Brenna: Four Weeks Ago
When I walked out of the front door of the jail, I saw Rick and Nialla sitting in a gleaming white Mercedes right across the street.
Rick had spent two months scheming to get the car, pushing us to make more and more money. It was the longest time we’d stayed in the same place in a while, almost three months in Las Vegas. But Cinnamon got arrested in Vegas, and word on the street was that she’d talked. I wasn’t clear what happened after that, except that we left Vegas without her. For the first time in a year, we were back down to the three of us, Rick and Nialla and me.
I didn’t want to go out on the track anyway. I hated working the street. But after buying the fucking car, then relocating us to Portland, Rick was short on cash. On the first night here, he’d said, “I’m raising your quota to fifteen-hundred dollars a night.”
The second night, I’d failed to make that quota, coming up short almost two hundred dollars. So at three o’clock in the morning, he dumped me out of the car and said, “I’ll be back in an hour. You better have my fucking money then.”
Instead, an hour later, I was in jail.
I got in the back of the Mercedes and sank into the leather seat. As usual, Nialla rode in the front passenger seat and Rick drove. He didn’t say a word when I got in the car.
“You okay, sweetie?” Nialla asked.
I shrugged. “Tired. It was awful in there.” From the moment that cop Mackey had grabbed my breast—just checking for weapons, he said, smirking—I knew I was in trouble. Maybe not from the cops: Rick had coached me over and over again, for two years, on how to deal with them. But from Rick. Because he was unpredictable and dangerous. And now, sitting in the back seat of the car, I felt a cold, sinking sense of dread, because he wasn’t saying anything, not anything at all.
Nialla asked me something, but it took me a minute to even realize she was talking, because every nerve ending was tuned toward Rick. The muscles in his hands were twitching on the steering wheel, the veins on his forearms prominent. He was furious about something.
Nialla gave me a warning glance, a look I recognized. When Rick was like this, we kept our mouths shut. We only spoke when spoken to. We jumped when he said jump.
When he was like this, he was terrifying. The one time I’d been in the hospital in my life was when Rick thought I had disobeyed him. He hit me twice with a baseball bat, then when I collapsed he carried me to the emergency room and told them I’d been mugged. I verified the story, of course. What else was I going to do with him sitting right there in the waiting room?
“Did you fucking snitch?” This question was in a deceptively calm tone. I was in deadly danger if I responded the wrong way now.
“No. Of course I didn’t.”
His shoulders tensed at my response. “Then how the hell did you get out so quickly?”
“I don’t know, Rick. They said I had to come back for an arraignment a week from Tuesday. They took my fingerprints and asked a bunch of questions and let me go.”
Rick was driving in circles in the darkness, up Eighty-second Avenue, across and back down. In a couple of minutes we were going to pass the police station all over again. “What kind of questions?”
“My name and age and where I was from. I gave them the story you always told me to, that I’m from Maryland, that I’m nineteen. They wanted to know if I had a pimp and I told them no.”
I had a flash of memory, of me and Sam with Mom at the fire station, being fingerprinted. I was maybe ten. Was it for a missing kids’ program of some kind? Did they still have those fingerprints on file? No one had said anything while I was in the jail, but would they figure out who I was?
On our right, we passed the church parking lot where I’d been arrested just a few hours earlier. A moment later, the police station on our left. A block beyond there, a girl who looked maybe thirteen stood on the corner. Just before we passed her, a car pulled up and she leaned forward to talk to the driver. She nodded once, then opened the car door and got in, taking one quick look around for cops. A moment later Rick pulled into the parking lot at the diner. He drove to the back of the lot and parked next to the dumpster.
Rick casually turned around in his seat and pointed his pistol at my face. I froze, all of my attention narrowed down to the circle of the barrel, inky black steel in the darkness.
“Are you telling me the truth?”
