Finding Me (25 page)

“You fucking bitch!” he screamed at me. He slapped me across my cheek with the back of his huge hand. Gina and Amanda both froze. I don’t remember what I’d done to upset him—it never took much to tick him off.

Jocelyn, who was playing by herself in a corner of the kitchen, looked over at us. She didn’t make a move. She must have been trying to figure out why her father was so mean to her Auntie Juju.

Once, Jocelyn woke up screaming in the middle of the night. She had had a very bad dream. She was screaming loud enough to wake up the whole neighborhood. The dude came running up the stairs and into her room; the door between our rooms was open that night, so I could see everything that was happening.

“Shut her up!” he yelled at Amanda. Amanda tried to quiet her down by rocking her back and forth and rubbing her back, but Jocelyn kept on sobbing. So the dude put his whole hand over her mouth and nose. “Be quiet!” he told her.

Is he going to hurt her?
I thought
.
I wanted to punch the piss out of him. I could tell Amanda was upset too, just by the angry look on her face. Jocelyn eventually calmed down, at least until the next time she had a nightmare. Sometimes when she woke up yelling I tried to help Amanda out by singing to Jocelyn; none of us wanted the dude to come upstairs and touch that child again.

After one of her dreams Jocelyn told me, “The bad man was trying to hurt people.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Everything will be fine.” The dude may not have hit his own daughter, but the wounds he gave her still seemed very deep.

I
N
THE
SUMMER
OF
2012 Gina started itching. A lot. She got a bunch of little red dots all over her body. “What do you think this is?” she asked me, scratching one of the spots on her arm.

“It could be the chicken pox,” I told her. Whatever it was, it was tearing her skin up. The dude didn’t seem to care, but the next day he bought her some cream that was supposed to stop the itching. It didn’t work.

Over the next several days she got more and more red spots, but I noticed they didn’t seem to be turning into poxes. They looked more like mosquito bites. One afternoon I figured it out.

“It isn’t chicken pox,” I told Gina and the dude. “It’s bedbugs.” I had just seen one of the little suckers crawl across our mattress. I picked it up and held it right in his face.

“Holy shit!” he said. “You’re right. We better close the door so they don’t get over into Amanda and Jocelyn’s room.”

That’s what happens when you’re a dirt bag; you bring bedbugs into the house. The dude didn’t get our mattress from the store. He once told me that he got it from an alley outdoors. “A mattress is just a place to lay down on,” he said. “Who cares if it has a few stains on it?”

But by the time 2012 rolled around, that bed didn’t just have “a few stains.” It was filled with everything from dust and semen to spit and blood. The mattresses were so filthy that I’m surprised we didn’t have bedbugs many years before. And when the dude closed off the doors to our room it was a hundred degrees outside—hot as hell, with no ventilation. Gina and I sweated like pigs. But even after I showed him that bug, he didn’t throw out that bed. Instead, he came into the room with a huge piece of plastic.

“Get up,” he said. He threw the plastic over the mattress. “Well,” he told us, “I hope they die.”

I hope you do too!
I thought. A few days later I started getting the bites. I knew that would happen; there’s no way you can sleep on top of a mattress filled with bugs and not get eaten alive. Eventually we were both covered with dots from head to toe. Sometimes it would seem like the bites were clearing up. But whenever they started to go away, we’d get a whole bunch of new ones. It was exactly like our experience in the house: just when we thought things were getting a little better, they actually got worse. A new catastrophe was always just around the corner.

We spent the entire miserable summer switching between scratching our bedbug bites and trying to stay cool. Only one good thing happened that whole summer. While we were down in the kitchen the dude let Gina look through a newspaper. In one of the ads she saw a dress she thought I would like. Later, when I wasn’t around, she begged the dude to buy it using the money she had “earned”—that big stash of bills he was always throwing at us like we were his little hookers. I couldn’t believe he went out and bought the dress, but he did. She later told me the whole story. It was the one and only time he let us “buy” something with “our money.”

When Gina surprised me with it, I was so excited. “It’s beautiful!” I told her. “I love it!”

It was a sleeveless sundress that had a variety of pretty colors in it—pink, green, and blue. It was so long that it went down way past my ankles. I wore the dress a lot, right on top of all those terrible bedbug bites.

The long, hot days slowly got cooler and shorter, but the daily rapes didn’t slow down. Sometimes I tried to zone out by thinking up some way to escape. And I told Gina, “We should start doing exercises so we can get stronger and knock his ass out.”

She laughed. But a few days after I said that, we started up a routine. Every morning we got onto the floor and did a bunch of sit-ups and push-ups, even though I felt pretty weak.

“We have to build up enough muscle to break out of here,” I said in the middle of one of my sit-ups. Gina nodded and kept exercising.

“Heck, yeah,” I told her. “We’re busting out of this place.” We got a little stronger, but we were still chained up on Seymour Avenue.

Around the end of September I couldn’t do it anymore. I was nauseous and leaking milk, pregnant again for the fifth time since I’d been held captive.

T
HAT
FALL
,
WHEN
J
OCELYN
was five, the dude took her to some kind of outdoor fair or carnival. They returned with some food.

“Jocelyn wanted to get each one of you guys a hot dog,” he said. The only trouble was that the hot dog was smothered in mustard—and I am extremely allergic to mustard.

