Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (36 page)

I make us the most amazing breakfasts of over-easy eggs, nice and yolky with bacon and sausage—just because I can. Sometimes when I’m cooking, I go out of my way to push the pan to one side of the burner. He always demanded that it be exactly in the middle of the flame and called me names if I did it wrong. It feels liberating to do things my way, not his.

I want to finish high school, but Jocelyn comes first. Classes at the neighborhood elementary school started only a couple of weeks after he was sentenced. I didn’t think she was ready for what other kids might say, so I’m homeschooling her for one more year. We turned a small bedroom into a classroom that has lots of things we wished for on Seymour Avenue, like light pouring through the windows. We have a laptop and a printer, and a brand-new desk.

The walls are covered with harder vocabulary words:

Congruent: same shape and size.

Homographs: words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.

We study math, contractions, alliteration, proper nouns, the solar system.

I taped the alphabet to the wall, along with words that start with each letter. And at the start of every class we stand, as we did inside Seymour Avenue, put our hands over our hearts, and say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Gina and I have become closer friends than we ever were inside. It’s like we’ve started over. Joce loves it when Gina comes to visit, and she uses my phone to text her silly messages. It’s tougher between me and Michelle. We are very different people, and I think life is going to take us in different directions. We endured the unthinkable together and we’ll always have that bond. I wish her happiness.

Joce has made new friends. Some of the little girls in the neighborhood come over to play, and I’m starting to let her go to their houses. But it’s hard to let her out of my sight. When they play in the front yard, I sit on my new sofa and watch them out the window. I’m happy that she is stepping out into the world, but I’m also worried. Will she run into traffic? Will she be too trusting of others? Will kids be mean to her?

I don’t sleep much. I lie with Joce until she falls asleep, then I get up and pace, walking from room to room, trying to settle my racing mind. Seymour Avenue is like a scary movie playing over and over in my head. Because he killed himself, Joce and I will never have a chance to confront him, so I’ll never really be able to feel closure.

A few weeks ago Teddy, Beth, and I went to a yard sale and as we were loading the car, Teddy teased me and called me a “dumbass.” He was just joking, but I felt like I’d been hit by a train. I choked up and started crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

I snapped at him: “Don’t ever call me that again! He used to call me that, and I hate it!”

Poor Teddy was just joking, but hearing that word triggered something completely overwhelming inside me.

I don’t go out all that often. When I do, people recognize me. Everybody means so well, but it’s awkward when strangers walk up and hug me. I’m not sure what to say or how to act. I’m seeing a counselor, and she says it will take time to heal. One minute I feel whole and strong, and the next minute I feel like I am breaking.

I think about what it all means, who I am after ten years in that house. I know I’m more aware of other people’s pain. I am a believer in the power of hope—in myself and in God. But I still don’t know why this happened to me, or what lies ahead for me and Joce.

After all those years locked up in a house dreaming of getting out and being with other people, sometimes all I want to do is be by myself at home.

So at night I pace, trying to figure it all out, looking for peace.

December 11, 2013: Moving On

Gina

My tutor and I meet at a Cleveland Public Library with big windows, where I can see the snow falling outside. Diane Cook, a retired teacher, tutors me several hours a day and helps me with other skills, too, like budgeting money and studying for my written driving test.

Today we’re working on reading. I never finished seventh grade, so I have a long way to go to get my high school diploma. I’m twenty-three and sometimes I think it would be easier to just quit and get a job. But every time I say that, my mom nearly jumps out of her skin. She wants me to finish school, period.

I know she’s right, so here I am, making my way through
The First Part Last
by Angela Johnson, a novel about teen pregnancy. I turn to page seventy-five and start reading out loud and keep going until I reach the last line of the chapter: “Nothing has changed, but everything has.”

“What does that mean?” my teacher asks. “What’s changed?”

“He’s growing up, maybe,” I say.

This is how I am rebuilding my life, one page at a time, one day at a time.

