Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (28 page)

Jaycee was held captive in a shed in the guy’s backyard and she had two kids with him. It was hard for her to talk to the police after they found her, because he made her so afraid for so many years. I know that feeling. There have been times when I thought about screaming for help, like when the police were raiding the house next door a couple of summers ago. But I felt so beaten down and frightened that I couldn’t open my mouth.

Jaycee says she was scared of the outside world. I know that I’m frightened that something will happen to Jocelyn when we get out of here. Will I ever be able to let her have a sleepover at a friend’s house or go shopping?

Even he has warned her about strangers. “Never get in a car with somebody you don’t know,” he tells her. He says that when they go out, she’s friendly with everybody. I guess that’s good, but it makes me worry, like Jaycee worries about her kids.

We read more about Jaycee and I say, “This is just like what happened to me.”

“It is similar, because she had the kids,” he agrees. Then he looks at me and asks, “Are you going to write a book about this?”

“I’m not sure,” I answer. “Do I want to write a book and relive all this?”

Someday, when I get out of here, I know some people won’t be able to understand why I didn’t figure out how to kill him or escape. It’s going to be hard to explain how fear paralyzes you. And I have Joce to worry about. If I fought back and he killed me, she would have only him to raise her, and I can’t let that happen. People are also going to say there was something wrong with me because I allowed myself to get close to him. I can’t help what people say, but I’m the one who went through this, and only I know what I’ve had to do to survive and to create the best possible life for Jocelyn.

“If you write a book, are you going to tell the truth? Are you going to say that you had feelings for me?” he asks. “’Cause if you don’t, you shouldn’t even write it. It won’t be true.”

“I am going to tell the truth,” I say. “I’m going to tell people what you did to me. I will tell them about all the rapes.”

“I never raped you,” he says.

I hate it when he says that. Does he really think that because I’m not screaming and hitting him every time, it’s “consensual”? He loves that word.

“Yes, you did,” I tell him. “You rape me all the time.”

He knows what he’s doing is wrong; that’s why he locks us up and keeps us hidden. But I don’t want to get him mad, so I drop it. Sometimes he is kind to me, and I do feel close to him.

“If I write a book, I’m not going to lie,” I say. “If you want people to know I care for you, fine. I’ll say that. But it was only like that after I had a kid with you. It wasn’t like I got here and said, ‘Oh, I’m so in love with you and I want to be here.’”

He turns off the computer and tells me, “You got in my car willingly. You got into bed with me because you wanted to. I never raped you. It was always consensual. I never did anything wrong.”

“I’m going to tell the truth,” I say again.

August 30, 2012: Bedbugs

Gina

I wake up itching. My arms and legs are covered with little red bites, which is weird because I don’t know how mosquitoes could possibly get in the house. The bites are incredibly annoying and are driving me crazy. Michelle and Amanda haven’t been bitten at all.

“I think you have chicken pox,” Amanda says.

“No, I had chicken pox when I was nine,” I tell her. “I definitely remember that. I missed a lot of school.”

“Maybe the measles?” she wonders.

She says I should stay away from Jocelyn in case I’m contagious.

Over the years we have all had colds, fevers, and stomachaches. He is around schoolkids all the time and gets sick, and then his germs race around the house. But I often wonder what he would do if one of us got seriously ill, or broke a bone or had an appendix attack? Even if he found an emergency room far from Cleveland and the doctors didn’t recognize us, he knows we would tell people and he would go to jail. Getting sick is just not an option. He would let us die.

In the heat this summer I had a lot of breathing problems and was making a scary wheezing sound. I have allergies and told him I thought it was from the mold and dust in my room. I was suffocating and needed some fresh air, and though he wouldn’t open the boarded-up window in my room, he cut a round hole in the ceiling to the attic and opened the windows up there. He rigged up a fan that was supposed to suck the hot air out of our room, and it did help a bit.

When I show him the spots all over my legs and arms, he goes to the drugstore and buys some skin cream. It calms the itching enough for me to sleep, but when I wake up, I freak. Now my face, neck, back—every inch of me—has red dots. And then I spot the problem: a plump little bug crawling on the bed. Bedbugs! So gross! I just saw on TV that there are tons of them these days.

