Hiding Places

by Shannon Heuston

  HIDING PLACES

  By Shannon Heuston

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Ursula

  I’ve always been afraid.

  Not the delicious fear one derives from watching horror films or riding roller coasters, but the gut wrenching, can-barely-draw-a-breath variety of fear that freezes the blood and tinges the world sepia tinted tones of dread. I view life through terror streaked lenses.

  My father, Helmut Reiter, has always been afraid too.

  “Come away from the windows,” he’d rasp in his heavily accented English. “You cannot go near the windows! They might see you.”

  I would press my hand against the cold windowpane, peering out, seeing nothing but a ghostly reflection of myself. Ever obedient, I’d withdraw, allowing the heavy drapes to fall back into place.

  Papa liked to play hide and seek, but for him it was no child’s game. It was serious. He would get upset when I chose bad hiding places.

  “Under the bed!” he scoffed. “Do you think they will not find you under the bed?”

  Most of the time, we hid together, in the back of the pantry or the crawlspace behind the closet. Papa would whisper stories and sing songs, until Mama came home and made us come out.

  “It’s safe,” she always said. “They’re gone.”

  Who, Mama? Who?

  Papa’s terror was contagious. I hated leaving the apartment, even to go to school. If Mama didn’t insist, I would stay home. On the days I went, it seemed the weather was always stormy, the wind switching the trees. I walked clutching my Waltons lunchbox to my chest, aware of all the hidden eyes around me, watching. Unlike my classmates, I hated recess, hated being outside, without solid walls to protect me. I stuck to the perimeter of the playground, within easy distance of a grove of trees. They would provide excellent cover, if I had to run.

  Teachers described me as shy. I wasn’t shy. I was terrified.

  “You don’t need to hide anymore,” Mama assured Papa. “No one is looking for you.”

  Papa stabbed a finger in her face. “That’s what you think! They can be nice to you for days, months, years, but one day they will hunt you down like an animal!”

  Who, Papa? Who?

  Mama sighed.

  “Mama, who are they?” I finally asked one day, when I was eleven. “Please tell me. I’m old enough to know.”

  Mama shook her head sadly. “They’re nobody. People long dead, mostly. Your Papa hid when he was a very little boy, but one day the bad people found him and took him away. That scared him so bad, he believes they’re still looking for him. But they’re gone.”

  Papa was right. Trust no one.

  Years passed. I was a shadow, flying under the radar, the student no one notices. I rarely spoke, but I studied hard and got good grades. I had nothing else to do. I had no friends, choosing to keep to myself, hiding behind a wall carefully erected to keep everyone out.

  Papa’s screams of terror woke me in the night, fragments of a nightmare from which he could not wake.

  I learned people were capable of evil long before I was taught they were also capable of good.

  After graduation, Mama insisted I go away to college. I resisted. The City University of New York was good enough for me. But she wouldn’t budge.

  “You need to get out of this apartment, away from your father’s ghosts,” she said.

  I chose Baylor University, a small college located in the town of Baylor, an isolated community on the other side of the Adirondack mountain range. I only left my dorm room to attend class, which frustrated my roommate.

  “I can never get a minute to myself,” she complained into the phone when she thought I was sleeping. “I have no privacy, and she’s not the least bit friendly. It’s like rooming with a zombie.”

  I never bothered learning her name.

  Sometimes, when I felt particularly vulnerable, I holed up in the closet to study. I liked the snugness of the small space, and the security of being hidden from view.

  One Sunday afternoon, my nameless roommate returned unexpectedly with several family members in tow. They hung out for hours, while I sat in the closet curled around my book, my muscles cramping. Finally, when the need to urinate became dire, I emerged, rolling back the partition and blinking like a mole in the sudden light.

  I read shock on the faces of the people in the room. “Sorry, I have to go to the bathroom,” I told them. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The situation was beyond saving.

  “Were you in there the whole time?” my roommate asked, disbelief etched across her face.

  “It’s a nice, quiet place to study,” I said, with what dignity I could muster.

  My roommate moved out a few days later. I returned from class one day to find her side of the room stripped bare. She never even said good-bye.

  Word got out about me after that. No one wanted to room with me. I ended up with a single without having to pay extra. If I’d known coming out of the closet would rid me of roommates forever, I would have done it much sooner.

  I returned to New York City for grad school, earning my master’s degree and Phd from the City University of New York. This time Mama didn’t argue about my choice of school. Her health was deteriorating, and she needed help handling Papa.

  My concentration was psychology, and now Papa’s malady had a name, Agoraphobia, although he was never officially diagnosed. I also suspected post-traumatic stress disorder, not unusual for a Holocaust survivor. I thought medication might help, but I knew he would never leave the apartment to see a doctor.

