Once inside, the privacy screens are up, and our designer clothes are shed as he instructs us in his own version of a live show.
We do as we’re told, including the new girl, despite the fact we don’t even know her name. I’d like to say this was somehow fun, or perhaps erotic in some way. But I can’t. I don’t feel anything anymore. I simply do whatever he says.
Thirty
It takes a while, but I open my eyes and sit up on the bed. I’m one part of a mass of bodies. Flashes from the night before flit through my mind. There was a time when I woke from a night like that and felt cheap and dirty, but that’s long gone. I don’t care enough to be upset anymore. I’m numb.
“Look at Paige,” a girl called Chelsea giggles as she points at my naked body. “She’s so skinny that she looks like one of those starving kids on TV.”
I walk over to her and grab at her face. “Shut the fuck up.”
“You’re just jealous because Reggie likes me better than you. He’s not calling you up as much anymore.”
Chelsea is fairly new. She put up a huge fight when she got here, but now she’s just like the rest of us. Completely dependent, and willing to do anything he asks.
I grab a fistful of her hair and pull back hard. “You’d better start eating Paige or he’ll get bored with you and toss you out.” She laughs defiantly.
I curl my lip back and spit in her pretty face. The other girls in the room just look on uncaring, or else they don’t even hear or see.
“You’re a bitch, Paige,” she says, wiping off her face as she gets up to leave the room.
I roll my eyes and reach for a silk robe and slip it on my frail body as I scan the group. In the middle of the bed I can see a tuft of red hair where Maxine is still lying, fast asleep.
“Hey, Maxie,” I call out to her, tying the sash at my waist as I walk back over to the bed, shaking her awake. But she doesn’t stir. “Maxie,” I say again, louder this time.
“Oh shit,” Jenny, the girl on the bed next to her says. When our eyes meet I know it’s not good, the bottom of my stomach feels like it just dropped out. “She’s cold.”
“No,” I shriek, rushing to sit next to her. Everyone in the room scatters as I try to lift and shake her. “Wake up damn it. Wake up!”
Her head rolls from side to side as I shake her about even though I know there’s no point. Her skin is bone cold. Her lips are blue. There isn’t a single piece of life left in her.
“Reggie!” I screech.
He appears in the doorway, followed by the other girls. He swears and calls me over to him. Still clutching Maxine in my arms, I shake my head in refusal.
“I said, come here,” he growls, as he grabs my hair before dragging me out and dumping me on the couch.
“Stay there,” he commands, a finger pointed in my face like I’m a dog.
He speaks in soft tones to some of the other men in the apartment. They’re his security and our handlers. They do whatever he asks just like us girls do, but they do it because he pays them.
One of them walks over to me and grabs me around the waist, dragging me, kicking and screaming to the ‘cool down’ room. I want to know what they’re going to do with her. I want them to call an ambulance. I want them to do something to help.
“Why am I in here?” I scream. “I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“You’re becoming a problem. Calm the hell down,” he says as he shuts then locks the door.
I scream my head off in there, but it makes no difference. The room is completely sound proof.
Thirty-One
The day the numbers start back up
I don’t know how long I spend in the cool down room, but eventually my body is kind enough to let me pass out. When I come to, I’m not at Reggie’s anymore. I’m somewhere else.
The stench of the room is a mix of rotting garbage and human filth. I look around, and I’m lying on a stained mattress laid on the floor of a large room littered with other filthy mattresses, broken bits of furniture and listless bodies.
There are a group of people huddled in a corner, passing around a pipe. Am I in a crack den? When I sit up, a sharp pain stabs through my middle.
“Ow.” I cry out as the pain radiates around to my back and fiercely clenches at my abdomen. I look around me, desperately searching for someone to help me.
A person, or maybe two, give me a cursory glance, but that’s about it. No one really cares.
I force myself to stand and weave my way towards the door. I have no idea where I am once I make it outside. The area looks industrial. There’s nothing familiar.
Clutching at my stomach, I walk until I come to a petrol station. The smell of the gasoline is strong in my nostrils as I stumble past people standing by their cars, filling up their tanks.
I must look a fright, as a woman gasps when she sees me and hisses at her kids to look away.
When the automatic glass doors open, I step through and freeze as a burst of warmth seeps between my legs. When I look down, there’s a dark stain spreading on my pants. Touching it, I look at my hand. There’s bright red on my fingertips.
“Are you all right, love?” the cashier asks carefully from behind the counter.
“I…I…” I stammer. “I think I need an ambulance.”
Pain rips through my middle, and I cry out from the shock of it, my knees buckling beneath me as I fall to the floor.
As I lose consciousness, a man’s concerned face appears above me. Slipping away, the last words I hear are, “Be careful, mate. She looks like a druggy. Who knows what diseases she has?”
Thirty-Two
People are speaking underwater as a rocking sensation shifts my body. Feebly, I reach my hand up and try to take the thing off my face that’s causing pressure.
“Leave it alone, love. It’s helping you breathe.”
