by M. E. Betts
She took a couple of cuts of venison from the fridge, set them in a pan, and took some spices from the cabinet.
"So how old is Timothy?" she asked Jon as she washed some potatoes.
"He's four," Jon replied. He rubbed his face and sighed. "Only four. Can you imagine what this must be like for someone his age?"
"Kids are resilient," Shari said. "For all we know, he might handle it better than any of us."
"Yeah, maybe." He sank down into an armchair near the kitchen. "I just wish...I just wish I could protect him from this, you know?"
Shari nodded. "I think I know what you mean, but you have to keep in mind...you've kept him alive and safe."
"Yeah, but...I know it's not logical, but I just wish I had some way to take all this away. Let him live a normal life, but now..."
"Now we have to redefine what a 'normal life' is," Shari interrupted. "I don't mean to be dismissive. I don't have kids, so I can only imagine what you're going through. I'm just saying...it's a best-case scenario for him right now. His parents are both alive, and so is he. His generation..." She paused uncomfortably. "Whatever's left of his generation--is going to have to grow up way stronger than we did, that's for sure."
Jon snorted, and a dull smirk came over his features. "That's an understatement." He gazed into space for a moment absent-mindedly, then shook his head, snapping himself out of it, and stood up. "I'm sorry, I should've asked if you need help. Anything I can do?"
"You want to cut up a head of lettuce?" Shari asked, handing him a knife and cutting board. “I’ll get this meat ready.”
"Yeah, sure...it's in the fridge?" Jon asked as he began washing his hands. Shari nodded.
"I don't think Cindy likes me," she said after a few moments of silence. She glanced over at Jon's expression. His face confirms it, she thought.
"Why do you say that?"
"I don't know, maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but...it seems like when she looks at me, she's...I don't know...challenging me, in some way."
Jon was quiet for a moment, chopping the lettuce. "I don't know if I'd say that. But it's true, Cindy's never really been friendly with the females. In the past, she's come across as catty with most women, other than her sister. But that's her baby sister, and she's pretty meek in comparison to Cindy. You know, Cindy can boss her around, be the alpha-female."
Shari laughed. "I hope she doesn't think she can be the alpha-female here!"
Jon chuckled. "No, I don't think she's quite that bold. She knows we're guests here, and that you guys are doing us a favor. Trust me, she won't get outta line."
"If you say she won't, then I trust you," Shari said, smiling at him. He smiled back. He's much too nice for her, said the voice in Shari's head. Ain't that always the way?
"So if you don't mind me asking," he said, "how did you and Fauna meet? Did you know her before all this?"
Shari shook her head. "I met her the day all this began," she explained. "I came in off the road. There were a lot of car crashes. I avoided them as best I could, but when I saw one up the road from here, and a lot of zombies running around, I took my chances and turned in here. Fauna took me in. She's a very good woman. She's always saying how important it is to help our fellow human beings."
"Well then, I guess we all oughtta be thankful to her, huh?" Jon said. Shari nodded.
They heard the rattling of keys.
"They're back," Shari said. She looked around the kitchen and sighed. “Well, the meat and potatoes are baking, the lettuce is chopped...I think we’re done for now.” She flopped down on the couch to roll a smoke. “I'm gonna sit and relax, smoke a little. Today was the first time Fauna and I left the property since April. I was a little eager to get out, but..." She leaned back into the cushion, sealing the paper shut. "Now I'm just relieved to be back, and safe. You smoke?” she asked. She pointed to she joint she had rolled. “This, I mean.”
“No, I don’t smoke weed or cigarettes,” he said, and laughed. “Now, you put some of that in a brownie, that’s a different story!” Shari giggled.
“How’s dinner comin’ along?” Fauna asked, climbing up into the loft with Timothy, Cindy, and Stephanie behind her.
“It’s in the oven, “ Shari said. “Should be about an hour or so.”
“Daddy, I found a bunch of cool rocks!” Timothy boasted excitely as he climbed up.
“That’s great, buddy! You’ll have to show ‘em to me.” He turned to Shari, grinning. “Collecting rocks is his new favorite thing,” he explained.
