Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
FADE
Van Doren Prep is back in session in two weeks, and there are thirteen rescued children now. Doc Molly says the oldest is seven.
Envy has given them all names with their mostly nonverbal input. She doesn’t know exactly what happened to them, but she knows. Envy is a sassy little girl, and I absolutely adore her personality. She also has keen eyes and very adept observation skills.
Her father is never far from her when Envy is at the school with the kids. He keeps his distance, though. Some of the kids are uneasy with men around, just as we’d been preparing for based on Alice’s reaction as a newly rescued child.
When I arrive at the school, the kids are running around outside.
I park by the golf carts and other buggies and join the group of adults.
There are half a dozen women playing with and supervising the kids.
Greylyn, Jalon, Axl, Myro, and one of the younger generation I’m less familiar with, Sulien, are watching from afar.
Before I go to say hi to Lana, I stop by the table they’re sitting around under an umbrella.
“Hello, Fade,” Greylyn greets.
I smile and join them, setting the small bag I’d been carrying on the ground beside me. Axl slides me a glass of lemonade. I incline my head in thanks. “Hey.”
“Visiting Lana?” Axl asks.
I nod. “I am. I brought her another stuffy.”
I receive a lot of smiles.
“Can I ask you what you plan to do with them? And yes, I hear how that question sounds like they’re objects. Not my intent.”
Myro laughs quietly. “We know you don’t think of them that way.”
Greylyn sets her drink down. “We were just discussing that, actually. School begins in a couple weeks. As early as next week, we have students and staff arriving. We also don’t know how many more children we’ll rescue.”
“I’m going to ask this as someone coming from a place where I don’t really know how you operate, but I’m guessing turning them over to authorities and CPS isn’t an option?”
“They’re just as likely to have more traumatic experiences in CPS as they are a pleasant one,” Axl says. “They’ve been through enough, so we’re not turning them over.”
“It also means if we turned them over, then law enforcement would get involved, and that’s not an option we’re willing to accept. We know how these people would be dealt with, and quite frankly, that’s not good enough,” Myro says.
I nod. “I don’t disagree. I’m just… I guess I’m wondering what’s going to happen to them.”
“We’re considering taking them on as wards of the estate,” Greylyn says, meeting her father’s eyes.
Jalon smiles slightly. “We’ve done this before on a much smaller scale, and by smaller scale, I mean one victim came home and one set of my brothers have raised him like a son.
Right now, our biggest obstacle is living quarters.
We don’t think they’ll be comfortable in the big house, constantly surrounded by strangers coming and going all day and night.
They’re doing well in this environment.”
“But school starts soon,” Sulien says, and Greylyn nods.
“Exactly. It’s not so much the sleeping accommodations we’re concerned with.
Again, it’s the number of people they’re surrounded with.
The increased number of strangers. We want a location that’s less traumatic and less likely to be triggering, but we don’t have somewhere that will be ready within the next week or so,” Greylyn says.
“Thus, our conversation,” Axl says.
“I think Erez told me you have a hotel on the property?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
The lot of Van Dorens laugh at my reaction.
“We do,” Greylyn says with an amused smile.
“It would be easy enough to move the play equipment in the backyard closer to the hotel,” Jalon says, nodding.
“What about the cottages?” Myro suggests.
“I think they’re all empty right now. That’s more than enough room for them.
They’ll have the wildflower field, and the playground can be moved over there.
They’ll be removed enough from most of the activity on the estate where they should feel comfortable.
They’ll be able to have some privacy. If we break them up by the number of bedrooms in the cottages, we’ll use three or four.
One adult per cottage and per three or four kids is reasonable. ”
“I like that idea the most so far,” Greylyn says. “I like that they’re not in the cabins and surrounded by trees. They have a clear and long view of everything around them. I think that’ll give them more confidence in their surroundings.”
“Can I ask another question?” I ask.
Axl shoves me lightly. “You don’t need permission for every question, Fade. Just ask.”
“I don’t want to overstep.”
“You’re not,” Sulien and Greylyn say at the same time.
“Thanks. I’m wondering if they’ll have access to a therapist.”
