by James Frey
As the days went on, and Jacob became more desperate, and our mother became more desperate, I also became desperate. At the time I believed in the church, in Jesus Christ, and in the Heavenly Father as depicted in the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible. I knew nothing else. I had never been given the chance to learn anything or believe anything else. I did not want Jacob’s church to fall apart, or to be taken by the government. Obviously I did not want to lose our home, as it was the only thing of value that my family owned. I started looking for Ben Zion on my own. I asked Jacob’s permission before I started, and he initially said no. After Pastor Luke left, saying he could no longer reconcile his belief in Jesus Christ with what he had witnessed in Ben Zion, and he could no longer preach a gospel that he did not feel in his heart, Jacob granted me permission. Not only was he in danger of losing the physical building that held his church, but the congregation was losing members, as people felt the chaos, and saw the instability in the leadership, and started going to other churches.
I started by asking my mother, but she knew nothing. I went to the Bronx, where Ben had been living before his accident, before he came back to us, but no one would speak to me, and one large man recommended that I leave, that no one there would tell me anything, and some might hurt me if they thought I would hurt Ben Zion, who they knew only as Ben. I went to the construction site where he had worked, but the workers there had not seen Ben Zion, and the foreman of the site would not see me. I went to the jail and tried to speak to some of the people who had been in the tunnels with him. I saw three men and one woman. As soon as I told them who I was, they stood and walked away without speaking a word to me. I did what Jacob did, called police precincts and hospitals and homeless shelters. I went to the hospital where I had found Ben, but the doctor was not available. I went back to my mother, hoping maybe Ben Zion had contacted her, but I couldn’t find her. I went everywhere she had been, or where I knew she had been, but she was nowhere to be found. I stayed home and at church for two days and prayed, and still nothing. On the third day, I decided not to go to church and not to pray. I was tired, and I did not like being around Jacob, who was becoming increasingly desperate and irritable and rageful. I stayed home. I listened to the radio. I put on a station that was not a Christian station, which would most likely have resulted in a beating had Jacob known or come home and discovered it. I listened to a pop station, like a normal girl my age might have done, like normal girls my age all over New York City were probably doing at exactly the same moment. I heard songs about falling in love, about being in love, about going to parties and dancing, and about losing love and mourning love. I heard songs about beautiful kisses and songs about sex. I heard songs about big dreams and people going after them and sometimes losing them and sometimes finding them. I had never known any of these things. I had never experienced anything like them. My life had been church and prayer and school at home and Bible study. What boys I knew were off-limits until marriage, and contact between us was strictly controlled and supervised. I had never walked out the door of our house knowing I was going to see a boy, a boy who might like me, who might kiss me, who I might fall in love with and laugh with and dance with, a boy who would make me happy. I loved the songs I heard, and they made me smile. And they made me hope. And they made me dream. I had dreams I had only dreamed of having. Maybe someday I would know something real about them. Maybe someday some of them would come true. After two hours of songs and dreams and smiles and some awkward dancing, the phone rang. Jacob answered the phone when he was home, and it was my job to answer it while he was out, though no one ever called for me. I immediately turned off the radio, assuming it was someone for Jacob, and knowing that if they heard the radio, I would pay for it later. I picked up and said hello, and a man asked me if I knew Ruth Avrohom. I told him she was my mother. He said he was a social worker from a hospital in Brooklyn, and that my mother was there, and that they needed someone to sign some forms related to her. I asked him what had happened, and he said he could not share details, but that he would discuss it if I came to the hospital. I asked him if she was okay, and he said she was in critical condition. I got the address and hung up.
Without thinking, or without thinking of the potential repercussions, I left immediately. I took the subway and found the hospital. It was in a poor section of Brooklyn, and I was the only white person there, at least among the patients and visitors. I asked a woman where to find my mother. She sent me to the critical care unit. When I got there, I had to speak to another woman, who gave me my mother’s room number, but told me I had to wait for a doctor to speak to me. I sat down and I waited.
I waited for a long time. I was very scared. People looked at me like I didn’t belong there, in that hospital, and I felt the same way. No one else was white. Lots of the people didn’t speak English. I knew people who weren’t white or didn’t speak very much English at church, but there we were all united by our belief in God. At the hospital we weren’t united by anything. I had no idea what they believed. I didn’t trust them. I could tell by the way they were looking at me that they didn’t trust me. One asked me if I was a police officer. Another asked me if I worked for the state and was there to take away someone’s child. Most just stared at me for a minute or sat where they didn’t have to be too close to me. Finally a doctor came to see me. He asked to see my ID and I showed it to him. He walked me to a room down the hall, where my mother was lying in a bed. Her face was hideously swollen and there were large bruises on it. There were tubes and wires going in and out of her arms and a tube going into her mouth and bandages all over her. Her eyes were closed.
