CHAPTER 1 #3
“Here. You got the money or you want my discount?” he asked as he handed me a bag filled with little white pills.
I slid them into my pocket, confident no one could see us where we stood.
The club had cameras in the parking lot, but we weren’t in the line of them.
“ Little short on cash this month, huh sexy?” Justin taunted when I didn’t instantly reply to his question.
The truth was I had been hoping he wouldn’t ask if I wanted discount, because I knew I would be tempted to take it, even though I shouldn’t.
I’d told myself I wouldn’t. Never again.
But I needed a coat and boots, and I could buy more food if I didn’t spend as much on the pills.
It was so cold and I would need to heat the apartment for my Mum all winter, since she often forgot to put a jumper on, or even get dressed out of her nightshirt, most days.
Chicago winters were freezing, literally, and my Mum would just let herself sit and get hypothermia if I didn’t leave heat on in our apartment all day– which was expensive.
I needed every cent I could hold on to and it wouldn’t be the first time I took the discount, not by a long way, but I’d forced myself to turn down the offer for the last few months, trying to tell myself I had to maintain my dignity.
But when it came to a choice between dignity, or freezing and starving, I chose to let dignity go, just as I had time and again in recent years.
“How much?” I asked as I looked up at him.
“We’ll call it three for the pills with the discount, like usual,” he replied.
I took a shallow, panicked breath, and closed my eyes for a second to steel myself, then I nodded.
It would be over in minutes, because it always was with Justin, and I’d have enough extra cash for what I needed.
It wasn’t even that big of a choice, given the circumstances.
I handed him the cash he wanted, needing to be able to flee when this was all over.
“Good,” he nodded as he checked the cash, then slipped it into his jeans pocket. “Let’s go.”
I wasn’t breathing as he led the way to the back of his truck and opened the rear door. I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I could have if I tried anyway. Instead I slipped down the leggings I was wearing, leaving my coat, which came down to mid-thigh, covering me for the moment.
“Bend over,” Justin said and I could hear the sound of him loosening his belt buckle, then the zip of his jeans.
He slid his hands up the back of my bare thighs, his touch making every muscle in my body tense in revulsion.
Tears filled my eyes as he slid his hands over the fabric of my thong, then squeezed both of my butt cheeks.
“This body,” he breathed heavily. “You know I’d take care of what you need if you just stop fighting me, Cara. ”
I hated when he said my name. He’d tried to ask me out a ton of times. He wanted me to be his, and he told me he’d support me and make sure my Mum had the pills she needed if I accepted his offer.
I hated that I had actually considered it, but I had, more than once.
The man repulsed me, but how much worse could life with him be?
He seemed to earn a decent living dealing drugs.
He drove a nice car. Maybe I could clean him up a bit, and he wouldn’t gross me out so much?
At least I wouldn’t have to work myself to death, day in and day out.
At least he’d pretend to care about me. I needed that more than any of the other stuff.
I just needed someone. I was so tired of being alone and afraid.
I had been that way since I was eight years old and it was destroying me piece by piece.
I didn’t know how much longer I could go on as I was.
Just to have someone hold me, care about me – even if it wasn’t real – I needed that.
I had learned how to survive without help, but that didn’t mean I was good at it, and it sure as hell didn’t mean it was what I wanted.
“Just get on with it. Have you got a condom?” I demanded instead, refusing to show my weakness, fighting hard to cover the waver in my words and the tears trickling down my cheeks.
“Don’t worry. Always wrap it up,” he told me. I listened closely as he ripped open a wrapper, then I glanced over my shoulder to make sure he had the condom on, but as he lined himself up with my centre, I looked away and pressed my head to my hands where they rested on the back seat of his truck.
I tried not to cry out in pain when he pushed into me, but I wasn’t ready, or in any way turned on, and it felt like he tore me in two when he pushed into me.
Thankfully, he was little more than what the strippers at work called a ‘one pump chump’ and it was over quickly, but I could feel where there would be finger marks on my shoulders and hips where he’d held me as he brutally pumped in and out of me.
I know he was talking to me as I scrambled back a step from the truck and wrenched up my leggings, but I didn’t hear the words. They sounded tinny and hollow in my head and I couldn’t focus on anything but getting away from him.
All I know is that he was laughing loudly as I finally got my coat wrapped tightly around me and started running.
The pills were safely in my pocket and I had cash for what was important.
I hated what I had done, or allowed Justin to do to me, but I had needed that cash.
It wasn’t like he had taken anything from me that I hadn’t already lost or had ripped away anyway.
I swiped angrily at the tears running down my cheeks as I hit the busy street out front and got lost in the crowd.
