“Well, look who’s here,” Jadranka welcomed us, motioning for us to sit down at the table with them. The beach bar wasn’t too crowded yet, since the sun had only just gone down and a lot of patrons were probably still eating dinner at restaurants elsewhere. There were at least ten empty beer bottles between her and Mili on the table, and a ton of cigarettes mashed into the sand around them. Mili took a long drag off the cigarette he was smoking and triumphantly exhaled a gust of smoke into the dark blue early night air.
“We shouldn’t sit down,” Kristijan said, nervously looking over his shoulder at the bartenders. “They won’t serve Magda.”
“They don’t have to!” Jadranka bellowed. Jadranka was always superhumanly loud at night when she was drunk. She was wearing a red spaghetti strap bikini not unlike one my sister owned, and it occurred to me that night that I hadn’t seen her fully clothed even once during the three weeks we’d been in Split. “It’s not like she’s walking up to the bar and ordering a drink. You can sit right here. Mili will go order calamari or something. They won’t object if we order food.”
So, we sat down at the table and Mili trotted over the cooling sand to order snacks so that Magda’s presence with us wouldn’t be questioned. He returned with several beers, a fresh pack of cigarettes, and two plates of hot fried food. He was also delighted to announce that he had found my sister sitting at the bar with her arms wrapped around Tobin Mitchell.
“They’re lucky they’re in Croatia, where public kissing is tolerated,” Mili announced, suggesting that Bijoux and Tobin were all over each other. I rolled my eyes. PDA wasn’t really encouraged in Croatia, at least not by older people.
An hour later, I had to go to the bathroom, and left our table to walk past the bar toward the small bathroom behind its kitchen area. Beach bathrooms were just what you’d expect... a long line, a swinging French door and then a semi-lit tiny crouch space with a toilet that barely flushed. On my way back to our table, I observed my sister sitting practically on Tobin’s lap at the bar, his tongue down her throat and hands stroking her back. I decided not to interfere, more because I didn’t want anyone at the bar to know we were related than out of a lack of motivation to annoy her.
The bar was starting to get crowded now that it was really night time, and the music had been turned up. A remix of Tawny’s hit single, “Eyes on Me,” came on, and the makeshift dance floor began bouncing under the weight of so many hopping dancers. At our table, Jadranka was singing along at the top of her lungs for Mili and Kristijan’s amusement. She barely knew the words in English, but was so drunk that her eyes were closed as she crooned along.
“Come on, Magda, sing it!” Jadranka exclaimed.
Magda blushed. Magda was shy and would never in her life be a girl who sang at a bar, drunk or not.
Jadranka climbed up on the table and began dancing as well as singing. At this, we all exploded in laughter, because it was so unlike Jadranka to make a complete spectacle of herself. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to impersonate Bijoux, or was really just so drunk that she had thought it was a good idea to give an impromptu performance on our table top. Whatever the case, she sang with gusto, kicking over empty beer bottles. One that wasn’t quite empty fell in Magda’s lap, drenching her with stale beer, and she howled in surprise when the cold liquid hit her.
Then, the bad thing I had been expecting all night actually happened.
I felt a hand on my back and turned to see Danko.
“Let’s go, Elisabeth,” he said sternly.
Jadranka stopped dancing instantly and stood on the table top, staring Danko down.
Everything started happening too quickly. I stood, wanting to tell my legs not to obey my brain. But I stood anyway. I knew that following him to wherever he wanted to lead me was going to deliver me straight into the trap he had been setting for me for the last few years. A small part of me knew that if I refused to obey him in front of his niece and nephew, there would be an even greater price to pay. Standing there, on the cold dark beach surrounded by revelry and dance music, I knew that the time had come to pay whatever price he felt I owed him for whatever unknown crime I had committed.
I wasn’t sure why he was there, or even how he’d known where to find us. It was a huge beach, miles long. I frantically tried to provide myself with a plausible reason for him to have driven over to the beach to punish me… anything other than what I feared most, that there was no real reason. And then my pulse raced: the slivovitz. He’d noticed it missing. Surely, that was why he’d come after me. Or curfew, the week before, the night I’d gone out with Mili and Jadranka and Adrian on the boat. The night of the constellations. Jelena must have told him I’d gotten home late. That could have been it. I felt sickening panic. I had obviously messed up plenty of times in the last few weeks, even though I’d been trying to be good.
“It’s not curfew yet,” I said quietly, my last attempt to spare myself from whatever awaited me in his car.
It wasn’t curfew. It was just after nine. Even if I’d walked back to the house at a snail’s pace at that point, I would have been home on time.
“Your curfew is irrelevant,” he said sharply. “It’s Friday and you had an obligation to send your book report to your teacher. Obviously you’ve forgotten.”
I inhaled air that felt suddenly unbearably cold. The book report. I had forgotten. All this time, every minute of these three past weeks, I’d been so good, so careful, trying to avoid his attention. And even despite my best intentions, my mother had doomed me with that stupid book report.
