Voices sounded from the kitchen. Laughter. When was the last time I’d heard anyone laugh? I really could not remember. Then, it came to me, Jefe Hombre had enjoyed his evil chortle the time he’d found my stack of precious handicrafts — the small things I’d taken to making from recycled materials to keep myself from breaking down.
I had hungrily fantasized night after night especially come December about the foods I was missing most, Bobby’s ravioli with meat sauce, our favorite ‘family’ dish he’d make from scratch on Christmas Eve.
How my heart had ached, a mixture of guilt and sadness to think of the Christmas stocking with my name embroidered on the front that Mom dug out from the one, small holiday box she kept in the barn with its mess of old tinsel and lights back from when she was a kid.
I looked around me. I didn’t have one thing in my possession I could call my own, aside from Marybeth’s blanket. I thought of all the little things I’d taken for granted, the small gifts my mom stuffed into that old felt stocking — the lip-gloss and silly socks and pens and notebooks and gum and fun, cheap, but cute and thoughtful shit she’d pick out from the discount store in Petaluma during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
As the worst Christmas in my life was approaching, I’d acted on a deep urge to use my hands to make something meaningful for my family. Even though there aren’t very many of us and we’re a pretty odd bunch, they’re all I have and I had decided there in the compound, as captive, I was going to make it up to them, one day, to show them I really did love them in my own messed up way despite what I’d gone and done.
Searching around for inspiration, I’d stumbled on a stash of old plastic juice bottles and a bag of metal pull-tops. And whenever my jailer was out on his rounds around the compound, I’d sat myself down at one of the foldout tables in the kitchen and worked a half hour or so at a time on my stupid little dolls.
First I punctured the bottle tops with a knife, tying string into knots of hair that either I trimmed or braided depending on if it was a guy or a girl. I gathered twigs and leaves and moss and bark and fashioned them into small items of clothing. I took a marker pen that was used for identifying dried weed strains on bags and carefully painted their faces to suit the personalities I’d made up in my head.
By the time I was done, I’d produced a dozen plastic bottle wood sprites. It was the closest I’d come to feeling anything remotely like happiness or contentment in months. After I grew bored with making dolls, I moved on to crafting a bunch of bracelets, necklaces and key rings from the metal ring pulls and a ball of brown string.
It may sound silly and childish but it took my mind off my miserable existence, gave me a focus on something constructive while I figured how to get the hell out of there. I’ve never been much into arts and crafting and all that maker stuff, but this sparked something in me that brought out a side of myself I’d never known existed. It felt good. It still does. I like making things and growing things. I’ve learned that about myself.
Jefe Hombre was as quick as an eagle in swooping down on a bracelet I’d accidentally dropped under the table. He made fun of my work, scouring the kitchen ‘til he came across the stash of my pull-top jewelry and dolls.
My stomach ached afresh as I focused on the bare surface of the small dresser across from the end of the bed. He’d laughed his head off as he dumped my handiwork out of its hiding place in a cardboard box under the sink and onto the folding tabletop. I leapt forward to stop him but I was too late. He swept my creations to the floor with the side of his hand, followed by a cruel-ass show of stomping all over it as he flattened the plastic bottle dolls with the bottom of his boot ‘til their faces were sad and distorted.
Why did he have to do that? Destroyed the one innocent thing that I’d been able to do for myself, my sanity? Later that same evening, he’d taken great pains in his preparations to cook — his version of a chocolate mole sauce with shredded chicken and rice — only time I’d ever seen him at the stove. Didn’t I know, it was Christmas Eve, he asked? “Wipe your tears, bitch,” he barked. I knew enough Spanish to scrape by with a basic understanding but I never let on how much.
