Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (16 page)

Amanda

I’m watching my TV, and they’re just a few feet away on the other side of the dresser, watching theirs. It’s a little hard to concentrate with two TVs playing different channels, but I try to tune out their shows.

We’ve been down here for a couple of hours, and we haven’t said anything to one another. I’m trying to keep to myself. But I am getting more and more curious. What is he so worried about? If he doesn’t want us talking, that seems like a good reason to do it.

Why the hell not?

I slide over and look around the dresser at them.

“Hey,” I say.

They both turn to look at me, surprised.

I’m whispering so that they understand that I’m trying to make sure he doesn’t hear us. It’s quiet upstairs now, so maybe he’s out. But for all we know, he could be hiding at the top of the stairs, testing us to see if we’re talking.

“What are you guys watching?” I ask.

“Just stupid stuff,” Gina says.

I move my chain so I can sit on their side of the dresser, and we start talking a little. It’s awkward at first, but we discuss music and TV shows. I mention that I like Eminem, and Gina says she’s into Christina Aguilera. She says she misses her family and her mom’s cooking.

I tell them about him driving by my sister’s house and telling me that he saw her girls outside wearing matching clothes. That really scared me, I tell them, because I knew it was a threat. He meant he could kidnap them if I didn’t do what he said.

“He did the same thing to me!” Gina says. “He told me that if I wanted company he would kidnap my friend Chrissy.”

The more we talk, the more I like them. Gina is nicer than I thought, and I think our families have a lot in common. We have seen them together on TV, so we make jokes about Tennessee hillbillies and Cleveland Puerto Ricans hanging out, and we actually laugh.

“Our families are better friends than we are,” Gina says.

A Will Smith movie is playing on their TV.

“He’s so cute,” I say.

“Oh, yeah, he’s cute,” Gina agrees.

“Does he tell you not to watch TV shows with black people?” I ask.

“Yes!” they both say.

We talk about what a horrible racist he is, and I tell them how he took my radio, opened it up, and stuck a little piece of a plastic spoon from Wendy’s inside, so I couldn’t turn the dial to the station that plays mostly rap music.

We make fun of how cheap he is. He insists that I water down the dishwashing liquid because he says a small bottle needs to last for at least two months. If I need more, I have to ask him, and he puts a little pea-size drop on the sponge. He has a fit if I use too much.

It feels good to talk, and to know that we’re all feeling the same things.

Gina

Amanda isn’t stuck-up at all, like I thought. She listens and cares when I tell her about all the sick stuff he does to me and Michelle, like how he rapes me and her while we’re chained together. It’s as horrible watching it happen to someone else as it is having it happen to you.

Amanda’s crying now as I tell her.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know he was doing that to you.”

She says that he told her that he was not having sex with me and Michelle, so she thought it was easier for us.

“He says he has me for sex, but you two are here to be his maids. I always figured he was lying, because why would you go to all the trouble of kidnapping two girls just to have them clean your house?”

We talk about how he says he has a “sexual problem,” and he calls his thing Charlie.

“He told me it’s not his fault,” I say. “He blames Charlie. He’s always saying, ‘What Charlie wants, Charlie gets.’”

Amanda

I realize now what he’s been doing. He lies to them about me, and he lies to me about them. That’s his way of dividing us and making sure we don’t trust one another. Screw him. We’re on to his mind games.

Conan O’Brien’s show comes on TV, and there’s a funny skit about a bear in a diaper that runs around being really obscene. It’s so silly that we all crack up. It feels great to laugh after we’ve been talking for hours and crying.

It’s late, and I’m about to fall asleep. But I feel like we need to get something straight first.

“Anything we talk about, we have to trust each other not to say anything to him,” I tell them. “Otherwise we’re going to get each other in trouble. We have to stick together.”

August 24

Amanda

I’ve barely gotten to sleep when I feel him next to me. He has his clothes off, and he’s pulling at my sweatpants. It’s humiliating. Gina and Michelle are on the other side of the dresser, and I know they’re just pretending to be asleep.

“They’re right there,” I whisper through my tears. “Stop it.”

