1. Galena
GALENA
A fter my release from the hospital, I was a mess and still needed someone to look after me.
I wasn’t a minor anymore, but the doctors wouldn’t consider releasing me without someone there to help in case of a fall or something like that.
My friend Katie was living on campus, leaving me with nowhere else to go but home with my stepfather.
Leland and I had both been grieving, and I foolishly thought we could at least cling to each other.
He had been the only father figure I had ever known, and I’d thought that at least I’d be safe with him.
I had been a basket case, if I’m honest, and I had held on to Leland in the hopes that we’d endure our grief together.
That I’d heal at home. Maybe there had been some part of me that had just wanted to be around familiar things and smells while I healed.
I’d wanted to sleep in my own bed, to cry, and mourn my mother.
Whatever hopes I had were dashed almost immediately.
At first, he would bring me a cup of soup from the deli I liked and leave it by my bed.
Then he started sitting in the corner of my room, watching me with steepled fingers and eyes full of judgment.
Initially, I convinced myself that he was there to make sure I was okay, but I knew that my internal alarm was going off.
Eventually, I admitted to myself that it was creeping me out.
Finally, one day, he said what he had obviously been thinking all along: “It should have been you, not my Maria,” before walking softly out of the room. Anger battled with guilt and misery in the pit of my stomach, making me want to hurl. He didn’t know that I wished the same thing some days.
After that, I knew I needed to make plans to leave.
It became an unhealthy space for me, and I knew it wasn’t one-sided.
I had only been staying at home to cut costs while in college, but I had to drop my classes for the semester due to the trauma from the attack and the grief from my mother’s death.
At that point, I had missed almost three weeks of my term with no way to make up for the lost time.
I was hopelessly behind and in danger of losing the scholarships and grants that had allowed me to take my classes, but I couldn’t gather the energy to care about school.
Grief battled against my desire for justice, which didn’t seem imminent. To be fair to the police, I hadn’t provided them enough information to go on, but I didn’t want them to go to jail. That wasn’t enough, and I was afraid. I wouldn’t lie to myself about that.
Leland hadn’t been feeling well. He hadn’t been in a good place emotionally, pacing the house late into the night and talking to himself.
I knew he had been looking for the men who attacked us—well, he didn’t particularly care that they had hurt me.
He was searching for them only because they had attacked my mom.
It was unlikely that I could convince Leland that he couldn’t handle the three men we saw on the street that day.
Although they might have looked sleazy—one was balding and a bit overweight—they were ruthless and all carried weapons.
Still, I wasn’t naive enough to think he cared about me getting caught in the crossfire.
He would corner me and ask me questions over and over again about the attack. Did I know the men? How many were there? How tall were they? What did they look like? What did they say? Until I would finally crumple, crying, telling him I didn’t know.
He’d left his teaching post, and bills had piled up on the table where we’d had so many wonderful memories, where I had done my homework, and where we had eaten so many of our holiday meals.
One day, Leland had looked up at me blearily, clutching his chest with one arm.
I knew then that something was wrong, but by the time the ambulance had come, he was already dead—heart attack, they’d said.
I felt relieved, which made me feel like a bad person.
Later, sitting at that same table and looking at the empty house filled with stacks of bills and debris fluttering from the paramedics, it was overwhelming.
Everything had changed in my life. Where I’d been a college student just barely a month previously, with somewhere to live and parents, now I was an orphan.
It only took a week to realize I couldn’t stay there.
The house had been in Leland’s name, and the bank notices had been piling up on the table before he had died.
I was afraid to take anything that didn’t belong to me, but I was able to go through my mother’s things and collect her jewelry that I knew she’d want me to have.
There had been a few hundred in cash in the house that I took without too much guilt.
I had been saving a little from babysitting and a small part-time job during school.
My bank account had just under four grand in it, which I cashed out.
Rock bottom could be defined in so many ways.
It seemed like I kept finding different ways to discover a new level of it.
At first, I got a studio apartment, but it was clear after only a month that I’d been thinking too big.
Rent was exorbitant in the city, something that I’d never fully realized.
My friend Katie had said I could crash at her dorm, but that wasn’t something I wanted to do, and something in me couldn’t give up on Queens.
So, I was here, paying rent on an eight-by-ten storage unit and pretending it was okay as a living space.
It was indoors and heated (mostly), and an attendant was stationed at the desk.
Granted, it wasn’t really an apartment, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
It took a little longer than I expected to find a new route and steer clear of the corner boys.
That was yet another thing I had to get used to—the threats lurking everywhere.
I hadn’t considered myself naive until recently.
Now I understood that for years I had been blind to the dangers, but now that my eyes had been opened, I was much more cautious .
I pressed the keypad at the back entrance of the facility, hoping they wouldn’t notice me slipping in after closing again.
People weren’t supposed to live here officially, but New York wasn’t cheap, and the owners overlooked it if you kept a low profile and followed the rules.
I knew three other people here doing exactly what I was doing.
Still, I worked hard to keep everything quiet so I wouldn’t cause trouble.
