“He was your Papá,” she says helplessly. “He was—”
Part of me recognizes the oddity of her speaking English. English was for school and work and errands. At home we only spoke Spanish unless the older kids were working on homework. The entire neighborhood—literally, the entire neighborhood—was family, all the cousins and second cousins and aunts and uncles, the grandparents and almost grandparents, the older siblings who married and moved into houses just down the street or around the corner. Unless it was schoolwork, you didn’t hear English until you left the neighborhood and went past the corner stores. Even then, you were as likely to hear Spanish until you got deeper into town.
I take her face between my hands, lean forward, and kiss her forehead. When Vic did it to me, it was support. Now, it’s goodbye. “Go home. Your daughter is lost, and she is never coming home. She found a better family on her own.”
“That man, that agent,” she spits. “He took you away!”
“He rescued me. Once from the cabin, and once from you. Goodbye, Mamá.”
I turn and walk away, and there’s a part of me aware of the sobbing little girl in the back of my mind, the hurt child who couldn’t understand why her parents did what they did, why no one else cared. Be patient, I want to tell that little girl. It gets worse, but then it gets better. Then we get rescued.
Sterling doesn’t ask how it went when I get in the car. She just starts it up and pulls out onto the road, headed to Manassas and home.
Home.
“Can we stop by my house?” I ask once we’re on the highway. “Something I need to do.”
“Of course.” She watches me from the corner of her eye, most of her attention still on the road. “Cass called. So far the search of Gloria’s house hasn’t turned up anything suspicious.”
“Are you serious?”
“They’re still looking. Watts and Holmes have her at the station, but they haven’t questioned her yet. They’re waiting for the results.”
“This is a terrible day, Eliza.”
“Yes.”
My house looks the same, my cozy little cottage with its quiet colors and Jason’s flowers blooming along the walk and the front of the porch. I’m not sure why I expected it to look different. It feels different now. Shouldn’t it look different as well?
But it doesn’t, and the keys open it same as ever, and aside from the dust that’s accumulated over the past eleven days, the inside is also unchanged. Siobhan never kept very much here, just some clothes and toiletries and a couple of books by the bed. Her absence hasn’t changed it.
Even the bedroom, the bed still unmade and probably still smelling of her a bit. I haven’t been in it since the night Emilia Anders knocked on my door. The black-velvet bear sits on my nightstand, and dozens of relatives line the shelf that wraps around the room.
I’ve never likened the sight to my family’s neighborhood before.
Grabbing trash bags out from under the kitchen sink, I stalk back into the room and pull bears from the shelf, shoving them into the bags. But every last goddamn bear is off the shelf, even if some of them are spilling across the floor. My hand closes around the black-velvet one, with the faded red heart and the smart bow tie, and I . . . I can’t.
Clasping him to my chest and trying not to think of Ava holding those damn angel bears the same way, I lean against the wall and sink to the floor, my feet sliding into the space under the bed. After a few minutes, Sterling picks her way between the bears, not stepping on any of them, and moves some aside so she can sit next to me.
I’m not sure how long we sit there in silence. Long enough for the light coming through the windows to shift to dusk, for shadows to stretch across the room and distort perspectives.
“Once upon a time, I was the youngest of nine,” I whisper eventually. “I used to share a room with my two next youngest sisters, but when I was five, I got my very own room up in the attic. I was so proud of it. It had a pretty pink canopy princess bed, and a white chest for dress-up clothes. And it had a lock all the way up on the top of the door where I couldn’t reach. The night of my birthday party, my very first night in the room, I found out why.” I turn the bear so he’s braced against my thighs, his worn face more squashed than usual. His stuffing is so old, he doesn’t bounce back the way he used to. “For three years, my father molested me, and the rest of the family ignored it. My siblings, all the adults, they knew, but the people of their generations, back in Mexico . . . you just don’t talk about things like that. So they closed their eyes and turned away.”
“Three years,” Sterling repeats, her own voice whisper soft. Maybe it’s the kind of secret, maybe it’s the twisting light vanishing across the bedspread. There’s something about the moment that says anything louder will shatter.
“My father also gambled. The family didn’t know about that. They would have been less forgiving. All the different pieces of the family relied on each other to get by; his gambling meant he put the whole extended family in jeopardy. He got in over his head with a private group. He couldn’t even sell the house to cover it. The entire neighborhood was family, so he would have had to explain. It wasn’t enough to cover it anyway.”
“So he gave them you.”
“He sent me to play in the woods behind the house, and when no one could see me, they grabbed me. They had a cabin deeper in the woods, too deep for anyone to really go.”
“How long?”
“Two years.” Sometimes I wake up and can still feel the rough boards beneath me, and the manacle around my ankle, hear the heavy chain that rattled across the wood with every movement I made. “There were some other kids there. Collateral, maybe, or winnings. They were never there long, but a couple of the men had taken a liking to me. Said they liked my fear. I’d been there almost two years when I got a chance to escape. The cabin wasn’t well-made; the wood wasn’t finished. We’d had a wet summer and everything was rotting, and I pulled up the ringbolt attached to my chain. Wrapped it around me like a feather boa so it wouldn’t clank, tiptoed past the men as they were sleeping, and ran like hell into the woods.”
“You don’t like woods,” she says after I fall silent. “Eddison always goes in, if there’s a way for it not to be you.”
“Sí. It was night, and dark, the trees too thick for moonlight. There were little ravines all over. I ran and ran and ran. I fell so often, but I dragged myself back up, more and more scared every time. And I couldn’t find a way out. I was too afraid to scream. Maybe it would bring help, but it was more likely to bring the men.”
“They found you?”
“In the morning. They came out looking for me when they noticed I was gone. The chain had gotten caught in a root system, and when I tried to work it loose, I fell over the edge of a ravine. The manacle caught and broke my ankle. I was just hanging there. They beat me for trying to escape.” Using the bear’s soft paw, I trace the scars on my cheek. “Broken bottle.”
She leans her head against my shoulder and waits.
“They put me in the root cellar after that. It was stone and the trapdoor had a lot of locks. I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to try again, to be honest; it didn’t matter. But a few days later, I woke up to yelling. Yelling and gunshots. I was huddled there in the dark, and the locks scraped and the door opened and there was a big man standing there. I was terrified. It could only get worse, right? But someone handed him a flashlight, and he made it dance around my feet, and he came down the stairs and knelt in front of me, and said his name was Victor.”