the dude dropped off, but I threw it up. My breasts were very sore. I started throwing up all the food he gave me. I knew I was pregnant; I felt the exact same way I did when I was first pregnant with Joey.

The dude didn’t figure it out right away. My room was so disgusting that he probably didn’t even notice my vomit on the floor. In fact, I tried to hide the pregnancy from him because I didn’t know what he would do if he found out. No matter how sick I felt when he came in the room, I acted like I was fine. I know it might sound crazy, but in my weakened and disoriented state of mind, I thought I did want to have another child. I missed my son so much that my whole body ached. And I didn’t even have my little Lobo anymore. At least I could have something that was all mine, a baby growing inside of me, even though the baby’s father was the Devil himself.

For the next few weeks after he’d brought Amanda to the house he seemed to come to my room a lot more often—in the morning before work and then two or three times at night.

“She don’t want to do it,” he told me, “so you’re gonna have to do it.”

As much as I hated it when he came to my room, I was happy to hear that Amanda was fending him off. “I don’t want to force her do things and then make her cry,” he added.

I thought,
But you’re okay with making
me
cry?
I wondered why he seemed to be treating her different from how he was treating me. Why she got the better TV. Why he made me do the most sick sexual acts with him and tell me it was because she didn’t feel like it. I figured it was because he had an obsession with blondes. But I didn’t blame Amanda for the way the dude treated either one of us. He was the psycho bastard who had us both chained up; the whole situation was a result of his twisted mind.

One night he started biting and sucking my nipples real hard. He was always telling me how he had a thing for girls with big boobs; I’m pretty sure that was one of the main reasons he chose to kidnap me.

All of a sudden he stopped. “What’s this?” he said. A little bit of white liquid had leaked from my nipple. He wiped it off with his hand and looked at it. It was breast milk.

“You must be pregnant, you little slut!” he shouted.
Right away he got off of me. “There’s no way in hell you’re having a baby in this house!” he shouted. He slammed the door and pounded down the stairs.

The bastard started trying to starve me so I’d lose the baby. He still came into my room to get his sex every morning and night, but he never brought any food. One night after he’d been starving me for a couple of weeks, he came into my room holding a huge barbell.

Holy crap, I thought. What is he going to do with that?

My whole body shook with terror as he walked over to my bed. He put down the barbell, grabbed my foot, and pulled me over the edge of the mattress.

“It’s time to get rid of this little problem,” he said. “Stand up, bitch.”

“No!” I shouted. “Keep away from me!” But he yanked me up and onto the floor. The chains cut into my neck as he pulled me upright.

As soon as he picked up the barbell again, I started screaming my head off. “No, no, no!” I yelled. “Stop it! Please don’t kill my baby!” I tried to get away from him by getting back onto the bed, but he grabbed my hair. And then with one hard swing—
Bam!
—he punched me in the stomach with the barbell.

I screamed bloody murder and fell to my knees. In horrible pain, I hugged my arms across my stomach. “I hate you!” I yelled. I was sobbing so hysterically that the whole neighborhood should have heard me. “Get out!” I screamed. “I hate you!”

He gave me an evil look. “Tomorrow it had better be gone,” he said, before he left the room.

I cried into my pillow for hours. My stomach felt like someone had just driven over it with an eight-wheel truck. Blood was rushing from between my legs, all over the place. I tried to use my sheet to stop the bleeding, but it was coming out too fast. I was in so much pain that I passed out. When I woke up, I think it was the middle of the night. I lay on my mattress in the pitch-black and sobbed uncontrollably. I felt like I wanted to die. The only thing that kept me breathing was that someday I wanted see my Joey again.

Just as the sun was coming up I started having horrible cramps. Minutes later I felt something slide out of me. It was the most god-awful thing I had ever lived through. The dude came upstairs before work and saw the big mess on my mattress.

“You aborted my child!” he yelled. He slapped me so hard in the face that I saw stars. “That’ll teach you not to kill my baby, you slut!”

All I could do was lay there and stare into space.

T
HE
REST
OF
2003 and the first part of 2004 went by very, very, very slowly. Every week was exactly the same as the one before it: five straight mornings of McDonald’s breakfast, followed by rape. Hours of boredom from morning until afternoon. More of me being violated at night after the dude came home. Loud Spanish music over the weekends. I thought I would lose my mind.

I knew Amanda was still in the house because sometimes I could hear her moving around (her steps sounded much lighter on the staircase than his elephant steps), but she and I still rarely saw each other. A couple of times I took a chance and tried to yell something to her after I knew the dude had gone out, but I never got an answer. She probably couldn’t hear me over the noise of her TV from wherever he had her chained up.

