Chapter 39
thirty-nine
. . .
Sacrifice
Thirty-eight years ago
lynda carlisle
eighteen years old
The air had been frigid that day, the old house creaking and the radiator thumping like its life depended on it. In reality, all the girls that lived within the Jennifer Grace Cottage lives depended on the enveloping warmth of the far outdated radiator. The whole contraption taunted the girls with its pitiful powers that often left the home as frigid as an igloo. Lynda gave the radiator a kick, realizing she’d need to tinker with it again. She had the magic touch, the only one who ever seemed to get it working right.
She was just about to head to the closet in search of the toolbox when the front door opened, a gust of cold air bursting in with it. Lynda looked up to see who was entering, and in tumbled their newest housemate.
The teen girl was horrifically thin, blonde with stringy hair and dark circles cupping the hollow space below her eyes, as if ready to catch tears. Lynda had a feeling that the well of tears in this poor young girl with the small smile and timid wave was all but dry.
Something lurched in her heart for the poor thing. Perhaps it was that the latest newcomer reminded Lynda of her own mother. Frail. Broken. Helpless. A shell of a soul, barely even standing. She wondered what the girl was high on, the marks of self-medicating clear all over her frame.
Lynda was tasked with showing the new girl around. Hope, that’s what she said her name was, though the sardonic laugh that accompanied it told Lynda that hope was the last thing she felt.
Lynda could relate.
“I was raped,” Hope said, sitting at the edge of Lynda’s bed. Lynda fought the urge to tell the tired and tattered girl to get up and shower before soiling the neat folds of her small cot, the one place she actually considered her own within the home. Now was not the time for her compulsive neatness, though.
“Raped?” Lynda asked, as if it was a word she did not understand. Of course she understood it—had lived it herself, time and time again. Many of the girls of the home had.
Still, the word “rape” was one no one liked to use. Lynda felt herself tensing at the sound of the word’s compilation of vowels and consonants. Yet she admired this girl’s ability to say it without hesitation.
“Yes, raped,” Hope repeated, eyes in a glaze as she stared at the threadbare carpet below them. Finally, her pale and haunting eyes looked up at Lynda. “For the final time, anyway.”
It was all she spoke that night. After her admission, Lynda directed the girl to her own bed, the one on the other side of the small window. Lynda had enjoyed a brief few weeks of having a room of her own in the house, but she did not mind the company of the home’s latest newcomer .
The mattress creaked with a piercing wheeze as Hope curled her small frame into a ball, turning away from Lynda. The dots of her spine could be seen through her thin sweater, stretching out across her back like old railroad tracks, desolate and searching for some unknown destination.
Lynda rose from her cot. She lifted the plush blanket she had purchased with her own money and draped it over the girl’s body. Lynda felt that Hope needed it more than she did.
Hope had the kind of speaking voice that told Lynda she came from money—more so than anyone else in the home. In the following days and weeks, she opened up to Lynda, explaining that her parents had died two years prior in a car accident, when she was fifteen. With no extended family able to take her in, no friends willing to take on the responsibilities of a teenaged girl, she was placed into foster care. Lynda wondered how it was possible that someone with means could end up homeless, just like she had been. It scared her to realize that life really never did provide any guarantees, even when you came from roots that offered promises of more.
When spring came with its breaths of fresh air and budding blooms, Lynda showed Hope the small garden behind the cottage. She taught her how to dig out holes and bury bulbs, ensuring the roots were down, the pointy sides were up, explaining that these were dahlias and lilies, and they would bloom in the summer. When Lynda pointed to the rose bush, asking when it would bloom, Lynda smiled to herself at Hope’s wish for the most unoriginal of flowers, ones she herself never cared for. She found she was a little more excited for the roses to bloom this year.
Hope proved to have a green thumb as well, and together they worked the cottage’s garden, expanding it to include herbs and vegetables. Fresh mint for tea. Basil, cucumbers, and tomatoes for summer salads. The cucumbers grew in abundance, and Hope and Lynda guided the younger girls into slicing them and filling mason jars with a brine of vinegar, water, dill and any other spices they wished to have. The result was their very own homemade pickles to accompany their ham sandwiches.
The girls poured over books in the library on all things botanical. There was something wonderful about getting their hands dirty in the soil. Something powerful in knowing they were capable of manipulating the earth in a way that produces small treasures. Hope expanded their operations to making tinctures, drying herbs and flowers, and experimenting with the right vinegar ratio, wishing she could get her hands on alcohol for the proper recipes. For now, as she was attempting to stay clean, she’d stick with her natural remedies.
