Sol understood Cocoa’s rage. She was releasing everything she’d held back all those years. She had been suppressing her fear of and anger at Asante since Nihla disappeared. Sol was not surprised that Asante had not fought back. She’d felt Asante’s crippling guilt since Nihla’s disappearance. Sol lay down to rest. She was exhausted from the fight she’d just witnessed. She heard Asante crying over Cocoa’s panting. She could feel Asante sinking. Cocoa had knocked her into the full awareness of what she’d done to Nihla.
Thursday.
Like the others, Asante had been afraid that, if Lucien broke his pregnancy-induced sex fast, he would come after them with a vengeance after a long reprieve. He would rip the pregnant one apart. Asante figured that he still had not touched Nihla except to move her from the safe room to the bedroom. He hadn’t fed Nihla, who’d just started to feel and express hunger for food. But that could have been part of her involuntary detox delusion. She marveled at her tattoo of three side-by-side hot-air balloons that she scratched at continually because she felt the tiny orange lines of the flames burning. She hadn’t been able to explain to Asante when or why she’d gotten it and had no idea who belonged to the monogramed initials in each. At least she was clean, sort of. At least she’d stopped talking, finally. At least she’d saved her worst for the privacy of the bedroom, where the others could not witness her cutting.
Asante had known why Lucien had left the back-room door open. He’d wanted them to hear the sounds gushing out of Nihla. He was daring them to try to escape. He wanted to test their submission and their will to live. Asante had listened closely as if waiting for his instructions. She heard Nihla ask him for ice cream. She had not had it in years, she claimed, and volunteered to make him feel good in exchange. It was either that or a hit of whatever he was willing to give. She was even willing to settle for a joint. Asante could hear Nihla jumping on the bed and talking in a singsongy voice. She heard her hit her head against the mirrors on the low ceiling and waited to hear the scream that never came, even when one broke and fell. Nihla plopped down hard and excitedly examined a small shard of broken glass. This was the tool she needed to make her sundae. Asante heard Lucien let out a long groan and knew there was trouble.
He ran to the back room and grabbed Asante by the arm. The women knew that something had gone awry with Nihla because Lucien never took them out two at a time. The pregnant one hoped that he was setting a new precedent and that she would not have to give birth in the back room and at least one of her cellmates would accompany her. Asante did not want to be involved in whatever plan he’d devised to subdue or get rid of Nihla. However, she welcomed the chance to get out for a moment. She did not expect to see blood.
She didn’t give away her repulsion when he asked her for help without saying a word. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. Asante looked at Nihla from the corners of her eyes and gagged when she saw the girl cutting herself. Using her tattoo as the stencil, Nihla was tracing the three scoops on her arm. She did not look at them once while slicing off flesh. She laid the sections on the largest piece of the mirror. The girl squealed, and Asante thought that Nihla had finally felt the pain from the cutting, but she had done so not out of pain, but because the blood resembled:
“Strawberry topping! This is just a strawberry sundae. No banana, dude!” She looked up at Lucien for the first time. “Strawberry ice cream too. No vanilla.” She smiled at him. “No dulce de leche, no chocolate, or whatever you are.”
Asante sat back to watch, waiting for Lucien’s invitation to help. She could see that he had stopped counting the cuts. He hated blood. He finally grabbed Nihla’s wrist to stop her. To stop the bleeding, he snatched the bedsheet from under her. He decided then and there that he would get whatever drug she needed to get her to stop the cutting.
Friday.
Lucien brought enough ice cream and cocaine for both women, but Asante never got a taste of the latter. Nihla was ravenous and, worse yet, willing to do anything and hurt anyone to get her fix. Asante let her have whatever she needed, as long as she stopped trying to get at the mirrors on the ceiling to complete her strawberry sundae. Asante wanted to save some ice cream for the pregnant one. She took advantage of Lucien’s predicament and, on the pretext of going to the back room to get her favorite brush, brought three of the four pints of Häagen-Dazs to the others. She returned to the bedroom to Lucien’s pleading eyes. She responded to his request by dictating how they would handle the situation.