A jumble of words poured out of me. “Yes, Rick, I’m telling the truth, please don’t hurt—”
“Shut up. You stupid fucking whore. Worthless. Why did you let yourself get arrested? I can’t fucking believe it. I ought to shoot you right here and now and then drop you in the dumpster.”
“Rick…” Nialla said his name in a pleading tone.
He never looked at her, just kept his cold eyes on me. “Should I do it, Strawberry? Should I pull the trigger now?”
I shook my head. “No. Please, no. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t give them my real name. I didn’t mention you at all. Please…”
He stared at me for a second more then shook his head. “If I find out you’re lying to me, you are dead. Understand?”
I didn’t let my sudden relief show. Instead I just said, “I understand.”
He put the pistol away. “Let’s get some breakfast then.” He said it in such a casual tone, the last ten minutes might not have ever happened.
***
Two nights later, Nialla said to me, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I was a little hazy at that point—I’d had three drinks in little more than an hour — but that statement caught my attention. I sat up and looked at her. “What?”
She looked at me. Her expression looked dead. “I hate this. I’ve always hated it. Maybe sometimes I thought he was telling the truth, or that he’d change or something … I don’t know, but one of these days he’s going to kill you or me or both of us.”
I swallowed. The idea of Nialla leaving me alone with Rick was inconceivable. “Where would you go?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just somewhere Rick can’t find me. Maybe put up my own ads and go independent.”
Rick would find the ads. She was deluding herself. She said, “Come with me.”
I shivered. “I’m afraid.”
She whispered her response. “I know. Me too.”
I got up and fumbled through the drawer beside the hotel room bed then packed a pipe with weed. Once I had a good lungful, I passed it to Nialla.
Talk of running away reminded me of Rose. Rose had been about my age when Rick picked her up at the bus station in El Paso. She had run away from home, right into the arms of a nightmare. She was only with us for a few weeks—she tried to run away in Tampa. But she didn’t have any money or anybody to call, and she quickly went rogue, working the track.
We’d already stayed in Tampa longer than we normally did in any one place. Not long after that, about two weeks, Rick showed up at the apartment as agitated as I’d ever seen him. “Pack up, we’re leaving,” he said.
Both of us had gaped at him … he’d lined up a dozen appointments between the two of us. Leaving now meant abandoning a lot of money. Rick didn’t walk away from money unless there was a really good reason.
The next night, in Miami, I saw on the news that Rose’s body had turned up. She’d been murdered.
“We’ll have to be careful,” I said. Even though Rick wasn’t around, I found myself whispering. “I don’t want to end up like Rose.”
Nialla shuddered.
“Where is he, anyway?” I asked.
She sneered. “He’s got a new girl he’s trying to recruit. Eighth grader he met the other day.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Nialla shook her head. “I know.”
“What’s her story?”
Nialla shrugged. “He said she’s a foster kid. I don’t know what else.”
I shook my head. This girl wouldn’t be the first. Rick’s pattern was to watch for girls who were a mess. The girls who were in trouble, or from broken homes, or into drugs. He’d fascinate them, then reel them in like fish; they were about to be thrown out on the deck of a boat, wriggling and flopping, unable to breathe. Sometimes he’d only keep them for a week or two and then move on. He had sold two girls, one nineteen years old and the other fifteen years old. I had watched helplessly from a locked apartment as the younger one was taken away, tossed into the back of the van and taken who knows where. He threatened more than once to do the same to me if I ever tried to contact anyone from home or make trouble for him. But his darkest threats were for girls who ran away, and Rose was proof he meant it.
Whatever else Nialla was thinking about leaving had to be tabled—we had appointments scheduled.
That week we were doing incalls; typically, the first week in a new city that’s all we’d do. It was safer that way. Once Rick had a feel for the tempo of a given location, we would start doing limited numbers of outcalls. He could charge more for those, but they were far more dangerous. Not from police arrest, but from the customers. Twice, once in San Francisco and once in Atlanta, customers had pulled guns on me. Several other times I’d been raped when I refused to have unprotected sex or to do certain acts which were uncomfortable or painful. At least with incalls, usually either Nialla or Rick was nearby if I needed to call for help.
