The Woman in the Trunk

by Jessica Gadziala

  Unfortunately, my great-grandparents passed before I was old enough to remember them, and my grandparents only made it to my early teens.

  So all she had left to feel thankful for was me. And she showed it. I don't know if I knew anyone else who had as close a relationship with their mother as I did. She was who I confided in when I had a crush, who I cried to when said crush rejected me, who I went to for fashion advice, who I went to movies with.

  She was my best friend in the entire world. And I was hers.

  As a kid, I never stopped to wonder why she clung so tightly to me, why she would often come in my room to watch shows, and "just so happen" to fall asleep in my bed with me instead of going back to her own.

  I don't ever remember hearing my parents arguing, but as an adult, I knew they must have, knew that the bitterness between them didn't just happen overnight, that there were many cross words that must have created it slowly over time.

  And the older I got, the more I could see how much she had protected me from him. Not because he abused me, not because he was ever outwardly cruel to me, but because his cold indifference would have been just as hard to come to grips with as a small child.

  He never wanted to be a father, and he didn't feel the need to act differently.

  So my mom worked hard to be both parents for me, even while I shared the walls with my father as well.

  He was never around, anyway.

  So we clung to each other.

  And we had decided on flower cupcakes for the party, had picked out her sweet, light pink sundress that I had always admired as my outfit, had sat and written out invitations in my mother's beautiful, flowing penmanship, had even found the perfect park with an actual koi pond and a pergola so we wouldn't melt in the heat.

  It was all set up.

  We had been working on little specifics. Like the music to load onto my iPod, if four pizzas would be enough, if we should paint our nails red or yellow—or a combination of the two—if I should wear my hair up or down.

  We never would hammer out those details.

  We never would have that party.

  I would turn sixteen.

  But by then, my mom wasn't around anymore.

  It was a normal night.

  My mother and I had stood brushing shoulders in our tiny kitchen, chopping up vegetables for a stir-fry, deciding on peanut sauce since my father wouldn't be home. He hated all things peanut butter. My mother and I binged Reeses when there was enough leeway in the budget for us to buy a big bag and do so.

  We had eaten dinner in front of the TV in the living room, watching Gilmore Girls reruns for the thousandth time, having always connected to the mother/daughter dynamic, loving the small-town vibe even though we both agreed we were city women through-and-through.

  Then, my mother got one of her migraines, having to take one of the pills that made her sleepy and loopy, so she went off to her room to rest in the dark, and I did the dishes and went to my room to listen to some music, still trying to perfect that playlist of mine.

  I fell asleep on a mixed CD a friend had given me.

  I woke up to it still playing on a loop.

  But I wasn't alone like I had been when I fell asleep.

  And it wasn't my mother in the room.

  Or my father, for that matter.

  No, it was a stranger.

  Tall and an almost emaciated sort of skinny, something that made his suit hang off his body, looking like a skeleton dressed up for Halloween.

  There was nothing significant about his face, except his eyes seemed black and too close-set.

  He was just like any average guy you might see on the street or in the store.

  But he damn sure didn't belong in my bedroom.

  My mouth opened, ready to call for my mother.

  But even as my lips parted, I could hear her.

  Already screaming before the sound abruptly cut off.

  This man wasn't the only one in the apartment.

  And someone was doing something to my mom.

  I wasn't naive.

  I knew all the terrible ways a man could hurt a woman. I just... I just never thought it could happen to my mom.

  Or happen to me.

  But then this skinny man was moving across my bedroom floor, was making his way to where I was still stretched out on my bed.

  I wanted to scream.

  I wanted to run.

  I wanted to fight.

  But it was like something had clicked off in my brain. It was like the connection between my mind and my body was misfiring.

  I couldn't scream.

  I couldn't run.

  I couldn't fight.

  I couldn't move.

  Not even when he got to the bed.

  Not even when his hands moved out, pulled off my clothes, touched me, pulled off his own clothing.

  The clearest memories I had of that night were of the aftermath.

  It was how I distinctly remembered how the bed bounced as he moved off of it, how I finally managed to move, curling up on my side, wrapping my arms around my legs. How tears had soaked my pillow without me having been conscious of crying in the first place, how cold my room was, making goosebumps bead up across all my exposed skin.

  It was the man's hands as he methodically pulled his clothes back on.

  Underwear. Pants. Shirt. Belt. Jacket.

  It was his one hand, in particular.

  With a big, red birthmark covering it.

  I knew the shape, the shade, where it ended and began.

  It was the most vivid memory I had as I lay in my bed, crying, in pain, even after the man left.

  At some point, I was aware of my mother in my room, her lip split, her eye black and blue, her hair a mess, wearing only a t-shirt when she'd gone to bed with sweatpants on as well.

  "It's okay, baby. It's okay. I'm here. We are getting help."

  And we did.

  The police showed up.

  My mother and I were brought into the hospital.

  We were separated.

