Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (11 page)

He laughs at me when he comes back into the room and points at the lock. He must have been watching me.

“I told you not to try anything. If I can’t trust you, I’m not sending your letter.”

He hands it back to me, and I hold it close to me and cry.

 • • • 

Every morning when he goes to work, I have to go back to the basement, where I feel like I’m in a dark hole. I can’t stand being with him upstairs, but I also hate being below ground with no light. So I wait until he seems to be in a good mood, and I work up my courage to ask him to move me.

“Do you have other rooms? Somewhere else I can stay in the day?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “I got rooms upstairs.”

“Well, can you put me up there? I can’t stand the basement anymore.”

“The other rooms are not fixed up. I’ll have to clean them.”

He actually seems to be considering the idea. I pray that he does.

Two days later he announces cheerily: “Okay. Your room is ready!”

He takes me to the second floor, where I have never been, and pushes open one of the closed doors. The room looks like a prison cell, with dirty yellow walls, a big bed with no sheets, and an old dresser and a TV. There is a thick chain with one end tied to a big steam radiator. He picks it up and says the other end is for me, and wraps it around my ankle.

At least I’m not underground anymore.

 • • • 

They keep showing Amanda Berry’s picture on the news, and there is something familiar about her. Then I realize: she looks just like the picture of a blond girl taped to the mirror in my new room.

I point to the photo and ask him who she is.

“Oh, that’s my ex-girlfriend.”

But I get a sick feeling. I’m sure it’s Amanda Berry. Why would her photo be in his house? What if he kidnapped her, too? Oh, my God, I bet he killed her.

“Did you take her?” I ask him.

“No.”

I don’t believe him.

We sit there for a long time watching TV, then I ask him a few more questions about Amanda Berry. The more I think about it, the more scared I am. She’s been missing for a year. If he did kill her, he’s probably going to kill me.

He can see how terrified I am and finally admits that he has her.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

He unlocks me and takes me into the hallway outside my bedroom.

“You can look in, but pull your head back fast so she doesn’t see you,” he says.

He opens the door to the room right across the hall from mine, and I see a girl with blond hair sitting on the bed with her back to the door, watching TV.

He closes the door quickly and then, almost bragging, says, “I have another one, too.”

Oh, my God! There are two other girls in here!

I’m too shocked to respond, but I finally ask: “What’s her name?”

“Michelle.”

He leads me to another door in the hallway, opens it, and I look quickly and see a girl with dark hair lying on a bed, also watching TV. She doesn’t see me.

Who is this Michelle?

April 2004: Hiding Something

April 4

Amanda

I’m watching the news, and there’s another girl missing: Gina DeJesus, a seventh-grader at Wilbur Wright who disappeared at Lorain and West 105th. That’s so close to where I got taken! You can see the Burger King where I worked from there.

It sounds just like what happened to me, so I wonder if he had anything to do with it. But I haven’t heard anybody else in the house.

I do know that the other girl is still here. He told me her name is Michelle. She’s in the room right next to me, and she’s aggravating. I hate the head-banger music that she plays and sings along with.

“You should be more like her; she doesn’t cry at all,” he says.

He keeps telling me that she’s happy. He says her family is screwed up, and they are paying him to give her a place to live. He says he’s doing them a favor, and that her life here is better than the one she had before.

I’ve never talked to her to find out what is really going on, because he keeps us apart. Every once in a while we’re both downstairs at the same time, and we say hello, but I’ve seen her only briefly, and maybe ten times this whole year. Once when we were in the kitchen together and he went into the other room for a minute, I whispered to her, “My name is Amanda Berry.”

“I know who you are,” she said. “I’ve seen you on the news.”

But then he came back in, and we couldn’t talk anymore.

Now he’s in my room yelling at me again: “Stop it! Stop it now!”

“She says you’re making noise,” he says. “What are you doing?”

One of his big rules is that we have to be quiet. The only noise allowed is from the TV and radio.

