Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

by Amanda Berry

  And what would he do to us?

  He doesn’t make mistakes. I’m so worried the police and FBI will never figure it out. He seems like a nice, normal, middle-aged, friendly guy. He doesn’t look crazy.

  That’s how he gets away with this. He hides in plain sight. He says he can get away with anything, including killing us. If his daughter found out about us, how do we know he wouldn’t do something terrible to her to protect himself?

  I tell Gina and Michelle all this, but I don’t say what else I’m thinking: I’m still not completely sure I can trust them. We have become closer down here in the past few days, but maybe they are so afraid of him they would betray me. If we screamed for help, they could claim it was all my idea, and he might kill only me.

  “I think we should just keep quiet,” I say. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Gina

  Amanda is right. We don’t know what he might do if we screamed.

  I once told him my father was looking for me and asked him what he would do if my dad found us: “Would you shoot him?”

  “I’m not going to talk about that,” he answered.

  I do think he would kill my dad. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.

  After Arlene has been up there for about an hour, we hear them get up and walk out the back door. He comes down the basement stairs in a good mood.

  “They’re gone,” he says. “You can watch TV now if you want.”

  He’s talking a lot, which usually means he’s happy.

  “Rosie wanted to see the basement, but I made up a lie,” he says. “I told her I couldn’t find the key, and it was a mess down there anyway.”

  He’s so proud of himself.

  He keeps talking about what a great time he had with Arlene, and how they were laughing as they watched old family videos.

  August 27, 2005: Chained in the Van

  Gina

  We’ve been down in the cellar for four days. Between visits from his kids, he’s come down here a bunch of times to take Michelle upstairs to help with the “cleaning.” Yeah, right. We know what he’s really doing with her, and she tells us anyway. So why does he try to hide it? I don’t get it.

  He takes Amanda upstairs, too, and she’s crying each time she comes back, but he hasn’t bothered me. I don’t know why. Maybe seeing Arlene has made him feel guilty. It’s so rare that I get this much time away from his disgusting body.

  Late at night we’re all watching TV when we hear him come down the stairs.

  “Okay,” he says. “Time to go.”

  Thank God. It’s so damp and smelly down here.

  “Emily is coming to stay overnight for a couple of days. I have to get you out of here. You’re going to the garage.”

  The garage? Oh, no. Maybe Arlene or his other kids figured out there was something weird going on here, so he has to get rid of us.

  He unlocks the chain tying me and Michelle to the pole and makes us stand up. We’re still chained together at the ankles. He tells us to pick up our pillows and sheets and follow him out the basement door up the steps and into the darkness of the backyard, like prison inmates in leg chains.

  “Be quiet out here,” he orders. “No noise!”

  “Are you going to kill us?” I ask him.

  “If I were going to kill you, I would have done that already,” he says, laughing.

  As we make our way across the backyard in the dark I realize it’s the first time I’ve been outside in a year and a half. I smell freshly cut grass and feel a breeze. We see lights in the neighbors’ houses on both sides, but I’m too scared to make a sound. The garage door is open, and I can see his van inside, facing out.

  “Keep your heads down and walk straight to the garage,” he says.

  We shuffle along the side of the van, looking at the ground. The side door is open, and he tells us to get in. The two seats in the back are folded all the way down, and he makes us lie down there, chaining us to the seats.

  “I’ll be right back,” he says. “Remember—no noise.”

  We lie in the dark, afraid to say a word, and he returns a couple of minutes later with Amanda. She has a chain around her ankle and she’s carrying her pillow. He has a small mattress that he wedges through the van door, and Amanda climbs in and sits on it. He locks her chains to the seats, too.

  He brings out Amanda’s TV and a tiny fan, sets them between the front seats, and plugs them into the garage wall. He gives us a little blue bucket for a toilet and hands us some chips and a couple of old pop bottles filled with water.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” he says, locking the van doors.

  It must be a hundred degrees in here. The little fan is swinging slowly from side to side, pushing around the hot, wet air.

  August 28

  Amanda

  This van. It’s the one. It’s the same maroon van that drove me away from my life. I see that day happening all over again: He pulls up alongside me, and I get into that passenger seat. So stupid.

  I’m lost enough in my thoughts that at first I don’t hear Michelle speaking.

  “I always thought that you didn’t like me,” she says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I wanted to be your friend at the beginning,” she says, “but I thought you didn’t like me.”

  I’m too hot for this conversation. Sweat is pouring off me, and it stinks in here. The bucket is on the floor right next to my mattress and everybody has used it. I’m in a rotten mood and I snap back at her, “Don’t be stupid. I don’t need friends.”

