6
Left to Die
I was dying. They had poisoned me, and I couldn’t resist any longer.
I fell asleep.
“Get up and walk!” a strong voice shouted inside my head—and I’ve always believed that was God.
“I can’t. I’m too tired.”
“Get up and walk!” the voice shouted a second time.
“Help me, God. Please help me.” Even though I can’t explain it, I was able to stand up and I began to walk slowly. Stagger is probably more accurate. I was still wearing those little heels and kept thinking I was going to fall.
In front of me stood an abandoned building, and it was near the water. I was at an old marina. As I stumbled toward it, I saw a pay telephone attached to that rickety building.
I stumbled over to it, picked up the receiver, and heard a dial tone.*
No matter where I looked, everything was blurry and fuzzy. I felt disoriented. I was so nauseated and weak I could hardly hold on to the phone. I didn’t have any money. Because I couldn’t read any of the numbers, I fumbled around until I found zero and dialed.
“This is the operator. How may I help you?”
I tried to talk but the words weren’t coming out very well.
Quietly but firmly she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Don’t know. Lost. Help me get home?”
“Where do you live?”
“I don’t know. I don’t live anywhere.” My words were slurred and I probably wasn’t making sense. “In a hotel.”
“What’s the name of the hotel?”
“Dynasty.” I remembered that much.
“Hold on, sweetie. I know you’re lost and you’re drugged. I can hear it in your voice.”
I must have said more, but I was so groggy I don’t remember.
“Just stay on the line with me, okay?”
“Okay. Please . . . please . . . help me . . . get to my mom.”
Although I don’t know how long it took, someone at the desk of the Dynasty Hotel spoke to the operator. I could hear his voice and the hotel was small enough that he knew the permanent guests. Even though the man at the desk probably knew who I was, I couldn’t say words that made sense.
“Who’s your mother?”
“Ella . . . Ella . . .”
“Yes, I know her,” he said. He connected the operator with our room.
My mother was upset when the operator talked to her. “I told you not to go with that girl! I had a bad feeling about her. That Mary—this is her fault.”
“No, no, Mom, it’s not. It was the other kids. Please don’t be mad at me because I went with them. I’m so sorry, Mom, I’m so sorry.” I’m not sure I said all those words aloud—but I know I tried to say them. I was afraid that my mother would be mad at me. She said I slurred and paused between nearly every word.
The operator interrupted a few times in a quiet, kind voice. Finally, Mom calmed me down by saying repeatedly, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” Then she asked, “Where are you?”
“I don’t know . . . Don’t know. Come . . . find me.”
“Tell me where you are.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom . . . I’m lost. I don’t know, I came with them . . . a boy driving the car . . . made me take the white pill . . . and drink something. A wine cooler . . . I made a mistake.” I was babbling, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Listen carefully,” the operator interrupted. “Look around you. Just tell us what you see.”
While I was trying to describe things, Mom became hysterical and cried.
The calm voice of the operator blotted out Mom’s wailing. “Take your time and look around you.”
“Feel . . . like . . . I’m going to pass out . . .”
“We’re going to help you,” the operator said. She asked more questions. “What do you see near you?”
“Do you see lights?”
“I see cars a ways off.”
“So you’re near a street. Do you hear cars?”
“Yes . . . and we went over a bridge . . . and I don’t know . . . what happened. They made . . . made me . . . drink fruit drink . . . tasted funny.”
Then I passed out.
My next conscious moment was looking into the worried face of my mother. She and a cab driver were lifting me up from the ground.
“Come back to me, Katariina, come back to me,” Mom pleaded. “Wake up, please wake up.”
I must have drifted in and out of consciousness. Mom got me back to the hotel. When I was clearheaded enough to understand her, she said I had given the operator enough information so Mom knew approximately where I was. With the help of the cab driver, they drove around until she spotted the dangling telephone. Then she saw me on the ground.
Mom didn’t call the police, but she did call a doctor. She described everything she had learned about my being drugged.
When he asked to talk to me, I explained what I could. At first he thought they had given me speed, but he changed his mind when I described the size and shape of the white pill, the nausea, and my heart racing so fast I felt like it was going to explode.
He listened and probed with more questions. He was never positive what they had given me, but he said, “Whatever it was that they forced you to take, you have to stay awake. You can’t go to sleep tonight. It sounds like what they gave you will kill you if you go to sleep.”
“If you go to sleep, you’ll never wake up.”
I mumbled that I understood.
“I want you to walk around the hotel with your mother.” Then he said to Mom, “Those people who did this to her are dangerous. She’s thirteen. If it’s what I think it was, that dose should have killed her.” He paused before he said, “That was probably their intention. Drugs and alcohol don’t mix.”
After the phone call, Mom and I walked around the hotel until six o’clock the next morning. I expected her to be angry with me, and I deserved it. Instead, she was patient, loving, and kind. She rarely lost her temper, so when Mom had shouted at me on the phone, I now understood that it came out of her fear and anxiety.
She never told anyone what happened, but she did talk straight to me about Mary. “Now you know, don’t you? Mary is not your friend.”
“I don’t think it was Mary. It was those other kids. They’re the bad ones. Mary is the good one.” I was not willing to give up the notion that Mary was my one true friend.
“Mary is not your friend! They’re all part of the same group. She sent them to you.”
I listened, not wanting to believe her, but I knew she was right.
“I want you to stay in this room,” Mom said, “and you’re not to leave while I figure out a new place for us to live. We can’t stay here. Those people could try to kill you again.”
What happened was my fault, and now we had to move. Mom didn’t speak another critical word to me, but my shame increased. It proved to me once again that I was useless and always made bad choices.
I stayed in the room, but by the end of the day I was tired of doing nothing except watching TV. I sneaked out of the room and walked over to a nearby hotel. Just then, I spotted Mary. She was befriending a boy who looked like he was about ten years old. He was a white American boy who wore nothing but his swimming trunks and was barefooted. She leaned toward him, and from her bent-over position, I knew she was talking sweetly to him—the way she had talked to me.
Something inside me jerked, as if I instinctively knew that she would try to sell him too and use him to do the same thing she wanted me to do.
Mary must have sensed someone coming up behind her. She turned, stared at me, and her face turned ghostly white. She didn’t say anything, but her expression said, “I thought you were dead.”
“You wanted to kill me, didn’t you?” I didn’t give her a chance to say anything. “You’re not my friend!” I turned around and ran back to the room.
By then, I was really scared. She wasn’t my friend and I didn’t know what she’d try to do to me if she got the chance. Now I knew the truth—and I cried as I said aloud, “Mary isn’t my friend.”
When Mom came home from work, I told her what happened.
“Don’t ever leave the room again!”
I didn’t leave the room until it was time for us to move out of that hotel. I was too afraid.
I thanked God for intervening and for sparing me. Repeatedly, I promised God I would never disobey my mom again.
And I meant it.
But that wasn’t the end.
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*Years later, when I told that part of my story, a man who worked for the phone company said, “You had a real miracle. When they abandon a building, we turn off the phone lines.”