Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (3 page)

“I’m going to take you home now,” he says and tells me I can pull my pants back up.

“Please,” I beg him. “Please take me home.”

I start praying, asking God to get me out of here.

We start toward the door but then he suddenly stops.

“Turn around, get on the bed, and take your pants down.”

“No! No!” I scream. “If you don’t take me home right now I’m going to call the police!”

I blurt that out even though I know I can’t call anyone. He still has my phone.

“Help! Help me!”

Doesn’t his roommate hear me? What’s going on in this house?

I run back into the bigger bedroom and try to open the door to the hallway but there’s no knob. I see a doorway next to it and run into it, but it’s a closet.

I’m cornered, crying, when he grabs me by the arms and drags me over to the bed, where he yanks off my pants and rapes me. He must be fifty pounds heavier than me, and it hurts so bad.

When he is done, he gets up and says, “I’m going to take you home now, but you have to be quiet.”

I’m terrified and I know he is lying.

“I’m going to tape your mouth so you don’t scream any more until I get you home,” he says as he reaches for a roll of gray duct tape, tears off a long piece, and slaps it over my mouth from ear to ear.

He slams my wrists together and tapes them, too, and then does the same to my ankles. Then he takes out a leather belt, and I freeze. Is he going to beat me with it? Hang me? I don’t move as he slowly wraps the belt around my ankles, over the tape.

He takes a motorcycle helmet from the closet and pulls it over my head. I can see out of the visor until my tears make everything foggy.

“Don’t worry,” he says, as if he is actually trying to help me. “I’m just doing this so I can carry you to the van and take you home.”

He picks me up and throws me over his shoulder. My head is dangling down by his butt, and every part of my body hurts. He carries me down to the first floor, then takes me into the basement.

He sits me down on the cold concrete floor and props my back against a pole. He takes a thick rusty chain, like a tow truck might use to pull a car, and wraps it around my stomach and the pole. He clamps it shut with a padlock and puts the key in his pocket. We are not going out to the van.

He pulls off the motorcycle helmet and turns on a little black-and-white TV, setting it on a tiny stool.

“Be quiet. Don’t scream. Don’t try to get away,” he says in an oddly calm voice as he switches off the one bare lightbulb and walks back upstairs.

I look around and see piles of clothes, boxes of junk, and dusty shelves filled with knickknacks. It smells like wet dirt, like the basement hasn’t been aired out in years. It is so creepy.

I have to break out of here. I put my taped hands up to my face and use my fingertips to pick at the tape across my mouth.

“Somebody help me! Somebody help me!” I scream when I get it loose. “Please! Someone hear me!”

I bite into the tape on my wrists and begin to chew it off, bit by bit. It takes forever, but I finally get my hands free and quickly pull the belt and tape off my ankles.

Now my nails are broken and my fingertips are bleeding. I struggle to get this chain off my waist, but it’s so tight I rip my shirt trying. My jeans are kind of thick, so I wriggle out of them, hoping that if I have that extra bit of room I can slip out of the chain. But I can’t.

“Somebody please help me!”
I scream over and over, not knowing what else to do.

He’s going to come back and kill me, and I’m going to die because I took a ride from a dad who turned out to be a psycho.

I have no idea what time it is, but while I have been fighting with the chain many TV shows have come and gone, so hours must have passed.
Cops
is on as I finally fall asleep against the pole.

 • • • 

I wake to the sound of heavy footsteps. My body tenses up. He’s back. How long have I been asleep?

“I told you not to try to get away,” he says in a cheerful voice, looking at all the ripped tape.

It’s so strange how nicely he’s talking to me, like we’re friends playing a game.

“I brought us breakfast,” he says, holding out a Burger King bag. “But first we’re going to take a shower.”

He unlocks the padlock, loosens the chain, and helps me stand up. Since I couldn’t get my jeans back on, I’m wearing only my shirt and underwear. He walks me up the stairs, staying close behind, and guides me into the bathroom off the kitchen, where he tells me to undress and get in the shower. Then he takes his clothes off and comes in, too, and with a washcloth rubs away the sticky stuff from the tape around my mouth and ears.

