by Jake Parent
They shopped at stores she only knew from movies. Saks Fifth Avenue, Barney’s, Bloomingdale’s. He not only bought her expensive clothes, but the people who worked in those places treated Cristina like she belonged. They pampered her. Showed her how to do her makeup exactly the way she wanted it. She’d never felt more beautiful.
On the second day of their trip, Anthony bought her a diamond necklace at Tiffany’s, one that sparkled like his eyes. When he put it on her, she felt like some kind of princess.
They went to dinner at restaurants whose names she couldn’t even pronounce, where they ate meals that cost more than Tío Alberto made in a month of landscaping.
A few months later, out of the blue, Anthony asked Cristina to marry him. The proposal came with the biggest diamond ring she’d ever seen. She said yes without hesitation. Not only did it feel like she’d won some sort of lottery, but her heart was genuinely bursting with love for this man who treated her like a sacred treasure.
Overwhelmed with happiness and with big dreams for their future, she told him she wanted a huge wedding. The one she dreamed of as a little girl. The dream she’d completely forgotten about as she grew into a woman.
That was the first time she saw him upset.
His face changed as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Gone was his praise and worship. In its place, the kind of frustration one might show an unruly child. He demanded to know if she expected him to meet every desire she had, no matter how big. He lectured her on respect, and the need for her to understand “the way things are going to be from now on.”
Looking back, of course, it was a big red flag that should have told her exactly what was to come. But she ignored it. Blinded by what she thought was love, and, more than she cared to admit, by the fact he was her ticket out of the ghetto.
On top of her heart’s confusion, Cristina and Anthony usually did coke and drank from the time he got home until they finally went to sleep. If they went to sleep. Every single day. Her mind was in a constant fog.
She had no one around to help her sort through her problems. No friends. No parents. She hadn’t talked to her uncle or grandmother in years.
So, without much internal debate, she went along with Anthony’s plan of taking a weeklong trip to Las Vegas.
After 72 hours of partying in club after club, casino after casino, the two ended up in a makeshift chapel on the outskirts of the city. They were married by a man dressed as Dean Martin, but only after a frightening incident where Anthony raged at the poor guy, threatening to come back with a crowbar if Dino looked at Cristina’s tits one more time.
The next two days were a blur.
One memory she would never forget though was spending time with a few other girls. High-class hookers with fake everything. It was actually a lot of fun, until Anthony couldn’t get it up, which was unsurprising after five days of living on nothing but cocaine, ecstasy, and alcohol.
He started breaking stuff in the hotel room, yelling about how the women he’d hired were “nothing but dirty lesbians and a waste of his hard-earned dollars.”
He threw a lamp against the TV. Then the TV against the wall.
At one point, he choked one of the girls so hard her lips turned blue.
Cristina had to scream in his face before he let her go.
Their trip to Vegas came to an abrupt end. They gathered their things in a hurry and caught a taxi to the airport, before the girls’ employer could come looking for them.
Anthony’s behavior didn’t improve when they got home.
Instead of treating Cristina like a queen, he started acting like she was his slave.
He monitored her at all times, demanding that she keep a GPS tracking-app for her phone turned on whenever she was outside the apartment. If she did something as simple as make an unscheduled stop at the nail salon, her phone soon rang. On the other end would be Anthony, going berserk, wanting to know where she was and what she was doing.
When Cristina was home, he had an entire methodology for torturing her when she did anything he didn’t like.
The first step was to take away her coke supply and her cigarettes. Before long, she’d be begging him to forgive her for whatever imaginary offense he thought she was guilty of.
Anything to get her fix back.
When she was totally weakened by fear, he would literally hold her captive. He installed electronic locks on the doors and could seal the whole condo whenever he wanted, all with the click of a small remote he kept on his keychain.
And when that didn’t satisfy his need for control, he just plain hit her.
She would never forget the first time.
They’d actually been having a good day. The sun was shining. They ate a nice breakfast at a local dive called the Mini Gourmet, and Anthony had promised to drive her up to wine country later that afternoon.
When they came home to pack a few things, he was smiling at her like he had when they first met.
But for some reason he decided to pick up her phone and go through the recent calls. He saw one from “Tío” and went ape-shit. He threw the little flip-phone across the room at her, almost splitting her forehead open with it. Luckily, she managed to duck at the last second.
After the phone exploded into about a thousand pieces against the wall, she tried to explain that the call was from her uncle, the one who’d basically been like a father to her when she was growing up. She’d decided to reconnect with him and her grandmother after so long away.
That only made things worse. Anthony started screaming about how he was her family now. He called her “a ghetto bitch” from “a family of dirty wetbacks that hadn’t done shit for her.”
Were they the ones who put her in designer clothes?
Had they taken her out to restaurants and bought her $500 bottles of wine?
No, they were the ones washing dishes in those restaurants.
They were nothing but dirty scum, whose purpose was to serve the people who did the real work in society.
He ended his little speech by saying that if she really wanted to go back to “eating rice and beans,” she was more than welcome to do so.