I watched him take a can of tomatoes, chicken stock, chili, garlic, onion, peanuts, raisins, peppercorns, sesame seeds, cinnamon, sugar and almonds from a brown paper sack of ingredients he’d bought the previous evening. It had been the first trip he had taken me on into town. He’d locked me in the back of the truck, my hands and feet tied, after dark, sufficient blocks from the main drag for me remain unnoticed. All he’d had to do was mention Jazmin. He still assumed at that point there was no way I was going to run while he was alive and breathing and threatening to retaliate. He’d watched me clean up the mess of my crushed handicrafts as he settled in to preparing his holiday feast. I ate what little he deemed my portion as I held back my tears.
My tummy rumbled loudly at the thought of food. I was back in the here and now at Grace Place. I wasn’t yet anywhere near ready to tell them all of what went down in the compound. The smell of coffee wafted down the corridor and in through the open door to my room. I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker and I can’t stomach coffee in my condition.
I checked myself out in the small mirror on the wall above the dresser, barely recognizing the gaunt looking chick with the short hair and the protruding belly. There’d been no mirrors in the compound, yet another way to dehumanize us.
~ Three girls ranging from around my age into their late twenties sat around the table in the kitchen, dressed and ready for the day wearing what looked like a uniform of jeans, dark green hooded sweatshirts and sturdy work boots.
Rachel, the oldest looking of the three, smiled, a surprisingly big, broad beamer for such a thin, pale face. She held out her hand to introduce herself. She’d read my thoughts. “I know, it looks a bit weird, all of us in the same getup, but there’s little use for being dolled up here,” she said.
I was to go find my own set of jeans, tees and sweatshirts, plus underwear and socks, stacked, she told me, in the linen closet down the hall.
“You’ll find sneakers and outdoor boots on a rack by the back door,” Rachel said. “Pick out two of each item of clothing to fit and footwear your size, that’s all you’re going to need for now.”
“Meet Carla and Sandra,” Rachel added, indicating who was who. “Don’t worry, it’s not a cult,” she laughed — “we dress alike and eat as a family but that’s about where the similarity ends.”
I reached out and nodded my head at each of them. Carla was short and round, Sandra tall and heavy set. They both looked like they’d been through the ringer and still only in their early twenties at most. Rachel motioned me over to the stovetop where a big pot of oatmeal as good as any my mom ever made bubbled away beside a stack of bowls.
“Help yourself,” she said. “We soak the oats overnight. I’m on breakfast shift this week,” she explained. “It’ll be your turn soon enough.”
The oatmeal was thick and creamy. Heaven. It warmed and filled the ever-hungry hollow in my tummy, topped with a more than generous helping of brown sugar, cinnamon, sliced bananas and walnuts.
I’d woken feeling faint and nauseous, my new normal, though I was ravenous by the time I stepped into the kitchen. The first time I’d felt it wash over me, it took me to my knees, I had no idea what the whole nastiness of morning sickness was about. I had zero knowledge of any of this before it happened to me, how would I? Despite the name, take it from me, morning sickness strikes at any time during the day or night during the first weeks.
It had taken me missing my period twice and throwing up at multiple, random times for a few weeks to catch a clue. I soon learned to keep something in my stomach at all times, even if it had meant stealing a supply of dry crackers for my pockets, whatever I could get my hands on.
I was relieved to spot a clear glass canister filled with granola bars on a shelf above the sink where the girls washed and dried the breakfast dishes. Emergency snacks.
>
Still, I had said nothing to no one, not even Jazmin, though I was sure she had figured it out. It was classic denial on my part and who wouldn’t do the same given my circumstances? I’d willed it to go away but that didn’t work and by the time I figured out what was really happening, I found myself feeling sorry for the poor little thing, attached, responsible.
I was the last one at the table. I shoveled in spoonful after spoonful of the delicious, sugary oats, best thing I’d tasted in I don’t know how long, reminding myself, as I have since I accepted what was really happening to my body, that none of this is the baby’s fault. I mean, how does a girl my age, someone who had never even gotten close to doing the business with someone she actually liked, wind up getting herself impregnated in the worst possible way? At 18 this shit happened to me.