“Yes,” Greylyn says. “We have two of our cousins heading this way over the next couple months. We’re planning to begin with group therapy, based on age. We’re taking a guess right now, but from what Aven has figured out, the children are abducted around two years old, on average.”
I’m not the only one who makes a disgusted face.
Greylyn nods. “We’re going to assume that all children are taken into their operation at two, so the older they are, the longer they’ve been a victim.
None of us have, thankfully, had the misfortune of being a victim like this, so we’re going along with our cousins’ recommendations for therapy as well as what logically makes sense to our uneducated-for-this-situation brains.
They’ll begin with age-based group therapy so they’re not alone with strangers, and, hypothetically, they experienced the abuse for relatively the same length of time. ”
“Your cousins—are they…”
“Both female. Both licensed child psychologists who specialized in childhood trauma in school. One just graduated in May and acquired her license last month. The second has been practicing for several years now. They’re working on transferring their licenses to practice in Arizona, which is why there’s a delay in their presence,” Greylyn says.
“You feel better about the situation with the kids?” Axl asks.
I bow my head and smile. “Sorry. I hope I’m not being nosy. I guess Lana has me far more invested than I ever imagined being.”
“She chose you,” Greylyn says with a soft smile. “Knowing what she’s been through at the hands of men, her trust in you is huge, and I think you feel that.”
“I do,” I agree, nodding. “Saying this out loud might sound heartless, and I don’t mean it that way, but I don’t want her to end up like Alice. I want her to survive and live a happy, full life without the demons that will cling to her in the coming years.”
“We all want that,” Axl says. “I don’t know if you know, but we grew up with Alice.”
“I know.”
“I can’t claim that any of us were incredibly close to her. She tended to stick close to her brothers. More so than I think any of the Deth boys realize to this day,” Axl says. “It’s easy to say, in hindsight, there were signs that we didn’t recognize.”
“Maybe we imagine there were signs,” Sulien counters. “Because our consciousness needs to say that there were. It’s a form of guilt we all hang onto. If we’d just recognized this one thing and told an adult…” He shrugs.
Greylyn and Axl agree with sad nods.
“We will do everything we can think of to lead them down a different path,” Jalon says in his soothing voice. “We are fortunate that there are no limits to what we can do. As long as we can think of something, we have the means to make it happen.”
“As sad as it is, Alice’s death has opened our eyes, and we are looking at our family, our friends, our students, our staff—everyone we’re surrounded with—a little more closely.
We’re more attuned to their behavior and take note when something shifts,” Greylyn says.
“It’s awful that it took her death to make us all more aware, but we’ve learned since then.
We will do everything we can to make sure we never lose someone else.
Especially not the kids she opened our eyes to. ”
“One of the things we’ve introduced to our staff since Alice’s death is better, more thorough training on recognizing signs of mental distress,” Myro says. “There are yearly trainings required by the state, and we have our own, too. This is one area we’re constantly expanding on.”
“This year, we’re adding lessons that are age appropriate for our students too,” Sulien says, and I have to guess that he works at the school.
“The teachers have their hands full with sixty kids in their grade, and they do a damn good job. But that’s roughly a dozen instructors per sixty students.
If we teach the kids how to identify signs that their peers are struggling, that’s seventy-one sets of eyes on every single student in a grade. ”
“I’m not sure if you’ve met the triplets’ three younger kids, have you?
” Axl asks me. I shake my head. “Our uncles, Avory and Ellory, were constantly teaching their kids about good touch and bad touch. My earliest memory of this was when Brodrie and Sawyer were not quite three. I was eight. I’d fallen off the monkey bars and ended up with a big bruise across my face from where I hit the pole.
The way those two-year-olds converged on me to demand that I tell them whether it was bad touch that caused me a bruise will forever be loud in my head.
As I look at these kids, I think about that and know that we can give them age-appropriate tools that we can build on as they grow to recognize when there’s something suspicious happening with a peer. ”
“That’s really cute,” I say.
“It is,” Axl says, grinning.