I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I was scared to step into the room. The doctor told me she had been attacked outside a homeless shelter. There were no real details as to what exactly had happened, but he had heard that there had been a dispute regarding food with a man at the shelter. The supervisor at the shelter had seen her leave, and she was found an hour later in an alley two blocks away. She had been raped and beaten. Her nose and cheekbones were broken and her skull fractured. She was stable, and would most likely live, but she was in poor condition. The police had taken a report, but there were no real suspects and they didn’t expect to arrest anyone. He said that for the immediate future my mother could stay at the hospital, but that she would have to leave fairly soon. He asked if I could take her in. I started crying.
I stayed with her for a couple of hours. I sat at her bedside and tried to apologize to her. I knew she couldn’t hear me but I did it anyway. When I got home, Jacob was waiting for me. I tried to tell him what had happened but he said he didn’t care. Our mother was no longer our mother to him. I tried to talk to him about it and he hit me, and he kept hitting me. When he stopped, I went to my room and I stared at the ceiling until I heard Jacob go to sleep. I waited for an hour after that, and I got up and I got dressed and I left.
I went to Manhattan. The subway was empty. It was the middle of the night. My plan was to go back to all of the people I had seen and ask them again if they knew where I could find Ben Zion. I would explain the circumstances and why I needed to see him, believing if I could find him and bring him back, Jacob would allow our mother to come home, where I could care for her. I came out of the station into the city. The sidewalks were deserted. The shops were all closed. There were no cars on the street. It was quiet and still and beautiful. The long, straight blocks stretching out to the horizon line. The buildings in shadows, in black. The electric storefront signs were glowing red, yellow, blue. The streetlights were flickering. The blacktop was deserted. The closest location was the hospital, so I started walking towards it. For fifteen minutes I saw no one, though I did occasionally see shadows moving behind lit windows. As I got closer to the hospital, I started to see cars, and a few people. Hospitals are one of the few places in the world that never sleep, never stop, never have a chance to breathe, to be alone or quiet, to be deserted. The closer I got, the more people I saw, some in scrub
s or white coats with badges on the front, some just sad or upset, some who looked sick and lost. I went to the emergency room, where the doctor worked. There were a few people in the waiting room. All of them looked scared, almost guilty. A young woman and a young man, both dressed like they had been somewhere fancy, looked like they’d seen a ghost. A little boy held his father’s hand. An old woman sat by herself and stared at the floor. A couple was sitting together, the woman sobbing into the man’s shoulder. As I walked to the reception desk, I saw the doctor standing in an office behind it. She was on the phone. She seemed very serious. The receptionist asked if she could help me and I told her I needed to see the doctor. She asked why and I told her it was about my brother. She asked if my brother was a patient at the hospital and I told her he was but not anymore. She asked why I needed to speak to the doctor and I told her it was very important, that it was about my brother. I asked her to give the doctor my name and tell her I needed to see her. She said she would and I sat down.
I waited for an hour. Every time a doctor or nurse would come in, everyone would look up, some mixture of great fear and great hope on their faces, knowing that at any minute they were going to be either saved or ruined. The fourth time, the woman doctor came in and looked at me and smiled and sat down next to me. She said hello and asked me what had happened. She could see fresh bruises on my arms and neck, and assumed I was there for some kind of care. I told her about what had happened with my mother and the situation at home, though when she asked if Jacob had beaten me, I said no, and I told her I needed to find Ben Zion, and that I had been searching for him for several weeks and couldn’t find any trace of him, or anyone who would even talk to me about him. She asked me if I thought Ben Zion would be in any danger if I found him, and I said no, we’re his family, we need him, we love him and we miss him and we need him. She smiled and said she’d be back, and she hugged me and walked away. She came back a little while later with a sticky note in her hand. She said he was living on a farm upstate and that she’d called the farm and spoken to him. He told her to give me the address and that I should come see him, and that he loved me. I took the sticky note and she hugged me and I left.