  I was given some sort of patient advocate as the all-female team came in, scraped under my fingernails, trimmed them, took pictures of my body, put me in stirrups, and prodded already sore spots.

  It was then that I told the police about the birthmark. I'd even taken her pad, drawn a hand, and colored in the spot, so I knew she would get it right.

  It never occurred to me at the time, but my father never came to the hospital.

  Eventually, my mother and I huddled together in the back of a cab and rode home, both in silence, but clinging to one another, neither of us able to talk about it yet, to vocalize the horror. Just there for each other. Just in it together.

  We went back into the apartment, and she settled me on the couch, knowing I couldn't go back into my room, not going back into hers either.

  She made us tea, but never drank her own.

  She put on Gilmore Girls.

  She put a blanket over me.

  And then she sat in the chair at my side, eyes glued on the front door of the apartment, seeing something I didn't, thinking thoughts I never considered because I was so confused with my own. Thoughts of stolen innocence. Thoughts of feeling unsafe in my own home. Thoughts of how I was going to explain this to my friends. How anyone could ever understand.

  "I should have talked to my mom," I told Lorenzo, feeling tears clinging to my lashes. It had been a long time since I let myself remember that night. It never got any easier when I did.

  "You were a little girl, Gigi," Lorenzo reminded me, hand touching my knee, giving it a little squeeze. "And you had just been through hell."

  "I know that."

  And I did.

  On a rational level.

  But people, well, we were rarely rational. We were emotional people.

  And as horrible as the last part of my story was, the hardest was the next part.

  Because my mom knew something I didn't.

  I hadn't known that at the t
ime.

  I hadn't asked.

  And maybe she wouldn't have told me if I had.

  But she knew something.

  Something so horrible that when I had fallen asleep, she'd taken a kitchen knife, went down the elevator, gone onto the front steps of our apartment building, and slit her wrists.

  On the steps.

  Because she didn't want me to find the body.

  In fact, she was found just ten minutes after it was too late.

  I didn't wake up for ten hours.

  Then, finally, there my father was.

  Face grim.

  Eyes strangely hard. And in the aftermath, I had attributed that to his way of grieving.

  "Mom killed herself," he told me, not bothering to sugar-coat it, ease me into this new, harsh reality.

  Mom was dead.

  And the only person who truly loved me was gone.

  The only person who could possibly understand how I felt after the attack was done.

  And nothing, absolutely nothing would ever feel the same again.

  I spent my sixteenth birthday in a therapist's office, curled up in the chair, hugging my legs, putting a wall up between us, as the kind woman said things about how some people process trauma, about how my mother's way of processing didn't have to be mine, about how there was always someone to help, about how there were medications if I needed them, that I had people there for me, people who loved me.

  I knew the grim truth, though.

  There wasn't anyone who loved me left.

  I was alone in the world.

  I didn't think medications would help me process that.

  I didn't think therapy would either, so I stubbornly refused to go after a month of sessions.

  Instead, I went back to school. I worked in the bakery. I slept on the couch. And I rather obsessively drew that birthmark on lined pages of my school notebook.

  Dozens, hundreds of times.

  They scattered around the apartment.

  My father picked them up and threw them away.

  "He knew about that birthmark. He'd seen it every day for months," I told Lorenzo. "There was no way he didn't know it when he saw it. He looked right down at it upstairs. And he wasn't surprised to see it there."

  The reality of that still made it feel like someone had a hand around my throat, like they were cutting off air.

  It all came tumbling back as I sat there while my father shook hands with my rapist.

  My mom staring at the door.

  That hadn't been kicked in.

  The police said the locks hadn't been tampered with, that we must have left it unlocked.

  We hadn't.

  I knew we hadn't.

  I had locked it myself, slid the knob on both the deadbolts my mother insisted we install when there had been a slew of burglaries in the building several months before.

  The door had been locked.

  And no one had tampered with it.

  And my mom sat there staring at it for hours when we got home.

  Because she knew.

  She knew someone had unlocked it.

  And it wasn't either of us.

  Maybe she knew more than that too. Maybe she recognized the man who had attacked her. Maybe she knew about the birth-marked man. Maybe she had met him, had shaken hands with him in the past.

  Other things came back too.

  Like how that month, magically, the cable didn't get shut off. The phone didn't ring off the hook with creditors looking for their minimum payments so they would leave us alone for three weeks.

  My father ordered in dinner almost every other night.

  He bought a fancy new watch.

  He got a new wardrobe full of suits like his mafia friends.

  "I wonder how much I was worth," I said to Lorenzo, shaking my head, too numb to feel shocked by the revelation. "I wonder how much he thought my mom's life was worth. I bet it wasn't much," I added, taking a shaky breath. "I always knew I meant little to him. But I guess just... not how little. He'd let someone take something important from me for a full stomach, for a new watch, for fucking chicken parmesan and lobster rolls."