The next few days were uneventful. I skipped my arraignment hearing—at Rick’s orders, of course—and on our tenth day in Portland we started taking outcalls.
A few days after that I met Kaylee, the girl Rick was trying to recruit. We were at a tiny dive bar on Eighty-second Avenue, sitting in the back. I sat beside Rick and kept my mouth shut. He faked listening sympathetically as she talked about her foster father (who hit her) and her stepfather (who had raped her). He showered her with compliments, telling her how beautiful she was and how sorry he was that she had to live like that. I almost rolled my eyes, but I knew if I did he would likely kill me.
Kaylee was thirteen. She had chestnut hair that hung well below her shoulders and wore a too-small tank top which revealed just budding breasts, a flat tummy, and a tiny waist. She was falling for his bullshit.
All he could see was dollar signs.
He didn’t take her back to the hotel that night. Rick would keep working her for a while, with soft words and gifts, until she was so confused about who she was that she’d believe anything he told her.
I put her out of my mind. Nialla didn’t bring up running away again, at least not in the next couple of weeks. Not until the night of my eighteenth birthday.
The fourteenth of September arrived like any other day. I crawled out of bed a little after eleven in the morning, drank a Jolt Cola, then sat smoking until I felt alive enough to move around. A few days earlier, Rick had moved us from a pretty swanky upscale hotel to a dump on Eighty-second Avenue. He didn’t explain why—Rick never explained anything.
We had two adjoining rooms. One that we worked out of, and one where we slept. As I was smoking my fourth cigarette, Rick opened the door from the adjoining room and said, “Your first appointment is at noon.”
I waved my hands at him, a non-verbal whatever. Then I got up and walked into the bathroom, cigarette still dangling from my lips. There I stood, staring at myself.
Objectively—not that I could be objective—I looked like shit. The circles under my eyes had become permanent, wrinkled like someone twenty years older. I was pale and looked sick. Rick’s tattoos marred my body, along with the cigarette burn some asshole managed to give me before Rick busted down the door one night about a year ago.
I was pretty sure I didn’t have HIV, though it had been a couple of months since I’d been tested. I had, however, contracted other STDs. I’d gotten treatment of course, at local clinics, but the infections weren’t enough to cause Rick to let me stop working, not even for a night.
By the end of my self-assessment, I felt nothing but hopeless. I had nowhere to go. No one to turn to. I should just kill myself. At least then Mom and Dad might find out and get some closure. And poor Sam … it broke my heart that I would never see her again.
Half an hour after my lunch appointments were over, Nialla came into the room followed by Rick. At the time I was sitting on the edge of the bed staring into space.
Nialla held up a box in green wrapping paper.
“Happy Birthday, Strawberry.”
I gave Nialla a look of gratitude. I didn’t really care what was in the box, but I was thrilled that she had remembered and gotten something. Anything.
“You have to open it right away,” she said.
I nodded and looked to Rick for permission. He nodded, and I began tearing the wrapping off. Inside was a white box. It felt cold to the touch. I lifted the lid and saw inside.
It was an ice cream cake. I swallowed. I had once mentioned to Nialla that my favorite flavor had always been cookies and cream. She’d remembered.
“Oh, that’s so sweet!”
Rick’s voice immediately jolted me back to reality. In a harsh tone he said to Nialla, “I told you to get her a gift. Not to fatten her up.”
Nialla and I met each other’s eyes. His tone had a very sharp edge to it. I jumped to her defense. “It’s okay … I don’t have to eat it. It was the thought that matters. Thank you, Nialla. And Rick, since you sent her out for a gift for me. Thank you.”
His shout made me jump. “DID I FUCKING ASK YOU?”
Rick was working himself up to a rage now. He looked back to Nialla and said, “You’re so fucking stupid. I ask you to do one thing, just one fucking thing, and you can’t even do that right.”