He’s mad, but he gets up and unchains me. “Come upstairs,” he orders, loud enough for everybody to hear. “I need you to help me clean the kitchen.”

I walk upstairs with him and he takes me to the living room, where he finishes what he started downstairs.

When he’s done with me, he leads me back to the basement. It’s so hot in the house that I can feel his sweat all over me. I smell like him, and it sickens me. He twists the chain around my ankle again and snaps the padlock shut.

August 25

Gina

We’ve been down here all day, watching TV and playing with a PlayStation. We’ve been talking about how he kidnapped us—it was almost the same experience for Amanda and me. He tricked us into his car by talking about one of his kids.

We hear his footsteps across the kitchen floor, and as the basement door opens Amanda hurries back over to her side of the dresser.

“My daughter Rosie is coming over,” he says.

Oh, my God. That’s my friend Arlene. Rosie is her middle name, and a lot of people call her that. I haven’t seen her since that day I was taken, except when she was on
America’s Most Wanted,
crying about missing me.

“Don’t make a sound,” he warns us. “Don’t talk. Don’t get up to use the bathroom. Shut the TVs off. I better not hear any sound from down here.”

He turns off the light and leaves.

“She’s my friend,” I whisper as we sit in the dark. “We go to school together, and she was with me right before he kidnapped me.”

Amanda says he was dropping Arlene off at her mom’s house right before he kidnapped her. Poor Arlene. What will she think if she ever finds out?

We have other connections to his kids, too. Amanda tells us she went to school with Angie, his older daughter, and that she’s met his son, Anthony. Michelle says she knows his daughter Emily.

I hope the police notice all the connections we have to him and his kids.

We hear the back door open, then footsteps and voices in the kitchen.

Arlene is ten feet over my head.

Amanda

We can’t make out what they’re saying, but Gina can tell it’s Arlene’s voice. There’s somebody else up there, too. Maybe a friend of Arlene’s? They walk through the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor. We’re too scared to make a sound.

Arlene lived in this house until she was about five or six, and he told me her bedroom was the one where he kept Michelle for a long time. So I guess she wants to see her old room.

After a few minutes we hear them coming back down, and then the living room TV comes on. It sounds like they are watching videos and having a good time.

“They’re up there laughing, and look where we are,” I whisper.

We’re all mad, but we can’t help being a little goofy, cupping our ears with our hands, as if that will help us hear them better. Of course it doesn’t work, but we’re giggling. It’s hard to stay completely quiet, especially when you know you have to.

“What if we scream?” Gina asks.

We’ve all been thinking the same thing, but I’ve been too afraid to speak it out loud.

“I don’t think so,” I say. It’s too risky. He’s smart, and Arlene is only fourteen. I’m sure he could come up with some story. He could tell her, “Oh, my girlfriend is downstairs with her friends, and they’re just messing around.” He could think of some lie that Arlene would believe. He’s that clever. I’ve seen it.

And what would he do to us?

He doesn’t make mistakes. I’m so worried the police and FBI will never figure it out. He seems like a nice, normal, middle-aged, friendly guy. He doesn’t look crazy.

That’s how he gets away with this. He hides in plain sight. He says he can get away with anything, including killing us. If his daughter found out about us, how do we know he wouldn’t do something terrible to her to protect himself?

I tell Gina and Michelle all this, but I don’t say what else I’m thinking: I’m still not completely sure I can trust them
.
We have become closer down here in the past few days, but maybe they are so afraid of him they would betray me. If we screamed for help, they could claim it was all my idea, and he might kill only me.

“I think we should just keep quiet,” I say. “It’s too dangerous.”

Gina

Amanda is right. We don’t know what he might do if we screamed.

I once told him my father was looking for me and asked him what he would do if my dad found us: “Would you shoot him?”

“I’m not going to talk about that,” he answered.

I do think he would kill my dad. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.

After Arlene has been up there for about an hour, we hear them get up and walk out the back door. He comes down the basement stairs in a good mood.

“They’re gone,” he says. “You can watch TV now if you want.”

He’s talking a lot, which usually means he’s happy.

