55. Memphis

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

memphis

F or the first time in all the years that I could remember, there were no racing thoughts to try to sort through on the way up that staircase. It didn’t even feel possible. Of all the times for absolute panic and terror to paralyze me, this should have been it.

I was standing at the top of the stairs just a few moments later, never having hesitated to get there. My feet carried me toward the hallway that would take me to the bedrooms for the kids who were brought to this hell. I watched my hand reach out for the wall on my right side. My fingertips fell effortlessly into place in the grooves left behind by so many sets of small fingernails. Not acknowledging the marks felt like it would’ve been disrespectful. Not acknowledging the people who’d left them behind as they were carried or dragged down this hallway, even knowing there was a good chance that several of them wouldn’t even be alive anymore, felt unforgivable. They deserved this moment of recognition now.

I was never able to acknowledge them then. I was never able to recognize that we coexisted in the same giant bundle of pain and brokenness while it was happening.

But I could now.

I could let myself feel it again as an adult who’d probably never been safer in her life, even while she ventured right back into her personal hell. Utah’s presence changed everything about this experience. Even if there was someone hiding in this house, waiting specifically for me, I’d walk back out of here. Nothing inside these walls could be more dangerous than the man following me. To realize power like that was available to do my bidding at the point of a finger was invigorating. And for the brain that overthought fucking everything to find a way to simply accept that realization as absolute fact brought an intense kind of freedom that was nearly impossible to describe. It was a calm that I could confidently say I’d never felt in my entire life. Never.

The first door on the right was the room where I’d stayed. Everything inside me should’ve been screaming at me to stop; to turn around and run, to sprint as far away from this place as I could get. Instead, I stepped right through the open door. It was every bit as sad as I’d remembered. Knowing that children were forced to live in these conditions was truly heartbreaking, but nothing about seeing it now was as terrifying as the memories suggested it would be. I stayed still for another few moments, simply assuming that some kind of breakdown was coming. Or a brain aneurism, at the very least, from having successfully held back all thoughts for the first time in my life.

The only thing that happened was Utah taking a step around me to begin looking in the room himself. If he was horrified by what he was seeing, he didn’t let it show. He remained perfectly expressionless while the smell alone should’ve been enough to bring any grown man to his knees. The handful of twin mattresses spread across the floor were probably the same ones that were here the last time that I was.

I knew firsthand that those mattresses were covered in every single thing that could come out of a human body. Most of us were girls. Several of us were way too young to be expected not to wet the bed when we were afraid. Some of us were too young to realize that if we didn’t use the bathroom before we were supposed to be in bed for the night that we wouldn’t be allowed to leave the room again until the morning, regardless of need. We were here during several of the cold months and the room had more than one broken window. More than one of us ended up sick during that time, and none of the adults cared about who had a stomach bug or who vomited where. Two girls experienced their first menstrual cycles in this setting.

They knew kids were resilient. As long as we stayed alive and could follow instructions, they weren’t willing to invest anything else into improving the way that we lived.

Utah stopped at the broken window through which I’d convinced our roommate to jump to cause a distraction. He turned back to look at me like he knew. There was no way he could’ve known. There were two other broken windows in this room. It could’ve been any of them. But my own guilt over that particular situation had me entirely convinced that he knew; that he could feel it was that window. Rather than leaning out the opening to look down at the ground, at how far of a fall it would’ve been so that he could turn back and call me a monster, Utah only nodded before he went right back to inspecting every corner, every floorboard, every mattress.

We went through the other three bedrooms the same way. I’d never actually been in the others before that day. Two of them were identical to the one where Em and I were kept. The third was behind a locked door and I had to wait for Utah to break into it before I realized what it was.

“Do they hire a fucking cleaning person for just one room?” Utah seethed from the doorway behind me while I entered the room.

“Three women were in charge of our lessons, of the practicing ,” I explained while I walked between the three perfectly kept beds complete with frames and linen in this room. “I guess it never really dawned on me that they actually lived here with us.”

I watched Utah drag a finger across the headboard of one of those beds and rub the dust that came off it against his thumb. The very noticeable streak it left across the headboard suggested that, even though this room was way nicer than the others, it still hadn’t been cleaned or occupied in a long while. Utah went through the effort of opening every dresser drawer and checking every corner of this room and its closet thoroughly while I only paced around it in awe.

I’d never spent any amount of time trying to understand the kind of human who could live in a house like this, who could oversee the things that went on in this space, who could sleep in this room while children simply tried to stay alive in the other rooms. Seeing this room, though, put all of those thoughts right at the front of my mind. Trying to grasp the kind of life someone would’ve had to have lived previously to end up with a job like this one felt insurmountable. There was no explanation that would be good enough. No horrid background story or level of blackmail could be reason enough to do this to children.

By the time I’d stopped wandering aimlessly around that room, I looked toward Utah to see him watching every step I took with intense focus. He still hadn’t said anything. I couldn’t believe he’d said so little for the amount of time that we spent in this house already. If the roles had been reversed, his ears would’ve been bleeding by now from having to field my thoughts and questions. We didn’t say anything to each other until we were standing back at the top of the stairs, after we’d gone through the entire second floor.

“How do I get to the basement, sugar?” he asked quietly. “You don’t have to go down with me. Just show me where it is.”

That was why he hadn’t said anything. He was dreading that question. I led him back down the stairs and through the room that they’d used as a makeshift doctor’s office when someone needed medical attention to stay alive. I opened the closet door and pulled up the carpet to point at the little hatch that was cut into the floor with the padlock on the latch.

Something between a sigh and a growl came out of Utah just at the sight.