“I’m sitting here watching TV,” I say. “What noise could I be making? When I stand up to pee, maybe she hears my chain. Does she have her ear to my wall?”

I’m not making noise. Why is she telling him lies about me?

April 7

“I only took your freedom,” he tells me.

He’s actually suggesting I should be grateful to him because he didn’t kill me. I want to kill him. His sick strategy is to take everything from me, then make me feel lucky and appreciative when he gives me a sandwich or lets me take a shower.

“It’s really hard to lose everything,” I tell him. “It’s so hard to sit here, stuck in this house. Everybody else is going on with their life outside, and you have me chained to a wall.”

“Don’t think like that,” he says.

He talks as if I have no right to be upset, as if all he has done is inconvenience me.
Oops, I didn’t mean to burn your toast, sorry.
That’s his tone. He acts as if it’s his right to do whatever he wants to me.

He’s not God. He can’t decide my life for me.

It would be so much easier if I just died, but I can’t think like that.

I can’t let him win.

April 10

I’m on
America’s Most Wanted
! They are showing pictures of me and Gina DeJesus together, because we both disappeared in the same neighborhood.

I’ve watched that show so many times, never once imagining I would be on it. They said Gina and I would be on next Saturday, too. Maybe somebody saw him with me, and this TV show will jog their memory.

April 10: I Feel Like She’s Close

Louwana had lost about thirty pounds in the year since Amanda had disappeared, and Beth could feel her mother was breaking. All the rage, sadness, and drinking were taking their toll. Louwana had not been able to go back to work and was now surviving on welfare checks.

She often felt guilty about the little arguments she’d had with Amanda before she disappeared. She knew Amanda was thinking of skipping work on the day she went missing, and she wished she let her. Regret ate at her.

Beth decided that she needed to be a positive force, because that was the most important thing she could do for her mother and her sister.

“I’m not going to eat today,” Louwana would say. “What if Mandy didn’t get to eat today?”

“It won’t do Mandy any good if you get sick,” Beth would reply.

She kept her mother busy putting up “missing” flyers and yellow ribbons around town, and she made sure her daughters kept their grandmother company. The kids sat and watched movies with her and often spent the night.

Louwana and Beth were constantly calling reporters and asking for coverage of Amanda, appealing to them on holidays like Mother’s Day or Christmas, or with any other hook they could think of. Sometimes the reporters came to interview them, but mostly not. Louwana yelled at them when they ignored her, but Beth reminded her that some coverage was better than none.

Beth hated public speaking, so to get over her fright she imagined that when she was looking into the lens of the TV camera, she was talking directly to Amanda and telling her everything would be okay.

One day a producer from
America’s Most Wanted
called and said that John Walsh, the show’s host, wanted to give Amanda’s case national exposure. A crew came to film in Cleveland, and Beth took the lead in the interviews: “We love you, Mandy. We want you home. We’re always going to be looking for you. We’ll never give up.”

Beth knew the odds were not good that Amanda would be found alive, but her instincts were telling her something different.

“My heart doesn’t feel empty like it would if she was gone,” she told her mother after the camera crew left. “I feel like she’s close.”

April 16

Amanda

He takes me downstairs to have a shower, the first one in days. As we’re walking through the dining room I see something strange. He sleeps down here a lot on a bed pushed over by the wall but now he has a strange, boxy contraption on top of it, like something kids would build. He pretends to not even notice it as we walk by. He seems like he’s hiding something.

Oh, my God, I bet Gina DeJesus is in there.

He must have taken her, too.

April 20

I’m in a new room now. He just moved me across the hallway into a smaller bedroom that’s painted blue. He didn’t say why, but I wonder if it’s because he put Gina in my old room. I still haven’t seen or heard her, but I sense something different in the house. I think she’s here.

I hate this room. It’s not like I loved the other one, but I had gotten used to it after almost a year. Change here usually means trouble.

He has a mirror set up on one wall of my room so he can stand in the hallway and see what I’m watching on TV. He put another mirror downstairs over the sink in the kitchen, so when he’s standing there he can keep an eye on what’s happening behind him. It’s awful to be watched every second. I’ve been crying all the time since he moved me.

