CHAPTER 39
I end up spending seven days at the hospital in Vienna, four of which I was unconscious.
On the eighth day, an ambulance picks me up to transfer me to a hospital in Denmark. I’m more than relieved that I got medical travel insurance when I left for Budapest almost a year ago. I nearly skipped it because I couldn’t imagine needing one, but my cautious disposition made me check the box anyway. But no amount of boxes could have saved me from the nightmare that awaited me in Budapest.
András stays with me until the moment the ambulance takes off.
“Call me any time,” he says, taking my hand. “If you need someone to talk to or just need to know that I’m there for you—it doesn’t matter. You have both my private number and my office number. Use them.”
He got me a new phone a few days earlier and must have saved his numbers on it. Until now, I’ve only used the phone to call my sister, but I do think I’ll take him up on his offer.
“Thank you.” I squeeze his hand and try to convey my sincerity through my eyes. No words can express how grateful I am for everything he’s done for me. Without him, I couldn’t have gotten through any of this. I would have been sent home as an empty shell. András has given me a spark of will to move on and make something resembling a life for myself in Denmark.
I spend another three days in a Danish hospital before my sister comes to pick me up and take me to her place. Part of me is disappointed she never came to see me at the hospital in Vienna—or even here. She did call and send flowers, but a sister is supposed to show up when her sibling’s life is hanging by a thread. It’s not like I was halfway across the world.
I guess this is yet another testament to the nature of our relationship. Besides, I never came back to visit her during the year I was away. I might’ve had good reason, but she doesn’t know that—at least she didn’t. So I guess I can’t really blame her.
Plus, she’s making up for it more than plenty by letting me stay at her place until I get back on my feet.
I have no idea where I’ll go when it’s time to move on. I have no attachments here besides my hometown, and I’m never going back there. My parents are out of my life for good. Their blaring silence as I lay in the hospital confirmed that. I didn’t get a single phone call, a card, or even a get-well from my sister on their behalf. Dead silence.
It hurts. No matter how much I detest them, it’s painful to find out that your own parents don’t care about their daughter being hospitalized in critical condition.
So I’ll choose someplace new, probably a city where I can blend into the crowd. Thanks to the sadistic billionaire who provided for me for months, I have enough money to start over somewhere new—even if it takes some time to find a job.
My sister does everything she can to be the good sister she strives to be. She has transformed her husband’s home office into a guest room and provided me with a few clothes, toiletries, and a stack of books to get me started.
“Just let me know if you need anything,” she says as she shows me the room. “I’ve cleared three drawers for you.” She points at the tall dresser beside the desk. “You can put your things there once you get them.”
“I have no things coming,” I say tentatively and set the small teddy bear on the nightstand. It’s all I have—the green-eyed teddy, my phone, and the hospital clothes I came in.
My sister reaches for the bear, and I’m quick to snatch it back.
She looks confused, almost offended, and she can’t hold back her accusatory tone. “What happened, Rebecca? I’ve been worried sick.”
I get it. For several weeks before the knife incident, I ignored her calls and texts, feeling too broken to keep up the charade. Then suddenly, I’m hospitalized, and no one tells her anything. All she knows is what the doctor knows: that my body was covered in cuts and I was circling the drain when I arrived at the hospital.
Shaking my head, I look into the teddy’s innocent eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Are you for real?” Her pitch rises. “I’m letting you stay here, and you won’t even tell me what happened?”
Tears brim in my eyes, and a slight tremble settles in my bones. This is typical of my sister. She wants to do the right thing, and she does succeed on the outside, but always fails miserably on the inside. Her empathy is as wanting as our mother’s—at least toward most people. She showers little Sophie with all the love a child needs, but everyone else has to work hard to gain a little sympathy from her, and for the next two weeks, she keeps raining agitated questions down on me.
I end up telling her I was attacked and can’t remember much, but it’s hard to make up a convincing story when I’m face to face with her.
“Is it one of those men you sought out?” she says with a mix of outrage and horror painted across her taut features. “The ones who beat you?”
Cold ice slithers down my back as my every muscle contracts. I can’t even get an answer out; I just rush back to the guest room and curl up under the covers where I lie trembling for hours.
My sister’s words spread through me like a virus, festering in my body and mind. I’ve never felt sick for craving the warped things I like. Shame has eaten away at me for the way my body betrayed me at the hands of Gabor, but I never truly felt it was my own fault.
But now, things change.
My mind wanders back to the first time I saw Gabor. Our eyes only locked for a moment, but it was enough for Gabor to see the warped desires hidden deep within me. Even more so, the way I cast my eyes down revealed my submissive nature and stirred the beast inside him.
I wonder if things would have turned out differently if I had stopped the reaction and kept my eyes up. Then he might have lost interest and found another girl. Maybe I would still be strolling along the river, watching the old castle and the water. Maybe I’d even have found a nice Hungarian man, who would keep my romantic image of the city intact.
