Winter Flower

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  But both of us cried when Richard Gere climbed the fire escape to go get her. At first it was just a few tears, but then I freaked out because I began sobbing as I leaned on Nialla. I felt her tears splash on my face and I put my arms around her.

  I felt ridiculous reacting that way. But how else was I supposed to react? When he talked about rescuing the princess, it hit me that no one would ever call me Princess. No one would ever rescue me. No one would even want me. I was sixteen years old and I’d already lost count of how many men I’d had sex with. I had long since stopped fighting, because I didn’t want to die.

  Except that most of the time I did want to die.

  It was after the tears finally stopped that I asked Nialla why she stayed with Rick.

  She thought about it for a long time while she carefully packed pot into a bowl. Then she lit up, stoking the coal and inhaling deeply, then passed the bowl to me. “What else am I going to do? I don’t have anywhere to go. My father’s the worship leader at the Calvary Baptist Church in Richmond. He’d die if he knew his daughter was a whore. I’m sure he’d rather I’d be dead. I don’t know what else to do. Where would I go?”

  I thought about that, and it made my stomach turn a little. I felt the same black tendrils of shame. What would my parents think? And Sam? She practically worshiped me. When I thought about how disappointed Sam would be I wanted to sink through a hole in the ground and disappear.

  “How did you wind up with him?”

  Nialla sighed. “Not so different from you really. I fell in love with him. I kept it a secret, because Dad would have gone batshit if he’d known I was dating an older guy, or dating anyone really. And Rick was so sweet sometimes. He gave me jewelry and stuffed animals, and even though I couldn’t take any of it home, he kept it at his place. He talked about how some day we’d go away together.”

  “Was he your first … guy?”

  She bitterly shook her head. “No. That was my uncle when I was eight.”

  Oh. She said the words in such a flat, emotionless tone that I wanted to cry for her.

  “Rick was the first person who ever really treated me like I was worth something.”

  I asked the next question very carefully. “Do you still love him?”

  For the first time in that conversation, she met my eyes. Just for a second, then she looked away. She nodded. “Sometimes.”

  Crazy, but I felt sorry for her.

  The next day, Rick ordered us to pack our bags. We were leaving. This time, our destination was Dallas, Texas.

  ***

  A few days after we got to Dallas, I was lying on my side in bed after a john had left, just thinking how awful things were. The year before, in my sophomore year history class, we spent almost a week on World War II and the Holocaust. One of the books we read was called Night. By Elie something. Wiesel? I don’t remember for sure. Anyway, the book was about a boy whose family ended up in a concentration camp. The boy related his experiences of horrible brutality, of the gas chambers and ovens, of torture and murder. When I read it, my brain couldn’t accept what I was reading. I couldn’t grasp it as reality. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could continue living under those circumstances, how they wouldn’t just curl up and die.

  Now, I sort of understood. Because as horrible and pointless and brutal as my life had become, I was still functioning on some level. And I didn’t understand why. Because I felt … not just dirty—that wasn’t a strong enough word. I felt filthy inside, ashamed and disgusted by what I had become. Ashamed, because I hadn’t killed myself. I hadn’t overdosed, or slit my wrists open, or jumped from a high window. I thought about such things constantly. I had fantasized about what it would feel like to draw a blade across my wrist and watch the blood bubbling up from the line, dripping and dripping.

  I hadn’t had the courage to do it. And I hated myself because I was a coward.

  You’re nothing but a dirty whore.

  The words Rick had made me say stuck to me, an invisible coating that somehow I was sure anyone who met me would be able to sense.

  The john had been gone for maybe five minutes when I saw it. He had taken his jacket off when he came in and casually laid it on a chair before getting undressed. I had asked him the usual questions. What was his name? What did he do for a living? Was he married? The answers were generic, hardly different from any others I heard. Jack, he said. He was a high school teacher. Married, two kids, but he and his wife were estranged. The phone he left behind, the phone that had fallen down beside the chair, unnoticed … it was an old flip phone.