Cindy helped Timothy up, and climbed up behind him, her gaze focused on Shari. There she goes, Shari thought, giving me that stinkeye again. She watched as Cindy lit up a cigarette.
"Oh, hon--" Fauna said. "You wanna smoke that out on the balcony?"
Shari watched, wide-eyed, as Cindy's expression became one of utter indignance. She's not gonna talk back to Fauna, is she? On her first day here?
Cindy sneered. "But--Shari's smoking weed in here!"
Shari, Jon, and Stephanie all stared, mouths agape. They looked first at Cindy, then at Fauna, who, with her head slightly cocked to the side and one eyebrow raised to an almost comical level, looked more irritated than Shari had ever seen her. That bitch has got some nerve, Shari thought, struggling to hide her amusement.
Fauna strode over to Cindy, took the cigarette, walked into the kitchen with it, and ran water from the sink over it.
"There," she said, throwing the cigarette butt away. She pointed to the balcony. "You wanna smoke, do it outside. My house, my rules. Ain't no one ever smoked cigarettes in this garage, and that ain't about to change. Now, I tried to ask you nicely. Do us all a favor, don't ever cop an attitude with me over somethin' so trivial on my own property." She stood, staring Cindy down, until the woman was nearly cowering behind her husband.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, sighed, and straightened her stance. "You're right. It's your place, not mine."
"Apology accepted."
"I'm gonna go have one outside," Cindy said, taking two more cigarettes from her pack. "You wanna come with me, Steph?"
"Yeah, sure." The two of them went out to the balcony, closing the sliding door behind them.
Fauna turned to Jon. "Is she always this hard to get along with?"
Jon started to shake his head in repudiation, then seemed to change his mind. "She can be. I was hoping she would have the good sense to be agreeable...I mean, I know she's grateful to the two of you, but--she doesn't really get along with women."
Fauna nodded. "Yeah, I saw those looks she's been givin' Shari. Not too confident, is she? It's a shame, she's a pretty enough girl."
So Fauna noticed it too, Shari thought.
"To be honest, uh...don't tell her I told you this, but I feel like I should mention it...she has some issues. She used to be on medication before all this, but well...obviously, she hasn't been able to get her meds. I was hoping she'd level out, but...I think the stress is really getting to her without her medication." He saw the look of concern on Fauna and Shari's faces. Shit, maybe I shouldn't have brought that up, he thought. "I'll talk to her," he said. "I'm not gonna let her ruin this opportunity we have here, or make everyone's lives miserable because she can't get along with the two of you." He glanced over at Timothy, who was sitting in front of the coffee table, looking through the assortment of rocks he had collected. "Is it okay if I use your shower, get Timothy and myself cleaned up before dinner? It's been awhile since any of us have had a proper shower. We had water at the store, so we were able to wash up in the bathroom sink. Still, it'd be nice to take a real shower."
"Yeah, bathroom's over there," Fauna said, pointing. "Towels are in the cabinet in there." Jon scooped Timothy up, and Fauna waited until she heard the water running before she spoke to Shari. "We're gonna have to keep an eye on her," she said in a hushed tone, looking out the balcony doors where Cindy and Stephanie sat, talking. "She pulls any more shit, I got no problem puttin' her ass out in the barn. The rest of 'em can stay in
here with us, but I'm not takin' any of her shit."
It this going to be like Nick all over again? Shari wondered. Why do people have to be such a pain in the ass? "Good call," she said, "but hopefully it won't come to that."
Daphne sat on a fallen tree trunk at her temporary camp. She would leave the next morning. She never stayed in one place for more than a day. Her camp consisted of only herself, her rather large pack, her sleeping bag, and the bonfire she had started. She was at home in the woods, truly in her element...a veritable forest nymph. Even as a child, in her foster home, she had spent a great deal of time in the woods behind the house.
Her childhood had been unusually harsh, at least after her sixth year. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants, and spent the first years of her life in a Chicago ghetto. They were the only years of her life she remembered fondly, although the memories were few and indistinct. She sometimes vaguely speculated on what her life would have been like, what she would be like, if she had gotten to grow up with her family...but the speculations never really took a definitive form in her mind, as self-reflection was not one of her strong suits.