I looked around table at the blank stares of Mili, Kristijan and Magda. Danko didn’t seem to even notice that Magda had a full bottle of beer in front of her and was visibly drunk. Jadranka folded her arms over her chest where she stood on the table, as if it were the most perfectly natural thing in the world to be standing on a table top in a bikini, watching a friend’s stepfather discipline her. I wanted to scream at them all to make him go away. Wouldn’t one of them come to my rescue? Didn’t they have any idea what he had planned for me?
But they didn’t know. How could they have known? Why would they have guessed something so horrible? They probably thought I would be dragged to the car by my earlobe like a naughty little girl, endure a severe verbal scolding and be sent to bed early.
“Let’s go,” he repeated. “Your mother is waiting for you at home and she’s very upset.”
I smiled weakly at Kristijan, wishing I could just cry for help. His eyes locked with mine and for a split second his face looked so sad that I wondered if maybe he had some idea of what was going to happen to me next. As if it were a protective force field, I wrapped my beach towel around myself, and I began following Danko, feeling like I was in a bad dream. He was walking across the sand in his leather docksiders at a brisk pace, and I had to trot in my flip flops to keep up with him. I thought briefly and wistfully of my bike, locked further down the beach against the fence, and even at that moment I knew so many bad things might happen before dawn that promising myself I’d fetch the bike in the morning was madness.
The morning might as well have been never.
I climbed into the back seat of the car without saying a word. Surely he had expected me to sit in the front passenger seat next to him, but in a pathetic way, I thought maybe I’d outsmarted him. He slammed the driver’s side door as he climbed into the car, and started the engine.
For a few minutes as we drove, I thought maybe I was safe. Maybe I was really just in trouble over the book report. Maybe we would just drive back to the house. I’d hop out of the back of the car and sprint for the front steps, run up to my room and lock the door. I wished I’d stayed home and played cards with the grown-ups. If I’d been there, in plain view all night, maybe he wouldn’t have dared to make tonight the night.
Outside the windows of the car, the landscape was dark. I knew as we drove past the small street that led to our front gate that all of my imagined scenarios of potential safety were n
ot going to come true. This was it. The moment I’d been dreading for over two years. I thought I’d been so smart, thought I’d found crafty ways to avoid this. But now that the moment had arrived, I was scared but couldn’t even bring myself to cry. My fingertips were freezing.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked quietly.
He didn’t reply. I thought about trying to make a run for it if the car stopped at a stop light, but I knew all too well that there weren’t really any stop lights out in this quiet part of the island. There were barely street lights. And even if there had been a stop light on every corner, he’d locked all four doors of the car using power lock. I wasn’t going anywhere.
We were a good mile inland from the beach when he turned the car down a quiet residential street and parked. When its engine stopped, the silence was suddenly deafening. We were far enough from the closest houses that I wouldn’t be heard if I screamed.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, my voice trembling.
The power lock on the doors made a BLIP sound, opening all four locks at once at his press of a button. He got out of the front seat of the car and in under a second crawled into the back seat next to me on all fours. In the few seconds of close proximity to his body that I experienced, I could smell alcohol on him. The grown-ups had been drinking the whole time they had been playing cards, I guessed. As he grabbed for me, his palms were sweaty.
I knew my only chance for salvation was to bolt at that second. I felt for the door handle behind me and fumbled, finally finding the right angle at which I could open it from my strange position with my hand behind my back. The door fell open and I tumbled through it, but with Danko grabbing at my legs.
“Get back here,” he growled, and then cursed in Croatian. His grip on my left leg was so firm that I fell forward onto the gravel of the street, scraping my palms. I kicked at him with my right leg, not caring if I hurt him, not caring if I bruised him or if I had to explain to my mother or even the police what had happened. My heart was beating wildly and my voice was stuck in my throat. I hadn’t made it completely out of the car, he still had me by one leg, and as he tried to pull me back into the car despite my struggling, he tore off my bikini top by its long strings in the back. Finally I fell forward further onto the pavement but as I scrambled away I realized I was topless, and one of my flip flops had fallen off. My beach towel was still in the back seat with him, and my bikini top was in his hands. Wildly I climbed up to my feet once I got to the other side of the street and turned back to see him climbing out of the back of the car after me.
I crossed my arms over my bare chest. The heat of the evening had passed and now the breeze blowing in from over the water was chilly. I felt my skin prickle with goosebumps. I could hear my pulse in my own ears. My feet felt like bricks. I couldn’t move. My knee was bleeding from where I’d hit the pavement but I knew I couldn’t think about how badly it burned.
Anything could happen out here, I told myself. I imagined him just killing me, choking me to death and leaving my body on that road. He would come up with some elaborate story that would check out, and Mom would never know the truth about what had happened to me.
“Elisabeth,” Danko said sternly. “Get back in the car.”
“No.”
Run, run, run pounded in my head.
But I looked around. We were on a quiet residential street in the middle of nowhere, in the pitch black night. I had been so mortified on our drive away from the beach that I honestly hadn’t a clue where our house was in proximity to where he had driven me. I only had one flip flop and the ground below my feet was sharp gravel. If I tried to outrun him, I wasn’t going to get far.
“Where do you think you’re going to go out here?” he asked, his tone of voice making me feel like a complete idiot. “There’s nowhere to run, and you’re practically naked.”