One of the girls asked me if I was finished with my breakfast, “Not yet,” I said, wanting my first feast of freedom to last forever. “I’ll wash my dish myself, thank you.”
My statement was met with a glare and a swift and assertive: “We do things in shifts around here, keeps it fair and efficient.”
I scraped up the last of the oatmeal and dutifully handed over my bowl. By my calculations, I was somewhere around 16 weeks. The same pair of jeans I’d worn since I left home had suffered some serious stretch around the middle, even with the button and zipper undone. I rummaged through the closet after breakfast and found a pair of jeans that looked big enough to pull over my belly.
Rachel figured it out in seconds, though she said nothing. I could tell by the way she kept darting a look at my stomach, quickly sliding her eyes away. She’d disappeared for a few minutes but popped her head back into the hallway.
“Kate will be in shortly,” she said. “She’ll meet you in the kitchen after you’ve washed and dressed. It’s okay to take your time today, Mia.”
The girls chatted and laughed as they put on their rain gear and headed outside to various parts of the property for their preassigned rotational work duties. It was Carla’s lunch shift.
She reached for a waterproof jacket from a coat rack by the door. “Rich pickings in the winter garden,” she said. “Wait ‘til you see what we have going on out there. It’s great.”
Rachel was off to the barn to help work on what she described as a random mess of old farming equipment. “We’re fixing up a beater truck this week,” she said, which explained why her fingernails were so grimy. Jo was the resident self-taught mechanic and, in her words, she was as happy as a pig in mud when up to her arms in overalls and grease, taking engines apart and making them work again.
Sandra was on laundry and dinner duty that day. “Come see the art studio before you get started. That’s also where we dry the sheets,” she said.
It felt weird wearing boots for the first time in months. It was a bit like walking on the moon. I was forced to remove the bandages from under my socks in order to squeeze my feet into their tight, leather confines. Small bolts of pain rose up through my legs from the cuts on the soles of my feet. I hobbled along as I followed Sandra outside and into the white painted interior of the barn. My eyes were immediately drawn to a kiln. “Most of the pottery we make here is sold in a gallery up in Ferndale,” Sandra said, catching my interest. “The money goes back into our art program for supplies.”
I experienced a ping of something strangely exciting and familiar as I ran my hand over the surface of the kiln. It was the same feeling I’d had when I’d made my ring pull jewelry and the ill-fated doll collection. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a pile of clay.
Back in the kitchen, Kate took off her rain jacket and hung it to dry by the stove. She made us a big brown pot of yet more lemon ginger tea, these women drink it by the gallon, I swear. She launched into a second short account of the history of Grace Place, this time, how she and Jo had come to be here.
The place was in her family since her grandparents’ generation. Kate’s grandfather was a lawyer in San Francisco. I liked hearing how he’d traveled north to hunt and fish and to get the hell out of the city for a couple of weeks at a time, longer in the summer months. I have only ever spent the odd day here and there in San Francisco, my whole life. I have no idea what it’s like to live in a big city. I’m gonna have to start small when it’s time for me to get back out into the world.
“My mom, his only child, she kept the house as it was,” Kate said. “She rented it out to a fishing family for years.”
Her mom passed and she left the house to Kate. “It hadn’t been lived in for a while. It needed work,” she said. “A lot of work.”
Kate was a lawyer, like her grandfather before her. Smart. She met Jo in her job at one of the tech companies in Silicon Valley.
“We connected through our dislike of the vast moneymaking mentality and the constant hustle and bustle, the endless work days and constant high pressure,” she explained. I knew nothing of that world, but I nodded my head, anyway.
Jo was raised on the Oregon Coast. When Kate brought her out to the Lost Coast to visit the closed up house she’d inherited, Jo was blown away by the beauty and peace of the place and the similarity to the house where she herself was born.
“It was Jo who named it Grace Place,” Kate said. “We set about making it our permanent home soon after.”
