16. Kinleigh
SIXTEEN
KINLEIGH
EIGHT YEARS AGO.
I keep my eyes plastered on the side mirror, waiting for Neely to look. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him an ally, because he’s a monster just like my father. But, from time to time, he’s offered me crumbs to put my mind at ease.
This morning, he doesn’t look. In fact, he keeps his aviators on, the brim of his hat low, and his focus anywhere but the back seat.
From the center console, my father’s phone rings and he answers it, keeping the volume low.
“We’re around the corner. Send the gate code to Neely.”
There’s a pause. “Same as what we do for the 5kers.”
The 5kers. I know what he’s referencing. While my father doesn’t pluck the women and young girls from the streets, he does take part in the transferring of the victims from one holding location to the next. I’ve snuck into his office plenty over the years, memorizing what I can without actually touching anything.
A 5k file, from what I know, is a young woman who has had an IUD implanted, and who is sold for communal use. I shudder to think what happens to those girls, but then again, what happens to any of them?
“Are you having an IUD put in me?” I ask, gripping the headrest of my father’s seat, dragging myself closer.
An IUD would be a good thing. I’ve already had three procedures done; I can’t withstand another. The emotional pain of a forced abortion is nearly crippling, but the sick desire to have it done so that I don’t become a mother to my father’s child is greater.
I don’t bother pretending that my father doesn’t rape me on a nearly daily basis. Neely is fully aware, and if anyone should be ashamed, it should be Forrest Conway. Neely’s gaze drifts out the side window, as if the conversation at hand makes him uncomfortable.
“Just tell me what you’re doing to me,” I plead as my father drops his phone back into the cupholder.
He steers us toward a gate, and Neely holds his phone out. Forrest eyes the screen then dusts his fingers over the keypad, and a moment later, the gate opens.
He drives us through a small, gated community of homes. They’re all similar, with little driveways and mailboxes on the lawn, so different from what I’m used to out on the ranch. Distracting myself with the neighborhood only goes so far, because one of the garage doors opens, and my father pulls his truck inside. Standing at the door is a man wearing a navy blue tracksuit, white piping down the legs and arms. The garage door closes, sealing us into darkness.
Neely twists in his seat, sliding his shades off. “Get out.”
I don’t say a word but rather, slide out of the back of the truck, dropping to my feet in the garage. For a moment, I think of bolting. Is there a way I could make a break for it and get away? But with my father, Neely and the other man just two feet away, I know my getaway must wait for another day. Soon.
My father grabs my wrist and yanks me into the house. Once inside, he shoves me off on Neely while he speaks quietly with the man in the blue tracksuit.
“Pills?” I quietly ask Neely, but my question goes unanswered.
If I were just getting on pills, why would it have to be a big secret? I look around the tiny home, finding the walls bare, one singular black couch centering the living space.
My eyes move around the kitchen. There isn’t so much as a dirty spoon on the counter, or a crumb on the floor. There are no handprints on the stainless-steel appliances, and there’s not even a garbage can anywhere to be seen. There is no stack of mail sitting unattended to, there are no discarded shoes or forgotten piles of clothing like most homes have.
It’s empty.
This is not a home.
Panic claws up my throat as I peer up at Neely again, searching for answers in his stony expression.
“What’s he doing to me?” I foolishly beg, but Neely gives me nothing.
The man in the blue tracksuit looks at me while speaking to my father as icy panic slips down my spine. Oh my god. What’s he going to do to me? I clutch Neely’s hand, yanking it as I stupidly beg him for help.
“Don’t, whatever he’s going to do to me, please, don’t let him. He makes me help him take care of them, the prisoners. I’m complicit. Please, please, don’t let him,” I whisper-hiss, tears stinging the backs of my eyes.
Just as he’s looking down at me, Forrest appears, glaring.
“Why are you so panicked, sweetheart?” he asks, his syrupy sweet tone roiling under my skin. He smiles at the man in the blue tracksuit. “Let’s calm her down.”
Let’s calm her down means let’s drug her , and I’m so fucking tired of being drugged I could scream. So, I do.
“No!” I cry out, bolting instinctually for the door we came in.
Neely catches my wrist, and before I know it, my eyes are closing as warmth spreads through my veins, making me too sleepy to fight, too tired to speak.