  I stared at it, stunned. Everywhere I’d been since my abduction, there had been no phones except for Rick’s. He removed them from hotel rooms, and when he left he locked us in from the outside if possible.

  I could call home. Or 911. Would a phone like that have a GPS? Would 911 be able to find me from it? I didn’t know the address here. I was paralyzed. Who should I call? Sam? My mom? What would I tell them?

  You’re nothing but a dirty whore.

  Rick’s words were an assault. I simultaneously felt nausea, terror, despair.

  For the first time in days I began to cry. How can I go home now? I didn’t have a home. I wasn’t the same person I had been, and the one thing I couldn’t bear was to see the disgust my parents would feel about me.

  I groaned. I could be free. All I had to do was walk across the room, pick up the phone, and dial.

  If I was going to do it, it had better be soon. I was running out of time.

  Instead, I picked up the pack of Pall Malls from the bedside stand and lit one. The rush of nicotine brought clarity to my thoughts. But I was no closer to an answer. I stared at the phone like it was a poisonous spider.

  Are you fucking crazy? Call! Call!

  Call who? I couldn’t go home. They’d never understand.

  You’re nothing but a dirty whore.

  I was still paralyzed and smoking a cigarette, tears streaming down my face, when the door opened. It was Rick. He looked murderous.

  “Where the fuck is it?”

  I barely moved, just nodded in the general direction of the phone. He swept it up in his hand and opened it up, looking at it. “Did you fucking call anyone?” He must have been checking through the call history.

  I shook my head.

  After a minute he looked up from the phone. He looked surprised. Then he smirked. “Guess that’s it, then.” He started to walk out of the room then looked back in. “You’ve got another client in twenty minutes. Be ready.”

  He walked out, shutting the door behind him.

  I lit another cigarette and stared. What did it mean? Why hadn’t I called? I lay down on my side again and held the cigarette in front of me, watching the smoke slowly twirl up. What it meant was obvious. He owned me now. The things he had said, the things he had made me say, they were true now.

  ***

  Not long after that, Rick made me get my first tattoo, an intricate scrollwork just on the edge of my pubic hair bearing the label, Rick’s moneymaker. I wasn’t a person anymore. I was a product to be bought and sold. In each city, the pattern was the same. We would arrive and spend an hour on the first morning posting ads on Backpage, my face obscured in the ads. The phone calls would pour in within minutes of posting the first ad. Typically we would take a couple of lunchtime appointments, then things would slow down for the early afternoon. Then from five in the afternoon until two or three in the morning I would see one man after another.

  By that time I was regularly doing outcalls. For those, Rick would drive me to the location—typically hotels, but sometimes people’s houses or apartments—and then pick me up an hour later. We had a system for outcalls, for safety. As soon as we were settled at an outcall and had determined it was safe and that the client had paid, then we would call. Not getting a call within five minutes of going in meant there was trouble.

  And trouble happened often enough. Most of the time it was guys who didn’t want to pay. These wer
e guys who would call an escort, refuse to pay and rape them, figuring that it would never get reported. They were probably right. After all, what good would it do to call the police?

  So the plan was, if I didn’t call and check in during the first five minutes of the visit, Rick would return and bust down the door. It happened more than once.

  ***

  We had left Dallas and moved on to Cincinnati before I heard a client tell me, “Merry Christmas.” Somehow I had survived three months of terror and the loss of whatever innocence I had.

  When he said those words, the guy was putting his tie back on. Like most of them, this one had a wedding ring. Did it mean nothing to these men? Were they all like this? In the last three months I’d had sex with men barely older than I was, men my father’s age, even men my grandfather’s age. They were teachers and cops and ministers and accountants. And so many of them were husbands and fathers.

