He worked as a nurse’s aide at Good Samaritan and as a corrections officer at the prison out in Florence, pool and swing shifts at both, irregular hours, so I never had much idea what time of day it was when I felt my box being pulled out. Sometimes, from inside, I’d smell the heavy sweetness of the sundae. I was always excited.
Two years after I was taken, we went to Westwood Mall, the first outing we’d ever had. It was our second anniversary, Danny explained, and he wanted to do something special to celebrate. He gave me a pearl necklace, real pearls, he said, and I promised to behave. He’d even bought a pretty blue dress and shoes for me. At Acropolis Greek I stabbed his hand with a plastic knife, kicked off the shoes, and fled. I was surprised at how easily the knife went in, at the way it broke off when I twisted. Flesh should not be that vulnerable, that penetrable.
After that, I lived in the mall. Found safe places to hide from security guards, came out at night or during the rush hours to dine off an abundance of leftover fast food, had my pick of T-shirts, jackets, and all manner of clothing left behind, read abandoned books and newspapers. I had turned from genie to Ms. Tarzan. Periodically I’d watch from various vantage points as Danny prowled the mall hoping to find me. You may remember apocryphal tales of Mall Girl, sightings of which were first reported at Westwood then quickly spread throughout the city’s other malls. Eventually everyone came to believe the whole thing was ex nihilo, spun from vapor to whole cloth, no more than a self-serving stunt. The journalist who first reported these tales and devoted weeks of her column to following up on them, Sherry Bayles, was summarily fired. Lack of journalistic integrity, the paper cited. Later, when she was working as a substitute teacher, more or less by simple chance we became friends. She’s the only one I ever told about my days in the mall. Endearingly, she did no more than smile and nod.
My Edenic time at Westwood ended after eighteen months. A newly hired security guard gave credence to the stories and lay in wait for me long after his shift was done. I was biting into half a leftover hamburger I’d fished out of one of the trash containers when he came up behind me and said, “I’d be happy to buy you a whole one.” His name was Kevin, a really nice man. He bought me that hamburger, complete with fries and shake, on the way to the police station. There, a Mrs. Cabot from Family Services picked me up.
So the second—third? fourth?—act of my life began.
Next morning I woke up in what they call a holding facility. Whatever they called it, it was an animal pen, thirty or forty kids all stuffed in there. One of them came snuffling around my bed like a pig after truffles around 3 a.m. and left with a bloody nose, down one tooth. At 8:00 they gave me a breakfast of underdone, runny eggs with greasy bacon mixed in and carted me off to see a social worker.
She said her name was Miss Taylor. “The report states that you’ve been living on your own in the mall. Is that right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you’re eleven?”
“Almost twelve.”
“You told the admitting nurse that before this, you spent two years in a box under someone’s bed.”
Miss Taylor was sitting behind a desk in an office chair. She rocked back and forth, staring at me. When she rocked back, she went out of sight. There she was. Gone. There she was again.
“The nurse thinks you made that up.”
“I don’t make things up.”
“You also said that during that time he repeatedly abused you.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Ignoring me, she went on: “That he touched you in inappropriate places, put his member in you.”
“His penis, you mean.”
“Yes. His penis.”
“Sometimes he did. More often it was other stuff.”
I’d made her out to be just another office zombie, but now she looked up, and her eyes brimmed with concern. You never know when or where these doors will open.
“Poor thing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why?”
“Sweetheart—”
“My name’s Jenny.”
“Jenny, then. Adults are supposed to care for children, not take advantage of them.”
“Danny did take care of me. He brought me sundaes. He fed me, he cleaned my box twice a day. Took me out when he came home.”
Tears replaced the concern brimming in her eyes. I had the feeling that they habitually waited back there a long time; and that when they came, they pushed themselves out against her will.
She tried to cover by ducking her head to scribble notes.
Three days later, Mrs. Cabot showed up again to escort me to what everyone kept calling “a juvenile facility,” half hospital, half prison. (Daily my vocabulary was being enriched.) The buildings were uniformly ugly, all of them unrelievedly rectangular, painted dull gray and set with double-glass windows that made me think of fish tanks. I was assigned a narrow bed and lockless locker in Residence A—a closed ward, the attendant explained. Everyone started out here, she said, but if all went well, soon enough I’d be transferred to an open ward.
That was the extent of my orientation. The rest I got onto by watching and following along. Each morning at 6 we had ten minutes to shower. Then the water was turned off, though there weren’t enough showerheads to go around and even when we doubled up, some girls were left waiting. After that we had ten minutes to use toilets in open stalls before being marched in a line through a maze of covered crosswalks to the dining room. Captives from other residences, boys and girls alike, would just be finishing their breakfasts. We waited outside like ants at a picnic. Once the occupying forces were mustered on the crosswalk opposite, we entered.
School was next, three or four grades and easily twice as many ages lumped into one, with a desperate teacher surfing from desk to desk looking as though this, staying in motion, might be all that kept her from going under. Each hour or so an attendant materialized to cart a roll-call group of us away for group therapy (equal parts self-dramatization, kowtowing by inmates, and surreptitious psychological bullying by therapists), occupational therapy (same old plastic lanyards, decoupage, and ashtrays), weekly one-on-ones with the facility’s sole psychiatrist (a sad man whose hopelessly asymmetrical shoulders accepted without protest the dandruff falling like silent, secret snow upon them). Occasionally one of our troop would be led off for shock therapy, only to return with eyes glazed, mother’s milk of her synapses curdled to cheese rind, unable to recognize any of us, to recall where she was or remember to get out of bed to pee or, if she did, to locate the bathroom. One or another of us would take her by the hand and lead her, help her clean up afterwards.
I could provide little useful information about my parents or my origin. Scoop the fish from the bowl, which is the whole of what the fish knows, how can the fish possibly describe it to you? Family Services’ own searches came to naught as well. Back then few enough possibilities for tracking existed. Children’s fingerprints went unrecorded. Enforcement, legal, and support services were not so much islands as archipelagos. I’d been taken more or less at random and kept, first by Danny, then by myself, in seclusion. Four years had passed. Essentially I had no identity.
The long and short of it was, I got assigned as a ward of the court and, barring foster placement, which we all knew to be about as likely as universal health care during a Republican administration, was remanded by the court to the juvenile facility “until such time as the aforesaid attains her majority.” This majority, I found as I burrowed into outdated law books for impenetrable reasons ensconced in the facility’s woeful library, was not fixed. I could petition for it after my sixteenth birthday.