FOURTEEN
Not long after that eventful day when a new doorway had opened to her, another closed.
Her grandparents were found by the side of the road, both shot in the back of the head with a .22-caliber bullet.
It was a sensational murder mystery on the local news for a few days and then it was gradually forgotten. Angela didn’t know if the police were looking hard for the killer, but it didn’t really matter because even if they were, they never found him and no one was charged with the murders. What mattered, though, was that her grandparents were dead and even if they found their killer that wouldn’t bring them back.
Angela was beyond devastated. She stayed in her room and cried for two days. She felt totally lost. She didn’t want to eat, or for that matter, to live any longer. She wished she had been there with her grandparents and that the killer had put a bullet in the back of her head first so she wouldn’t have to endure the agony of losing them.
Sally took it mostly in stride.
She spent the morning of the funeral smoking meth. She drove them to the funeral in her ratty old Pontiac GTO, a car that had been a fixture in the dilapidated trailer park since long before Angela had been born. Angela sat in the backseat crying. The sky cried, too, with a steady drizzle.
Standing beside the open graves, rain plastering her hair to her head, Angela felt numb. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. All she wanted to do was to hold them and be with them. She didn’t think she could go on without them.
In their will, they left money to pay for their funeral and burial. They left their home in town to Sally. But they left the cabin to Angela, along with an endowment she would receive when she turned twenty-one.
Sally was angry about the cabin and the endowment going to Angela. She ranted and raved that her parents hadn’t left everything to her. She was their only daughter, after all. She resented her parents for it. She hated them for it. She was consoled by the fact that the house in town was worth more than both the cabin and the endowment together.
It didn’t take her long to sell the house. It would have been better to move into the house and sell the trailer, but Sally didn’t see it that way. Selling the house got her more money.
Angela wished she could escape to the cabin, but it was way too far to walk there, and she wasn’t yet old enough to drive.
Once Sally had what she thought of as a fortune from selling the house in town, she started spending it on drugs. Angela knew that her grandparents would not have wanted their house to be turned into money for drugs. But she also knew that it was more important to them that the cabin go to Angela. In a way, Angela thought that giving the house to Sally, even though it would go for drugs, was a way to distract her from what they thought was more important—that Angela have the cabin.
On many a night, the trailer became party central. Friends, neighbors, and strangers smoked, got drunk, and were rowdy late into the early-morning hours. Some did lines of cocaine on a mirror on the coffee table in the living room. Most of them smoked, either cigarettes, meth, or pot. A few shot up heroin. Even when there wasn’t a party, there were frequently tweakers hanging around to share the meth her mother scored, or to supply it.
When Angela left her bedroom in the morning to go to school, there were often people asleep on the couch, in the chairs, or in their own vomit on the floor. She knew most of them, but it wasn’t uncommon for strangers to be there in the house when she left for school.
After Frankie had vanished, Sally had gradually become more and more involved with a new guy, Boska. Boska was some kind of shadowy supplier to dealers, so he had no problem satisfying Sally’s needs. More often than not he spent the night.
Boska was a big man, thick-boned and barrel-chested. He rode a Harley and had a scraggly beard. He hung out with other bikers and sometimes brought them to parties at the trailer. They were the scariest guys Angela had ever seen, but it was Boska who made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
Angela would shut herself in her bedroom when there was anyone other than her mother in the trailer. One night, Boska broke the door so it wouldn’t latch anymore. Then, when her mother was sleeping, he would come in, sit on her bed, and ask her stupid questions, like how she was doing in school or what she wanted to be when she grew up. All the while he leered at her. Boska scared her to down into her marrow.
With her now-ample supply of drugs, Sally was out of it much of the time. She would be up for days, strung out on meth; then she’d smoke pot for hours to bring herself down so she could sleep. Those periods were less like sleep and more like a coma.
It was during those periods of her mother’s comatose sleep that Boska came into her room and the serious abuse began.
Sally’s continual quest for oblivion had earned her badges of scabs. The teeth she had left were rotten. Her eyes were bloodshot and ringed with red. Her once-beautiful face looked like badly crinkled paper plastered down over a skull.