A couple weeks after her sixth birthday, both of her parents and her older brother were killed in an wave of gang warfare in the neighborhood. They had bought a new TV, which had just been delivered, and they were in the process of lugging it into the apartment building when the gunfire erupted around them. Daphne had been in the apartment, watching cartoons, when she heard the gunshots. She hid in the closet until the noise died down. She waited, wondering when her family would come back in to comfort her, to reassure her that everything was okay again, but they never came. She heard the wail of sirens in the distance, approaching. She was still in the closet, tears rolling down her frightened face, when their neighbor, an elderly Irish woman named Mrs. Morris, came in and called out to her.
"Daphne, dear, are you in here?" she called. "Oh Lord, please let the child be okay."
"I'm here, Mrs. Morris," Daphne said, opening the closet door and stepping out. She sniffed and wiped the tears from her face. "Did they hurt my family?"
The elderly woman's expression was one of momentary relief that the young girl was safe, then instantly changed to one of profound sympathy and concern. She couldn't formulate words...she could only nod in confirmation, tears clouding her pale green eyes.
Daphne had no other living family willing to take her. She had an uncle in Ireland, but he was hardly the type to come all the way to America to retrieve a niece he didn't really want. The next seven years of Daphne's life were spent in central Kentucky with a foster family, the Andersons. They were devout Southern Baptists, with a biological child of their own, Bobby, a boy three years Daphne's senior. The Andersons attempted to indoctrinate their religious views in Daphne through various forms of physical and psychological abuse and, in some cases, downright torture. When she was bad, which seemed to be always, they tried to help her see the error of her ways by forcing her to do chores outside, day and night, even in the bitter cold of a January night. They would have her pull weeds from the lawn, or move piles of heavy logs or bricks across the yard, or pick up after their terrier, Precious. She didn't need a coat, or a sweater, or shoes, because the discomfort of the cold, the punishment, would remind her of God's disappointment in her, which she would have to atone for if she wanted to earn His everlasting love and approval. On very rare occasions, Daphne was allowed to sleep on a bench in the mudroom near the back door, if Mrs. Anderson was feeling merciful. Those nights that she spent in the backyard, shivering and alone, she also spent hungry. Daphne's foster mother explained to her one night, while she stuffed her face full of pizza and wings with gargantuan arms and tiny hands, that bad children needed to suffer for their sins before they could be allowed to eat. Daphne watched in disbelief, her large, sunken eyes filling with tears, as the woman gorged.
"I've earned this," her foster mother explained to her, speaking through a mouthful of food, "because I've done what God expects of me. Now go outside. If you get your chores done, maybe you can have some breakfast tomorrow."
Daphne retreated outside, knowing that when tomorrow came, there would be no breakfast, even if she did finish her chores. Mrs. Anderson stopped just short of starving her, sometimes waiting more than a day at a time to allow her to eat. There would be some excuse. It would be something like, "Look at you! You're filthy! How could you let yourself get so dirty?", and she would think, Because I spent the night outside doing chores, you guys never let me shower, and it didn't rain last night. Or it would be, "That wood is stacked all wrong, it needs to be straight. Try it again, and move it to the other side of the yard while you're at it. You'll do it until you do it right." And there was always beating, no matter what she did. She had a constant assortment of welts and bruises, which never had a chance to heal before they were overlapped with new ones.
As much as it made her blood boil, she didn't dare talk back anymore. She knew that if she did, they would put her in the basement, and that was the worst punishment of all. That was when she usually went most of a week without eating anything whatsoever, and where her brother Jason compounded her punishment. The rapes began when she was about 9, and he was twelve. He easily overpowered Daphne, outweighing her by over a hundred pounds...he took after his mother when it came to eating habits. She screamed, and heard Mrs. Anderson yell from upstairs, "Shut up, I wanna hear my show!" She would then turn the TV up louder in an attempt to drown Daphne out. She screamed all the more loudly, hoping for anybody to hear her, for God to hear her and make it stop, but her screams fell on deaf ears. The closest neighbors were almost a mile away, so she could shriek as loudly as she wanted to, but only the monsters she lived with would hear. She had tried running away on a handful of occasions, but they had put a GPS pet tracking device around her neck. They always found her within a handful of minutes, and the punishment was severe, even compared to the usual treatment. The Andersons claimed to "home school" their children, so Daphne didn't get to leave the house at all since she had first come at age 6. She daydreamed often of being allowed to go to school with the other children, like she did in kindergarten when she lived with her parents. A doctor showed up to make house calls when the state demanded that she get a check-up, but he was a friend of the family's. He looked the other way when he saw how abused and malnourished Daphne was, although she did overhear him on one occasion chastising Mr. and Mrs. Anderson about it.