  Once I developed an understanding of Papa’s ordeal, I read everything I could find about the Holocaust, gravitating to the most brutal accounts. I needed to know the depths to which humanity could plunge. The worst ones gave me nightmares, stories of children being burned alive and brains of toddlers being dashed out in front of their weeping mothers. I felt obligated to read their stories and feel their pain, to bear witness for them, shoulder the burden of their horror.

  No wonder Papa hid. Sometimes, when I woke from being pursued by them in my nightmares, I couldn’t catch my breath. The horror was so complete, so dark, my lungs resisted taking in air. It made me want to hide forever too.

  Too many people had enthusiastically participated in the Holocaust to dismiss it as an anomaly. No, that horrific occurrence indicated everyone possessed a dark side. Under the right circumstances, even the most gentle person could turn into a monster.

  My obsession with the twists and turns of the mind was what compelled me to choose psychology as my field of study. People fascinated me. What causes a Ted Bundy, or an Adolf Eichmann, or a Mother Theresa? Was it genetics, environment, a virus, or something less tangible, the influence of evil? I had to k
now.

  After receiving my doctorate, I taught a series of classes of my own design, The Psychology Behind the Holocaust, for the City University of New York. My lectures were so popular they were standing room only. I never had an empty seat. I found my popularity as a professor both amusing and perplexing. The eccentricities that repelled my peers made me an interesting instructor.

  After many years of illness, Mama died. Now only Papa and I lived in the apartment in Brooklyn, two ghosts shambling around a seventies era time capsule. There was daffodil wallpaper in the kitchen and shag carpeting in the parlor, but what did it matter? We had no one to impress, and I didn’t care enough to spend time updating the place.

  I never went anywhere without looking around at the people surrounding me and thinking, what would it take? What would it take to summon forth the inner monster raging silently inside all of us, people who laughed and loved and lived? What would it take?

  My obsession became a prison.

  Chapter Two

  Maggie

  My first assignment in Writing and Critical thinking was to describe the most embarrassing moment in my entire life.

  My journey to Baylor University had been long and hard. Unlike the rest of the freshmen, I was twenty-two years old, already a woman of the world, although I didn’t feel that way. I felt like an insecure, awkward teenager, especially amongst sophisticated college girls. I used to think I could be one of them. But when I attended the freshman mixer my first night on campus, everyone else already seemed to know each other. I hung around on the fringes, silent and miserable, the truth undeniable. I would always be an outsider, condemned to observing life, never participating.

  It was easy for me to identify the most humiliating moment of my life, even though God knew there were many.

  Stealing Cousin Laila’s used panties.

  It was the meter via which I judged my life. Whenever things were bad, I would think, “at least I’m not stealing someone else’s underpants.”

  Growing up, my brother Jonathan and I spent one week out of every summer with Cousin Laila’s family. They lived in a huge colonial with a heated inground pool in the backyard. That was what passed for a vacation in our world.

  My Uncle Wes, Laila’s father, was a lawyer with a thriving practice. Laila’s room was a teenage girl’s dream, complete with a walk-in closet overflowing with clothes, an enormous television, and a vanity table filled with expensive cosmetics.

  My fifteenth summer, my head wasn’t turned by Laila’s expensive state-of-the-art computer, or her bookcase full of paperbacks, or even her impressive collection of shoes, a pair to match every outfit. No. My head was turned by her underwear drawer.

  That summer I had two pairs of panties. I dutifully washed them out every night and hung them up to dry.

  When Laila first observed this ritual, she wrinkled her nose. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Washing my panties,” I answered, as if this was an ordinary thing to do.

  “Um… why?” Laila asked, in a tone with which I was familiar. She thought I was weird.

  “They’re too delicate to put in the washer,” I said, carefully wringing them out.

  Ha. They were plain cotton briefs that could be purchased at the supermarket.

  But I couldn’t tell Laila the truth. Laila might tell her parents, and then word would get back to my parents, and they’d be pissed.

  “Don’t tell them our business,” they warned Jonathan and I every year.

  I wasn’t sure what business they were referencing. All I knew was asking for new underwear was out of the question. The request would send Jana, my mother, into a rage. She would demand to know where all my panties had gone. I knew she wouldn’t believe my explanation, that they’d simply fallen to pieces after hundreds of washings.

  No, she’d get angry, and hit me with her fists, maybe even choke me, because things like this wouldn’t happen if I took care of my things. I needed to learn.

  I think that was part of the business my parents didn’t want me telling Cousin Laila’s family.

  I was trying to make do until September, when I was allotted a small amount of money for back-to-school clothes. Jonathan and I only received clothes in the beginning of the school year and for Christmas. You took your chances if you asked for anything during the year.

  Now here was Laila’s underwear drawer, so stuffed full she couldn’t even shut it all the way. My eyes glowed. When my cousin left me behind one night to attend a classmate’s party, I didn’t even care. I spent hours inventorying the underwear drawer. There were so many pairs of panties, in every color of the rainbow, I couldn’t count them all.