“More coke. See if you can get your hands on some needles and some H. It has to look like a real overdose. I’ll get her ready. Bring me my makeup bag. I know you still have it.” Under her breath she whispered, “You probably been trying to dress up in some of my clothes.”
Lucien came back with the bag too quickly, as if he had not hidden it even after all those years.
“You got my clothes too?” She did not need to tell him to bring something tight fitting and provocative because that was all she used to wear. “I need a blow-dryer and my curling iron, if she’s gonna look right.”
Lucien came back with everything, the hair supplies, heroin, plus his souvenir handgun.
“I forgot to ask you for my jewelry.”
Feeling her first high in more than five days, Nihla started to perk up. “I’ve got my own jewelry. Where is it, Lulu?”
Asante was surprised to hear his nickname pronounced like a little girl’s name. No wonder Nihla trusted him so much.
The rings, necklaces, and especially the earrings looked familiar to her. They should have, since most of it had been hers. The rings Chiqui had counted as her inheritance and Cocoa’s hollow door-knocker earrings with her name across the middle rounded out the collection.
“She’s ready.”
Bandaged, dressed, and made up, Nihla looked like someone Lucien might have considered taking. But she still looked like a streetwalker rather than a homegrown brothel prostitute.
“Do what I told you. They’ll think she overdosed.”
Asante was not about to let him shoot the girl in the basement. That would be the point from which none of them could return. If he got a taste for blood that he himself had drawn, enjoyed the snuffing out, the silencing, the doll-like stillness of a dead dressed-up girl, then this new fetish might take over. She might be next to take a bullet to the head and fall face-first onto the bedroom carpet. He could kill them all at any time. But, thus far, he’d never used force, just coercion, blackmail, the imminent threat that he would hurt the others if one of them failed to cooperate. If he started outright killing, she would be responsible for two lives taken at once when he turned on the pregnant one. He would save her, his first, for last, and he would take his time. He might not even use the gun again. He would devise some new mechanism or replicate Nihla’s slicing so he could see blood that he was no longer afraid of. He’d memorized their cycles, counted the days for each, and avoided menses like a cat dodging a hungry dog. But he acclimated to new situations quickly. Blood no longer scared him. Killing still seemed to. She needed to keep it that way. She would not do his dirty work. She could show him how. She was hoping that Nihla was as hard-core a user as she’d seemed, so she could bounce back from a dose that would have been lethal to a lightweight.
Saturday.
Asante had watched Lucien inject Nihla himself. He half carried, half dragged the girl out of the basement. What he’d done after that, Asante could only guess. She’d given him the instructions. All he needed to do was follow them. He had to give Nihla the final dose at 9:00 p.m. as he stopped pretending to look for parking on Haven Avenue in Washington Heights. Unable to find a spot, he’d pull up slowly to the emergency room doors. He didn’t need his .22. The hood of his coat and his scarf wrapped around his face up to his eyes were enough of a disguise. He’d have popped off his license plates. He’d stop and roll her out of the van without coming to a complete stop
. He’d be grateful that at least the passenger-side rear automatic door still worked so he didn’t have to get out to open and close it.
One day early! Lucien had set Nihla free one day early, which was why Sol and the others continued to believe that their former cellmate was dead and that Asante had helped kill her. Neither Asante nor Lucien knew if Nihla was still alive. Lucien had not bothered to try to find out. Asante had always hoped that Nihla had survived. Lucien had hoped she hadn’t. Neither had ever mentioned the white girl again.
Whenever one of the others would ask about Nihla, Asante would quickly correct her: “You mean the seven-day slut, or should I say six? He let her go early.”
Sol had asked only once. Like the others, she did not believe that the issuance of such a dehumanizing title could come from a merciful mouth. Asante was a murderer as far as Sol was concerned. She hoped that none of them ever got sick or became delusional enough to warrant extrication from the back room. They’d come to fear a transfer to the bedroom even more than before. Although they’d each wished that Lucien would kill them while raping them, they didn’t want to die in whatever mysterious way he’d killed Nihla. The rape room had become the kill room. What a place to give birth.