I don’t cry much. Amanda is still a fountain of tears, but everyone is different. I try to push my locked-up years out of my head, erasing him from my mind and filling it with new and happier memories. At least that is what I want to do, and it seems to be working.

I’m starting a new life. The Gina I was, the Gina before Seymour, is gone. That innocent, introverted, and happy-go-lucky person doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s hard to let her go. But it’s what happened. So instead of dwelling on that, I’m focusing on figuring out the rest of my life. Everyone changes, anyway. Sad and violent things happened to me, and because of that I think I can help other victims, like a young girl I met recently. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me about the bad situation she grew up in. She needed someone to listen to her, and when she was finished I told her, “I’m glad that is over. Take it slow, day by day. Enjoy that it is not happening now. Enjoy the right now.” She was grateful and said that if it worked for me, it just might work for her.

I appreciate everything now: new eyeglasses, a quiet bath, squeezing all the toothpaste I want onto a new toothbrush, my mom’s pork chops. I have my own bedroom! Because of kind people who gave to the Courage Fund, my family was able to pay for an addition to our small house that my dad had been planning for years, and someone donated a privacy fence outside, too. I’ll have my license soon and just bought a little Toyota so I can drive to the mall or over to Amanda and Jocelyn’s. I couldn’t believe all the funny license-plate frames they sell, and for fun I picked out one that says
YIELD
TO
THE
PRINCESS
!
It’s hysterical when my dad drives my car.

While I was practicing driving, I drove my car into a really deep pothole the other day and messed up the front end. I am mad at myself for doing that, but I’m not letting it bother me. I’ve had worse problems.

I spend lots of time with my mom. We go to bingo and dance salsa in the house, but mostly we just hang out together. It’s been hard for her to get used to the idea that I’m not fourteen anymore, not a kid to correct, to tell to sit up straight or not to stay out late. I understand why she still thinks of me that way, and that she wants to protect me, but I am so much older now.

I’m jumpy sometimes and wonder when that will stop. It happens over little things, sometimes just the sound of the front door opening. For years, whenever I heard a door open it was almost always bad news. My niece came close to me holding scissors the other day, and I asked her not to come near me with them again. She didn’t know about how he would use them to chop off my hair.

Sleep can be hard, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, kicking and crying and screaming “Get off of me!” My little dog, Lala, sleeps in my room. For the few months I had her on Seymour, before he gave her away to his relatives, she slept beside me, between my legs, or even right on my pillow. Lala was in the car with him and his brother when he was arrested, and she ended up in an animal shelter. One day on the TV news, I saw her there. I told my lawyer, Heather Kimmel, that I would love to have her, and she went and rescued her for me.

I have very few things from the Seymour years. I threw away all my clothes. I have Lala and some notes and poems I wrote to my family: “I hope to see you soon so we can sit outside and watch the moon.”

I love walking outside and looking up at the sky. It may be my favorite thing. It always cheers me up to gaze up and see the sun or the moon. I wish everyone would realize how much they would miss it if they couldn’t go outside for years.

My nieces talk about Twitter, what they are googling, and how to use the GPS on their cell phone. When I first got out of Seymour Avenue, I had no idea what they were talking about, but I’m catching up with all that changed in the world between 2004 and 2013. A lot of my school friends have jobs and babies.

I feel closer to God. There were times inside when I lost my faith, or nearly did, because I couldn’t understand why God would let this happen to me. After I got out, I went to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church and I knelt there and prayed and asked God to forgive me for doubting Him.

I also said a prayer to Nilda Figueroa. When he first kidnapped me he told me this was all her fault, that if she hadn’t left him he wouldn’t have kidnapped me, Amanda, and Michelle. For a while I was actually angry at her. I guess I was mad at anything and anyone who I thought could have saved me all that pain. I had no idea then about all she endured, and so I asked her to forgive me for ever blaming her and told her I was sorry for what she went through. I also lit a candle for all missing children.