I didn’t get to go downstairs very often, but once, when he took me to the kitchen, I noticed that he’d put up alarms all over the place—by the windows and above the doors. There were also little mirrors everywhere, like rearview mirrors he had put up so he could see what was happening from every direction. Seeing all of that really made me feel like there was no hope of escaping.

At this point I stopped thinking too much about how I could break out of the house. It seemed like everything I’d thought of—trying to wiggle my hands out of the chains, trying to get away from him while he raped me—had failed. He kept me chained up almost all of the time, and when I was unlocked, he was always with me and watching me closely. I couldn’t work the padlocks loose. And the few times he took me on the back porch, he threatened me with his gun. I don’t think of myself as a quitter, but after you’ve wracked your brain for every possible way to escape and nothing works out, you start to give up a little. I guess I just started feeling hopeless. I was also terrified that if he caught me, he would blow my brains out. And what good would I ever be to Joey if I got myself killed by this bastard? None!

One afternoon in the spring of 2004 I heard another news report that freaked me out. On April 2 fourteen-year-old Gina DeJesus had gone missing from the same area where Amanda and I had been kidnapped. Just like I had recognized Amanda, I also knew who Gina was—her older sister, Mayra, went to my school. In my heart I was pretty sure the dude had kidnapped her. That evening I prayed so hard that I was wrong.

Later that same night I heard a girl screaming bloody murder. The sound was coming from the basement. “Help me!” she yelled over and over again. “Somebody please help me!”

I knew it was Gina. With all of my heart I wanted to go down there and save her. I wanted her to know that someone did hear her, that if she could just hold on for another minute, help was on the way. But with two huge chains wrapped around my body, all I could do was listen to her screams—and wonder why no one ever heard any of us.

16
______________

The Third Girl

F
OR
THE
REST
OF
A
PRIL
I didn’t hear another sound from the basement. The silence was creepy; it worried me to death. And what made it even worse was seeing Mayra on the news begging everyone to help her find her little sister. I asked myself over and over:
Is Gina down there in the helmet? Is she struggling to breathe? Has Amanda seen her? Will I ever see her? Is she still alive?
I had no clue.

Finally, one night I looked directly at the dude and said, “I know you took that girl.” He stared at me but didn’t answer. I was surprised he didn’t knock me in the head.

A week or so later the dude came into my room and handed me a red spiral notebook, a pencil, and a small sharpener. “Here, maybe you can draw or something,” he said.

The pencil was dull, but it had an eraser on the bottom. Some of the pages of the notebook were torn out. I didn’t thank him. I just took the pencil, notebook, and sharpener out of his hand. On the inside I was yelling, “Oh my god! I can’t believe it! Now I can draw! Yes!” This was the first day in that house, other than the days I got Lobo and the TV, when something good happened.

After he left, it felt weird to even hold the pencil in my fingers. I hadn’t held a pencil or a pen for over a year. My fingers shook. I was scared because I kept thinking I heard the dude on the stairs, and I didn’t want him to take the notebook away from me. I never knew when he would change his mind about something. I really missed drawing wolves, so right away I drew one. I made it so big that it filled the whole page and went over the edges a little. It wasn’t my best one, but I was still happy.

From then on, the first thing I did when I woke up was pick up that pencil, sharpen it, and start writing or drawing. I couldn’t get enough; I wrote every day. Poems. Songs. What made me sad. Letters to Joey. And dreams of how I wished everything could be different. I was careful not to say anything too specific about the dude, because I figured he might read it.

This is one of the first things I wrote:

Every time I see a butterfly, it reminds me of how precious life can truly be. To be able to turn from a caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly and fly away so freely and gracefully wherever she may please, without no one in the world to tell her what to do. I wait for that special moment in time when I get to live life freely, without no worries, pain, or tears. I just want to be happy. I want to hear the laughter in the air without all of the pain. One special day I’ll get to live my life just like that beautiful butterfly. I will no longer feel blue inside.

The only time I got interrupted was when the dude came in. I didn’t want him to read what I wrote or take away the notebook, so I hid it under my pillow.

A few days after he gave me the notebook the movie
101 Dalmatians
was on TV. I cried the whole time because it reminded me of Joey. I missed him more than you can imagine. Only a mother can understand what it’s like to have her child torn away from her. It’s like having your soul ripped right out of your body. You can barely speak because it hurts so bad. To try to get rid of some of the pain, I wrote to my huggy bear:

I am sitting here watching
101 Dalmatians
and remembering that it’s your favorite movie. You loved to watch it over and over again ... I miss you, baby. I wish I could hug you right now. I wish I could watch the movie with you and see you laugh. One day I will see you again. I love you with all of my heart.