I am not Zero. I am One. I am knowing voices. I cannot hear. I am not broken. Like this room. Burning. Like this house. I am smelling fire and smoke, snow and cold. I am not begging. I hear him scream, “Help, help, help!” They come for him. Footsteps go. Voices go. Zero, Two, Three, and My are sad. Three is noise. She is cry. She is scream, “Here! Here! Here!” It is not our time. I am knowing. But I feel for Two, Three, Four (she dead), My, and even Zero. Three say to My, “Come here, baby.” I am hearing them cry.
LA KAY
The House felt the sound when Its top bedroom floor collapsed. The boom startled It and Its newly discovered inhabitants in the back room. It felt their stomachs drop and knew that they were thinking the same thing It was—that Its insides were about to come down on them. It was trying to puzzle out how to keep that from happening. It wanted to keep them safe until It could let somebody know that they were there.
It was feeling guilty about having missed their presence. For how long? If It retraced Lucien’s steps over the years, It could deduce when he’d likely taken each of them. In honesty, It needed only to consider the distractions that would have kept Its attentions away from the back room.
Louima, Diallo, 9/11, the August blackout. No one could have seen anything, let alone those struck blind during a hot summer. The recession a few years later. Then everybody’s attention had been focused on the election of the first black president. La Kay gave Itself a pass for missing anything during that period. It had been celebrating with the rest of KAM, especially the ones who had finally become U.S. citizens in the years prior and had voted in that historic election.
And then It had felt the tumult of KAM patrons old and new who’d needed a place to gather and mourn an unlikely earthquake in Haiti. They’d scarcely completed their acknowledgment of their nation’s independence when, on January 12, a fault had split open their worlds. Feeling their pain, La Kay had joined in their mourning while watching news footage of the disaster that had knocked an already kneeling country flat on its face. It cried at the sight of the cracked statue of Nèg Mawon, a memorialization of a centuries-old maroon rebel from the hills. Behind its fallen body, the Palais Nacional had split down its middle like America’s White House in a Hollywood Armageddon film. It hadn’t known what to do, how to help, as Lucien’s comrades had sat waiting for phone calls with news of loved ones who may have perished or been displaced by the worst natural disaster to hit their country in over a century. There had been no name for this monster that had risen from the earth’s center to devour their capital city and its surrounding provinces. La Kay had listened for a year, hearing about an anniversary that had overshadowed Haiti’s independence. It had seen a resurgence of visits and purchases by newcomers and old patrons desirous of inventory from Lucien’s stockpiles that they would send to refurbish their shattered land. It had no idea that he’d found new prey to manipulate and victimize worse than what he’d done previously.
La Kay groaned and put away the memories. It tried to figure out the happenings that had usurped Its attention in the years after that. The president had been trying to restore the economy, health care…None of that would have been gripping enough to distract It from Lucien’s activities. It vaguely remembered him bringing home somebody who wasn’t Leona. It should have known about the white girl. It still didn’t know who she’d been, how long she’d stayed, if she was still there with the others in Its safe room. But It felt in the pit of Its stomach the boom of guilt that It hadn’t been paying enough attention to the women being misled, drugged, or dragged into Its basement.
Now It wanted to stay alive for two reasons, to get the girls out and to ask Lucien why he’d made It complicit in his evil. It hadn’t understood what he’d done to Veille or any number of women at KAM. It had thought that Asante had been a passing but important mistress who’d voluntarily entered Its basement. It hadn’t known enough about the white girl to pass judgment. It started to resign Itself to the fact that It might never get at the why. It might hear something about the how, if It managed to get the women out. But, like honest help for Haiti, the why would never come.
