Finding Me (23 page)

O
N
AN
AFTERNOON
in the spring of 2006 we all got some horrible news. On our little television set Gina and I heard that Amanda’s mother, Louwana, had passed away. The reporter said that Louwana had done everything she could to find Amanda; in 2004 she had even gone on the
Montel Williams Show
and asked a psychic if her daughter was still alive. The psychic told her Amanda was already gone, but in spite of that, Louwana kept looking. I could only imagine the kind of pain she had been in. “She died of heart failure on March 2, 2006,” the TV reporter said. All I could think about was that call the dude said he’d made to Louwana. If he really did call her, she must have died from a broken heart.

Later on that day the dude let us out of our chains for a short time. I don’t know why he let us walk around freely, but he stayed nearby to watch us. I went over into the room where Amanda was.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” I told her.

She stared at me and said, “What?”

That’s when I realized she hadn’t heard the news on her own television set.

“Your mother just passed away,” I said. She began to cry, and I backed out of her door, wanting to give her some peace and quiet. When I was back on my mattress I could hear her sobbing. I felt so terrible for Amanda—and so furious that this man had stolen her from her family.

A few weeks after that I got another surprise. Every morning for a couple of weeks I started hearing Amanda throw up in her room. While we were all downstairs in the kitchen she told us she was nauseous and couldn’t keep down any food. Later that evening, when the dude took me into his room, he mentioned how sick Amanda was. “She might be pregnant,” he said.

“I imagine she is,” I said. “You need to start taking better care of her.” If, in his twisted mind, he thought they were married, I felt sure he wouldn’t make her abort the baby the way he’d made me.

He looked right at me. “How do you know that?”

I don’t know where I got the nerve that night, but I gave him a smart-ass answer. “In a few months you’re going to figure it out when there’s a baby popping out.” He didn’t hit me like I thought he would. He smiled—like he was happy there might be a baby on the way.

I was right. Amanda never told me she was pregnant. But she didn’t have to—the size of her stomach made it obvious. When she was around five or six months pregnant, her tummy looked like it had a basketball inside. I had so many questions I wanted to ask her: Did she want the child? Was she glad she was pregnant? Was she nervous? Afraid? Excited? Did he ever threaten to beat the baby out of her? But during the whole time she was pregnant Amanda and I said very little to each other—mostly just hi. It seemed the dude was usually lurking around. I could only guess what must have been going through her head. I kept thinking about my babies—the one I was trying to get back to and the ones this monster had killed.

To My Son: You are my shining star, you are the reason I look forward to a new day. You’ll always be in my heart, and that’s where you’ll always stay. You light the way for me, the day gets hard and I think of you and how we will be together forever. Never apart and one day have a fresh new start with you, because you are my hope to survive.

21
______________

Light of the House

As I lay down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep … if I shall die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take, so then all the pain and suffering in life will fade away and I can be free again, so I don’t have to dream of faraway places that I will never see, or a love that I will never know, or a family I always wanted but never got, or a son who I will never get to hold and say I love you to. … I pray and hope to keep my son safe and give him a better life than I had, filled with love, happiness, and serenity. I can really use a prayer right now … seems just yesterday I was holding you in my arms, now all those days are gone. I have to keep moving on, I have to look for a bright day at the end of the road.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
on Christmas Eve, 2006, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Get up,” a voice said. I rubbed my eyes and sat up on the mattress. At my side Gina was still asleep. “Amanda’s been in labor all day,” the dude said, unlocking me. “I need you to come down to the basement and help me bring something upstairs.” I was out of it. Christmas was a day I had started to hate even more than I used to love it. All those memories of celebrating with Joey had been replaced by ugly ones. On Christmas Eve the radio played one holiday song after another. I could barely keep myself from bawling. I had decided I would do my best to just sleep the day away—and then the dude woke me up. The two of us went downstairs.

Down in the basement there was a small swimming pool. It wasn’t the inflatable kind; it was one of those plastic ones that had walls. “Help me get this upstairs,” he said. “She’s gotta sit in this so she won’t mess up the mattress.”

I didn’t want to help. What I wanted to do was get into my bed and fall back asleep. But I didn’t have a choice.

The two of us dragged the plastic pool into Amanda’s room. I could tell she was in extreme pain. We put the pool down on the mattress, and he rushed her to get in. I gave Amanda my sweater to wrap around herself—it was very cold in her room. I then took her arm and helped her step over the side and into the pool. Once she got in there, she laid down. The dude stood there, giving me threats. “If this baby doesn’t come out alive,” he told me, “I’m going to kill you.”

I tried to ignore him so I could focus on trying to help Amanda. The dude was no help; he had no idea what to do.

“Push hard, Amanda!” I said.

When her beautiful baby girl finally arrived, I immediately knew there was a problem: her little face was blue. She wasn’t breathing.

“You’d better get her breathing!” the dude screamed at me.

My hands trembled and my mind raced.
God, what should I do?
How do I bring this baby back to life?
I put a damp rag on the mattress and laid the baby down on it. I then tilted her head up a little bit and pressed on her chest several times. In between that, I breathed into her mouth.