Even though Sally was only in her midthirties, she was used up.
Angela, on the other hand, was maturing into a leggy young woman blossoming with the femininity her mother had lost.
Sally was an easy lay, but Boska preferred Angela. Each encounter was accompanied by threats of what would happen to her if she didn’t keep her mouth shut. Angela was so afraid of Boska that she often lost her voice when he asked her questions. When he smacked her, she could only get out the words she knew he wanted to hear.
In order to stay alive, she submitted to him.
With no one to protect her and no way to escape her new hell, Angela learned to survive those encounters in her bedroom by letting her mind go to another place. What Boska was doing to her dimmed into insignificance. She wasn’t there. She was gone.
While Boska was on top of her and her mind was in another place, she was nearly as comatose as her mother.
When Boska was finished, the threats at knifepoint, and on occasion gunpoint, brought her back from that distant peace and scared her witless. She knew that if she angered him, he wouldn’t hesitate to slash her face, or cut her throat. He promised her a face full of acid if she ever crossed him.
One time when she did say something snotty to him as he was zipping up his pants, he said that if she ever smart-mouthed him again he would give her as a gift to the motorcycle gang that sold drugs for him. She could see in his eyes that he was not making idle threats.
After he left her room and then went to sleep with Sally, Angela would tremble for hours, unable to go to sleep, knowing that there was nothing she could do about it, no one who could help her, and that there would be more to come.
Her fear of Boska kept her from telling anyone at school about the things he did to her. She also knew that Mr. Ericsson wouldn’t be inclined to believe her, and would be even less inclined to help her. She was quite sure that Mr. Ericsson would be pleased to hear that she was getting what was coming to her.
She knew the police wouldn’t help her—Boska had been arrested dozens of times for all kinds of things and he always got out. He was released for time served, the charges were dropped, the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor, or he received probation. He never went to jail for the things he did. He always got away with it. She knew that if she went to the police, Boska would get out, and then when he had her alone she would pay the price for snitching. As far as Angela was concerned, the law was meaningless.
It all left Angela feeling totally alone and helpless. Frankie had been once, but Boska seemed perpetually aroused. He was an ever-present threat.
At one point she began to spend nights sleeping in hidden places in alleys, or in bushes behind other trailers, shivering in the cold but glad to be alone. One day when she came home from school, Boska grabbed her hair in his big fist and warned her that if she didn’t stay at home at night he’d come looking for her, and she sure as hell wouldn’t like what would happen to her when he found her.
After that, Angela stayed at home where he would have ready access to her. Her mother wouldn’t help her, the school wouldn’t help her, and the law wouldn’t protect her. There was nothing she could do but endure it while her mind drifted away to distant places.
She knew that the worst thing in the world would be to get pregnant, so she started on the pill. She got a supply each month from a women’s health clinic in a run-down rented storefront. She had just turned fifteen, and they thought she was too young to have sex, so at first they turned her down. She asked them if they thought she was old enough to have a baby. They relented and let her start on the pill.
Because they knew that some girls had difficult, and even dangerous, situations at home, it was their policy not to call the parents if the underage girl asked them not to. Angela asked them not to.
She seriously doubted that her mother would care if she thought Angela was screwing boys, but Angela knew she would be blamed if she told her mother the truth. She knew it was all too likely to blow up into a screaming fit. Sally would say that Angela had asked for it, and then, when her mother was out of it, Boska would do his worst to her for saying something.
Angela wasn’t sure she cared if he killed her, as long as it was quick, but she feared his threat of acid in her face.
She was relieved when the women’s clinic agreed to provide her with the pill and confidentiality.
After the money from the sale of her grandparents’ house ran out, Angela often became the unspoken source of payment for her mother’s drugs, so she knew that her mother would have a vested interest in looking the other way. If the men got what they wanted, Sally got what she wanted. That was all there was to it. Oftentimes Boska was the gatekeeper for which men could have her in exchange for what Sally received. He told Angela that he was protecting her from the guys who had diseases.