Knowing Lucien as It did, It knew that there would be no answers. It had learned long ago that Lucien tried not to ask himself questions. And It was right. Lucien would never explain why he’d taken Nihla because he hadn’t known himself. La Kay had peeped the posters in the garage, had seen the way Lucien had looked at the white women on the arms of KAM’s gamblers in their heyday. But It hadn’t gone far enough into Lucien’s memories, into his psyche, to know that the white girl must have reminded him of the glass dolls in his aunt’s curio. It would have wept to know that the white girl had not survived seven days in Its basement.
It tried to remember her, but so many years had passed. It had seen her only once or twice. It had heard only a minor dustup in Its basement bedroom. It had long ignored that part of Itself, ever since Asante. Nothing but Lucien’s endless garbage-quality television sets and stereos were down there. And whatever he’d done with that stuff, La Kay hadn’t cared enough to search. Now It had to search Itself for missed clues, for strangers dragged between Its legs into a hellhole. It found only one aberration in a consistently aberrant existence with Lucien—a baby boy who’d grown into a toddler and then a small boy. La Kay had been trying to figure out to whom the boy really belonged. Veille, Clair, and Dor would have never allowed Lucien access to their children. Now, reeling under the assumption that Lucien had somehow stolen or borrowed the child from one of his strays, La Kay had another reason to do away with Itself and Its owner to keep safe the newest child in Its midst.
Seven
LUCIEN
Lucien knew that he needed a doctor’s care to pull apart his fingers and toes, to warm his limbs back to life, to yank the cough out of his chest. He didn’t feel like he was dying. He was inappropriately hopeful for a man his age. But he’d survived two strokes, had maneuvered with his dragging leg and permanent claw, and had someone to lean on. He would stay in the hospital for a few days to make Leona happy, to keep her with him, and to get better so he could go back to his house and fix things.
* * *
—
LUCIEN HAD never been an engineer, but he had been a scientist in his own right. He had not built the safe room, but he’d thoroughly checked its soundness. He was unable to explain how the soundproofing worked, but he’d made sure it did before responsibly testing its efficacy on human subjects. He’d known that it sealed light and sound in and out. After two strokes, he’d learned that the room was not as accessible as he’d once thought. But it had always been good enough for his girls. It had functioned the way he’d needed it to. More important, it had made its involuntary long-term residents b
ehave. The intercom had been a different matter. It had been a post-construction fabrication, the lone weak spot in an otherwise fortified penitentiary.
He’d liked to play with it, to hear the yelps of the German shepherd, the screeching of the she-cat, the silence when it had been empty. He’d tested it for himself, making sure the buttons did not work from the inside. Unable to test it from both sides concurrently, he hadn’t known about its crack, crunch, purr, until My. Then he’d taken pleasure in knowing that he could twist the women’s bellies into knots at the press of a button without saying a word or playing a song. He’d crackled the box to life as the signal for Cocoa to sing to him when he could no longer manage the stairs or navigate the junky alleyway more than once a week. He had played music, mostly for her, but even before, so his captives could enjoy the tunes he loved.
He was still proud of his gentleness because he’d never overtly or violently attacked them. He’d never even hit them. He’d pulled their hair or their ears, especially during. The worst he’d done without knowing it was assaulting them with his scent even after he’d showered, when he’d put on deodorant and cologne, powdered his pubis. His smell scared them as much as the sound of him thudding down the stairs, grunting with exhaustion after a few pumps. The weight of him could be ignored. He liked it when they closed their eyes and went with them on the fantasies they created to escape. He even let them plug their ears with their fingers, so they wouldn’t hear his low, closed-mouth snarl. But the smell of his body was the worst of him, the part of him they could not flee from. They had to breathe. He tested them. He opened his mouth over their faces. His retch-worthy breath stood erect over the scent of his body. It rose above the smell of the slop bucket in the back room. It was so harsh that it became sound and solid at the same time. It was tangible and terrifying even to Asante, who’d once enjoyed the wake-up breath of her lover’s morning tongue. It woke them, made them sit up straight, made them try to run. It was an arresting odor that bound all of their five senses, seizing them where they stood. Even through the steel soundproof door, they could hear it. It announced his presence as soon as he ducked into the room. Even in the dark, without the light from a single candle, they could see its arrival.
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