Chapter 10 #2
Isaac forced me to eat everything before he did what he always did to me and drew more lines on the wall toward morning.
Then he dressed in peace. “It’ll be a while before we get to seven hundred and twelve,” he said mockingly, shaking his hair from his damp forehead and drinking moonshine straight from the bottle.
After that, he sat next to me, eating peanuts, drinking more moonshine, and smoking.
I didn’t notice much of it since I was elsewhere.
He had hit me in the face several times so hard that I was out of it.
I was lying flat on my stomach with my wrists tied to each ankle with a rope, but I barely felt the pulling in my joints.
I had numbed my senses and emotions so that I could continue to exist, to protect the part of me that was still Willa Nevaeh Rae.
It seemed even more fragile than the glass in the Palace of Shards and if I let anything slip through my protective shield, even the last part of me would shatter completely.
“Did Nathan ever tell you why we were in Baton Rouge years ago?” Isaac asked me at one point, blowing smoke from his cigarette into my face.
I merely blinked. It was so hard to think about Nathan because I wanted to keep him beyond this room, beyond any memory of this horror.
Pure and clean. Gott hjarta . I had asked him once if they had thought about abducting me back then, he and his companion, but he had replied that he hadn’t even known how to spell the word back then.
I had assumed they just happened to pass by our property since they lived in the area, at least for a while.
Isaac was watching me, but I couldn’t bear his gaze and turned my head to the other side with effort. “Shall I untie your bonds, little lady?” he asked almost tenderly.
I hated it when he acted like he cared about my well-being. I hated that he knew my body better than Nathan did. And I hated that his gentle words were making me cry, but I nodded.
Naturally, he didn’t untie me. “Look at me!” he ordered and I did as he commanded.
There was a rigid, cold light in his eyes; they looked like those of a crocodile waiting to attack, as if he was about to grab me by the throat and pull me under the water.
“I was there because I wanted to see my father.”
“What?” I asked tonelessly. I thought he meant one of the employees, but instinctively, I knew I was wrong.
“I was hoping he would take us in. Give us shelter, and if not, at least give me money to survive.”
For a few seconds, the whole world stood still and I was trapped in a bubble that was empty and without air to breathe. “No,” I heard myself whisper at some point, but it was too late. My mind started putting together all the pieces of a picture that I had been blind to.
“Oh, yes, I see you understand what I mean. It took me some time to find him in Louisiana, in a place where it was possible to get close to him.” He reached out to me and ran his index finger along my cheek.
“No…no, no, no…” The shock could hardly have been greater.
Ever since he came aboard the Agamemnon, he had always reminded me of someone.
And now, after he had indirectly told me who he was, my father’s son, whether conceived willingly or involuntarily, I suddenly knew who he looked like: my grandfather, Richard Hampton, of whom my father had only one portrait left—the one that hung in the Victorian reception hall in Baton Rouge.
I had walked past it every day during the Louisiana summers.
Isaac had inherited Richard’s noble features and that was why he had always seemed different to me than all the men from Coldville.
More cunning, more intelligent, out to win and get his way.
For power. Like my father, he always had to get what he wanted or so it seemed to me.
And he had even indirectly told me so. But before that, we definitely need something from Daddy .
I had believed it was mockery.
“I suppose you know what our father did back then?”
I stared at him, motionless. No! my mind was still screaming. Over and over, No!
“When I finally found the courage to call him out after weeks, he had his bodyguards chase me away. But I returned and that’s when he had them beat me up.
He shouted that I was a fraud, a swindler, like the ones who lurked outside his door every day, and that the next time, he would have his guards shoot me.
I believed him because, in Louisiana, no one is prosecuted for defending their property with a gun, not our father anyway. ”
The disturbance at the gate. I remembered. Dad had talked to me afterward. He certainly hadn’t believed a word Isaac said, maybe hadn’t really looked at him to see the resemblance. And my dad probably didn’t even know who Coralie McCormack was.
Dad probably thought at the time that the stranger wanted to kidnap me if he didn’t get any money and that was why we never returned to Baton Rouge.
Oh Dad!
I closed my eyes, unable to look at Isaac for a second longer. Isaac, my half brother, as well as little Nicholas, who had long since been buried.
Despite knowing the truth now that I couldn’t help but believe because of the similarity between Isaac and my grandfather, Isaac didn’t stop tormenting me.
Every night, he thought up new cruelties for me.
During that time, I learned that a person can endure a lot more suffering, a lot more than they initially believed.
They can make themself deafer and blinder than they believe possible but still break in the process, not all at once, but bit by bit.
I learned that you can or must forget yourself.
While mosquitoes sat on my blood-crusted wounds during the day, I just lay there and kept breathing.
And on, and on. I hung on by inhaling and exhaling.
I stopped crying and no longer hoped for rescue.
At the time, I didn’t want to be rescued either because I didn’t know how I would ever be able to live with these memories, with this body that no longer belonged to me, that was foreign to me, that disgusted me because it had to endure so many things that I hated and detested.
That I could not prevent. That only existed to satisfy my half brother so he could exact his revenge as if it were his duty.
Isaac told me the rest of his story in bits.
That way, he always had something new to share with me, something that could pull me out of my apathy.
Sometimes, he told me about Nathan—it was the only thing that could still make me cry and he knew it.
He told me about days and weeks without food, about the beatings and the farmers’ cattle whips, about endless grueling hours of waiting on the banks of the Mississippi where they hoped for a ride.
He told me how he looked after his younger siblings, always promising a better life.
His voice sounded so caring that I couldn’t connect it with his true personality and that only disturbed me more.
One night, when he was sitting on the floor next to me again, feasting on the sight of me, drinking, and smoking moonshine, he told me about how he met my father a second time. Our father .
He gently stroked the wounds on my face, something more terrible than any violence he could inflict on me.
I found him so disgusting, so revolting, I almost threw up again, something that happened to me often.
Blinking, I stared at the streak of light that fell through the window despite the night.
A few days ago, I had managed to get up during the day and peek outside through the crack.
I had seen men patrolling and bald cypress trees.
Was it winter already? December…Christmas?
There was probably snow in New York and the Christmas tree might already be up at Rockefeller Center.
Here and now, however, the sky had to be clear and starry, perhaps there was a full moon.
Dust danced in the moon and starlight beam, and for a few seconds, I thought of Lea and then Mom.
Could she hear me? I wanted to reach for the light, disappear into it, and hide from Isaac.
I wanted to die, to end my life myself, but I saw no way.
The windows were boarded up, so I couldn’t throw myself out, and there was nothing I could use to kill myself.
Isaac even took the ropes with him every morning.
He hit me in the face suddenly to get me out of my thoughts. “Listen to me!” he demanded roughly.
I looked at him, but I saw through him. The fact that he was my half brother was more horrifying than anything else.
“I saved money. I had worked for three or four years as a laborer in a crab fishery and for cheap cleaning companies. Illegally, of course. I cleaned smelly toilets because that was all someone like me could get, at least not without a work permit and a decent résumé. Someone like me only gets the crappy jobs that nobody else wants to do. And you only earn a few cents. I bet you didn’t even have to wipe your own sweet ass up there in your fancy penthouse, did you, little sister? ”