A minute or so later she started screaming. “Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaagh!” It was the sweetest sound I ever heard in that house. The dude snatched the baby from me and took her downstairs, I guess to clean her up.

When it was all over I was exhausted, totally wiped out. I helped Amanda get cleaned up and started to walk back to my room so I could lie down. As soon as I joined Gina on our mattress, the dude came in.

“You’re gonna help me get this pool outta here,” he said. While Amanda held her newborn, he and I carried the pool downstairs and into the backyard and dumped out the blood. Then I dragged myself back up the stairs and got into bed. It must have been five o’clock in the morning. That was how my Christmas of 2006 began.

I
FINALLY GOT TO HOLD
the baby that evening. The dude came into my room and handed her to me. Amanda was resting in her room.

“Here she is,” he said. He had a big smile on his face. The baby was wrapped in an old raggedy blanket, something he must have pulled out from the back of his closet.

She yawned and looked up at me. “She’s so cute!” I said. She was the tiniest little baby I had ever seen. I’m guessing she was five pounds, and maybe even less. She smelled so new and clean—the exact opposite of the dirty house we were in. Gina cooed over her too.

I looked down at her round face and bright eyes. That’s when my own eyes started filling up with tears. I missed my Joey so much in that moment. Right then he took the baby away from me and walked back to Amanda’s room. All through that night we could hear that little girl crying. I hoped someone would hear her screams and wonder why the sound of a baby was coming from the house of a single man. Gina and I thought that maybe this child would be our way out.

During the next week the dude let Gina and me go into Amanda’s room to see her a few different times. Amanda looked worn out. She and the baby were usually curled up together on the mattress, because there was no crib.

“What are you gonna name her?” Gina asked.

“I don’t know,” Amanda said. She looked down at the baby in her arms. We all started throwing out names.

“I like Jocelyn,” Amanda finally said. So that settled it: her new angel would be called Jocelyn. Her middle name was Jade. The dude went to a store and brought home a pink pillow with some kind of duck or chicken on it. He made Amanda write “Jocelyn Castro” on the pillow’s tag. Just seeing his last name on there made me gag. I heard Amanda tell the dude that she wanted the baby to have her last name.

“She can be Jocelyn Jade Berry,” she said.

I was right,
I thought. Amanda would never be the “wife” of that idiot. She was just trying to outsmart him.

“Well, she can be ‘Berry’ inside the house,” the dude told Amanda. “But I don’t want nobody wondering who ‘Berry’ is. So outside of here she’s ‘Castro.’”

Outside of the house?
That was my first clue that he planned to take his little girl into the real world. Didn’t he think his family might catch onto his double life? But then again, the dude didn’t do a whole lot of thinking.

After Jocelyn was born he gave them our room, the white one, because it was bigger. “She needs more space for her and the baby,” he said.

He moved Gina and me into the pink room, which was connected to the white room. The same pink room where he’d strung me up on those two poles the day he kidnapped me. I could open the door between the two rooms and hear a lot more of what was going on with Amanda and Jocelyn. In fact, the room was so small that I could reach over and push open the connecting door, even when I was on my mattress with my chains on.

I didn’t give a rat’s ass where he moved me. All the rooms were a dump. But in the pink room things did get a little better. He went back to feeding Gina and me a couple of times a day, and he finally gave me another spiral notebook. And for at least a few weeks after Jocelyn got there he left me alone. I think the new baby distracted him. Even before Jocelyn was old enough to know where she was, she was already bringing some light into our lives.

Not long after Jocelyn was born, the dude let Amanda out of her chains. “I don’t want the baby to see you with those on,” I heard him tell her. She still couldn’t get out of her room: he locked her door, and ours. But at least she didn’t have to sit on top of that dingy mattress all day. She could walk around with Jocelyn or play with her in any part of the room.

I loved Jocelyn from the moment I first saw her; she was precious. But I didn’t really get to hold her that much. The dude saw me as lower than dirt. He called me worthless in front of Amanda and Gina. He spit in my face. Over and over he reminded everyone that no one in my family was looking for me. And after all that, then he’d yell at me and say, “What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to be happy!” I knew he wanted to make me
not
be me. I didn’t believe the things he said about me, because that would be letting the darkness win.

But that didn’t stop me from adoring Jocelyn. When we were down in the kitchen together in the evenings, my job was to hold her and keep her quiet while Gina cooked and the dude talked to Amanda. I rocked her back and forth and sang her the same songs I used to sing to Joey. I bounced her up and down on my knee. She was such a good baby. Unless she was wet or hungry, she really didn’t cry a lot.

In my room I began making some clothes for Jocelyn. She had a couple of outfits, but they were stained and faded. So Gina and I tore up some of our old T-shirts, and then we used a needle and thread the dude gave us to make the baby a few outfits. We sewed some pants, some cute little bootie socks, and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Amanda seemed to love them, but when the dude saw them he said, “Those are ugly.”

“Well, it’s cold outside!” I said. “This baby needs more clothes!”