First, I didn’t want to have to find another place; second, it felt safe and clean here; and third, I paid cash and used a fake ID, so it was completely off the grid.
To find me here, I’d have had to really mess things up.
If I were braver, I’d leave New York for good. There was nothing for me here anymore, but I was afraid. I huffed a little laugh. Well, I was always afraid of everything.
Maybe I should consider leaving the state and starting fresh somewhere, but just the thought made me feel uneasy. Maybe I was still dealing with the trauma from the attack, but I couldn’t leave without finding a way to get my justice.
Even now, I felt adrift. My mother was gone, and the man I viewed as my father was dead.
We never even had a funeral for my mother.
Funerals, I reminded myself morosely. Leland’s parents passed away, and he was an only child.
I hadn’t even had anyone to call when he died.
The coroner asked if I knew of another relative to handle the burial arrangements, but I didn’t know of anyone to call.
They ended up giving me his ashes. Leland had my mom cremated, and her ashes were still in the box they gave him.
Just thinking about the small cardboard boxes I had in my unit with the ashes of dead people gave me the creeps, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them.
I wasn’t ready to let go of my mom yet, and I was angry at Leland.
Still, he had been good to me the rest of the time.
My fingers shook slightly. It was cold, a March wind with claws, but the tremble was mainly caused by adrenaline.
I had been running on it for months. Each time I made it back successfully without encountering one of the trio involved in delivering the “message,” especially the man in charge, I was surprised.
I kept waiting for one of them to pop out like a jack-in-the-box and live up to the promise of silencing me forever.
I tried not to think too much about the thin sheen of sweat coating me when I collapsed inside.
“Back again, sweetheart?” the attendant called from his desk, sipping coffee as if this were any ordinary day.
Maybe to him it was. The storage facility wasn’t exactly secure, but at least there was someone on duty to ensure that there weren’t any creeps around.
Most of them weren’t paying attention, but they were at least there. It made me feel a little better.
“Forgot something,” I lied with a quick smile, the kind that didn’t reach my eyes.
Discomfort stretched over my skin, but I didn’t elaborate.
This was another skill I’d learned in this new life I’d embarked on.
Keep it short if you were lying. Elaborating on a story was never a good idea, and I didn’t owe anyone information about myself.
He didn’t press. I didn’t ask him his name, and he had never bothered me. He seemed like a decent sort of guy, more interested in the sci-fi novels he brought for his shift and lunches that his wife packed in one of those igloo coolers with stacked Tupperware containers.
I hurried through the concrete hallways, clutching keys in one hand like a weapon and holding my small knife in the other.
Since living alone, I’d researched some self-defense techniques online, but I knew that wasn’t enough.
I’d take classes if I could. For now, I spent long hours in the library studying everything I could about how to protect myself, living off the grid, IDs, and of course… recovering from trauma.
The long corridors were empty as usual, with the roll-up doors on both sides, and I wanted to be alert in case one of them suddenly opened without warning. When I finally arrived at Unit B-14, I was relieved. Home, sweet hell. No windows. I hated that part.
It smelled like metal and dust, and the citrus spray I used to keep the mildew from setting in.
My mattress was on top of some milk crates, so it wasn’t sitting directly on the concrete, blankets piled thickly on top.
I lit a candle and yanked off the diner uniform that still smelled like grease and eggs, then pulled on an oversized hoodie with a shiver.
After the attack, paranoia had taken over for a few weeks.
I wasn’t proud of it, but I had sunk into a period where I couldn’t even leave my room for fear that I’d be jumped in the hallway.
Instead, I stayed in my bedroom with my computer, researching how to disappear.
What I found out was that it was nearly impossible without a lot of money.
Technology wasn’t on my side these days.
Much of it depended on who was looking. My problem was that I didn’t have the money for good fake identities, which had been my biggest hurdle.
I settled on getting several crappy ones instead and made sure not to use them more than once.
At the diner, I used a different one than I used here at the storage facility, and so on.
I wasn’t entirely sure if all the online chatter I had read was correct, but it had seemed logical to my brain that it was a good idea.
All I could do was do my best, and that was to lie low.
If someone were to locate my diner identity, I could regroup here, knowing it was completely separate.
It was one of the reasons I was so cautious in my route back each time.
When I first set up here, I was feeling depressed, but I made it as comfortable as I could.
Hung some travel posters and a few of my bird sketches, set up a small fridge and hotplate.
The guys upfront lent me their dolly to move some things, and I shuffled back and forth from the Uber.
I’ve become good at blending into the background—no paper trail. No noise. That’s how I survived.
I put the day’s tips in my special metal box—twenty-seven dollars, mostly ones.
When I left home, I struggled with panic attacks, but I researched them too.
I found techniques to help me cope and ways to manage them while I lied to myself, insisting I was fine, that I was a survivor, that I was strong.
There was one thing that burned hotter than my fear, and that was something I wasn’t sure I could achieve.
I wanted those men to pay for everything they had done. If there was a way, I would find it.