“Rosie wanted to see the basement, but I made up a lie,” he says. “I told her I couldn’t find the key, and it was a mess down there anyway.”

He’s so proud of himself.

He keeps talking about what a great time he had with Arlene, and how they were laughing as they watched old family videos.

August 27, 2005: Chained in the Van

Gina

We’ve been down in the cellar for four days. Between visits from his kids, he’s come down here a bunch of times to take Michelle upstairs to help with the “cleaning.” Yeah, right. We know what he’s really doing with her, and she tells us anyway. So why does he try to hide it? I don’t get it.

He takes Amanda upstairs, too, and she’s crying each time she comes back, but he hasn’t bothered me. I don’t know why. Maybe seeing Arlene has made him feel guilty. It’s so rare that I get this much time away from his disgusting body.

Late at night we’re all watching TV when we hear him come down the stairs.

“Okay,” he says. “Time to go.”

Thank God. It’s so damp and smelly down here.

“Emily is coming to stay overnight for a couple of days. I have to get you out of here. You’re going to the garage.”

The garage? Oh, no. Maybe Arlene or his other kids figured out there was something weird going on here, so he has to get rid of us.

He unlocks the chain tying me and Michelle to the pole and makes us stand up. We’re still chained together at the ankles. He tells us to pick up our pillows and sheets and follow him out the basement door up the steps and into the darkness of the backyard, like prison inmates in leg chains.

“Be quiet out here,” he orders. “No noise!”

“Are you going to kill us?” I ask him.

“If I were going to kill you, I would have done that already,” he says, laughing.

As we make our way across the backyard in the dark I realize it’s the first time I’ve been outside in a year and a half. I smell freshly cut grass and feel a breeze. We see lights in the neighbors’ houses on both sides, but I’m too scared to make a sound. The garage door is open, and I can see his van inside, facing out.

“Keep your heads down and walk straight to the garage,” he says.

We shuffle along the side of the van, looking at the ground. The side door is open, and he tells us to get in. The two seats in the back are folded all the way down, and he makes us lie down there, chaining us to the seats.

“I’ll be right back,” he says. “Remember—no noise.”

We lie in the dark, afraid to say a word, and he returns a couple of minutes later with Amanda. She has a chain around her ankle and she’s carrying her pillow. He has a small mattress that he wedges through the van door, and Amanda climbs in and sits on it. He locks her chains to the seats, too.

He brings out Amanda’s TV and a tiny fan, sets them between the front seats, and plugs them into the garage wall. He gives us a little blue bucket for a toilet and hands us some chips and a couple of old pop bottles filled with water.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” he says, locking the van doors.

It must be a hundred degrees in here. The little fan is swinging slowly from side to side, pushing around the hot, wet air.

August 28

Amanda

This van. It’s the one. It’s the same maroon van that drove me away from my life. I see that day happening all over again: He pulls up alongside me, and I get into that passenger seat. So stupid.

I’m lost enough in my thoughts that at first I don’t hear Michelle speaking.

“I always thought that you didn’t like me,” she says.

“What?” I ask.

“I wanted to be your friend at the beginning,” she says, “but I thought you didn’t like me.”

I’m too hot for this conversation. Sweat is pouring off me, and it stinks in here. The bucket is on the floor right next to my mattress and everybody has used it. I’m in a rotten mood and I snap back at her, “Don’t be stupid. I don’t need friends.”

I don’t know why I say that. I’m not trying to be mean, but I just gave her my super-bitch attitude. I think I’m just fed up with everything.

Michelle doesn’t say anything, but Gina speaks up: “Oooh, you are so cool!” she says to me sarcastically.

We look at one another for a second, and then all crack up. Gina totally called me out, and it was exactly the right thing to lighten the mood. It was like she popped a balloon, and all the built-up tension rushed out.

Amanda

Since we were taken to the basement five days ago the news on our little TV has been nothing but Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is underwater, and it looks like a war zone. We feel bad for all those poor people who lost their homes. Rain is falling hard on the roof of the garage, and the news says our storm in Ohio is what’s left of Katrina, moving north.