  It appeared that Laila only wore the stuff on top, cute little bikinis with bows and designs. Plain solid color cotton briefs had gravitated to the bottom, along with uncomfortable looking boy shorts and lacy thongs that looked itchy. I figured that was probably the stuff she never wore.

  Slowly, the idea of stealing from this bounty took root. I was not a thief, but I was in dire need, and Laila had more than enough. She didn’t even wear most of it. She wouldn’t notice a few pairs missing.

  That night, after Laila stopped chattering about some crush she’d seen at the party, I lay on the hard floor in my sleeping bag, pondering the theft of my cousin’s underwear.

  “I’m pathetic,” I whispered to myself.

  “Huh? Why?” Laila asked, her voice groggy with sleep.

  I fell silent, waiting for her breathing to even out again, shame washing over me in waves.

  I lusted after Laila’s panties, rushing to open the drawer whenever Laila left the room. “Two,” I promised. “I’ll only take two pairs. She’ll never miss two pairs.”

  As the date of my departure grew closer, “Three. Just three. Three plus the two I have will give me five.” Five was plenty.

  I ended up stealing five pairs total. Each time I crammed another pair into my duffel bag, I tilted my head to one side and considered the drawer. Did it look noticeably emptier? No, I decided, before snatching another pair.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Laila asked that night.

  We were playing Nintendo, which I loved, since we didn’t have a game system at home. But I couldn’t focus. I kept walking Mario right into the killer turtles.

  I shrugged. “I don’t want to leave,” I confessed, in an odd moment of closeness. “I’m gonna miss you.”

  This was a dangerous moment. If Laila said the right words, the truth about the abuse and neglect Jonathan and I endured might come tumbling out. But fortunately, my cousin never said the right words.

  She tossed her French braid over her shoulder. “You’re weird,” she declared, eyes riveted on the screen.

  I had trouble sleeping that last night. I kept waiting for Laila to accuse me of stealing her panties. J’accuse! How could she not notice? I had so few possessions that if anyone so much as moved them, I knew immediately. But Laila remained oblivious.

  The next morning, as my uncle served my brother and I special farewell pancakes, I wondered what he would say if he knew I’d stolen from Laila. Would he order me out, tell me never to return? I would miss this house with its clear blue pool in the backyard. Had he ever realized visiting them was the highlight of our summer, the only time my brother and I could be kids?

  Months after returning home, I held my breath whenever my uncle called to chat with my mother. I waited, heart pounding, for Jana to slam the phone down and stalk into the living room to grab handfuls of my hair.

  “You little bitch,” she’d seethe, “my brother opens his home to you every fucking summer and how do you repay him? By stealing his daughter’s underwear!”

  But no one ever said anything. Laila either never noticed the missing panties, or didn’t connect their disappearance to me. Perhaps she thought the cleaning lady stole them.

  I was home free. The following summer, I got a job at our neighborhood supermarket, so there were no more trips to Laila’s house.
r />   Several years later, out of the blue, Laila showed up at our house in suburban New York. She was on her way to a conference in Montreal.

  I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to hear how successful she was, having recently graduated from college and in her first year of teaching. I was still running a cash register at the supermarket, hating life. My sole ambition was to get promoted to bookkeeper, but to accomplish that your drawer had to be even most of the time, and mine never was. I was a failure at life. I couldn’t even do my menial job well. And to think, once people thought I was smart. My intelligence was a hindrance, a joke.

  Laila followed me into my bedroom. “What gives?” she asked.

  I avoided her eyes and shrugged. “I’m not feeling well,” I lied. I figured she was referring to how standoffish I was being. Well, what did she expect? I hadn’t seen her in nearly seven years.

  Laila had changed little in that time. She was still stubbornly slender with big boobs and freckles, an adolescent boy’s dream come to life. I was more solidly built. She really lucked out in the family lottery.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she huffed, tossing her head. Even her mannerisms were the same. “You know what I’m talking about. Come on. A checkout girl at the supermarket? You’re smarter than that. What the hell are you doing with your life?”

  Put on the spot, I squirmed. “I don’t have money for college, Laila. My family isn’t rich like yours.”

  “Student loans, dear. Financial aid. Come on. You can’t languish here.” She collapsed onto my bed. “Chrissake. This is the same single bed we used to sleep in when we were little kids.”

  I shrugged, busying myself with moving things around my dresser.

  “Poor. That’s your problem? And all these years I thought you were a lesbian,” Laila mused, half to herself.

  I froze. “What gave you that idea?”

  She snorted. “You stole my underwear,” she said, as if it were obvious.

  I recoiled, shocked. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror. It was pale, my eyes huge and haunted looking. “You knew?”