Or what if I had never even left Denmark in the first place—if I had let my parents get me the help I needed? Maybe I’d be cured and have found a way to be happy in the life I was living back then.
I force myself away from the poisonous line of thinking. Deep down, I know as well as I did back then that I’d never have found an ounce of happiness in that soulless existence. And If I hadn’t left, I’d never have met Janos, and if I hadn’t lowered my eyes, I wouldn’t have… the thought trails off as I remember what Janos told me—he was the one who led Gabor to me.
Clutching the little teddy bear, I stare into its eyes like it holds all the answers. Would Janos have taken me for himself if our eyes had locked that day he saw me outside the restaurant?
My heart pounds so hard it hurts.
And what then? Would I have stirred his protective instincts so much he would keep me, or would he have discarded me after using me?
I don’t know, and I wouldn’t dare to find out even if I had the chance.
I’m not sure I’d change anything if I could.
The thought only makes me feel worse, and thus starts a cruel circle of self-deprecation.
I feel utterly broken, but at least I’m not so broken I can’t recognize that staying at my sister’s is bad for me, so I start looking for my own place.
Not even little Sophie, who I once adored, can make me feel anything but broken.
She often yanks at the hem of my blouse. “Auntie Rebecca, will you take me to the park?” she asks with a huge smile that has a black hole in the middle where a tooth is missing.
I used to love taking her to the park, and I do relent a few times, hoping it will spark some of the joy I experienced back then. But it doesn’t. I can no longer take part in her innocent games. I’ve seen too much to pretend the world is a happy and carefree place.
It’s not just our small trips to the park that are darkened by my shadow, though. It’s their whole happy little family. They never say it, but it’s all too clear. My sister is stressed and snaps more at her husband than I remember her ever doing, and even little Sophie gets a harsh reprimand she hasn’t deserved.
So I take the first best apartment I can get and leave after only two weeks. It’s a cheap and cramped studio—even smaller than the one I had in Budapest—six miles outside a sizable city. I could probably have gotten something bigger, but I want to be sure I can afford it for a while since I don’t know when I’ll be able to get a job.
It’s a nice and well-kept building, but the walls are thin. I can constantly hear people moving around in the adjacent apartments. To make matters worse, there’s always some old lady trying to chat me up when I come and go.
If I had my way, I’d live in some remote place where I wasn’t constantly confronted by friendly people trying to catch a smile or a friendly chat. They’re all over the place here—neighbors, cashiers, even people in the street. It’s claustrophobic, really.
In Budapest, I rarely minded the crowds, not even when I was at my worst. Despite being closer to people there physically, I felt a greater distance. Everyone was a stranger, spoke a different language, and not least, minded their own business. I barely even knew how my neighbors looked. Even the tourists who spoke a language I knew were far from me—people passing through that I’d never see again.
Here, people are stuck. They want to know each other, settle down, and get comfortable in small bubbles of buildings and streets, routines and dead ends. Here, there’s not one and a half million people to get lost in; it’s only in the small city center that I feel a sliver of the anonymity I experienced in Budapest.
Some days, I consider moving far away from everything—find a secluded house in a forest or something. But fear and loneliness would eat away at me. Here in the city, it’s easier to keep them at bay. When I go to sleep at night, it’s reassuring to hear footsteps above me and faint music on the other side of the wall—signs that there are people close by who would hear if I screamed for help. Yet, my troubled mind often gets the better of me, tainting the sounds in dark, ominous colors to the point where I’m sure someone is trying to break in.
I rarely sleep through a whole night without waking with cold sweat on my forehead and my pulse pounding in my throat. Sometimes, I’ll even wake from my own screams.
It also happens that the guy in the apartment below comes up to ask if everything’s okay. He’s an athletic man in his early twenties, who clearly isn’t deterred by the idea of a violent boyfriend or a thief. He has no idea what kind of people are out there—men who’d break into a young woman’s apartment and rape her without qualms or regret. Despite his strong build, the guy wouldn’t stand a chance against a man like Janos, and sometimes I almost want to laugh at his reckless bravery.
And then I want to cry at the thought of Janos.
But at the end of the day, I’m grateful to live in a place where people show concern for each other—a place where you can count on the cops showing up no matter who the perpetrator is.
So I guess it’s not so bad living here after all.
It doesn’t take me long to get a job waitressing at a coffee house—one of those large chains that has several cafés in the city. The pay is only a little better than what I earned in Hungary despite the taxes being much higher here, and the working conditions are barely any better either. But I’m not going to complain. I’m just happy to have a job, so I won’t sit around all day alone with a slew of horrific memories.
Now that I have a steady income, I’m seeing a therapist once a week. András is the one who convinces me to do so. We talk several times a week, and since I rarely open up to him about what I’ve been through, he keeps insisting that I see a professional.