Soon the adventure turned to beauty endeavors. The girls saved their money to purchase various oils. They’d stand in the kitchen, heating and blending and laughing at the explosions of beeswax and aloe as they attempted to emulsify concoctions to make lotions and creams. “I’m going to sell these one day,” Hope would say. “Figure out the key to eternal youth.”
Lynda would nod and say she couldn’t wait to see. For both girls, youth had been robbed from them, replaced with hardships the young and innocent should never know.
It was in the midst of this growing friendship that Hope finally shared with Lynda the rest of her story.
Lynda had always assumed an old boyfriend or dealer had been Hope’s rapist, but instead her friend shared that within a few weeks of being in her old foster home, the man of the house had taken an inappropriate liking to Hope. Midnight groping would leave her disgusted and stunned.
At that house, Hope had shared a room with two other girls, twins who were three years younger than she was. She quietly took the man’s abuse, figuring at least she could keep the twins safe. She’d sleep in the bed closest to the door, always ensuring any nights he came in, he’d see her first. It was hell, but it was better than standing by and watching two twelve-year-olds receive this punishment.
She thought about saying something, sure. But she knew it would be hard to get anyone to believe her. Surely not the man’s wife, who always sided with her husband when disagreements arose. She could tell her social worker, but Hope feared what would happen when the man would inevitably deny it. Foster families willing to take in teens were hard to find, she had learned. Would the state be desperate to keep this home on the roster, removing Hope from the house but leaving the twins behind? She couldn’t take that risk.
When his actions escalated and he was lying on top of her one night, she got through it by imagining the way she’d kill him one day. How she’d get out of the house and find a way to murder him, ensuring no one else would ever endure abuse by this man. It was the only way she could survive, by fantasizing all the ways she’d watch the life disappear from his face. Lynda knew the feeling.
It was two years later when the twins were reunited with their biological family. Hope decided it was time to share her story with the social worker. She was a senior in high school, nearly on her own soon anyway, but she couldn’t stand the abuse for a minute longer. While powder and pills had helped her cope, she was determined to find some semblance of the person she once was before the hell of losing her parents, then gaining a rapist.
Hope was removed from the home and placed at Jennifer Grace Cottage, but as suspected, she learned that the man denied everything. The coward blamed the drug-using teen for lying, and so he was able to keep his standing as a foster home.
There was no justice served.
Lynda listened quietly to all of this one summer night when they had snuck out of the house and were perched on a bench in a park, trading sips of rum from a bottle in a brown paper bag, acquired through a sweet smile and friendly wink given to the drunk walking in the liquor store at ten o’clock that morning. The perfect target, the man happily agreed to buy the girls whatever they wanted, taking their money and returning with the prize. They were seventeen and eighteen by then, and would be heading off to college soon thanks to scholarships and a small sum of money Hope was to receive upon her eighteenth birthday. The girls would room together, never leaving one another’s side. The bond of sisterhood, brought together by the darkest of circumstances.
Heads spinning and bodies full of booze, they jumped on their bikes and rode around. Hope steered them down the winding streets until they reached the dirt road leading up to the shabby old foster home of her own personal horrors. They giggled, dropping their bikes to the side and sneaking around in the dark, between bushes, peering in at anything they could see. Hope wanted to know if there were any children in the home suffering as she had.
When a light came on in the house, Hope slowly rose from her hiding spot, eyes glued on the man opening the fridge, assembling himself a midnight sandwich. Lynda pulled at her hand, whispering for her to get back down, what the hell was she doing, but Hope was in a trance, eyes laser-focused on the man in the kitchen, now walking toward another room.
A light switched on outside. Lynda watched in horror the moment the man saw Hope. She grabbed her pseudo sister’s hand, telling her they needed to go. Now . They began running toward their bikes, stashed twenty or thirty yards away, the girls drunk and stumbling in their escape. Lynda’s heart was racing. She couldn’t believe they had been so stupid.