“I think we raised our kids in a bubble before my triplet brothers had kids. For various reasons, two-thirds of the triplets have always been far more aware of the ugly in the world, and they made sure their twins understood good and bad from an early age. No one else did that because we know that there’s no safer place for our kids to be than right here on the estate where the ugliness can’t reach them until they’re older,” Myro says.
“I think we wanted to pretend that it wouldn’t reach them even when they were old enough to leave the estate,” Jalon says.
“It wasn’t until the twins started noticing every damn bruise and Band-Aid we wore that the lessons of good and bad touch began spreading through us kids,” Axl says.
“I think most of my lessons on good and bad touch were from the twins,” Greylyn says, smiling fondly.
“My point on this long trip down memory lane is that the conversations and lessons don’t need to be heavy for our youngest kids.
As I said, the twins were not even three when they saw my bruise and were ready to raise hell because they thought someone had bad touched me,” Axl says.
“They took it as their responsibility to ask because family is huge with us. They love us, so they made sure they watched, even if they didn’t consciously decide to do so.
It wasn’t long before we were all watching each other and looking for signs of bad touch. ”
“We just need to expand upon that teaching and look for injuries that aren’t visible, like Alice’s,” Sulien says.
“The Brodrie-Sawyer method is perfect for visible wounds. Developing a method that works with our young kids for invisible wounds will probably be a trial-and-error process. We’re fortunate that we tend to have our kids for almost seven solid months so we can watch them, especially as they transition between here and home. ”
“Do all the kids live in the dorms?” I ask.
They all shake their heads.
“About half,” Sulien says. “Although right now, probably closer to two-thirds. There aren’t a lot of Van Dorens here right now since our youngest cousin is eighteen and in her last year, but we didn’t live in the dorms; we lived at home.
There are probably half a dozen in every grade that live off campus in town with their families.
There are some distant cousins here, but they live in the dorms because their families aren’t close. ”
“Erez has told me about growing up here. It sounds pretty great,” I say.
They smile.
“It was,” Axl says. “Just so you don’t get some complex that we’re removed from everyday teenage angst and shit, I still knocked up a girl when I was fifteen, so… It was a very normal experience.”
I laugh. “Wow.”
He hums, and his attention turns to the kids. Probably to his kid.
“I’m going to go say hi to Lana,” I say.
They wave me off as I get to my feet and grab the small bag from the ground. I feel better knowing that there’s a plan for the rescued children.
I only make it halfway to the playground where they’re playing before Lana spots me. She breaks free and runs toward me, but she’s stopped by one of the attendants who dives to catch her from running off. Lana points at me, and the woman I recognize as Jessie lets Lana go.
I’m happy to see Lana is wearing shoes now. Stopping where we collide, I bring her into my arms and hug her tightly.
“Hey, you,” I greet.
Her arms are fiercely tight around my neck. I don’t know why she trusts me. She couldn’t even see my face in the dark parking lot when I caught her. But she heard my voice, and for some reason, it allowed her to trust me. Now I just want to protect her from the world.
A place in my heart is terrified that she’s not going to survive the aftermath of her abuse. That’s what drove all my questions this afternoon. She’s been through enough. She deserves good things now. She deserves to escape the darkness she’s suffered.
“Are you having fun with your friends?”
Lana leans back in my arms to look at me and smiles.
Her hand rubs along the little patch of hair on my chin then onto my head where she rubs the short, coarse hair there.
Then her little finger traces along the delicate chain around my neck.
It’s the first time I’ve worn it, so even though she’s just a little kid and doesn’t understand the significance of me wearing it, my cheeks flush.
She nods. “Yes,” Lana whispers, and it’s the first word I’ve heard her say out loud.
As much as I want to celebrate her talking to me, I don’t want to make her feel pressured into talking more, so I ignore the pride and excitement in my head and hand her the bag in my hand. She doesn’t take it but touches my painted nail.
“You like nail polish?”
Lana nods.
“I’ll bring some tomorrow, and we can paint your nails. Okay?”
Her smile is wide in response.
“Here. This is for you.”
She peeks into the bag and grins more. Lana pulls out the little cat stuffy and hugs it to her chest. Then she snuggles into my arms, and I carry her to a bench close to the playground to hug her for as long as she wants to be held, despite the heat.