Groggy, eyes heavy, limbs weak, I wake slowly, my mind needing a moment to calibrate. I was in the truck with Dad and Neely, and we were headed to a suburb area outside Buffalo Trails. We went into a gated community.
I am in a tract home, and I’m about to– my eyes flick open as my heart wastes no time, beating fast and heavy, panic seizing my body. The room is yellowish beige, with chunks of textured drywall missing, old smears of brown around it. Blood turns brown in time.
What is he doing to me? In my panic, I surge off whatever I’m lying on, only to realize I can’t get up. I can’t move. I lift my head enough to crane it toward my body, eager to understand what is happening.
Fabric wraps my wrists and ankles, and big thick nylon straps run along my body, one below my breasts and one below my belly button. Using my heel, I bang whatever I’m lying on, and a metallic echo bounces around in the room.
Holy fuck. I’m on a gurney. Strapped to a gurney in someone’s house.
My mind veers to the shipping container buried in the Wild Hills, four miles from our property. Are one of the higher-priced females sick? Are they going to give one of them an organ of mine?
Sadly, though, as bad as I want that to be the reason I’m here, I know they’d likely just kill the prospect before getting her surgery.
I bang my heel against the metal gurney again, this time shouting through the paralytic haze.
“Hey!! Someone help me!!! Help me!!” I holler, knowing that Forrest will probably take a chunk of my hair and mark my ass for calling for help, but I don’t care.
I envision someone rescuing me when I cry for help, and though no one ever comes, I pretend he rides up and saves me. And that’s what keeps me shouting, even though I’ll pay a steep consequence for it.
The man who was wearing the tracksuit appears, only now his greasy dark hair is beneath a surgical cap, and his body is covered in medical smocks.
Dirty medical smocks.
“No,” I breathe, my eyes narrowing in on the particularly dark smudge of dried blood along his abdomen. “No, no, no!!!” I scream, I thrash, and I scream some more.
I scream so hard and so long that there’s a pop in my throat at one point, my vocal cords all but giving out. Then a mask comes down over my face, and I can’t tug it off because my hands are still bound at the wrists.
Neely appears. His eyes are cold when he looks down at me, and something cold rushes out of the mask, straight up my nose and into my mouth. I try not to breathe it in, I try to avoid it, but my free will is slipping through my fingers like hot sand, I can feel it.
I can feel it but there’s nothing I can do.
“He’s sterilizing you,” Neely says, and it sounds like a whisper but the world is growing groggy, so I can’t be sure.
He leans down, and I think he’s really close, but my eyes are hard to keep open. He plucks the mask from my face at the behest of the man at my side. They argue a moment, I think, or maybe not.
I don’t know.
I can’t feel anything.
Even the pain is gone from my heart right now.
“Kinleigh,” he breathes. Then I think he says something that sounds a lot like goodbye, but I don’t know for sure, because Tracksuit has the mask on my face again, and I’m lost to the cool, calming air filtering through my veins.
When I wake up, Tracksuit is standing there, his medical garb gone but for the scrub cap. He looks across the room but I’m too weak to turn my head.
A terrible memory crowds my mind, one of Neely being at my bedside, telling me that my father was having me sterilized.
I think of all the beautiful children I always dreamt of having, and refuse to believe it’s true.
“Bleeding is normal. Six weeks, tops. Anything more, bring her back in.” Tracksuit drops his gaze to me. “Wear a pad. No tampons for six weeks. And no intercourse.”
I blink, and though the mask is no longer on my face, I don’t bother speaking.
“Do you understand?” Tracksuit asks as his gaze nervously ping-pongs between me and whoever is across the room.
It must be Neely and yet when a phone rings, I know it’s my father.
He comes to the side of the bed with his phone to his ear. “You’re dead if I find you first,” my father cautions, a muted, heavy rumbling coming from the phone. He ends the call, glaring at me while speaking to Tracksuit. “Put her in my truck. Passenger side.”
An hour later, my father drives us home. He tells me that Neely is gone, that he’s a backstabbing traitor who will burn in hell when it’s his time. He doesn’t tell me that he paid that man to take away my ability to be a mother, that he gave my body to that man to mutilate without my consent, the same way he doesn’t tell me that I am forever his prisoner, but as I stare out the window at the countryside flitting by, I know both are true.