Cellar Girl

by Josefina Rivera

  ‘What’s she getting cookies for?’ Deborah demanded sullenly.

  ‘Jackie here tells me what y’all are talking about while I’m not here,’ Gary said.

  ‘Jackie!’ Lisa said, outraged.

  But Jacqueline seemed oblivious. She wasn’t trying to blab her mouth off for any reason – she was just the talkative type. I reckoned most of the time she didn’t really know what was going on.

  But it put me on edge.

  I can’t trust these other girls, I thought. I don’t know what they’re telling him up there.

  Jacqueline was a pretty innocent girl, she was just being herself, but who’s to say what she was talking about while he had her on his own?

  I could tell Deborah was thinking the same thing because when he took her upstairs she tried talking to him too.

  He brought her down but this time she didn’t get any cookies.

  ‘Hey, don’t I get cookies too?’ she shouted after him. ‘I told you a whole load of shit.’

  ‘Shut up, Deborah,’ he sighed. ‘I already heard all of that from Jacqueline. You gotta do better than that if you think that’s enough to sort you out.’

  Deborah started cursing him out again and he put her down in the hole as punishment.

  She and Jacqueline spent most of their time in the hole now – for Jacqueline it was just because she was new and Gary was breaking her in. For Deborah, it was punishment. Always punishment.

  Day after day Jacqueline and Deborah were stuck in that hole together and Deborah still didn’t quit her yelling.

  One night Lisa and me were trying to sleep and Deborah was still shouting her head off, so much so that we were exhausted listening to her. Every time I tried to think of my kids, hold their beautiful faces in my mind, she would scream and yell, shattering that picture into tiny pieces.

  ‘Oh, will you please just shut up!’ I shouted back for about the millionth time. I’d had it.

  ‘Yeah, you better shut up!’ Gary’s deep voice behind me came as a shock and startled Lisa and me. We had no idea he was down here. He came in so quietly neither of us noticed.

  ‘Jeez, you made me jump,’ I said.

  ‘We didn’t realize you were down here,’ Lisa added.

  ‘I’m never far away,’ he said darkly as he took up a stick once more and prepared to open the hole.

  * * *

  One day those girls were down in the hole and Gary was down in the basement with us when a dog food commercial came on the TV.

  ‘Man, that Alpo looks good,’ Deborah exclaimed loudly.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jacqueline laughed. ‘I know what you mean.’

  Deborah laughed too. ‘Shit, that dog food looks too good for them dogs. Look, it’s got peas and vegetables in it and everything. Man, I could definitely have me some of that!’

  I was playing cards with Lisa on the floor – Gary had given us a deck of cards and since Lisa and I were the ones usually up top with the other two in the hole, we wasted a lot of hours playing Rummy 500.

  Now Lisa and I looked up at each other and started laughing.

  ‘Oh really?’ Gary said, putting his head to one side. ‘You like the look of that dog food, huh?’

  Oh for the love of God! Why don’t you just keep your big mouth shut, Deborah?

  This man didn’t need any more sick ideas. He was doing pretty well on his own.

  But sure enough, the next day he came down with an open can of dog food and a plastic fork. He opened the hole and leaned in, smiling wolfishly. Then he passed the can and fork to Deborah.

  ‘Eat it!’ he ordered.

  She had no choice – she was the one who said it looked good in the first place and she even said she wouldn’t mind having some.

  Now she was spooning the lumpy gelatinous meat into her mouth. I expected her to throw up or recoil but it actually seemed like she was enjoying it.

  Next Gary passed the can to Jacqueline and made her eat some too. She dug the fork in and pulled out a gristly greyish piece of meat.

  ‘Hey, this don’t have no peas in it,’ she objected. ‘This ain’t Alpo – it’s just some supermarket brand.’

  ‘Eat it!’ Gary ordered again. She knew better than to resist so she put the unappealing morsel in her mouth and chewed.

  My face was screwed up in disgust. Lisa couldn’t even look.