My parents took me to the Night Out Against Crime three months after I was freed. They had gone every year to hand out “missing” flyers with my picture. I wasn’t ready yet to speak publicly, but my dad got up and said what I wanted to, that we were there “for every missing child that’s out there.”

I hope I’ll be able to do more to help those kids soon. I am finding my voice.

May 5, 2014: Washington

Gina

Wow! The White House.

Our names are on the guest list, and two uniformed Secret Service officers greet us. One of them says it’s amazing to meet us, but she’s got that backwards: we’re the ones who are amazed.

We were invited to Washington by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an organization that helped our families when we were gone. They are giving us their Hope Award, which goes every year to someone who inspires hope for missing children. The big awards dinner is at the Ritz-Carlton hotel tomorrow night, on the one-year anniversary of our escape.

The center flew us all here. I came with my parents and our neighbor Charlene Milam, who has done so much for my family over the years. Amanda brought Beth and two cousins, Tina and Tasheena. Our lawyers, Jim Wooley and Heather Kimmel, flew with us, too, but they insisted on paying their own way since they have vowed never to take a cent for working with us. They are like family now.

I had never been on a plane before, and neither had Amanda. Everybody told us not to worry about it—it couldn’t be easier, like sitting in your living room. Yeah, right! Our flight from Cleveland was so bumpy that people’s drinks were flying out of their hands and hitting the ceiling. Even passengers who flew a lot said it was scary, their worst flight ever. Before I was kidnapped, I would have thought: What bad luck that my first flight was so horrible. Now, after learning to focus on the positive, I think: What good luck that we landed safely.

We walk into the White House and see the East Room and the State Dining Room and the Blue and Green and Red rooms. On Seymour Avenue we used to call our rooms by their colors. I never imagined when I was living in that miserable pink room that one day I would be standing in this famous Red Room.

I have never seen such wide hallways and grand staircases. When we come to a shiny banister I whisper to Amanda that I bet the Obama girls slide down it when nobody’s around.

“I want a picture of me pretending to slide on it,” I tell her.

So I climb up on it, and she gets her camera ready.

“Gina, be careful,” Jim says. “You might fall.”

And, of course, I do!

“I bet I’m the first Puerto Rican to fall in the White House!” I say, laughing.

Just then we run into Bo, President Obama’s dog, in the hallway. He’s adorable, and the guy walking him lets us pet him for a few minutes.

I’m thinking that this has to be the single coolest day of my life. Then, as we are getting ready to leave, someone tells us that Vice President Biden would like to meet us and wants to know if we can come back tomorrow.

May 6

Amanda

It’s ten a.m. and we’re back at the White House, though we come in at a different entrance than we did yesterday. Today we’re going to the West Wing. The hallways are narrow, and there are people all over the place. Everybody looks like they are in a hurry. We stop for a minute outside the Oval Office and peek in, but it’s empty. I feel like I am on a movie set.

We’re escorted to a little seating area to wait for the vice president and I ask to use the ladies’ room. When I come out, I walk around a corner and whoa! I come face-to-face with President Obama, who’s talking to Gina and Beth. It’s really him! He is holding out his hand and he knows my name.

“Hello, Amanda,” he says. “I heard you were coming to meet the vice president, and I wanted to make sure I had a chance to say hello. I want to tell you how proud I am of you, and that it’s such an honor to meet you.”

Then he asks, “Do you have time to take a picture?”

It’s a funny question, since he’s the busy one, but I know he is just being nice.

We pose for a few photos with the president and vice president. And then he is off, saying, “I’ve gotta go deal with this Ukraine thing.” He’s making a joke, but it reminds us of exactly where we are.

The vice president asks us to sit down and then sits forward in his chair, looking at Gina and then me, focusing in hard, like we’re the only people in the world. “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through,” he says. “Nobody can begin to imagine what that was like.” He tells us about a terrible accident in 1972 that killed his wife and daughter. His eyes are filling with tears, and we’re all starting to cry, too.