Lynda made it to her bike, grabbing it and ready to take off, when she realized Hope wasn’t with her. She looked behind her, saw the man with one hand clamped around Hope’s long hair, the other over her mouth as he pushed her to the ground. In a panic, Lynda raced back to them. She jumped on the man’s back, punching with all her might while he gripped his hands around Hope’s throat. It was no use, though. Her punches might as well have been mosquito bites to him, nothing more than an annoyance. She scrambled around to find the rum bottle, discarded in the grass. She raised it up, slamming it down on the man’s head with all her might, while her friend’s blue eyes bulged in shock and horror. Two slams to his temple, blood gushing from his head, and he released Hope. Gasping for air, she scrambled to her feet, telling Lynda, “Come on, we have to get out of here,” but Lynda stopped her.
The man groaned on the ground, hands held to his face and covered in blood. “We can’t,” she panted out, trying to catch her breath. “We were trespassing. He’ll tell, and we’ll be done for.”
Hope was crying, saying they would explain what happened, it was self-defense, he had been strangling her, it would be fine. Everything would be okay.
But Lynda knew better.
She knew that this man’s word against the girls’ was not a thing to allow to happen. Lynda was eighteen, Hope about to be eighteen herself. They’d be tried as adults, and their lives would be ruined.
Lynda scanned around and found a rock big enough to do the job. She heaved it in her hands, standing above the man and saying a silent prayer for forgiveness.
Three more blows to the man’s head, she gave each one all the force she could, and then he was still.
They waited a minute. Then a minute more. The night around them was silent, save for the quiet hum of the house’s condenser unit as the air conditioning turned on.
They were leaning on each other and breathing heavily, scanning for any signs of life from both the surrounding area, and from the man on the ground.
Thankfully, there were none.
Lynda rushed around to grab the remnants of the broken bottle, instructing Hope to do the same. It was dark, they struggled to see, but the dried and patchy grass and dirt of the yard allowed them to collect most of it.
They collected the rock Lynda had used and dropped all the items in the baskets of their bikes before doing one last scan for evidence of their fight. They left the man there and rode along in the dark, far away from the house, eventually stopping at a curbside trash bin. Lynda dug through to find a bag to open, adding in the makeshift weapons with the remnants of someone’s pizza dinner.
Then they raced to their cottage and snuck back inside, washing dirt, blood, and sins down the drain.
It wasn’t long before the news of an investigation into the death of the man, left beaten to death in his yard, hit the newspapers. Lynda and Hope decided that if Hope was somehow identified as a suspect, Lynda should not be tied to her. So, they decided to change the plan. The girls would not go to college together.
“If the police should ever question you,” Lynda instructed, “you say nothing. We were home all night, right?”
Hope nodded. “Home all night.”
Parting ways was not what they wanted, but it was the safest way to keep Lynda out of jail. “Secret ‘til the end,” they promised one another. “We take this to the grave.” They hugged and cried and assured one another they’d make their way back into each other’s lives. Lynda prayed it was true.
When Hope turned eighteen, just a week before the girls were to head off to college, she received some money from her family’s small estate. Thirty thousand dollars, ten of which she gave to Lynda.
Lynda tried to refuse it, telling Hope that the money was hers. She couldn’t possibly. Hope insisted, smiling through tears and telling her friend she could pay her back one day if she really wanted, but either way, Lynda was going to take the money.
“I will absolutely pay you back,” Lynda said as she hugged the friend she was heartbroken to have to say goodbye to. “With interest.”
“With interest?” Hope said, blue eyes sparkling.
“Oh yeah. I’ll double it. Quadruple it. Hell, I’ll pay you back times ten.”
Hope laughed. “Times ten? That’s a hundred thousand dollars. You really see that kind of money in your future?”
Lynda nodded, zipping the last of her bags and swinging it over her shoulder. “I really do. For us both.”
Hope handed her the check and said, “Deal, then. Times ten.” They hugged with one last round of promises that when this was all over, they’d reach out to one another again. They’d find their way back. “But I’ll be changing my name, just a heads up,” she said. “Hope just doesn’t feel like the name I want to go by anymore.”
Lynda looked at her friend—her sister, really—sad to hear her say that. “But my girl, we have hope ahead of us. Tell me you believe that.” Tell me I didn’t kill a man for nothing.
Hope shook her head. “I want more than just hope.”
Lynda could hardly argue with that. And a name change might be another good safety measure. “Okay, then. What are you going to go by?”
Her blonde sister who looked nothing like her grinned. “I want to be Holly. Like the Holly bush, the symbol of protection and resilience.”
Lynda smiled. “It’s perfect,” she said, before adding, “Love you times ten, Holly.”
“Times ten,” Hope—now Holly—agreed.