I force my eyes to focus so I can make sense of what’s happening. I think I’m in an ambulance. An EMT flicks a light in my eyes, causing me to recoil as he asks me who I am.
“Paige.” My voice muffles behind the oxygen mask. “Paige Larsen.”
“OK, Paige. You’re in an ambulance on your way to the hospital. We’re going to take care of you. Do you know how long you’ve been pregnant for?”
“Pregnant? I’m not…” I mumble, confused. I’m not pregnant.
“It’s all right. We’re almost there.”
Pain radiates through my middle again, and I start crying. “Make it stop,” I wail. Why haven’t I died yet?
“Paige, we need you to tell us what drugs you’ve been using.”
“I don’t… I don’t… argh.” I writhe in pain. “What’s happening to me?”
“You seem to be in premature labour.” What? How?
I release a howling cry as my abdomen screams again.
“It’s all right, Paige. We’re almost there.”
* * *
When we arrive at the hospital, I’m wheeled straight through as the EMT’s tell the doctors and nurses everything they know about me. I get asked again what drugs I’ve been taking, and I’m really not sure what Reggie gave me. Some sort of compliance cocktail he called juice. Take your juice, honey. But I don’t think I’ve had any for a day or maybe two. Not since I found Maxine. I wouldn’t be able to feel anything if I did.
As we burst through a set of doors, my pains get closer together, and my back feels like it’s locked into one big painful knot. These feelings can’t be normal. It feels worse than dying.
Through my painful moans, I’m poked and prodded. Checked and questioned. Although, I don’t have any answers. I’ve been living in a drugged out state for so long now. I don’t know anything.
“What year is it?”
A doctor comes to stand beside me. “Paige, is there someone we can call who can come and be with you? The father? A friend or family member perhaps?”
“I don’t…no. I have no one.” I think back, trying to recall who the father might be. Numerous grunting
male faces flash through my mind. I squeeze my eyes shut tight. Blocking them out. I feel sick.
“OK,” is all she says in response.
Another pain rips through me, and I clutch at the cool metal edging on the bed as I scream out, the sound more akin to the soundtrack of a horror movie.
“It’s coming,” another woman says as she looks between my legs.
“No.” I grunt through the pain. “No. Please. No.”
“I’m sorry. We can’t stop it.”
I drop my head back and grit my teeth, unable to stop the primal moans and grunts from escaping my throat. But my eyes are closed as I wish for this to stop. It’s too much. What is it going to take before I finally die?
For the first time since I was taken to Reggie’s I’m completely lucid, and I’ve awoken to a nightmare. The reality of what’s happening hitting me like a ton of stone that lands firmly on my chest. I’m pregnant. How could I not know a baby was inside me? I didn’t even notice my body changing.
I growl through my clenched jaw as my body forces me to bear down. Tears burn a hot trail of despair as they stream out of my eyes. I feel it, I feel everything.
“No!” I scream as I feel an exiting from my body. “No!”
When it’s over, there’s nothing.
No crying, no gurgling, nothing.
“Show me,” I whisper, tears in my eyes and fear in my heart. They’ve moved to the side and no one is talking. “What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry,” the nurse whispers, sorrow in her eyes as she hands me my baby wrapped up in a blanket that dwarves its body. “She didn’t make it.”
“Oh,” I breathe as I look over my daughter’s tiny blue face and raise a shaking hand to gently stroke her nose, so perfectly formed. “Oh no.” I carefully unwrap her and touch every part of her body. Her fingers, her toes. Everything is perfect, and small, and… still.
So still.
“What have I done?” I gasp, my vision blurry as torrents of tears flow from my eyes. I hold my little girl to me, and I howl. The noises coming from me are the primordial wallows of a woman who just lost the final piece of her soul. I thought I was a bad person back when I used Ed for a home. I thought I was bad when I stole purses to make a living. I thought I was bad when I gave my body for another hit. But nothing compares to what I am now. I’ve murdered a beautiful innocent baby. I’m soulless. I’m pure evil.
No one in the room says a thing as I wail and clutch the tiny body. They move about, quietly doing their jobs. “I didn’t know,“ I say over and over again. “I didn’t know.“
The nurse beside me wipes at her eyes as she pushes back my hair, stroking me like a mother would her child.
It makes me ache even more.
Thirty-Three
While I sleep it’s easy to forget where I am and everything that’s happened, but the moment I wake and hear the constant noise of the hospital ward, I remember.
I’m a murderer.
Tears fall silently from my eyes, as I roll over onto my side and press my face into the pillow.
Why wasn’t I the one who died?
Why did it have to be an innocent child?
Thirty-Four
Over the coming days, I’m given a wealth of information about my own health, my baby’s, and why she didn’t survive.
Of course, it was the drugs. They tell me this, like it was actually possible it could have been something else.
A woman comes to visit me to talk about my ‘options’. She’s trying to be reassuring by telling me I’ll still be able to have more children in time. But I don’t want to have children. I don’t deserve to have children.