  Christmas Eve was especially busy, and Rick made us do half-hour appointments at the normal charge. The money made no difference to me one way or the other, I never saw any of it anyway. Rick’s warnings of what would happen if I dared to hide any money from him had been effective. Rick picked me up from my final appointment of the night at four a.m. on Christmas morning. The streets were glistening with icy cold grey sleet, and the Mustang slid while we were on our way to pick up Nialla.

  When we picked her up, she looked as bitter as I felt. Normally, I got in the back seat as soon as she came to the car, but tonight she waved me to stay where I was and slid into the back. I was silent as we drove back to the hotel, but Rick began to talk in a soft monologue. I tuned him out—sometimes when he was in a talkative mood, he could go along for quite a while without saying anything meaningful.

  This time, however, was different. After a couple of minutes of seemingly aimless talking, he said, “Tomorrow should be light for you girls. You’ve only got a couple of appointments each.”

  Nialla’s voice interrupted from the back seat. “On fucking Christmas? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  Rick’s face flushed with rage, and he turned around in his seat groping for her without slowing down the car. When he couldn’t reach her, he grabbed me by my shirt and slammed me into the glass window. I cried out in pain.

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch!”

  She did, instantly. Rick never hesitated to hurt either one of us; it didn’t matter who had committed the offense. I slumped in my seat rubbing my head. Underneath my hair on the right side of my head, I felt what seemed to be a small lump. I took my fingers away from the lump and looked at them. They were lightly spotted with blood.

  “Jesus, Rick, she’s bleeding.”

  Rick sneered. “She’ll be fine.”

  “Either way, you should let us have tomorrow off. It’s Christmas.”

  “Baby, you know I’m trying to save up to get us a big place. You know that. We can’t do that if you’re not making money.”

  Nialla muttered, “You and your bullshit house.”

  When I woke up the next morning, the lump had grown larger, but it was only noticeable to the touch. I stared bloodshot in the mirror as smoke curled up from my cigarette, and I wondered what Sam was doing. Had she woken up early that morning like we always used to and gone downstairs to see what presents there were? I leaned against the sink and closed my eyes, trying to envision the scene. Mom and Dad would be in the next room cooking, the smell spreading throughout the house. Mom would be playing classic Christmas carols on an old vinyl record that her mother had given her. She’d said more than once that album was the only reason she still had a record player.

  When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recognize who I was. My hair was in messy ringlets from the perm Rick had insisted I get. The ugly neck tattoo of a dragon with Rick’s name written through the middle of it marred my neck, making it something that wasn’t even mine anymore. My eyes were sunken. I was thinner than before, a lot thinner. Rick constantly called me fat and wouldn’t let me eat as much as I wanted. Once when he decided I’d eaten too much, he forced me to take a bunch of laxatives.

  I can’t make as much money off a fat bitch.

  I hated him. It was like he wasn’t even human. He had no feelings, he didn’t care about anyone or anything. He pretended sometimes, even made me believe it sometimes. But at moments like this I had some clarity. He was never going to let me go.

  And what about me? When I had the chance, I didn’t call. All I had to do was press three simple digits—911—and I could have been free. Why hadn’t I done it?

  The answer was simple enough. I was too damaged. I felt like I was filthy, like I was going to hell, like I might be contagious. How could I ever face Sam again knowing what I’d spent those months doing? It was better to pass out of their lives quietly.

  He’d even left his gun out on a couple of occasions. Never far away, never further than arm’s reach; once he set it down on the table between the beds in a hotel room. My eyes were instantly drawn to it.

  “Grab it, why don’t you?” He grinned as he said the words. When I didn’t respond, didn’t move, he gave a soft laugh. He knew he owned me by then.

  My first appointment that morning—Christmas morning—was an electrical engineer, a father of five kids, three of whom were in college. He wore a cross on a gold chain around his neck, and he talked about how much he loved his wife and didn’t understand why he couldn’t stop seeing escorts.

  I wanted to say, I’m younger than your kids. I wanted to say, Help me. I wanted to say, Go home to your family.