He took three steps toward me, slowly, to see if I’d bolt in either direction. But there was nowhere for me to back up, and nowhere for me to dash. Behind me, tall weeds brushed at the backs of my legs.
On the ride back to the house, all I could focus on was breathing.
Air in, air out.
Everything else could come later, I promised myself. I could feel everything else once I was alone, behind a locked door.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Danko was saying in the driver’s seat, next to me. I could hear his voice, but he sounded miles away. I focused my eyes on the road ahead, clutching my beach towel around myself. “You’re thinking that you’re going to tell someone. A trusted adult. Anyone who will listen.”
A few moments passed in silence. I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking nothing. My brain was flat-lining. I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t sniffling. I was just staring at the road, waiting for the gate to our fence to appear in front of the car.
“But who are you going to tell, Elisabeth?” he taunted me. “Your mother? She won’t believe you. You stink like booze. Poor little Betsey, always trying to get attention. You should be grateful for my attention. I’m probably the only man who’d ever think twice about touching you when your sister is around. You’ll never be even half as pretty as Bijoux, so you’re going to have to learn to be grateful for whatever you get.”
His words stung me as if he had thrown hot oil in my face. Because not only were they cruel, but they were my worst, most dark and private thoughts suddenly being spoken aloud. If I hadn’t been in a state of complete shock, I might have cried. But I felt nothing, nothing at all, not even hatred toward him. Just the desire to get as far away from him and that car as I possibly could.
“So, are we good?”
Finally, the gate to our fence. The house behind it, illuminated by its fancy lighting system against the night sky.
He let the engine idle, waiting for my response, and when I didn’t offer one, he tapped the security code into the automated system and the iron gate swung open so that we could drive through. I could have bolted from the car at that point. The doors weren’t locked. I could have gotten out, slammed the door, and ran back to the beach, or into town. I could have screamed my brains out to anyone who would have listened. I could have brought a swift and complete end to everything that had begun that night.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I nodded. I would have agreed to anything just then, just to get away from the smell of that cologne, the sound of that voice, out of his reach. All I wanted was to run up the grand staircase to my bedroom and lock my door.
I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, and as soon as the car had rolled to a stop in front of the estate’s front doors, I ran from the car leaving the passenger side door open behind me, blew past Jelena just inside the doors, up the stairs, and into the dark safety of my bedroom.
“Betsey?” I heard Jelena call after me.
I couldn’t sleep. Around eleven, Bijoux knocked on my door and said she was going back to the beach with Jadranka and Mili and would be spending the night at Tobin’s. I was trying to block out the sound of her voice, because all I wanted was for darkness to just consume me, but I heard a lower voice and assumed that Tobin was on the other side of the door, standing next to her. She was blabbing on and on about Jadranka having said I was in trouble. I hesitated for a long while before replying, telling her to go away. I wanted to be left alone, completely alone. I wanted to fall into a deep sleep that would last until the end of August, until it was time to board a flight away from that horrible place.
I was so ashamed. By never saying anything about the weird things that had happened during the previous two summers in Croatia, I felt like I had basically given Danko permission to keep going. And I admitted to myself, with a ton of shame, that I had kind of liked the attention. Maybe I had never said anything before because there was a part of me that was flattered that Danko had sneaked into my room to watch me change. Maybe I had let myself think that he thought I was prettier than Bijoux.
But that night, the worst night of my whole life, I knew it was
all a big, sick joke on me, and I felt stupid as well as violated. It was the humiliation over my own stupidity for not saying anything sooner – even more than the shame of that monster touching me – that kept me from running downstairs and telling my mom I needed to talk to her. He was right. Who would care, if I told? Who would care about little piggy?
My thoughts drifted toward just wanting to die. Everything about my life had been ruined, as far as I could see. I would never have a normal life again. There would always be this thing, this horrible event, this stain on my past, in my memories. What was the point of staying alive when everything that could possibly happen to me in the future would be in the shadow of this? And worst of all, there was nothing stopping him now from taking whatever else he wanted from me, whenever he felt like it.
But then it occurred to me like a blast of sunlight through a break in clouds: I didn’t want to die. I wanted Danko to die. He was the one who deserved to suffer, not me. For a while, my brain basically got on a mental treadmill on the topic of calling my dad in the morning. But the whole thing was just so unspeakably embarrassing. What would I tell him? How could I possibly say those words to my dad? And I hadn’t even talked to him once in the weeks since we’d left Virginia. I didn’t even know where in the United States he was.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night, even as the hours stretched into morning. The lock on my door was sturdy but not foolproof; Bijoux had already busted through it once that summer with a hairpin to steal my Alexander McQueen pink skull-print scarf (which of course, she had carelessly lost at a beach bar). As the minutes clicked by on the digital alarm clock next to my bed, I knew I would never again get a moment’s rest in that house. I needed to get out. And nothing would change when we got back to the apartment in Manhattan, except that Danko’s comments and actions would be less frequent but probably more desperate because of our closer quarters.
The Viscount's Daughter - [A Treadwell Academy - 03] Page 5