The man with the bandanna blindfolded me again before hauling me out of the truck. I felt warmth on my face and realized it was sunlight just as he led me back into shadows. My feet were on a solid surface; I was inside a building. We went down a flight of stairs, and it grew colder around me. The smell of moisture and moldering surrounded me, like rotting leaves, brown decaying things. I imagined the walls dripping with fetid water, moss creeping across the floor, slime oozing up between the cracks. He put me in a small room, more like a cell, with no window, no light, nothing but a thin foam mattress on the floor, a blanket balled up on top of it, and a bucket in the corner. He locked me in there, and he didn’t come back. I curled up on the mattress, pulled the blanket over my head to hide my face, and prayed to God with all the words I could barely remember from infrequent visits to Sunday school to wake up back at home in my own bed, with my own family.
Patrick shifted beside me. I turned to glance at him, realizing that between visualizing my lies and keeping an eye on Lynch and Morales, I hadn’t been paying him any attention. He was staring down at the surface of the table, blinking his eyes rapidly. I felt a sudden, sick twist of guilt in my gut. I hadn’t even considered what it would be like for him to hear these things. We’d gone over the story a hundred times yesterday, but I’d been embroidering it as I went along, and each new detail must have been like another blow to him.
“Are you all right, Mr. McConnell?” Agent Lynch asked.
“Perhaps you’d like to step outside for a moment,” Morales added.
Patrick shook his head and took a sip from the glass of water Agent Lynch poured for him. “I’m fine. We can continue.”
“Are you sure?” Morales asked. “It’s no problem—”
Patrick’s expression was carved from marble. “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Morales said at length. “Danny, whenever you’re ready.”
I stuck to the story. No more embellishments. I told them how they left me alone in that room for many days, the door occasionally opening to admit some food or water or to take the bucket for emptying. Sometimes a man would come in and ask me my name. When I said, “Danny,” he would hit me. What did I say my name was again? he would ask. “Danny,” I would say. Defiant. Lower lip wobbling but chin raised. Then I would be beaten and left with no food for days. This happened again and again until every inch of my skin had been broken and reknitted a half a dozen times. After the third beating I stopped telling him my name. After the twentieth I genuinely didn’t remember it anymore.
Once they had broken me, well. That’s when things really began.
Morales leaned forward in her chair, clasping her hands together on the table in front of her.
“One day the man who always came to ask my name showed up with another guy,” I said. “He was different. Cleaner. He seemed like someone important. He asked my name, and I told him I didn’t know what it was, which was true. He told me they were going to call me ‘J’ from then on. We all had names like that, just letters of the alphabet. He asked where I was from, and I told him I was from that room. I could barely remember anything else. I think . . . I think it was probably too painful for me to remember, you know? So I just forgot. It was easier for me to think I’d been born there in that room and never known anything different. I remember the man smiled at that.”
Agent Lynch glanced over at Morales. She gave a nod so small that it seemed to come more from her eyes than anything.
“We’ll come back to that man, Danny,” Lynch said. “For now, just tell us what happened next if you can. Unless you need a break first?”
I shook my head. “I’d rather just get through this,” I said, and it was true. Telling the lies, making myself believe them as much as possible so I would sound convincing to the people listening, took its toll.
“Of course. Go on.”
“They took me out of my room and gave me a shower,” I said. “It was only the second or third one I’d gotten since I’d been there. They dressed me in new clothes and then the clean man put me in a car and drove me somewhere. He didn’t bother blindfolding me or trying to tie me up or anything. I guess he knew I wouldn’t run.” I faked a crack in my voice, but it wasn’t hard. All good lies contained some truth, and I knew what it was like to be young and scared and feel beyond saving. “He took me to another house in the middle of nowhere. There were other children there too. That’s where we lived when we weren’t . . . being used somewhere else.”
My stomach started to feel unsettled as I continued the story. What they told me I’d have to do. What they did to me when I refused. How bad it got before I finally agreed, and how much worse it got after that.
“This one guy, he was always smoking. If I made him mad, he would burn me.” I pulled down the neck of my shirt, showing them a circular cigarette burn just under my collarbone. Might as well put my real scars and the healed breaks any X-ray would detect to use. “They broke my ribs a couple of times. My arm, too.”
“Did they take you to the hospital or a doctor?” Lynch asked.
I shook my head and rubbed my arm where the phantom pain of bones grinding together still lived. “No, they just made me a splint. Couldn’t risk anything else.”
The more truth I wove into my lies, the more the constructed memories blurred with my real ones. The dark room where I slept on a mattress on the floor was no longer in some human trafficker’s safe house but in a trailer home in Saskatchewan, the screaming voice suddenly a familiar one, the close walls those of the closet where I tried to hide. The metallic tang of fear in the back of my throat as I heard footsteps in the hallway at night was as vivid now as it had been then, and soon tears I had never cried for myself were building up in my throat for my invented Danny Tate, so thick it was hard to breathe.
Patrick reached out and slowly, carefully touched my shoulder. That did it. I broke down. “Crying” is too delicate a word for what it was. Patrick put his arm around me, but I flinched away violently, because I wasn’t in that room anymore, with the man who’d been nothing but the perfect big brother to me. I was back there, in the dark and the cold with her and with them.
“Danny,” Patrick said. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
I looked up at him, remembering where I was. Patrick looked bewildered and worried, and I let him squeeze my shoulder.
“Okay?” he said.
I took a deep breath and nodded. I was safe now. I was okay. And that very rare, very real display of emotion surely wouldn’t have hurt my cause here.
“I know this can’t be easy for you, Danny,” Morales said. “We really appreciate your bravery in telling us all of this. Take a minute if you need to.”
I shook my head and swiped at my eyes. “I just want to get this over with. I just want you to stop them.”
Morales nodded at Lynch, who asked, “Can you tell us how you got away?”
“They accidentally left a door unlocked,” I said. “I made a run for it.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About a year.”
“Why did you never seek anyone out?” Morales said, asking her first question of the day. “Go to the police?”
“You make that sound like an accusation, Agent,” Patrick said. “My brother is the victim in all of this. He’s not here to defend his actions.”
“I did go to the police,” I said. “That’s why I’m here now.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound accusatory,” Morales said. “I’m just wondering why you didn’t reach out for help in the year before you arrived at the juvenile facility in Vancouver.”