“Don’t make a sound,” Jane whispers so softly I can barely hear her. “He’s pissed. She’s done something bad.” I blink, trying to wake up.
The girl screams again, and in the mix of her screams and raging words, he speaks in a low tone. I can’t hear anything he says, but her sobs quit for a moment, and I hear the thing that makes her scream. He strikes her. It’s the sound of a lash. Like whipping a person with a belt. She screams again, and every inch of my body feels her pain. I am so tight and trembling that my muscles are spasming from the exertion of holding myself this way.
He strikes again, and again she screams but I think a little less. At the next strike, she doesn’t scream at all. He shouts something muddled, something I don’t understand, and the door slams again. The lock clicks in anger. His movements are rough and overly done, making more noise than is necessary. He’s snorting and spitting when he leaves the area, again crashing and slamming doors. His footsteps find their way back in; he rattles a lock. The door slams open and shut, and his grunting is obvious. One of the girls, maybe the fallen redhead, getting this violation is silent. She takes the grunting and the savagery without a sound. He’s done in seconds, and the door opens and closes again roughly.
There is no sound once he’s gone. The redhead is either dead or passed out from the pain.
We sit in the dark, waiting for something to change, something to bring us back to life.
Jane whispers to me, soothingly, “When I was a girl, I had a sister named Andrea. We were twins, she and I. She was the better child; my parents were always angry with me over small things. But Andrea was perfect. I rarely remember details of the life I had before the accident. I think I locked them away so I could make my parents perfect in my mind. But they were flawed in a few ways. When they died in the accident and I had lost my memories, I made certain I created new ones of them. I took pictures of my parents and told myself lies about them. Lies that made my life before the accident perfect. But then I went to the orphanage and I learned there were kids with stories so bad, mine seemed a bit sad, really. My parents had loved me, my sister was my best friend, and my house was clean and beautiful inside. The other kids from the orphanage had terrible lives. They’d been taken from their parents. Or they’d been left at the orphanage. I realized then that nothing about my life was as hard as theirs, and that I needed to be positive about my past and my limited memories. The nuns taught us that rarely is the truth of the matter the truth of the matter. Rarely do we see what’s behind the story. They taught me not to pity the children left there, because they were safe and loved, in a way. And perhaps their lives were better than what they might have been.” She lowers her face to my fingers and kisses softly. “This place and this life and this hell are the same. We cannot see the driving force behind what is wrong with him. We cannot pity the other people here, because we do not know the whole story. We can only be positive and hope for the best. That’s what survivors do. We don’t take on the shit we see and hear and suffer. It isn’t ours. It’s being done to us, but it doesn’t define us.”
I feel a tear slip from her cheek to my fingers, and nod. She can’t see me or know that I have agreed with her, but I can’t speak. My heart is aching, and my stomach is on fire.
We sit in silence and wait for a noise from the room. Part of me hopes the redhead is dead, freed from this terrible fate.
“Do you believe in God?” I whisper to Jane.
“I don’t know. I believe in miracles. I believe in science. I believe there is something else. The nuns taught us to believe in God, and taught about the goodness of him, but in this place it is hard to see the light. One of my favorite sayings is that only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars. And so we should be able—there is no darker place on earth. But I dare say the view from here is rather bleak and the outcome is rather hopeless. If I see the stars once more in my life, I will count myself lucky.” Her positivity talk doesn’t seem to have lasted long on her. I think it’s a weak moment, made entirely from the fear we both feel for the girl named Jenny.
So I do the thing she does. “We will see the stars again, Jane. We will see justice for the things that have happened here.”
She answers with a squeeze of my fingertips.
It is a long time, filled with tense silence, before we hear a noise. It starts with a whimper and then a shaky moan. Jenny cries out to us, “M-m-my b-b-back, m-m-my skin is t-t-torn.” She heaves her words. I’m certain each face of the other seven girls is the same as mine. Scrunched and wincing in desperate empathy. “P-p-please help me.” She starts to sob, and my need to help her worsens. I grip Jane for dear life, not sure what a single one of us can do.