“A baby doesn’t even cry that much,” he tells me.

I hate him.

“Did you take that girl, Gina?” I ask.

“No, of course not,” he says.

“I don’t believe you. I think she’s here.”

“Stay out of my business,” he snaps.

I smile to myself because I hit a nerve. So she
is
in this house!

“You told me if you ever got another girl, I could go home. So now that Gina is here, I should be home. Unless that was just another lie.”

That makes him really mad, and his voice gets deeper and meaner.

“You better shut up,” he says. “I’ve gone this far, I don’t know what I’m capable of now.”

He claims he moved me so he could sleep in my old room. Why does he lie? Does he think he can hide another girl in this little house, and I won’t find out?

He keeps the door to my old room shut and locked. Why lock it if nobody’s in there? The radio is blasting in the hallway, so I can’t hear if anybody’s moving around in there.

Maybe the police looking for Gina will find this house and rescue me and Michelle, too. I have to believe that every time he kidnaps another girl he is more likely to get caught.

April 21

“You think you are a victim, but I am a victim, too,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

He tells me that when he was a boy in Puerto Rico, he was sexually abused by a boy who was a few years older.

“That doesn’t give you the right to do this to me.”

“Shut up!” he says, looking furious.

Does he really want me to feel sorry for him? Because someone hurt him, he thinks he can hurt other people? I don’t even know whether to believe him.

It’s been exactly a year since he took me and there’s been a lot about my case on TV today. I guess he’s decided to tell me now about his childhood because the news reports are talking about how sad my story is, and he’s so selfish that he doesn’t like me getting all the sympathy. On the eleven o’clock news I see my mom and Beth crying, and they’re showing Gina’s sister bringing flowers to my house. If Gina really is here, it’s great that our two families are together. Maybe someday when this is over we can all be friends.

A few weeks ago I saw my mom on the news, and she was burning a candle for me. I asked him to get me one just like it, and he did. It’s in a tall, red glass container with a picture of Jesus that he got at Marc’s discount store. I lit it today and I’m going to light it on all my important anniversaries and family birthdays. It makes my room feel a little warmer.

I think for a second about setting the room on fire. I have the candle and a cigarette lighter he gave me. Somebody might see the smoke and call the Fire Department, and they’d find us here. But the neighbors seem so clueless that they might not even call, and I could be dead by the time the firefighters got here. I guess he knows I would never risk it.

It makes me lonelier to see my family on TV, but it’s also a gift. At least one day a year, on the anniversary of my kidnapping, I know they will appear on the news, and I’ll be able to see if they look healthy, what they are wearing, if they’ve changed their hair, how my nieces are growing up.

April 21 is My Day.

April 22

It’s my eighteenth birthday, and he comes into my room like he’s Santa Claus or something.

“Happy birthday! Can I get you a cake?”

He doesn’t seem to understand how much I hate him. Who chains someone up and then offers to get them a birthday cake?

“No,” I tell him in a dead, cold voice. “I don’t want anything.”

But really, there’s a lot I do want for my birthday.

I want to be able to take back my stupid mistake of getting into his van. I want to take back every mean thing I ever said to my mom. I want to be a normal eighteen-year-old, having fun and saving up to go to college. I want my own room back and my clean, pressed clothes. I want to wash and cut my hair. I want to take a shower, twice a day, like I used to. I want to talk on the phone, walk outside, go shopping. I so, so, so want a Dr Pepper.

I don’t want to need counseling for the rest of my life.

I don’t want to always be scared of everyone I ever meet.

I want this to be over.

April 2004: Get Away from Me!

On the afternoon of Friday, April 16, Ariel Castro’s daughter Angie and her husband, Sam Gregg, came home to find the message light blinking on their answering machine. They had just moved and had a new landline number. They assumed the message was from either Angie’s mother or her father, as they were the only two people who knew the new number.