  He made them eat the whole can – they seemed resigned. What could they do? They were hungry. And after that, Heidnik would regularly appear with a tin of dog food, and they’d eat it then, too.

  All the while Lisa and I were exchanging fearful looks. We hoped he wouldn’t make us eat it too. Luckily, we didn’t agree with Deborah’s thoughts about the dog food commercial in the first place so we got to stick with our normal diet.

  And thank God for that – if any of us had known at the time what was really in that can, no one would have touched it.

  * * *

  I thought about my mom a lot.

  I thought about the plate of lima beans we fought over when I was eight. She’d made me a tea of lima beans with fried chicken and potatoes. I ate all the chicken, I ate my potatoes but I refused the beans.

  ‘What’s for dessert?’ I asked Mom, my elbows resting on the table, my legs kicking the air beneath me.

  ‘Sit up straight, young lady,’ she said, taking my plate away.

  A minute later she set the same plate in front of me, complete with my rejected beans, this time with a desert spoon.

  ‘For dessert, you’ve got lima beans!’ she declared happily.

  I was outraged.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ I shook my head, pushing my chair away from the table and folding my arms in defiance. ‘No way. I hate lima beans. There’s no way I’m eating those.’

  ‘Well, you’re not getting anything till they’re all gone.’

  So we sat there like that for ages – it felt like hours – until finally Mom sighed. ‘Okay, you can go to bed now.’

  And I skipped up to bed, happy and confident I’d won the lima bean contest.

  The next day, however, when I came down to breakfast, she set down the same plate in front of me. Those beans!

  ‘Yuk!’ I shouted. ‘I’m not eating those damn beans.’

  ‘Language!’ Mom shot back. ‘Like I said, you’re not getting anything else until you finish them.’

  I went to school that morning on an empty stomach and when I came back for lunch, I was met with that same damn plate of beans.

  I realized with a heavy heart my mom wasn’t kidding around – I wasn’t getting any other food until I got rid of those beans! So, finally, in resignation, and after eighteen hours of refusing, I finally ate my beans.

  It just goes to show, when you’re hungry, you’ll pretty much eat anything. I got used to lima beans and in the end I quite liked them. It was a mental shift, I guess. In order to get the lima beans down me the first time I told myself that I loved lima beans, that lima beans were my favorite thing in the whole world. And after that, I was fine. I adjusted.

  * * *

  But Deborah didn’t adjust. She never quit planning and scheming.

  One afternoon she and Jacqueline got let out of the hole and they popped up with sly smiles plastered all over their faces. After Gary had had sex with us all and returned upstairs, Jacqueline whispered to Lisa and me, ‘We got a plan!’

  Lisa wasn’t impressed: ‘Yeah? What’s the plan?’

  ‘You two can take him while we’re in the hole and then you can let us out and we’ll finish him off with the stick. Then we’ll get out of here.’

  ‘What about the keys?’ Lisa asked the obvious question.

  ‘You saw what happened to Sandra!’ Deborah jumped in. ‘You want that to happen to all of us? He doesn’t give a damn if one or all of us die down here.’

  Lisa looked thoughtful – Sandra’s death had affected us all.

  ‘What do you think, Nicole?’ she asked me.

  I sighed, exasperated. I felt like I was dealing with a
kindergarten class. Ever since I’d got here and all these girls had been marched in one by one I’d decided one thing for certain: these girls didn’t have much clue. I wanted to tell them I was working on Gary, that I had other ideas but the way they kept shooting their mouths off, I knew that it would be foolish and self-defeating.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ I said.

  ‘Bullshit!’ Deborah erupted at me. ‘We don’t know till we try. He might have the keys on him all along. You don’t know for a fact what he’s got in his pockets.’

  ‘He’s not that dumb,’ I said. ‘If he brought the keys down every time he knew it would be a risk to his whole plan. There are four of us. Of course he knows we could overcome him. You think he hasn’t thought of that?

  ‘What are we going to do afterwards? There are no tools down here, nothing we can use to open up the shackles and he’s resealed the air vent. This place is a prison.’