I’m treated with strong doses of antibiotics while they tell me I’m lucky I didn’t catch any incurable diseases from my drug use and promiscuity. I wonder if that’s true. Is there anything about my situation that’s lucky?
I ask if I can have a hysterectomy, but I’m told I can’t unless there’s a medical reason for it.
It turns out I spent a little over a year as one of Reggie’s girls. All that time and I have very little memory of it. When I think back, it’s just a lot of flashes involving faces and acts I’d prefer not to think about.
I’m being transferred to a rehab facility so I can get the ‘help I need’. Really, I just want to lay down and die, but there’s something in this world that wants me to live—as long as I live miserably.
After four years out of home, I’m officially in the system and so is my baby. She was developed enough that I had to name her. I also have to bury her.
I called her Phoenix. My hope is that one day she’ll be born again to another mother, far more capable of nurturing her than I ever was or could be. I need to have hope in that. Otherwise, what was the point in all this?
The clothes I came in wearing, never came back to me. I have a feeling that they were so disgusting they took them somewhere and burned them.
Standing in the small hospital bathroom, I dress in a plain grey tracksuit and I’m ready to leave. The girl I see in the mirror now holds very little resemblance to the girl I remember. This one is pale with large sunken eyes and colourless lips. Her hair is long and matted, and her bones can be seen clearly through her skin. This isn’t me.
I don’t know who’s staring back at me.
When I step out of the bathroom there’s a woman out there waiting for me. She carries a clipboard and a small travel bag and introduces herself as Justine.
“I’ll be taking you to your new home today,” she tells me, smiling broadly. I suspect she’s trying to gain my trust, but I’m all out of that. I should have stopped trusting the moment my parents kicked me out of home. But I was stupid. I trusted, and I trusted like I actually believed I might belong somewhere. That someone might actually want me. But it was all a bunch of sordid lies. I was naïve, every bit the brainless girl Jeff mocked me for. Now look where it’s got me.
I’m nothing. I’m no one.
I nod my head curtly and follow along behind her as she leads the way out of the hospital. I notice the sad look some of the nurses give me as I leave the ward, they feel sorry for me. I really don’t think they should. I made most of my own choices. And those choices led me here.
Justine tries to make conversation with me during the hour it takes us to drive to the facility. But I don’t give her much in response. I seem to be all out of words. There’s simply nothing more to say.
“We’re here,” she says as we pull up in front of a large white brick building surrounded by neatly kept gardens.
I get out of the car and look over what Justine called my new home. It isn’t much of a home at all. It just looks like another hospital. As we walk through the front doors, it’s more of the same. Everything is white and sterile, and it seems like misery radiates off the walls. I don’t want to be here. But it looks like somewhere I belong.
Thirty-Five
“How do you feel after laying your child to rest?” my therapist asks the day after Phoenix’s funeral.
I blink rapidly as the memory fills my mind.
I’ve only been in rehab for a couple of days, but I was allowed to say goodbye to the daughter I’ll never know. I was escorted off the premises to attend her publicly funded funeral.
I stood there. On my own, staring down at the tiny coffin that held her body. No one was there, no one cared. They didn’t know her, or even know of her existence.
Her burial was witnessed by myself, my case worker, and the minister presiding over the service. That’s it. That alone is devastating to me. Her death is so significant. I feel like the whole world should be mourning in the streets.
With a bunch of flowers purchased from the service station on the way, I farewelled my precious girl, and vowed to never take another drug again and never to bed another man. The cost is just too severe. I’d rather be a nun.
“Paige?” my therapist prompts me, my eyes come to focus as a drop of water slips from my cheek and splashes on my hand. I touch my face
to find I’m crying.
“I’m sorry,” I say, wiping at my tears and frowning slightly. “Um… what was the question?”
“I asked how you feel about the funeral yesterday.”
I move my eyes so they meet his with a steady gaze. “Nothing. I feel nothing.”
Thirty-Six
One month sober
Group therapy. I’d love to know who the genius is that came up with this one. I feel like I’m sitting in a room competing for the title of ‘The Most Fucked up’. But we’re all fucked up, just in different ways.
“Paige?” Our group counsellor, Edith, calls on me. “Do you think you’re ready to tell us how you got here?”
“In a car,” is all I say in return. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to share my experience. I sit here, listening to others break down and cry as they tell their stories. Each one is sad. Each one is hopeless. I don’t want to add mine to the mix. It’s hard enough listening to theirs.
“How does it make everyone feel when Paige gives us an answer like that?” she says to the group.
“It makes me feel like she thinks this is all a joke. That she doesn’t take this seriously,” says Vicky, a small twenty-five-year-old Islander girl, whose voice is thick and gravelly and betrays the fragility of her size.
“I think she’s just being honest,” Liam, a nineteen-year-old high school dropout, says. Everyone calls him ‘Poor Little Rich Boy’ because he comes from money. But he’s just as lost as the rest of us. “By car is exactly how she got here.”
“Yeah, you would think that. You’re not exactly the best sharer here either,” another girl, Kerri, says.
Forever: Beautiful Series, book two Page 39