I walked to the bus station. I had enough money to buy a ticket most of the way there, but not all of the way. The station was disgusting. And frightening. It was dirty, and there were lots of homeless people and men who stood around waiting for something, or someone, and never seemed to leave. More people seemed to be coming to the city than were leaving it. As I watched them get off their buses, I wondered how many of them, if any at all, would end up happy, or would think they had made a good decision. I found my bus as fast as I could and got on and sat down in the seat directly behind the driver, so that if anything happened, I’d be near someone who could help me.
The ride was a few hours. The bus was mostly empty. An old couple sitting together holding hands. Three girls with shopping bags. A teenaged girl who looked tired and sad. A teenaged boy who looked like he was going to explode. I stared out the window at the green blur and the endless gray line stretching out in front of us. Three hours later I got off in a small town in upstate New York. It looked like it had been nice at some point in the past. The houses were clapboard Victorian, and many of them were very large, though most were now decrepit. There was a main street lined with shops, almost all of which were now closed and boarded. There were liquor stores and churches. Three gun shops. A discount clothing store and a thrift shop. A used car lot full of pick-up trucks, and crumbling factories at the edge of town. Most of the people I saw were sitting on their porch, or their lawn. Nobody seemed to be working. I stopped at a gas station and asked how to get to the town where Ben Zion was living. The man laughed at me when he asked me how I was getting there and I said I was walking, but he gave me directions anyway. He told me it was about seventy miles away. I started walking down the road. It was a two-lane country road with garbage and weeds along the sides. When I saw cars, I would step deeper into the weeds so that no one would see me, even though I knew they did. I was tired and my body still hurt from Jacob, and I was ashamed to be walking along the side of the road. I didn’t have running shoes or walking shoes. Just my church shoes, cheap black leather flats with plastic soles. And I was wearing what I always wore, a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse and long socks. I started sweating almost immediately, and I hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink for a long time. I’d walk for a while, and then I’d sit down and rest. I was making some progress, but seventy miles seemed like a thousand. I could not imagine walking the entire way. And I knew that at some point I’d need to sleep, and find some food. I knew that at some point I’d need to find shelter of some kind.
I started praying as I walked. I was talking to Jesus and the Holy Father, and asking them for aid and guidance. I told them I was scared and needed help. I told them I was devoted to them and believed in them and would do whatever they asked of me if they helped me. I begged them for a sign, for something to let me know they could hear my prayers. I held my hands together, above my heart, as I walked, and I looked up towards where I believed Heaven was, and I asked for the angels to come down to me. I believed, because I believed in and lived by the word of God as expressed in the Bible and had a personal relationship with Christ, that help would come in some form. I prayed so hard. I kept walking, and I prayed so hard.
I don’t know how far I got the first day, probably ten or fifteen miles. I slept in a park in a small town that looked exactly like the first one. All of them looked like the first one. I was woken by a police officer’s boot. He was pushing me with it. Not in a violent or angry way, but enough to wake me. He asked me who I was and what I was doing. When I told him where I was going, he laughed at me and turned and walked away. I got up and got back on the road.
It was a long day. The longest day of my life. I drank water from gas station bathrooms. I ate food from garbage cans. I walked for hours and hours. My feet and my body hurt. I kept praying. I kept asking Jesus Christ and the Holy Father for help. Twice cars pulled over and I believed my prayers had been answered. Both times men offered me rides if I would do things with them, if I would defile myself for them. Both times I ran off the road into the woods to hide. When they pulled away I came out, and I just kept walking.
Three days after I got off the bus, I found the entrance to the farm. My feet were burning and my throat was burning and I felt like I was going to vomit. I thanked God for giving me the strength to make it. I literally got on my knees and looked to where Heaven is supposed to be and thanked Jesus Christ and God. I thanked them for guiding me and keeping me safe and showing me where to sleep and where to find water and where to find food. I thanked them for allowing me to recognize non-Christian predators and avoid them. I thanked them for allowing the doctor to tell me where to find Ben Zion. I thanked them for Ben Zion himself, and for the gift of having him as my brother. I stayed on my knees for an hour, praying and thanking Jesus and the Heavenly Father. I stayed on my knees until the urge to vomit disappeared and until I felt like they had given me my strength back.
The walk up the drive was easy. The road was long and straight and there were woods on both sides. It took about ten minutes. When I came to the end, there was a large white farmhouse and a barn, and huge overgrown fields behind them. There were people around. Some were working a garden, some just sitting around. They all looked happy. A large woman asked if I needed help. I told her I was looking for Ben. She said he was out and she wasn’t sure when he’d be back. I asked for a glass of water and she got me one. She tried to talk to me but I asked her to leave me alone, and she did.