  ‘Never mind her.’ Deborah waved her hand dismissively in my direction. ‘She’s been here too long now. She likes it down here. She and Gary got their own thing going on.’

  ‘That’s bullshit!’ I denied vehemently.

  ‘We can do this without you, Nicole!’ Deborah blustered on. ‘We don’t need your fucking approval. Just keep quiet and I’ll get us out of here. You can stay down here another year if you like.’

  So they started plotting their moves, what they were going to do and when. But they’d forgotten to keep their voices down and like he said, Gary was never far away.

  * * *

  The next day I got taken up for a bath and Gary came right out with it. ‘I hear you’re planning to jump me in the basement.’

  ‘I don’t know about we, Gary, but yeah, there was a discussion about it,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye. He heard them talking about it but I tried to distance myself from the plan as far as possible.

  Gary’s eyes were boring into me now – I could see he was trying to assess how far I’d been involved.

  ‘You know I don’t carry the keys with me,’ he said. ‘So y’all would be stuck down there.’

  ‘I know. I told them that.’ I was trying to be as casual as possible. I just hoped he’d heard me earlier, telling them to lay off the plans.

  ‘Look, you gotta expect them to try and think of ways to escape, Gary – that’s just common sense,’ I told him with confidence. ‘You got them locked up here away from their families. It’s natural they’re gonna want to try and get out.

  ‘You have to expect it. But that plan – that was just a dumb idea.’

  Gary nodded thoughtfully – I could tell he was taking me seriously. And he’d heard me say ‘they’, like I was no longer one of them. At this point I was talking to him like a friend, not as one of the girls he had locked up.

  Once we were downstairs again he said to the others, ‘I know all about your little plan to try and jump me. And it wouldn’t work. Even Nicole thinks it wouldn’t work so you can put that thought right out of your heads. I don’t carry the keys around with me. You’d all die down here without me.’

  When he left Deborah ripped into me, her face contorted with fury. ‘You told him, you rat! How could you tell him about the plan? I knew you weren’t to be trusted.’

  ‘He heard you! I didn’t have to say anything. You weren’t smart enough even to keep your voices down while you were discussing it.’

  ‘You could have lied.’ Lisa was mad at me too. ‘You could have told him it wasn’t true.’

  ‘Hey, nobody’s stopping you doing it, even if he knows about the goddamn plan,’ I spat back. ‘If all you three think it’s such a great idea go ahead – kill the man who is keeping us alive!’

  * * *

  That night I thought of Mom again, of the day she taught me how to ride a bike.

  I was six years old and all the other kids my age had training wheels on their bikes, helping to keep them upright, their parents scared in case they fell over and hurt themselves.

  And when my dad brought one of my foster sister’s bikes out of the garage there were training wheels on it too.

  ‘She don’t need those!’ said Mom and she took them off.

  I was fearful – how am I going to stay on if I don’t have the little wheels at the back for balance?

  But Mom just waved away my worries.

  ‘Just get on the bike and balance yourself,’ she instructed as I climbed on the red bike and wobbled uncertainly.

  ‘You can do this,’ Mom said encouragingly. ‘I’m going to hold the back for you while you push the pedals. The faster you go, the more chance you’ve got of staying up. So just push and keep on pushing.’

  So then we started. I fell a couple of times but Mom never treated me like a baby.

  ‘Get back up,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re only gonna learn by falling off a few times.’

  So I quickly wiped the tears away and in under half an hour I was riding my bike round the park like a pro.

  I was six years old and all the rest of the kids on the block still had their training wheels on for another year. Mom was prepared for me to fall but she knew I would quickly learn how to stay steady.

  She trusted me, you see. And she knew I was only going to get better by falling.

  I felt so different from all the other kids who were still pedaling around with their little wheels – I felt bigger, older, smarter.

  And that’s how I felt now.