I show the bug to Michelle, and she jumps off the bed. I trap it on a piece of tape so I can show it to Amanda and him.

“I can’t sleep on this bed anymore!” I tell him, showing him the dead bug.

“Why are they only biting you?” he asks.

“I don’t know! Maybe they like my blood. But I can’t sleep here!”

Now I wish I hadn’t asked for a new bed. A few days ago I helped him carry a box spring and mattress upstairs. I had been begging him to get us a new bed because the one I had to share with Michelle was so miserable—an old mattress on the ground. It had been on a frame, but the wooden slats kept falling out, so finally we just put it on the floor. But the mattress was lumpy and even he didn’t like it.

After I told him I wanted a regular bed like Amanda’s, he found a queen-size one on a curb that somebody had thrown out. The mattress was so comfortable that when we brought it upstairs he hollered to Amanda to ask if she wanted it. She pretty much gets first choice of everything. She took it, but I didn’t care, because then we got her mattress on top of the new box spring from outside, so we were way better off than we had been.

But now, as I itch from head to toe, I realize the box spring must have been full of bedbugs. I sit on the little plastic portable toilet in our room, since the bed takes up most of the room, and there’s nowhere else to sit. I don’t want to be on that mattress. Last night I dreamed that a bug with a huge face was laughing at me.

I hate this place. Why is this happening?

He returns with rubbing alcohol and bleach-soaked rags and tells me to help him wash down the mattress and box spring.

When Amanda got her new mattress, before we even knew about the bedbugs, she asked for a sheet of plastic and duct tape to wrap it. She’s always so worried about germs, and Jocelyn sleeps in that bed, too. Now he realizes what a good idea that was, so he does the same thing to our mattress and box spring. Amanda keeps telling him to hurry, because bedbugs move fast.

“The bugs will never get out,” he says, putting more and more duct tape around the mattress. “They are locked inside.”

October 25, 2012: Encounter

Amanda

“I saw Beth and her daughters at McKinley School,” he tells me. “I looked at her, and she looked right back at me.”

This is just like last year when he saw Beth in line at Marc’s. It makes me think about what a small world Cleveland is. McKinley is just a few blocks from my old house, and I’m only a couple of miles away. We all live in one big neighborhood, so why can’t anyone find me?

I wonder if Beth feels anything when she’s close to him. Something strange, or maybe familiar?

November 6, 2012: Fired

Amanda

My mom would have been fifty today. I kissed her photo this morning fifty-one times: one for each birthday, plus one for luck.

Mom’s birthday is good luck for President Obama—he was reelected today! I’ve now missed the first three elections when I would’ve been old enough to vote. I can’t wait to vote someday.

It’s early evening and time to exercise. We jog every night now. He thinks he’s getting fat and the doctor told him he has high blood pressure, so he’s suddenly a lot more health-conscious.

We turn on the music and jog in circles from the living room to the dining room and into the kitchen, over and over for an hour, all of us in a line. He goes first, then me, Joce, and Gina. Michelle usually stays in her room, because whenever she’s with him they get into a fight. Gina and I have learned it’s easier if you don’t talk back to him.

We look ridiculous jogging, especially him. He likes to wear his sweatpants with the waist pulled way up high. He says that makes him sweat more, which makes no sense, but it sure makes him look funny.

Today he’s not wearing his old straw cowboy hat, just a bandanna around his head. The jogging feels good. Sometimes it’s so goofy that it’s fun. Gina and I pretend to kick each other as we run, and he mixes in salsa steps. We laugh at how idiotic he looks.

But then later it feels awful again, and the moments when we were smiling and pretending everything was okay are all gone. Gina has felt less and less like jogging lately.

She’s become more depressed these past few months, and sometimes she doesn’t even want to get out of bed. I really have to beg her to get up. Joce gets bored with the jogging, too, so she doesn’t want to do it for too long. But I think it’s helping me feel better. I’m trying to eat less junk, too, but it’s hard.