I try to be open with the therapist, but for some reason, I can’t tell her about Janos. I only mention him as a side character and never by name. What I do tell her, though, are all the horrible things Gabor did to me, which gives her more than plenty to work with. Talking about it is like living the nightmare anew. I spend several days after a session being utterly devastated, screaming my throat raw at night and crying my eyes out for hours on end, so I try to schedule the sessions before a day off.
Despite the breakdowns, my therapist keeps insisting that things will get better, and after a couple of months, I do start to feel the effect. My nightmares become less violent, and my drops into hopelessness are shorter and less devastating. But at the end of the day, everything feels meaningless. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing of importance and no one I’m important to. It’s like the pain dissipates and leaves an empty pit because there’s nothing new to fill the space. In some ways, the emptiness is as bad as the pain. I can go days without feeling anything at all—no devastation or anxiety, but also no hope or longing. I almost feel as dead as I did during the weeks Janos kept a cold distance.
One day, my therapist hits something essential within me—a crack in a solid wall that threatens to make everything burst and release the riptide into the open to destroy everything in its path.
Suddenly, I feel too much. I hate everything and everyone—my parents, who have written me off, my sister, who has gone back to calling once a month, András, who took me away from Janos, and Gabor, who sullied everything that once was pretty and innocent.
But most of all, I hate Janos. I hate him with the full force of my angry soul. Not only because he led Gabor to me and helped him violate me countless times, but more so because he sent me away—forced me away from the only person who ever mattered to me. I hate him so much that I come close to ripping the head off the little teddy bear several times, but somehow I always manage to rein in the rage long enough to stuff the bear into the back of a closet and start hurling porcelain across the room instead.
Almost two weeks go by in this furious state. One night when I can’t take it anymore, I take the bus to the ocean. The beach is dark and vacant, and hard gusts of wind have me shuddering in the cold spring air.
I haven’t been close to water since Budapest. It still makes me anxious, and the ocean never did appeal to me the same way a lake or a river did. It’s too violent and chaotic. Today, though, it’s just what I need. The waves hit the shore with wild splashes, and when I let out a furious scream, the endless ocean seems to swallow the sound. So I scream again and again as I step closer. Suddenly, the all-consuming urge to merge with the water that I often felt on the Chain Bridge rises within me.
I kick off my shoes, shrug out of my jacket, and discard my purse. Then I roll up my pants and step onto the wet sand. Here, I don’t need to fall over a rail to feel the water; I can walk straight in.
An icy shudder rolls through my body as the first splash hits my legs, yet the pull of the water is strong enough to urge me on. I take another step and feel the water wrap around my ankles. A few steps more and the edges of my pants get wet. A little farther and I’m in to my thighs.
The water is like a good old friend who knows me well. It understands the violent emotions whirring inside me, and it embraces my rage with open arms. For the first time since I left Janos’s arms, I truly feel like I belong somewhere, so I go farther out, screaming as I crash my angry arms into the wild waves.
My teeth chatter whenever I relax my jaw, and painful tremors have my body in a vise. But it’s nothing compared to the pain I’ve lived through. It can’t compare to the grisly feeling of a knife dragging across my ribs or the betrayal of my body climaxing at the hands of my perpetrator.
Most of all, it can’t compare to losing the only person who ever truly mattered to me.
After fifteen years of dreaming myself away into a postcard, I finally broke free from the smothering confines of my hometown and felt free. As quickly as I gained that freedom, it was ripped away, and I thought I would never find it again. But Janos gave me a place in life. It was dark and grim, full of pain and hopelessness, but when he was at my side, it was all meaningful—I was at home.
I hate him for taking that away from me. I hate him for throwing me away so easily—just another girl that Gabor was done with.
I scream into the vast endlessness and take another step forward. One more, and another. There’s nothing left for me in this life. If I can’t be with him, I can’t be anywhere.
A tall wave crashes into me, throwing me several feet back. I gasp for air and run my hands over my wet face.
Memories crash into me with the same force as the wave. The horror etched into Janos’s face when he found me on the kitchen floor and saw the knife I had cut myself with; the fierce possessiveness when he had seen András hold my hand; the sincerity in his voice when he said I was the only woman he’d ever cared about. Those are things I’ve remembered all along, but they’re not the only memories that slam into me. Shock and realization strike as I remember things that happened while my mind was shrouded in blackness or pain, unable to hold on to any information: Janos punching Gabor when he tried to cut my feet, the desperate edge in his voice when he cleaned my wounds and told me to stay with him, and the pain in his voice when he said goodbye.
I lean my head back and stare into the open sky, stunned by the things I’m only now seeing clearly for the first time. Janos betrayed Gabor to save me.