There was no use crying or mourning for things I never had and could never get back.
This was my life. I was alive. My Mum was alive.
Right now I could think little past keeping it that way.
It took everything I had left inside of my hollow body to do just that.
The walk back to our run down, crumbling apartment building went by in a blur of me beating myself up for giving in.
I was angry with myself for putting value on things like a warm coat and boots that didn’t leak water inside of them in the snow, over my own body, but when it came down to it, those things mattered.
Me not catching my death in the cold, so that I could continue to get to work each and every day, mattered.
My body was just a tool at that point, or at least that was the way I needed to think of it, because I didn’t have time to fall apart.
I stopped outside the door of our apartment on the second floor and took a calming breath.
I was pretty sure my Mum would be ready to leap at me or at least throw something when I opened the door, since she had been without pills or booze all day.
I needed to be ready. It was made worse by the fact I hadn’t stopped at the store as I planned to, so I had no vodka to appease her, but I needed to shower before I went anywhere else.
I’d deal with numbing my Mum with the pills I had, then I’d shower and get the groceries later.
A plan. That was what I needed to get me through the next hours and over the freak out I was having in my head.
I put the key in the door and opened it cautiously.
I was going to peek through the small gap to see where my Mum was in the room, but then I realised the lights weren’t on, which was never a good sign.
My Mum would often sit in pitch darkness, hiding in a corner, or in her wardrobe when she had decided something suspect had happened that meant Marcello had found her.
It was definitely going to be a longer night than I thought if my Mum was trapped in one of her episodes.
“Mum?” I called as I stepped inside and went for the light switch.
I pressed it and nothing happened. I pressed it several more times, and still the apartment remained in utter darkness.
No light could come in from the street because my Mum had long ago covered all of the glass panes with newspaper so not one crack of light could get through.
I had stopped trying to convince her we needed to let light in months ago.
Sometimes it was easier to go along with her delusions and coping techniques, no matter how crazy they were.
“It’s just me. Did you take the light bulb out again?
” I asked as I walked further in and closed the door behind me.
That was something else she did. She told me it would make it harder for the men who were coming after us to find us if they couldn’t turn the lights on.
I just hoped she hadn’t fallen or cut herself when doing it this time.
“Mum?” I called again when she didn’t answer me.
I strode into the tiny lounge area of the smallest one bedroom apartment in the world – I was sure - feeling confident of the layout, even in the dark.
There was a lamp beside the sofa that I intended to flick on, but I stumbled over something on the floor, and when I tried to catch myself, my foot landed on something even bigger and I ended up falling on my butt with a small cry, and landing in a wet patch.
“Fuck!” I cursed, praying it was water I had landed in, that my Mum had spilt, rather than a result of her having an accident, which had happened before.
I reached behind me, following the line of the old, ratty sofa until I reached the table beside it.
I got a hold of the base of the lamp and flicked the little switch there to turn it on.
I didn’t want to move when I didn’t know what my mother had smashed up and left all over the floor this time. If there were glass…
My thought was ripped from me as the light flicked on and I glanced to my right.
Blood. I had seen blood out of the corner of my eye, and now I had seen it, I could smell it too.
There was a strong scent of copper in the air that made me feel instantly nauseous.
I looked around me, terrified my Mum had fallen and hurt herself.
My instinct was to scream at the sight that surrounded me, but I held it back and instead clamped a hand over my mouth to be sure.
I don’t know why I didn’t scream. Something inside me told me not to.
Then I just sat there, completely frozen.
My entire body went numb, except for my heart which was beating so hard and fast I was sure that was the reason my body started to shake so violently.
I made my head move to look at it all again, even though I knew I shouldn’t.
I didn’t want to see it again, and yet I had to, because it didn’t feel like it could be real.
I didn’t know that kind of horror could even exist in the world.
But it was still there – my Mum, her body cut up into pieces and spread around the floor as if the pieces had been arranged that way for some sick, twisted display.
I sat in the centre of the tableau, in a lake of blood that covered the floor for as far as I could see around me.
Opposite me, on the floor, her eyes open and seeming to stare right at me, sat my Mum’s dismembered head.
The rest of her was cut up into tens of pieces, and the room around me was in disarray like there had been a fight there.
“Oh God,” I whimpered. I knew I had to move – knew I could be next if whoever did this was still in the apartment, but I couldn’t make my body move at all.
I just sat there, my own mothers blood soaking into my clothes with every second that passed, frozen by an equal mix of horror and terror.
I couldn’t stop the thought that ran through my mind over and over again – Did my father, or my brother do this?