When I was eight years old I ate some deviled eggs. Fifteen minutes later my whole face swelled up and turned red. I couldn’t breathe. My mother rushed me to the emergency room. The doctors tested me and discovered that mustard was the cause.

“It could have killed her,” the doctor told my mother.

I never ate mustard again. So when the dude came home with a hot dog slathered in it, I knew how dangerous it was for me. He knew it too: whenever he got burgers at McDonald’s, I wouldn’t eat it if he’d forgotten to ask them to hold the mustard. But now, knowing that I was allergic, he insisted that I eat it anyway. He put the hot dog down on the mattress.

“If you don’t eat this,” he told me, “you’re not getting anything else.”

Several days earlier he had gone back to basically starving me. “I’ll teach you to do what I tell you to do,” he’d said. He stopped taking me downstairs for dinner. Around that time he also figured out that I was pregnant, because I’d started throwing up—so that gave him a good reason to starve me.

“If I have anything to do with it,” he told me, “you will never have a baby in this house.”

On top of all that, I felt like I was coming down with some kind of virus or head cold. I had been coughing and sneezing nonstop. And my stomach was aching from not having anything to eat. So even though I knew mustard could seriously hurt me, I was tempted to eat the hot dog. Initially I hadn’t been able to keep anything down because of the nausea, but as I got a little farther into my pregnancy, my appetite came back. By this point I was so hungry that I thought,
Maybe if I wipe off the mustard, I’ll be okay.
Trust me, you think about doing a lot of crazy things when you’re dying of hunger, especially if you have no idea whether another meal is coming.

“Eat this or I’ll shoot you!” he ordered. If I was going to die either way, I figured I should at least die with a full stomach. So I picked up the hot dog and used the bottom edge of my T-shirt to wipe off the glob of yellow mustard. I put the hot dog up to my mouth, took a bite—and then I held my breath.

Within several minutes my face puffed up. My throat closed. My belly felt like it was being ripped out. “You look really bad,” Gina said.

The dude didn’t care. He wasn’t about to take me to the hospital. He just shrugged. “You’ll get over it,” he said and walked out of our room.

That night I lay on my mattress and prayed that the mustard would work its way out of my body. “If you’re listening, God,” I whispered, “I need you to help me right now.” But I got worse. Much worse. The next morning my face was twice as puffed up as it was the day before. My whole body had turned the color of a ripe tomato. I couldn’t feel my throat or my tongue. When Gina woke up and looked at me, I could see the fear in her eyes.

“Oh my God, what should we do?” she asked. I didn’t even have the energy to answer her.

By day two, the way I looked and sounded finally freaked out the dude. Not only was my face huge, but I was also coughing up a bunch of mucus. He brought in a big bottle of cough syrup.

“Take some of this,” he said, flinging the bottle down on the bed.

Over the next few days I drank that bottle. It helped my cough a little, but it did nothing for the other symptoms. The dude brought in some black beans from a can, plus some water. Gina mashed it up and fed me. I couldn’t get my mouth open wide enough to drink out of the cup, so she used a straw to give me some water.

By the fifth day I couldn’t move my body, much less open my mouth. I was in more pain than I had ever been in.

“I can’t deal with this anymore,” I said softly to Gina. I was losing my desire to fight.

She scooted over to my side of the mattress and cradled my head in her lap. “Michelle, you’ve gotta stay strong for Joey,” she whispered. “Your son loves you. He needs you. You can’t go like this. Please.”

One part of me wanted to keep going, but an even bigger part of me just wanted to go ahead and die. How can I keep living this way? If I get through this, will I ever even get back to Joey? Will dying at least put me out of this misery? That’s the last thing I remember thinking before everything went black.

What happened next still makes me tremble when I talk about it. Right after that total darkness, I opened my eyes to see a white light. It was brighter than any light I have ever seen here on earth. Then, suddenly, I heard a deep voice. “It’s not your time, Michelle,” the voice said. “It’s not your time. It’s not your time.” My whole body felt lighter than a feather. The next thing I knew, I heard another voice. This time, it was Gina.

“Stay with me,” Gina said. “You can get through this. I know you can. Joey loves you. I love you too.”

I opened my eyes to see I was still in that house. Still on that dirty mattress. Still stuck in the life that had led me to the doorway of death. I had crossed over to the other side—I know I did. What I saw and heard isn’t something you can just imagine.

A thousand different times in my life I had asked God to show up for me. Like when the man in my family first started abusing me. When I was shivering under that bridge. When the dude strung me up in that pink room. I have never been totally sure if God could hear me or if he even cared. But the voice I heard that night convinced me of one thing: God is real. Definitely. I don’t know why he let so many awful things happen in my life. I might never have an answer to that question, and I still get angry sometimes when I think about it. But there is only one way I can explain why I didn’t completely kick the bucket that night—God brought me back. I saw it. I heard it. I felt it. And for the rest of my life I will never doubt it.

It took another five days for all my swelling to go away. The whole time Gina stayed right there with me. She fed me some more. She wiped the sweat off my forehead with the palm of her hand. She encouraged me to keep on going. Sometimes God shows up as a deep voice and a bright light. Other times he shows up as a friend named Gina. On a dark night in 2012 God showed up as both.

24
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