  I didn’t say any of those things. I nodded and listened and pretended I sympathized. I stared up at the ceiling while he fucked me, and in my head, I just left the room. Usually I went somewhere emotionally neutral. I imagined myself comfortable and safe and alone, maybe reading a book while drinking a cup of tea. But that time, my mind turned back to Christmases past. I remembered Mom’s stunned surprise when Dad bought them new wedding bands for their tenth Christmas together. She had started crying, and I had asked, “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  She had shaken her head, replying, “Nothing’s wrong, baby. These are happy tears, because I’ve got the best husband in the world, and you’ve got the best daddy.”

  I remembered one of those rare Christmases in Virginia when we had lots of snow. After presents and breakfast, Sam and I had gone outside sledding. We had saucer-shaped sleds that flew down the hill. Every single time, Sam would shriek with delight all the way down.

  I missed Sam, and my mom and dad.

  I didn’t realize I was crying until the guy finished in a chorus of huffing and blowing. He lay breathing heavily, his sweat-sticky body covering mine, his face buried in my neck, and rolled over heavily. For a second he looked stunned, then he said, “Are you crying? Did I hurt you?”

  Did he hurt me?

  He actually sounded concerned. Normally, I tried to stay numb. Normally, I tried not to feel anything anymore. But when he asked that, I felt as if I’d been stabbed.

  Tears running down my face, I shouted, “Don’t act like you give a shit! If you did, you’d be at home with your own kids instead of fucking a sixteen-year-old in some crappy hotel! Go! Just go! Go home!”

  Suddenly he looked desperately afraid. His face red, he began throwing on his clothes. “You’re sixteen? You didn’t tell me that! I didn’t know!”

  He stopped getting dressed long enough to realize he still had the condom on. He threw it on the floor, a disgusting exclamation, and continued getting dressed. “You didn’t tell me that. Don’t you know I could go to jail for that? What kind of bullshit is this?”

  I sat up pulling the sheet around me and screamed, “Do you think I like this? Do you think I want to be here? Get out! Go home to your kids! Merry fucking Christmas!”

  He was out the door before he even had his shoes on or his shirt buttoned. The door slammed shut behind him, and I lay in the bed crying for a long time, trying to blot out the pain and the fear and
shame. But the shame was so heavy, it was starting to blot me out.

  I don’t know how much longer it was before I heard the door click and Rick and Nialla came back from the outcall he had taken her to.

  Rick muttered, “What the fuck is wrong with her?”

  “Leave her alone,” Nialla said.

  Then I felt her arms around me and I cried even harder.

  Twenty-Four

  Cole

  Even though it was late September, summer still clung on with fierce intensity. The air was thick with humidity, leaving everything with a moist texture reminiscent of my childhood summers. The smell of this time of year was often enough to transport me back to that last summer riding in the truck with Lucas. I remembered hiking at Tallulah Gorge, and a weeklong road trip to Panama City, nights partying with his friends and avoiding Big Bill.

  All of it represented a life I had always intended to leave behind. The one thing I never expected was to find myself living again in the rural South.

  Everything was strangely normal when I got to the restaurant at six o’clock the next morning. Same routine as always. Check the parking lot. Go inside; check the condition of the bathrooms; walk through and look at the floors, the grills, the waffle irons; check temperatures for the hot and cold stored foods.

  As I made my way along the area behind the back counter, I realized that things weren’t normal at all. The grill filters were gleaming, as were the backs of the egg pans which had been scrubbed to a mirror shine. The floor deep under the dish pit, and even the pipes, had been scrubbed clean. Someone had to have been down on their hands and knees under there. The windows were clean, everything was put away properly. Even the waffle irons, which were a bitch to clean because they maintained a constant temperature of four hundred degrees, had been thoroughly cleaned.

  There were no customers in the restaurant yet, and my third shift, Linda and Dakota, were lounging at the counter as they often were when I came in. Dakota was going through her tickets for the night. I looked over at them, then back at the gleaming clean kitchen, then back at them. “Did you guys do this?”