More days than she could count, Angela walked to school spitting out the taste of semen.
As time went on, she slipped into a deep depression. She felt like a trapped animal. There was no escape from the situation and no hope.
She did as she was told by men she dared not cross. She did as her mother told her as well, shopping for groceries and cooking, taking care of chores around the house, and in general doing her mother’s bidding.
She was the girl in the moon passing silently through the gloomy trailer, at the beck and call of psychopaths.
She knew that the only way the abuse would stop was if she were able to get totally out of her mother’s place. If she had a car, she could drive to her grandparents’ cabin—her cabin—and live there. But it would be nearly a year before she was old enough to get a driver’s license. The fact that she had no money to get a car even then only left her feeling even more hopeless.
She lost all interest in everything. She didn’t care about anything or anyone. She only did the minimum to pass her classes at school. Every person she knew used her for one thing or another. She wanted everyone to leave her alone.
At fifteen and a half, Angela started dyeing her hair different colors. In a way, it was the only thing she had any say over. She got piercings. With change she collected from the floor and couches in the trailer she could buy clothes from the thrift store and put them together in a way that in addition to her dyed hair and piercings gave her a forbidding look.
The kids at school were already leery of her. She was the girl who had messed up the face of a much older, popular girl. Now she, too, was older, and bigger. She didn’t take crap from anyone. On top of that, they thought she was a freak, and, because of the standoffish way she acted, possibly crazy. She had no friends. All of that kept them all far away from her.
As far as Angela was concerned, mission accomplished.
She knew that no one was going to protect her. No one was going to help her. She was going to have to protect herself.
In the back of her mind, she knew she had to get away from her mother and the trailer park. To do that, she would need to get older. When she turned sixteen she could get her driver’s license. But she would need a car. Realizing that a car was ultimately her only real salvation, getting money to buy a car became her central goal.
She was able to get a job with a housecleaning service, working a few hours every day after school without being missed much at home. She saved every dime she earned toward a car. Once she could drive and had a car, she would be able to get away.
Because she worked hard at the cleaning service, a manager at a clothing store offered her a job on weekends stocking shelves. Her savings continued to build. She gladly accepted tips she received from some of the people she cleaned house for.
The only money she wouldn’t take was the cash some of the men who abused her would push at her. It was their way of taking the crime out of what they did. If she was selling herself, then they weren’t really raping her. She always refused the money they offered. If they left money in her room, she put it out on the coffee table. She was not about to absolve them of their crime.
Her school had a driver education course, and when she turned sixteen she got her license through the course. As soon as she had her license, she went to a car dealership she had visited a few times previously. With the money she saved, she bought the car she had been eyeing and could afford. It was a well-used silver Honda, but to her eyes it was the most beautiful car in the world, not because she cared about the car itself, but because it meant escape from the abuse.
The day she picked up the car, she drove to the trailer park and packed up her things while her mother was sleeping off a party. There wasn’t much she really cared about, and she didn’t want Boska to come home and catch her, so as soon as she had the basics together in a couple of black plastic bags, she left for the cabin.
Before she left, she wrote a brief note, telling her mother that she was moving away and would not be back.
Driving up to the cabin and seeing those two mountains, one to either side, felt like the warm embrace of her grandparents. She knew she was at last safe. The first thing she did when she got inside the cabin was to load the Walther P22. If they figured out where she was and Boska came to haul her back to the trailer, she intended to blow his brains out.
Angela didn’t worry about her mother coming to bring her home. She was a lot stronger than her mother, and besides, her mother was more likely to smoke some crack as her reaction to the situation than come get her. Drugs were her answer to everything.
Once she put her things away in the bedroom, Angela sat down on the bed and cried with grief that her grandparents weren’t there, and cried with joy that she had finally escaped the abuse at home.
As it happened, there was no need to worry about Boska. He was unexpectedly killed in a motorcycle accident. He ran a stop sign running from the police and was broadsided by a woman in a minivan.
Karma was a bitch.