  Bigger, older and smarter than these other girls – I was in a situation I wasn’t prepared for, learning to adapt, to find a way through and not fall.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sleepless

  In the quiet early hours of the morning Lisa nudged me awake. I think it must have been early March. Springtime. The outside world would be going through that yearly stage of renewal, but there seemed to be no such renewal for us, no such hope. I had a new life I was carrying inside me, but not one I wanted. Luckily I didn’t have a bump to constantly remind me I was pregnant.

  ‘Hey Nicole. Nicole? You sleeping?’ Her voice punctured the fog of unconsciousness like a siren, tugging me out of a restless sleep.

  My dreams were frightening these days, clouded by dark ominous shapes that I couldn’t ever seem to see clearly. It wasn’t really like sleep at all. It was more a passive form of watchfulness, where half of my being rested while the other half stayed wide awake, just in case, just in case…

  I opened my eyes slowly, shielding them from the light with my hand. It was a practice I had become used to since falling asleep in this strange light.

  Lisa crouched next to me, her arms wrapped around herself, fear and loneliness seeping from her eyes.

  ‘Can’t sleep, huh?’ I asked her gently.

  She shook her head.

  She needed comfort, just to hear the sound of another person’s voice – I knew the feeling.

  ‘Tell me about your home, your mom and dad,’ she pleaded, a little girl needing a story before bedtime.

  I wasn’t feeling particularly talkative but I was as keen as her to chase the demons from my mind so I started to talk.

  And the more I did, the more I enjoyed it. It felt good to tell her about my childhood and the people I loved in the world – it reminded me that they were still out there somewhere and gave me hope that I’d be reunited with them.

  I told her about Mom and Althea, about my Catholic school and all the brothers and sisters who were often at our house.

  ‘What about your dad?’ she asked.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You don’t talk about him much.’

  ‘There isn’t an awful lot to say. For me, it was always Mom. We were with her night and day. Besides, by the time I came along my dad was retired and as a kid I just remember he spent the majority of his time upstairs in his room.

  ‘My parents slept in separate bedrooms – he was on the third floor and she was on the second so I didn’t see him an awful lot. Then as I got older I noticed he wasn’t rememb
ering stuff very well. He became more and more closed off from everybody in the house except for at mealtimes. He was a lot older than my mom and she became his carer as he started to go downhill.

  ‘He was slowly losing his ever-loving mind but Mom, she was amazing. He couldn’t walk in the end so we had a hospital bed in our home. We had to change him and wash him and feed him. Me and Mom, we took care of him together.

  ‘My mom liked having things to do so she kept herself busy.

  ‘Dad wouldn’t talk at all now – the only person he ever had words for was the priest. That used to rile my mom. The priest would come and pray with him and whenever he walked in he’d say, “Mr Patterson, how are you?”

  And my dad would say, “I’m all right.”

  So then Mom would say, “Oh now you can talk! But when we ask you stuff you don’t say anything!” Yeah, that really riled her.

  ‘He died at home and Mom was prepared for it. He was ready to go by then, he had a tube in his stomach and Mom had nursed him right through to the end. I was only fourteen.’

  I didn’t tell her about my birth father, the one I found at sixteen. Me and Iris had been talking for a time about trying to track down our birth parents.

  We wanted to know who they were, where they came from and whether we had brothers and sisters.

  We started at the records office where we found the original social security reports on how they found us kids. In the papers it stated the apartment was filthy and freezing cold and I was in a wet bed wearing just a T-shirt and a nappy soaked through with urine. My sister was so malnourished she couldn’t walk.

  Seeing it in black and white like that was strange – I’d known about the circumstances of how I was found since I was twelve when my mom had told me. But reading it in the files was different. I couldn’t see myself as one of those children, I felt so removed from it all. All I could think was ‘those poor kids’, as if they were someone else’s family.

  I wasn’t angry, I just wanted to know – how had they ended up like that? What drove my parents away?

  The records left a paper trail with my father’s name and his last recorded address – Porfirio Rivera. I learned that Porfirio was an alcoholic so he hadn’t given the authorities a lot of clear information on either himself or my mother Maria.