  I don’t know why I say that. I’m not trying to be mean, but I just gave her my super-bitch attitude. I think I’m just fed up with everything.

  Michelle doesn’t say anything, but Gina speaks up: “Oooh, you are so cool!” she says to me sarcastically.

  We look at one another for a second, and then all crack up. Gina totally called me out, and it was exactly the right thing to lighten the mood. It was like she popped a balloon, and all the built-up tension rushed out.

  Amanda

  Since we were taken to the basement five days ago the news on our little TV has been nothing but Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is underwater, and it looks like a war zone. We feel bad for all those poor people who lost their homes. Rain is falling hard on the roof of the garage, and the news says our storm in Ohio is what’s left of Katrina, moving north.

  The garage door opens, and he comes in carrying a Georgio’s pizza and a bag of candy. When he opens the van door he cringes from the smell and takes the bucket, dumps it out in the yard, then brings it back. It still stinks because he didn’t bother to rinse it out. Even with the fan there’s no circulation, and we’re all feeling sick, so we ask him for some air. He cracks open one of the little sliding windows.

  “Keep your heads down,” he says.

  He opens the garage door for a few minutes while he putters around near the front of the van. He’s obsessed with making the house look normal so the neighbors don’t suspect anything. The people on one side are from Puerto Rico, and he’s always speaking Spanish with them. Usually on summer days he’s out in the yard or the garage working, so he says they might think something is strange if the garage door stays closed for days at a time. He doesn’t miss a detail.

  He tells us Emily just arrived at the house.

  Gina

  I’m lying here, hot and sweaty, trying to think about anything but the heat.

  Whomp!

  What the hell? Somebody just smacked me with a pillow.

  “Michelle!” I shout.

  “I didn’t do anything!” she says. “That was Amanda!”

  I look at Amanda, and she’s cracking up.

  “Okay, girl!” I say, and I swing my pillow right back at her.

  Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

  It’s a full-on pillo
w fight now. All three of us are slamming one another with our pillows and laughing like crazy.

  “We better be quiet,” I warn.

  But it’s no use. This is too much fun. I can’t remember the last time I had fun.

  Whomp!

  I hope he doesn’t hear us.

  August 29

  Amanda

  I wake to the sound of the garage door. He opens it just enough to duck under and then pulls it shut again. I pretend to be asleep. I can’t tell if Gina and Michelle are sleeping or not, but they don’t move.

  When the door was open I could see light, so it must be morning. He slips into the van quietly, crawls up next to me, and says, “Take your clothes off.”

  “Please, they’re right there,” I say, nodding toward Gina and Michelle. “Please, no.”

  “Just shut up and do it.”

  He yanks at my sweats and is on top of me. It’s such a small space, and I know Gina and Michelle have to be hearing this.

  I think of his daughter. She’s now sleeping comfortably in the house while he attacks me fifty feet away.

  When he’s done, he’ll probably go inside and cook her breakfast.

  • • •

  We’re watching afternoon TV when the garage door opens again.

  I guess it’s time for the daily show for the neighbors.

  But instead he unplugs our TV and fan from the garage wall, gets into the driver’s seat, and puts the key in the ignition. What’s he up to?

  “Okay, I’m going to take the van out of the garage for a couple of minutes,” he says. “Get under your covers. Don’t get up. Don’t move. Don’t do nothing.”

  He starts the engine and pulls the van ahead just a few feet until it’s completely out of the garage. It’s so bright out that after all the darkness my eyes hurt.

  He gets out of the van and leaves the engine running.

  I peek out and see him go into the garage. Was the van blocking something he couldn’t reach?

  Then I have an idea.

  Gina

  Amanda whispers that she thinks she can reach the gas pedal.

  Her chain is too short, so she can’t actually sit in the driver’s seat, but she thinks she could probably press the gas pedal with her hand and ram the van through the gate across the driveway and out into the street.

  Somebody would have to notice that!

  “Do you think we should?” I whisper.

  She’s never driven a car. I wonder if she even knows how to do it.

  This is terrifying. We’ve been fantasizing in the garage about how we could escape. He has a lawn mower, a snow blower, and some tools there. We’ve been talking about how we could attack him with the lawn mower or hit him with a shovel.

  But it’s just talk. We couldn’t reach anything because of the chains. And what if we hit him on the head with a shovel and didn’t kill him? Then he’d be so mad that he’d kill us.