My heart pounds against the narrow walls of my ribcage, and my mind spins as I try to comprehend it. I knew he cared about me, maybe even loved me in his own special kind of way, but I also knew loyalty is everything in Janos’s world.
Janos risked everything to save me—perhaps even his own life. He did it to give me a chance at freedom—or any life at all.
If Janos hadn’t asked András to get me out, I would have been dead by now.
And fuck, it couldn’t have been easy for Janos to ask András for help.
All the anger that has festered inside me since I woke up in the hospital dies away as the magnitude of what Janos did dawns on me—and not just when he saved me. From the very moment our eyes locked that first night, he tried to ease the pain for me. And he did. He gave me something worth living for—kept the fire burning within me. It was the thought of him that made my hands clutch the rail all those times I wanted to fall into the water.
Another tall wave hits, and this one knocks me over as I didn’t see it coming. The powerful force pulls me under, submerging me into the turbulent sea. I flail against the water as I try to regain my footing, but once my feet touch the sandy bottom, I realize the water has pulled me farther out. Setting off against the bottom, I surge upward. Just as I breach the surface, another wave hits me, throwing me back under and farther away from shore. Panic thrums through my system, thick and blinding. But I do see one thing clearly. I don’t want to die—I need to get back to Janos.
All I can think as I fight against the unyielding water is that I need to tell Janos that I’m not free without him. It doesn’t matter if I die doing it or end up back in Gabor’s clutches; I just need him to know. Determination fuels my strength, and I somehow manage to breach the surface and swim through the current until I can reach the bottom and trudge back to the shore.
My muscles ache from the effort and my entire body shakes from the cold when I reach the beach, but I don’t collapse in the sand like my body begs me to. I go straight for my purse and take out my phone. I curse as the screen refuses to react to my wet hands, and when I manage to unlock it, my fingers are so stiff that I hit the wrong buttons several times. Finally, I find the contact I need and hit the call button.
“Rebecca,” András greets with unusual urgency. “How are you? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”
He’s been calling me for several days, but I’ve been too emotional to pick up. I know I owe him an apology, but something else takes precedence.
“Can you find Janos?” I’m not even sure he’s still alive. If Gabor found out what he did, he’d surely make him pay. But I need to find out. It’s all that matters.
My heart beats away with anxiousness as András draws out with a long sigh. “Rebecca, you can’t contact him. It’s dangerous, and it’s not good for you. You need to move on.”
Anger surges through my veins anew. I want to yell at him for thinking I’m sick like everyone else does, but that’s not why I’m calling. “Do you know where he is?” I press.
“No. All I have is his first name, and I’m not even sure it’s his real name.”
“But you helped him. You talked to him. You must know something.” My voice becomes shrill, and my teeth chatter so loud he must hear.
“Rebecca, what’s going on? Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter. Can you help me find him or not?”
Another moment of silence.
“Can you?” I say with frustration.
“No. I’m sorry, but—”
I hang up. I know it’s not okay. This is no way to repay everything he’s done for me. He’s the only person in my life I want to keep in it, so I should make an effort, but right now there’s only room for one thing.
I call a cab and quickly gather my things before heading for the road. My hair and clothes are dripping, my hands are blue, and I’m shaking all over. I try to rub some warmth into my arms, but the cold has gnawed its way deep into my bones, and when the cab finally pulls up beside me, I’m so stiff I can barely open the door.
The driver looks shocked and asks if I’m okay repeatedly, suggesting that he take me to the hospital instead of home. I reject him with a frustrated tone every time. No one is getting in the way of me finding Janos.
I haven’t lost my sanity more than I’m capable of realizing that I need a warm shower when I get home. The hot water is blissful and numbs my mind for a while, but the moment I’m out of the stall and under the covers, I take out my laptop.
And thus begins several days of restless searching.
I call more than a hundred people named Janos in Budapest, read anything I can find on Gabor and crime in Budapest, contact the embassy, and even call my old coworker who set me up with the contact, who got me the pepper spray.
Not a single clue appears. It’s like he’s a phantom.
Soon, I have to acknowledge that I can’t find him myself, and neither can the normal authorities. I need someone to help me. Someone who knows this world. So I form a new plan.
I’m not sure if it’s a very realistic one, but I have to try. The first step is to save up a lot of money, so I take more shifts, working up to fifty hours a week, and I stop seeing the therapist to save the money and save my energy for work.
I still talk to András a few times a week, but I don’t mention Janos or my new plan, and he doesn’t mention my strange call inquiring about him. He says I sound good, and I actually do feel better. I even manage a little humor and idle chatter about trivial things.
But even though it’s good for me to have a goal to work toward, the despondency and despair sets in every now and then, and I feel myself trembling with fear when my mind ventures into scenarios involving Janos being dead. The fear almost eats me up some days, but when it starts affecting my work and I have to call in sick, I pull myself together, determined to do everything in my power to find him.