Hidden(2)

When I turned twelve and started menstruating, things got worse. She would wash my hands in scalding hot water because she thought I was dirty, or she would cut my hair off because she said I looked like a whore. It was then I started to ask questions like, where is my daddy? Why don’t we ever leave the house? Why can’t I go to school? Why can’t I have friends? My mother would never answer. Instead, it would trigger an episode, some worse than others, so I stopped asking.

I was thirteen when the skinny man in the suit came to the house for the first time. I had never seen such a look of terror on my mother’s face. I was used to the fat man in the suit coming with the boxes. He never came inside and sometimes he would wave to me. He wasn’t scary. I had never seen the skinny one before. I heard her whisper, he found us, before she hid me in the pantry and told me to cover my ears and close my eyes and to stay hidden. No matter what.

I did as I was told, but nothing could have blocked out the horrifying screams that I heard that day. I’m pretty sure several hours passed before she let me out. I remember her opening that pantry door and me seeing her face swollen and red. Her arms and legs were mottled with black and blue bruises. She never stopped crying, even as she dug the hole in the ground underneath the pantry floor. It took her all night and most of the next morning to dig that hole as she continued to cry. She told me that when he comes back, I need to hide there.

He came back a week or so later. My mother heard his car coming up the driveway and she was able to get me to the pantry before he made it to the front door. I climbed into the hole and then she covered it with a heavy piece of wood to conceal it. The hole was big enough for me to sit with my knees held to my chest. It was unbearably hot and I felt bugs crawling all over me and tickling my skin and playing in my hair, but I kept still and stayed hidden. Tears and dirt dried on my cheeks. My stomach screamed in pain and my throat became raw. I think I sat in that hole for two days before my mother finally let me out. She slid the heavy wood board over to allow me to crawl out. She never said a word. I remember vomiting as soon as I was able to stand on my feet. I drank and ate and then crawled into my bed where I lay sick for three days. My mother just kept wandering around the house, scratching at herself and mumbling. Hot showers became more frequent after that day.

When I turned sixteen, I remember my mother hitting me for the first time. It was after another visit from the skinny man in the suit. Her eyes were dark and she was screaming at me as if she had no idea who I was. Her words made no sense. She came at me in a fit of rage and swung her fists at my face. I fell to the floor holding my head, trying to protect myself as she continued to swing at me with her fists and kick at me with her feet. Eventually, she grew tired and collapsed next to me, repeating over and over that she was so sorry. I shuffled to my room, and curled up on my bed and cried myself to sleep. The next morning she put a lock on my door. She told me I needed an escape or I would end up crazy like her. Every time she had an episode, I would lock myself in my room. Sometimes she would pound on my door and scream until she exhausted herself and I would hold my pillow over my ears to drown out the noise.

The day I turned eighteen, my mother gave me permission to leave the house. Kind of. She warned me about the world outside of the fence, the evil world filled with boys that would hurt me and girls that would laugh at me. She made me promise to stay within the fence and never let myself be seen. She’d say, don’t get dirty Amy and the devil is watching.

For the longest time, I accepted that our lifestyle was normal. I knew my mother was sick, but I also believed that she was protecting me from an evil world, sheltering me within the walls of the fences to keep me safe from boys like the skinny man in the suit. I believed other people lived within fences without cars, computers or phones and never left. I didn’t know any different. I think it was when I started getting novels in the boxes and reading about other’s lives that I realized I was different and just how sick my mother might be. The only books available to me were school textbooks and the classic novels that are usually required reading in high school: Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. I must have read Romeo and Juliet about twenty times. It’s my favorite. I live through my books. I escape into the world of the characters, because otherwise I might die from loneliness or just go crazy like my mother. I have to believe that the love I read about is real. That it isn’t all just make-believe like mother says. That the world really isn’t evil. That not all boys will hurt me and that not all girls will laugh at me. Every once in a while, I would find a magazine at the bottom of the box. Newsweek or Time mostly. Sometimes People. Although I read every single page to keep up on the latest technology and world events, nothing in the magazines interested me as much as the perfume advertisements. There was one in particular that I tore out and kept under my mattress. The picture is black and white. A woman and a man are holding each other in a tight embrace. Their shoulders are bare. Her head is tossed back with her eyes closed and his lips are touching her neck. The look in his piercing blue eyes as he peers up at her is full of passion and desire. I imagine sometimes that I am her, that someday a man will look at me like that.