Nialla’s eyes watered. “But, Rick—”
Whatever she was about to say, she never finished. He lashed out with a fist and punched her in the side of the face, knocking her head back with a jerk. She stumbled backward, hitting the television and then falling down.
He turned to me, rage on his face. “You want to eat the fucking cake? Is that what you want?”
“Rick, please…” I pleaded. I set the cake on the bedside table between the two beds.
He shouted, “Eat it! All of it.”
With shocking violence, he grabbed the back of my hair and slammed my face into the cake once, twice, three times. Cake and icing were smashed across my face, in my nostrils and eyes, in my mouth. The third time, my face hit the stand so hard that my vision went white. He kicked me in the side then turned and kicked Nialla even as she scrambled away.
He glared at both of us. “Clean up this goddamned mess.”
Later that night, when Rick was outside talking with someone on the phone and smoking, Nialla whispered to me, “I’m so sorry. I’m making a plan. I promise. We’re leaving him.”
Brenna
Our rooms were silent and sullen the first two days after my birthday, with few words passing between the three of us other than the practical in nature. Where’s the next appointment? What hotel? What time? As it always happened, on the third day, Rick came to me.
“You know I only reacted that way because I love you. Nialla’s jealous, that’s why she’s always trying to get you to eat crap and do more drugs.”
I didn’t answer, just looked away. We were sitting in the hotel room side by side on the bed. He reached over and touched my chin with his finger and thumb, gently pulling my face toward him. “Come on, Strawberry. You know I’d never hurt you for real.”
I avoided his eyes. I didn’t want to hear anything he had to say.
“Come on, baby. It’s not going to be much longer that we have to do this … you know I’ve been saving up. Pretty soon I’m getting us a place. I’ve already scoped it out, it’s a beach house near San Francisco. You’ll love it. You can lay by the beach and read your books and we’ll be happy, just the two of us.”
I finally looked at him. “What about Nialla? You going to throw her in the garbage?”
Inside, I froze. It was stupid, foolhardy, for me to say something like that to Rick. At any minute he could explode into violence, any provocation.
He gave a mock hurt face. I didn’t think he was capable of a real one. “You don’t believe that, do you? Not really. I know you’ve seen the way she looks at us. I think she’s planning to leave. She doesn’t think I know it, but she cut out one of the seams of her purse and she’s been stashing money inside where she thinks I won’t find it. You know how I feel about you girls holding out on me.”
I shook my head. “She wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t.”
Rick went completely still, his pale eyes fixed on me. “I bet she’s talked to you about it, hasn’t she? Did she tell you she was leaving? That she’d take you with her? Are you going to believe that lying whore over me?”
I had to answer quick and without any hesitation. “No, no, of course not.” This was bad. If she was really stashing money and he knew about it, then any minute things could get very ugly. I had to calm him down, distract him. “Rick, you know I wouldn’t leave you. Nialla wouldn’t either. We couldn’t live without you.”
He shook his head. “You girls think you have it bad. You don’t even know what bad is. I’ll tell you something. When I was six, I lived with my stepdad. He used to fuck me all the time. I hated it. It went on for years.”
I wanted to vomit.
He pointed at me. “One day—I was sixteen by then—I knifed him. I was done getting fucked by that old bastard. So you know what? They charged me as an adult, sent me to prison. I did four years, and you know what happens to a sixteen-year-old in fucking adult prison? Same old thing. There I am, with some asshole’s dick up my ass. Don’t you ever act like you’ve got it bad. You get paid, you get drugs and pretty jewelry and all that bullshit. Everybody gets fucked in the end. Everybody.”
Rough, he shoved me back on the bed and pawed at my jeans. Then he pulled off his own clothes and without bothering with any of the niceties of foreplay he mounted me and began to fuck. As always, I looked at the ceiling and imagined myself someplace else, someplace happy. I imagined myself sitting on the porch of the big house next to Sam, laughing and giggling. I tried to shut out his words, shut them out forever, because for just a second, they made me feel something … compassion? No, not that. Not for him.