By the time he was done, his face had turned so red and twisted, it reminded Cristina of an evil clown she once saw in a carnival House of Horrors.
When she started crying, he backhanded her across the face.
At first she was shocked. It wasn’t the first time a man had hit her. Far from it. But somehow it had been the worst. Anthony was supposed to be in love with her.
When she tasted the blood leaking from her split lip, a part of her brain said to dig her long, perfectly-manicured French-tip nails into his eye sockets.
He must have seen the anger in her eyes. For a moment, she could sense fear.
But it disappeared as soon as she made the regrettable decision to turn her eyes downward, just for a moment, like a dog frightened into obedience. In that instant, he felt power. And instead of showing mercy, he clenched his fist and punched her, just once, as hard as he could in the ribs.
For a week, it hurt every time she took a breath.
Each time he saw her wince, he said something like, “I hate that you made me do this to you, but hopefully it taught you an important lesson about how the world really works.”
From then on, every time she didn’t fight back, every time she didn’t say something, every time she was out of the house and didn’t take the opportunity to run as far away as she could, he grew bolder.
He soon started bending her over his knee like a child, slapping her backside with his favorite studded belt when he didn’t get his way. At first, it was only for specific things, like if she forgot to pick up his dry cleaning. Then it became a kind of game to him. He was always purposefully vague about what he wanted her to do. That way he could respond to whatever choice she made by punishing her for it.
Eventually, the abuse became a daily routine. Her legs and backside and lower back started to develop blisters from the metal
studs on the belt, sores that would fester and pop and ooze blood. Where the wounds did manage to heal, thick scars formed. After a while, they looked like the kind left on the backs of slaves in the south before the Civil War.
Anthony once saw Cristina staring at the marks in the mirror. He threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone. It was her own damn fault, he said. If she listened and did what a good wife was supposed to, instead of acting like some street-whore all the time, he wouldn’t have to hurt her.
She tried to do her best to please him. But on more than one occasion, he almost killed her anyway.
One night, they’d done a ton of blow. Cristina even managed to score a bag of heroin by trading some expensive clothes for it, since she didn’t have any cash of her own. Anthony, of course, didn’t know. He was never shy about telling her how little he thought of “junky lowlifes.”
She was in the bathroom cooking up and having trouble with it. After so many years of sticking herself, it was hard to find a vein, and she didn’t dare shoot into her arms, for fear that Anthony would find out. It turned out not to matter. She was about to poke the needle into her leg, hoping he wouldn’t notice it among the other bruises, when he kicked in the door.
“Oh, I knew it,” he said, before proceeding to call her every hurtful name he seemed to know, everything from “dumb bitch” to “junky whore” to “hopeless cunt.”
He said that if she wanted to kill herself, he would be more than happy to help speed up the process.
Grabbing ahold of her thick hair, he dragged her from the bathroom and onto the 20th-floor balcony of their condo. He wrapped his arms around her chest and hoisted her over the edge, telling her that if she screamed he would drop her and tell everyone she jumped. As hard as she tried to stay still, she couldn’t help but squirm and kick her legs. Her body needed to escape from danger, like a fish out of water.
“Please,” she pleaded, trying to keep her sobs as quiet as she could. “Please don’t kill me, baby.”
He held her there for what seemed like hours, but in reality was likely only a minute or two. A couple of times, he unclasped his hands, letting her drop a few inches before grabbing her again and hauling her up. She looked up and saw, not the psychotic grin he often had when beating her with the belt, but a blank stare that was colder than death.
“Are you ever going to do that shit again?” he asked finally, in a voice as lifeless as his eyes.
“No,” she answered through the tears. “No. No. No. Never.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes, yes, yes. I promise. I swear, I won’t ever do it again. I’m sorry I’m such a bad person. Please give me another chance, Anthony. Please don’t kill me.”
Without another word, he dragged her back onto the balcony and into the bedroom.
He threw her onto the bed.
He raped her again and again and again.
Only hours later, when the sun mercifully peeked in through the window, did he finally stop. By that time, she was bleeding and in so much pain.
After he slept and his head was a bit clearer, there had been fear in his eyes, as if even he knew that he’d finally taken things too far. He wouldn’t let her out of the house for several days, presumably afraid she would say something. She wasn’t allowed to go see a doctor, even when she kept throwing up in the days that followed.
That is, until three weeks later, when she missed her period.
He held her tightly by the arm as they walked down to Rite Aid to buy a pregnancy test. She threw up all over the condo’s bathroom when she saw the pink plus-sign appear.
Even then, he drove her to the OB/GYN himself, making sure not to let her out of his sight. He was fidgety and nervous as they entered the parking garage at the doctor’s office, no doubt worried they would discover the damage he’d done to her.
As it turned out, the doctor didn’t examine her that day, but they did administer a test. And any hope she had of getting away from Anthony vanished when the nurse came in, a huge smile on her face, confirming that Cristina was indeed pregnant.