  "Gigi—"

  "My mom knew. And she just... she couldn't live with that reality. Christ," I said, scoffing. "I don't blame her. I think if I had known too, I would have been out on the steps with her."

  "You're not going to kill yourself, Gigi." There was so much conviction in his voice. Like he would take the knife out of my hand if I reached for one. Me. Someone who meant very little to him in the grand scheme of things.

  "Oh, why not? Your father is going to have me killed anyway."

  "You don't know that. We don't know how this changes things. I can fix this."

  "You don't know that."

  "I do. I know that. I've been fixing messes with this family for over a decade. I will figure it out. You're not getting killed for this. I'll fucking fix it, Gigi," he added, voice firmer, sensing my disbelief.

  My gaze dropped for a second, looking down at my hands, picturing how easily I had reached for that gun, had aimed it, had shot.

  "I killed my father."

  "The son of a bitch fucking deserved it," Lorenzo said, making my head lift, finding anger simmering in his eyes. For me. For what had been done to me.

  It struck me suddenly that since my mother passed, I'd never really had someone on my side. Someone willing to fight for me.

  If someone had told me that the person that finally would be on my side would be the underboss of New York's biggest mafia family, I would have had a good, long, much-needed laugh about it.

  Yet here we were.

  I felt I knew Lorenzo enough at this point to know that look on his face.

  Determination.

  And that he was a man of his word.

  He would do everything in his power to fix this.

  If there was a way to do so.

  "Hey," he snapped, grabbing my chin again, yanking it up high, like I always did when I was being stubborn. "Don't give up on me now, do you hear me? Where's that hellcat who wanted to bash my brain in with a bottle of whiskey? I need her back. Just for a little while longer. Because I am going to need to leave you here. And I am going to need to go up there and fix this. Don't crumble on me now."

  "I don't crumble," I told him, jaw getting tight. I knew he was baiting me. And that I was biting. But I guess that was the point, wasn't it?

  "Prove it," he demanded, eyes bright.

  I didn't see it coming.

  But he leaned forward as his hand slid from my jaw to my cheek, slipping down to the side of my neck where he liked to rest it, and his lips pressed to mine.

  But it wasn't hard and demanding, like I expected from him.

  No.

  This was something I didn't think he would be capable of.

  Soft and sweet.

  It was like a warm drink to my system, working through me, warming me from the inside out.

  It was over far too soon, though, leaving me cold and alone in the basement as Lorenzo stood, walked to the door, gave me one final glance, then walked out, closing the door behind him.

  I could hear him talking to someone through the door, making my stomach twist.

  I could trust Lorenzo. He was proving that more and more by the moment. And if I could trust Lorenzo, I could trust Emilio and Chris. But Arturo? Arturo's men? Definitely not.

  "It's me," a voice called through the door.

  "Who?" I called back, trying to keep my voice low.

  "Chris," he answered.

  "Maybe I would know that if you ever spoke to me," I shot back, hearing a small chuckle in response.

  "Hang tight," he told me, voice barely above a whisper. He must have been talking to me between the crack in the door, paranoid we might be overheard. "We got this."

  I wanted to believe them. I wanted to trust that their confidence wasn't misplaced, that they could somehow spin this conversation into something positive.

  But I had fin
ally met Arturo Costa.

  And he didn't seem like the kind of man who let people get things over on him.

  For the supposed "boss of all bosses," he was a surprisingly small man. In both stature and nature. He clearly got off on my father's ass-kissing. He loathed it when I didn't cower before him. Then there was that oddly weak, higher-pitched voice.

  I guess movies and TV—and, let's face it, Lorenzo—had skewed my perception of what mafia men were supposed to look like and act like.

  It seemed like Arturo understood this preconception, too. I guess it was why he was so ruthless. Because he knew it was the only way a man like him could command respect.

  Except it wasn't respect at all.

  It was fear.

  And being made to feel fearful made people angry; it didn't inspire loyalty.

  So maybe Lorenzo and Chris were right. Maybe they could work this out, after all.

  I couldn't let myself get too hopeful, though.

  My gaze shifted around the cold, empty side of the basement.

  This was not the place for hope.

  This was where it went to die.

  A shudder moved through me as I wondered how many men had lost their lives right where I was sitting, how much blood had been bleached from the floors, how many people had begged for their lives while being chained to a wall.

  I wasn't naive enough to believe everyone made it out of this place alive. I wasn't even naive enough to be sure I would.

  At this point, though, I was more worried about the things that could happen before death than the act of dying itself.

  If Arturo was a small and weak man who used fear as a motivator, if he employed rapists and child molesters, if he didn't have the respect of his own damn son, who knew what could happen to me down here.

  And Christopher would be powerless to stop it.

  Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, resting my head back against the wall, suddenly wishing I had put on pants and a normal shirt for this event.

  At the time, I thought the dress and heels would make me feel more sure of myself, that they would work as some sort of shield between me and the men I would be faced with. I figured I would be going back to Lorenzo's penthouse after the meeting.