“Here, let’s get this off,” he says sweetly, like he’s washing a baby, and then he begins to shampoo my hair.

I am disgusted by his touch. I want to run away from him, but I’m trapped.

I’m afraid he is going to attack me again, but instead he climbs out of the shower and finds some Band-Aids for my bloody fingers. He gets dressed and gives me a pair of jogging pants and one of his shirts, then takes me into the living room. We sit on the couch, and he hands me a cold ham-and-egg croissant.

He’s talking, but I’m in shock and can’t focus.

“It’s time to go upstairs,” he says after I finish eating.

What choice do I have? I follow him up the stairs and into the bedroom where he raped me.

“Just lay down and relax,” he says, pointing to the mattress, which has no sheets.

He lies down beside me, and I brace myself for what’s next, but he seems exhausted, like he was up all night. At least an hour passes, maybe more. He is inches from me, asleep, or pretending to be. I’m afraid to move or make a sound. My mom and Beth must be losing their minds, so scared about what has happened to me. I am so scared about what is happening to me.

Then, suddenly, he opens his eyes, stands up, and says, “Let’s go downstairs.”

He walks me back down to the basement, sits me against the pole, and locks the chains tight around my stomach. I cry and cry, but he only turns up the volume on the TV, shuts off the light, and walks back upstairs without a word.

It’s so dark.

Then I remember: It’s my birthday.

April 25, 2003: Alone in the Dark

Amanda

He has moved me upstairs into the bedroom where he first raped me. It’s not pitch-black like the basement, where I spent the first two nights, but it’s still dark. There are two small windows covered with heavy gray curtains that were probably white once.

I have to lie sideways on the queen-size bed, my toes hanging off the edge, because of the way he has me chained to the radiator. The padlock on the rusty chain around my stomach feels like a big rock. Its weight makes it hard to sleep, and it’s giving me huge purple bruises.

He came in yesterday and put some old socks around the chain so it wouldn’t hurt me so much. I don’t think he felt bad for me but was just tired of me complaining. He fastened them with plastic zip ties, and now those are digging into me.

The chain is just long enough that I can stand up next to the bed to use my “bathroom”—a tall, beige plastic trash can. He put a trash bag over the top, but it still smells so bad that it’s making me sick.

The chain isn’t long enough to let me open the curtains, or reach the switch for the overhead light. So when he leaves for work in the morning and turns it off, I have to sit in the dark until he comes back. He told me that he kept the light out of my reach so that I couldn’t flip it on and off to attract the neighbors’ attention.

He’s careful. He constantly peeks out the window to check if anybody is watching the house. Whenever he leaves he keeps a radio blasting in the upstairs hallway. That way, he says, nobody can hear me if I scream. It’s hard for me to even hear my TV. Is that girl he called his roommate still here? Who is she and why isn’t she helping me? After the first nights in the basement, I lost my voice screaming, so I don’t bother anymore. I know nobody can hear me over the radio. Sometimes he stays out all night, and that means it’s impossible to sleep with the noise, or even to think. I have a constant headache.

He has a weird mannequin, a woman’s torso with black hair that he dresses in a red fishnet tank top and props up in the kitchen. Sometimes he lays it down on the living room couch when he goes out. He says if a burglar tries to get into the house, he’ll see it and think somebody is home.

I still don’t know his first name. I can’t believe I know his kids. I met Anthony only once, and I haven’t seen Angie in a while. Why did I agree to come here to see her? I was having a bad day and made a bad decision. Now I will probably die because of it.

 • • • 

I hate wearing his ugly, baggy clothes. I even have to wear his underwear—big, nasty briefs. It’s like I’m wearing a prison uniform. The only thing I have left of my own is the bra I was wearing when I got here. I used to hate my work uniform, but now I’d give anything to have it back.

I eat once a day, if I’m lucky, McDonald’s or Burger King that he brings for me when he comes home. Often that’s at five or six in the evening, but sometimes it’s midnight, and I am so hungry.

After I finish eating, he tells me to strip, and he does it again.

When I’ve been here four days he asks, “Do you want to come downstairs and watch TV?”

The last thing I want to do is spend more time with him. But I’d love to get out of this room and away from the smell and these chains, even for a few minutes.