I loved hearing their story. What came out of this kind, unintimidating woman’s mouth next, stopped me in my tracks. Kate told me point-blank how she’d been raped when she was my age. He was a college jock and they were at a frat party that got out of control.
She was calm as anything when she told me this. I sat back in my chair with wide eyes and said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.
Kate took a minute. She reached out and touched my arm. “There is zero pressure for you to share any details you wish to keep to yourself with regard to what happened to you in the compound, Mia,” she said.
“When you feel the time is right to talk, I’ll be here. Just to listen, mind you. The rest is up to you.”
She never said a word about my bump. No one did, at first.
Kate switched back to explaining how she’d taken a leave of absence from the legal world to oversee the fixing up of Grace Place and make it livable. It was during that time she’d trained in crisis support counseling for women.
“Jo urged our move to Grace Place and it all made sense,” Kate said. “In the past two years, we’ve welcomed 15 girls and women into our fledgling program.” She told me I was the sixteenth. It made my heart hurt to think of all the others.
Most women stay six months, some longer. It was a huge comfort to learn that I’d be welcome to stay here a while, a massive load off my mind. I knew there was no way I was anywhere near ready for the outside world or the isolation of the ranch and my mother’s questions.
“However long it takes,” Kate said. “When you’re ready to leave, you’ll know it.”
I was placed in rotating work duty doing my part in keeping Grace Place going with hot meals, laundry and gardening, which has turned out to be my absolute favorite thing, after playing with clay, when the rains finally stopped. I’ve learned new and practical skills in Jo’s basic engineering program and to make pottery during art therapy time over in the art barn.
Was I on board with all of this, she asked? “Yes, please, ma’am” I said, my first real smile forming in months. If I could have figured out how best to say it, I would have blurted out how I’d rather have curled up and died than leave.
I tucked my hands under the small mound of my belly. How I had craved even the smallest feelings of safety and security and I willed my relief to pass through to the baby.
The other girls are nice and all. We’d all been through some crazy shit or other. It makes for a strange bunch of sister chicks, but I like them well enough and there is strength in numbers, for sure. I was hesitant to be overly trusting at first, restless and forever looking over my shoulder, but the constant reassurance I feel in their presence is the best thing for me
and I can’t help but start to feel safer by the day.
If I think about it too much, why I’m here, what I’ve escaped, I freak myself out. It was hard to get any of it out of my mind those first few weeks. Kate and Jo, they are the ones who keep us from ourselves, steering us away from reliving whatever trauma we’ve gone through, keeping us occupied, talk being the best therapy, I now know. They pour so much into this place, so much of themselves, it’s amazing. It makes me want to be as good as them, no matter the mess I’ve made. I’m making my peace with myself, but it’s taking time.
A week into my being hidden away in the safe haven of Grace Place, Jo handed me a pair of baggy overalls for my first shift working on the engine in the barn.
We tinkered around in the cold for a couple of hours. “Put on some extra layers next time, Mia,” she said. I could see my breath when I stepped outside. Though I still prefer to work in the garden, I do like learning how to handle the various tools, the feel of oil and grease on my fingers. It’s empowering to handle the sorts of greasy spanners and spark plugs that I’d never in a million years have thought of picking up. I have the capability now of looking after my own truck or car engine thanks to Jo and that old fixer. I can’t even drive, yet I’ll never need a guy to change a wheel for me. Jo put her tools down and stood there, looking at me across the open hood.
“Be sure you wash up well, Mia,” she said. “Scrub those hands.” Then, simply, glancing at my midsection: “Especially in your condition.”
So they all knew, they’d known since the first, of course they did. I kind of thought it would come out as a hushed and awkward “are you pregnant?” sort of whispered inquiry after dinner one evening, by the fire. Instead, I figured this was Jo’s way of telling me that I was in charge of my baby and me. She wiped her hands with an oily rag.
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