And so she endured the torture of living, for the most part, outside in the family's backyard, and in the twenty feet of woods directly behind the house that she could wander into without setting off her security collar. At least when she was outside, she could breathe the fresh air, bask in the sunlight, climb the trees, and dream of the day when she could finally be free of her living hell. If the weather was dangerously cold, she would retreat into one of the sheds for shelter. Some nights in that shed, she would take a flashlight out of the cabinet and read from her stepfather's many dusty, neglected military survival guides. It was how she taught herself to read. She wasn't a particularly strong reader, but she wasn't illiterate. The subject matter motivated her to build her phonics skills, and she learned a lot of useful survival tips. I bet that idiot didn't even bother to read these, she thought of Mr. Anderson. Someone might as well make use of them.
One early spring evening when she was around thirteen, she was quietly stalking around the outside of the house, eavesdropping on her foster parents from outside of the open kitchen window. They were unaware of her presence, ignorant of how soundlessly, how stealthily, she had learned to move around under their noses.
"You were supposed to get batteries on your way home," Mrs. Anderson was scolding. "You'll have to go back out."
Mr. Anderson sighed. "I'm not going back out, dear." He lowered his voice, but not low enough for Daphne's superb hearing. "She's not going to know that the receiver's not working, just for this one night. As far as she knows, the thing's working, same as it always does. I'll
go first thing in the morning. For tonight, we'll leave Precious out in the yard with her. You know she'll bark if Daphne tries to leave the yard."
"Whatever you say, Gerald," her Mrs. Anderson said, exasperated. "I just hope it's not too cold for my puppy out there."
Eyes wide, heart racing, Daphne silently crept back to the opposite side of the yard, behind the garage, where she was supposed to be scrubbing the paving stones. Had she heard right? They couldn't track her? She ran her fingers over the device around her neck. Is this nightmare finally over? she wondered, giddy with excitement. She would wait until they were asleep, and make a break for it.
That night, she tried hard to hide her elation as her foster mother entered the backyard holding Precious, petting and kissing the dog's head. The bright glow of the full moon washed the yard in a silver glow.
"Mommy's sorry, Precious." She eyed Daphne. "It's just for tonight, we'll wash that flea powder off tomorrow and you can come back in," she lied. "Yes, you can! Yes, you can, pretty puppy!" Her love for the dog made Daphne want to vomit. I'll bet she loves that dog more than her husband and son, she thought. She watched as her Mrs. Anderson laid down some blankets for the dog in its house. She turned to look at Daphne, and when she spoke, her tone went at once from warm and loving to flat and cold. "What are you looking at? Don't you have chores to do?"
Daphne turned away silently and smiled. Whatever, she thought. This is one of the last times you'll ever get to tell me what to do.
She waited about an hour after she saw all the lights go out in the house. Precious had barked at the house in protest for awhile, but was now sound asleep in her doghouse. Daphne slipped away silently, knowing she wouldn't wake the dog. She's a spoiled housepet, not a guard dog, she thought. And they don't know how good I've become at sneaking. They had given her no choice but to be good at it. She entered the woods, about twenty-five yards past the house, and then stopped and waited a moment. Part of her thought for sure, even though she knew better, that the collar would give her away. When more than a minute went by and she didn't see any lights come on in the house, didn't hear her enraged foster parents, she smiled a cheshire cat's smile and ventured further out. For the first time in nearly seven years, she felt truly alive. She wandered the woods, delighted just to be in a different setting than the one that had enslaved her all those years.