“Okay,” I say, trying not to look at him.

He unlocks the chain and walks me downstairs. The door to his roommate’s bedroom is closed.

We sit on the couch and he turns on the news. My mom and Beth are on Channel 5, being interviewed in our house.

“It’s been a hard week, and it’s getting harder,” my mom tells the reporter, wiping her eyes with a tissue. She’s sitting on the couch, where I used to cuddle up beside her. “She never made it home. Somewhere between there and here, something happened, and nobody can figure it out.”

Beth is crying. “I’m hoping she’s out there somewhere,” she says. “I hope nothing happened to her. Maybe somebody’s got her, drugged her or something. Just bring her home.”

I’m crying, too, but glad I’m on the news, because that means people are looking for me. Maybe somebody will see this interview and remember something.

“Your mom looks really upset,” he says. There’s no sympathy in his voice, it’s just an observation, as if he had nothing to do with her misery. He flips around the channels looking for other news reports about me and finds them on Channel 8 and Channel 3. He can’t take his eyes off the TV.

I look at him. He has an odd expression on his face, and then I realize what it is: He’s proud. He’s admiring his work, he feels like he’s done something big.

This makes him feel important.

April 27

It’s Sunday. I’ve been gone six days. And so far, he’s raped me at least twenty-five times. It’s been four or five times every day.

He’s out the door at five a.m. to go to work. Then he’s back around eight or nine and strips off his bus driver’s uniform—black jeans and a burgundy shirt with a little yellow logo for Cleveland Public Schools. After he’s done with me, he goes back to work and drives little kids until lunchtime, when he comes home and forces himself on me again.

Then in the evening, he does it again—sometimes several times. He always leaves my chains on.

He slobbers on my face and is obsessed with my breasts. He’s always touching my chest and telling me, “These boobs are mine.”

I am learning that the more it hurts me, the more he likes it, and that it’s over quicker when I don’t fight. What would be the point, anyway? I’m chained to a radiator, so where could I go?

I told him I would like something to write on, and he asked if I wanted a journal. I said yes, and he came home today with a blue diary with flowers on its cover.

“You can write what you want,” he says, “but don’t write any names.”

I know he might read this, so I have to be careful about what I say. But I’m going to write to my family. Maybe that will feel like talking to them on the phone or sending them a letter. I miss them so much. I want to let them know I’m alive.

When he leaves I begin my first entry, by the light of the TV:

4/27/03. Sunday. One week.

I never thought I would miss my mom sooooo much! But it’s sooo true. You never know what you got ’til it’s gone! I just can’t wait to go home. I’m 17 now, but don’t have a life. But he told me I’m young and will go home before summer. Another two months! Tomorrow it will be a week I’ve been here—so I’ve survived this long. I’ll just try not to think about it. But it’s hard.

I saw my mom and Beth crying on TV. My mom said, “Mandy I love you” and I started bawling. I love you Mom. See ya sooooon!
Love, Amanda.

It feels good to write that. I am glad they don’t know how horrible it is here.

Eminem’s new song, “Sing for the Moment,” is on the radio. I can’t believe it has some of Aerosmith’s music in it, the chorus from “Dream On,” my mom’s favorite. As I listen to it I get lost in the music, and it takes me back home for a few minutes. I can picture myself there with my mom, safe and free.

I know I haven’t always been the best daughter. Sometimes I would argue with her over some pretty stupid stuff. I wish I hadn’t. When I get out of here, I won’t do that anymore.

He controls when I eat, what I see, what I hear. But he cannot control what I think, so I am going to take my mind somewhere else when he climbs on me.

I have almost nothing in this room, but I have an idea. I have a few pictures of my mom, dad, and nieces in my purse, and I’m going to make a family album. To make a frame I carefully rip apart an empty box of Crunch ’n Munch that he got me. I chew a piece of gum and then separate it into tiny pieces that I stick on the back of the pictures and press them into the cardboard from the box. Then I prop it up on the table next to my bed.

When he is doing horrible things to my body, I look at my mom’s face. I imagine her laughing. I picture her smoking her cigarettes and gabbing on the phone, or cooking in the kitchen. I look into her eyes and lose myself in her.