Rick didn’t take long. Spent, he rolled off of me and got up and began to get dressed without words. I lay there staring off into space. Finally he said, “I got you something for your birthday.”
He dropped a small jewelry box next to me. I sat up and opened the box. It was a pair of diamond earrings.
I felt nothing but anger. He hadn’t bought the earrings. I had. I paid for them with countless men using my body. I wanted to flush them down the toilet. Instead, I looked up at him and met his eyes. “I love them. Thank you so much.”
Brenna
It rained heavily for the next several days. Rick was grumpy because business was slow, so I did my best to stay out of his way.
The day after Rick had said it, I whispered to Nialla that Rick believed she’d been stashing money in the lining of her purse. She nodded wordlessly and no more was said about it. I hoped that meant she was going to get rid of it.
One early morning Rick and Nialla picked me up from an outcall. I climbed into the back seat and he began to drive back toward the motel where we were staying.
“I’m starving,” Nialla said.
Rick said, “Let’s get some breakfast.”
Nobody consulted me, of course. I just went wherever Rick took me. Even after two years, Rick treated me more like a piece of baggage than a person.
Rick parked the car in the side lot next to Dave’s Diner, a crappy little place. We’d eaten there a couple of times before. I hated it. Early morning hours, the place was usually full of pimps trying to show off their girls. Sometimes they’d buy and sell girls in those booths.
When we walked in, Rick went for one of the booths in the back.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I said.
Rick looked around, assessing the layout of the place, looking at the exits, the people, the locations of windows. He already knew there were no phone booths where the bathrooms were—the first time we came here, he’d walked me to the bathroom.
He nodded permission. “Go ahead.”
I turned and headed to the back as he and Nialla sat in the booth. As I walked down the short hallway to the bathroom, I passed the bulletin board and kept walking—then I froze. And turned back to the bulletin board. My heart started to pound, the pulse rushing through my face.
A flyer was stuck on the bulletin board. A flyer with my face on it.
I looked back toward the restaurant. Rick and Nialla were around the corner and couldn’t see me. I quickly tore the flyer down and ducked into the bathroom and locked the door.
I gasped as I looked at it.
The top of the poster said in all caps: “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?”
Underneath, in smaller letters, it said, “Our daughter Brenna was kidnapped in Virginia. She was last seen in Portland three weeks ago. Reward for information leading to her recovery. Brenna, we love you. Mom and Dad. Call 571-555-1572.”
On the left, a mug shot from three weeks ago, me staring dead-eyed at the camera. On the right, me two years ago. I didn’t even remember that picture being taken. I was wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day I was kidnapped, and behind me was the VW Beetle Mom and Dad bought me for my birthday. On my face in that picture, I had an innocent, happy smile.
The girl in that picture still had her mom and dad. She still had Sam. She still had her life, and innocence, and happiness. She was me … but not ruined.
I began to weep. Most of the time I could contain the pain. Most of the time I could just keep going. But this was too much. This meant that they were still out there looking. They were still out there wondering where I was. They hadn’t moved on, they were grieving, they wanted me. All of Rick’s fucking lies were just that, they were lies meant to confuse and destroy me and keep me in his power.
How close were they? My mom and dad might be right down the street? Had my mother touched this very flyer? Sam might be nearby. For a second, the old shame almost overpowered me. They had the mug shot, which meant they knew what I’d been doing when I was arrested. The shame was so overpowering I wanted to die.
But then I realized that was lies, too. That was one of his lies, meant to keep me from them, meant to keep me leaning on him, listening to him. They knew what I’d been doing, and they’d still come all this way, they’d still come looking for me. They still wanted me.
I clutched the flyer against my chest and struggled not to wail. Every part of me ached with longing and pain, emptiness and hurt, and loneliness so powerful I felt it like a yawning chasm in my soul.
I wanted to go home.