Ever since Joce was born, but especially in the last year or so, he’s been buying healthier food. His doctor told him to eat more fruits and vegetables, and while he still cooks a lot of rice and beans, he makes me steam broccoli or green beans or kale, something green every day. He read on the Internet that kale is good for you, so he has that a lot. He suddenly has cucumbers and carrots in the fridge, and fish. He’s started growing peppers and tomatoes in the backyard.

But it’s annoying, because the good food is only for him and Jocelyn. The rest of us still have to eat a lot of McDonald’s and other junk because it’s cheaper. He buys apples and oranges and bananas, but we’re only allowed to eat them if they start going bad.

He still has a sweet tooth, though, and loves chocolate so much that he keeps huge Hershey’s bars with almonds in the fridge. Mainly those are just for him, but sometimes he gives us a little.

I go into the kitchen to get a drink of water after jogging when he walks in looking happy.

“I finally got fired today,” he says with a smile, holding up a letter from the Cleveland Public Schools saying he’s been terminated. This has been his plan for a long time. He’s been more and more worried that driving a school bus was too risky, that he would make a mistake at work and the police would come here again.

One time in 2004, he left a kid alone on the bus while he went to have lunch. He got suspended and he said two cops knocked on the front door to talk to him, but he wasn’t home. I must have been upstairs, chained in my room, because I never heard anyone knocking.

He says if he quit, he wouldn’t have gotten as much money, but now he can collect unemployment, and it’s better for his pension, too. He says he’s been egging on his boss for a couple of years, getting smart-mouthed with him and trying to get fired. Last Valentine’s Day he went shopping at Marc’s. He left his school bus in the parking lot and went in wearing his driver’s uniform. His boss was in the store and told him he wasn’t supposed to be doing personal errands with the bus.

“He said he was going to fire me, so I said, ‘I don’t care. Fire me!’” he tells me. Another time he got into trouble for making an illegal U-turn with a bus full of kids.

“This way I can spend more time with Joce before all this ends,” he adds.

He’s been saying stuff like that more and more lately, talking about “the end,” but he never says exactly when that will be. I think he’s trying to figure out how we could all go home. I’ve said to him I could just say that he wore a mask all the time, so I didn’t know who he was. I keep telling him: I don’t have to tell anybody about you. But he knows better.

“I can’t take you home yet. I don’t want to go to jail,” he says. He is obsessed by prison and watches
Lockup
on MSNBC all the time. I know it scares him.

“Look at us,” I say. “We’re in jail. We’ve been in jail for years.”

He hates it when I say that.

“This is not jail!” he snaps. “You are not in jail!”

He lives in his own little fantasy world.

 • • • 

On Sunday he took Joce to the Westfield Mall for the first time, where she got to ride a little kiddie train, and he bought her these cute Skechers called Twinkle Toes that light up. He paid $40 for them! That was surprising.

She wanted to get her ears pierced at the mall, but he said no. He would have to sign a permission form, and he didn’t want to put his name to anything. But he took her to a photo booth, and the pictures of them together are actually nice. So finally I can put a photo of her up on my wall now—the first one I have of her. I’ve been dying to get one, and it’s taken until she’s almost six years old.

Joce is starting to feel these walls closing in. She feels stuck in here. She asks all the time to go out with him to the festival at St. Rocco’s Church, or shopping, or anywhere. She wants me to come, too. I always say I have to clean or just, “I can’t go right now.” He jumps in, too, and says, “Mommy has things to do here. She’ll come next time.”

The other day Joce told me that she wants to move to a bigger house with more space for her to run around. She’s growing up, and that is complicating things for him.

“We can’t keep living like this,” he says.

“No, we can’t,” I agree. “You should take us home.”

It’s only a matter of time until Joce tells somebody about how she and her mom and some other girls live in this house. She wants her friend Tiffany from the park to come over to play and doesn’t understand why we always say no.

She’s been crying more lately when it’s time to go upstairs, and gets so bored in the bedroom that sometimes she just walks around in circles. She doesn’t want to play with her toys, because she’s sick of all of them. It’s often so hot in this room that he sawed a four-inch hole near the bottom of the door to let in more air from the hallway. So now Jocelyn will sit and look out the hole for hours, waiting for her daddy to come home. She knows that until he returns we have to be locked in, and it’s starting to upset her more.