Anthony had no problem producing an enthusiastic smile that would have made any politician jealous. He hugged her and kissed her in front of the nurse, although she half-figured he would now try to beat her until the baby died. She hated to admit it, but at the time, part of her hoped he would.
A surprising thing happened, though. He started being nice again.
On the way home from the doctor, he pulled into a Safeway parking lot and ran inside. Ten minutes later, he came out with what must have been the biggest bouquet of flowers they had. An explosion of beautiful colors and scents filled the car as he handed it to her. She cried, and honestly couldn’t have said whether the tears came from wanting to believe that he’d had a change of heart, or from the fear that it was all a ruse to get her inside the condo so he could finish what he’d started that night on the balcony.
But in the days, weeks, and months following the news of the pregnancy, he continued to treat her well. Like a queen again. Like he had when they first met.
While Anthony continued to drink and do blow, he cut way back. And Cristina was almost completely sober while she was pregnant. For the first time in years.
The world was clearer than it had been in a long time.
He brought her flowers almost every day, often with her favorite hand-made chocolate-covered cherries. Once there was a pair of diamond earrings. Another time a bracelet.
She thought things might go bad again when they found out the baby was a girl. Anthony had been set on having a boy. But the kindness continued. As Cristina got bigger, he even started doing the dishes and helping with all the things she normally did around the house.
Despite the flowers and the jewelry, and as much as she wanted to believe his supportive smiles, Cristina always felt deep-down that it was all an act. In the back of her mind, she continued to devise ways to get away from him. But no matter how much energy she put toward plotting an escape, she always came back to the same conclusion.
What the fuck else was she going to do?
Go to the cops?
She hadn’t exactly had the best of luck with them in the past, and she figured they would probably lock her up for child endangerment or something. Her baby would end up in foster care. Parentless, just like Cristina was.
She also knew that, if she did take off, Anthony would search for her. She would need to get as far away as possible. Maybe Mexico. But she didn’t speak more than a few phrases of Spanish. And besides, what would she do down there? Go back to turning tricks?
It was hopeless. She had only two choices. Suck it up and go on with life, or suicide. And maybe those two options were the same, since she knew it was only a matter of time before he really did kill her.
Feeling overwhelmed, Cristina decided to do the only thing she’d ever been good at. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, hoping for the best.
Soon after Anise was born, Anthony went back to his old ways.
He hated the sound of the baby crying, to the point he sometimes walked around with his hands cupped over his ears, yelling for Cristina to make it stop. Usually she could. But sometimes babies cry for no reason. She tried to tell him that, but he acted like she was making Anise cry on purpose.
On one such occasion, the baby had been wailing for hours. Anthony was snorting a lot of coke, a habit he and Cristina both returned to in full-force after Anise was born. He was amped up and pacing around, mumbling about how he had so much work to get done.
Cristina started to fear that he would do something to her. Or, even worse, to the baby. She kept picturing that night on the balcony and swore, then and there, that if he ever tried to do anything to hurt Anise, she would kill him, even if it meant giving her own life.
She was sitting on the sofa. The baby was in her crib, finally beginning to settle down. In Anthony’s eyes, however, it was already too late. He undid his belt – the belt – with a psychotic calm. The deadne
ss washed over his eyes.
“Cristina,” he said. “I thought that baby would have taught you how to be a better woman. I really hoped having our daughter in the house was going to transform you into the person we both know you can be if you choose to.”
Her mind tried with infinite desire to hold back the tears, knowing it would only provoke him. They came anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’ll try to do better, baby. I’ll try to be better. Just please, don’t hurt me. Please, Anthony.”
“It’s for your own good.”
During the next five years, he beat her almost every day.
The scars on her body were torn off and reformed over and over again, becoming thicker and thicker each time. And with every passing day, her resolve to do anything about it grew weaker.
When Anise was old enough to be aware of her surroundings, Anthony was always sure to wait until the girl was sleeping before he took Cristina into the other room, for what he’d come to call her “treatments.”
Over the course of those years, everything good that was inside Cristina died. Every ounce of self. Every bit of desire to be something and to leave a mark on the world. All of it was dead. Killed by a man who said he loved her.
The only thing leftover was an empty shell of a person. And despite getting dressed up every day, desperately holding on to her external beauty, she went through her daily routines in a daze, trying to be as robotic and predictable as possible, knowing that perfection was her only salvation from more pain.
Part of her hoped he would just lose it one night and hold her over the balcony again. Only, next time she wouldn’t plead for her life. She would tell him to let go. Beg him to do it.
There were times when she fantasized ways of ending it all herself.
She imagined filling up the bathtub and using one of Anthony’s straight razors to slit her wrists from top to bottom, letting her blood cloud the steamy water.
Sometimes she pictured using his belt to hang herself. There would be poetic irony in that, at least. After all, it was the object she feared most in the entire world. More than all the guns and knives and nuclear bombs combined. She couldn’t even bring herself to go near it, unless she was picking it up off the floor, and then only so it wouldn’t get used on her.