  But Amanda looks serious. She’s staring at that gas pedal.

  “That’s crazy,” I say.

  Amanda

  I can do this. But I have to move, now.

  I have to stretch myself into the front-seat area, put the car in drive, and push that gas pedal. I think the chain is long enough. If I can make a big enough crash, somebody will come to see what’s going on.

  But what if nobody does?

  I’m trying to get my courage up. I can do this. I have to do this. I’m breathing harder. All I can see is that gas pedal. Gotta go now!

  Just then the driver’s side door opens, and he hops in and reverses the van back into the garage.

  “Good job keeping quiet,” he tells us.

  I feel my whole body deflate. Did I just miss our best chance of escaping? Maybe our only chance?

  He plugs in the TV and the fan, locks the van, and closes the garage door. We were outside for maybe five minutes. Now we’re back in the dark.

  Why did I hesitate? I keep replaying it in my mind, again and again and again.

  August 30

  Amanda

  He’s back. It’s dark outside, and he’s in one of those nasty moods where you have to be extra careful.

  “Emily’s gone, so you’re going back inside,” he says.

  He unchains us, and we pick up our pillows. The only sound is the clinking of the chains as we walk across the yard. When we’re back in the house he tells us to fill the laundry baskets with our stuff. We’re all moving to new rooms.

  I’m going back to the big room with the yellow walls that Gina and Michelle have been in together for a while. And they’re being put into the tiny room next to it, which is not much bigger than a closet. The only way into their room is through my room, which has the only entrance to the hallway. So by bolting my door, he has all three of us trapped inside. It’s simpler for him.

  I don’t know why he put the two of them in the smaller room, and me by myself in the big one. Just when things are getting a little better between us, I’m afraid this is going to make Gina and Michelle resent me. When we have so little, it’s easy to get jealous over even the smallest things.

  When we walk in, we see the chains waiting for us. He locks my ankle with one fixed to the big steam radiator. He links Gina and Michelle together by the ankles, and they sit down on one mattress.

  I hope they keep their promise and don’t tell him anything that we talked about.

  September 6

  Amanda

  Everyone in this house is a liar.

  He just yelled at me for telling Gina and Michelle that he forces me to have sex, and he’s furious that I was thinking about trying to escape in the van.

  I’m scared about what he’s going to do to me. Sometimes he hits me across the face. Sometimes he won’t feed me, or gives me only the worst leftovers. Other times he unplugs everything for days: my TV, my radio, my fan.

  How could they have told him those things?

  Maybe they didn’t. Maybe he was spying on us.

  I go to their door and ask them why they talked. They claim they didn’t. They say he knows things about them that I must have told him, so they’re mad at me.

  I don’t know what to believe, so I don’t believe anyone. I’m done trusting anybody in this house. The only person I can rely on is me.

  Gina

  I don’t know what Amanda is so angry about. I didn’t say anything to him.

  He told us that she thinks we’re stupid, and that she’s helping him watch us. I can’t believe that’s true. She seemed so nice in the van, but I don’t know what the truth is anymore.

  I’m so annoyed that he moved me and Michelle into this tiny room. It’s completely unfair. I guess I’m not the new girl anymore.

  “Why does she have the big room, and the two of us are stuck in this shoebox?” I ask him.

  “She has more stuff than you,” he says.

  “You’re putting us in a shoebox!” I say, but he doesn’t care.

  I just want to go home. I already missed my fifteenth birthday. I want out of here.

  Christmas Day, 2005: Broken Heart

  Amanda

  My third Christmas here.

  I wake up chained next to him, just as he’s leaving to go to a family Christmas party. At least I have my tree. It’s a little plastic green one from the dollar store that he bought for me. It’s about two feet tall, and it came in a box with some ornaments and a string of different-colored lights. I set it up on my dresser in early November to add a little cheer to this dull room.

  I try to go back to sleep because at least when I’m asleep I don’t feel lonely.

  When I wake up hours later it’s quiet in the house, so he must still be out. I plug in the tape I’ve been making of all the newscasts about me. My TV has a built-in VCR, so I can use it to tape over old movies. I record everything
I can about my family on the news, so I can see them whenever I want.

  I start writing in my diary, and note the time: 2:57 p.m.

  Hi Mom! How are you? Are you having a good day? I hope you all are! I’m sitting here crying. I miss my life! We’re so close! I’m so lucky for that. I always had someone to talk to. Just the little things now are such big things—saying good night or good morning or I love you.

  He comes in from his party. I think he’s been drinking.

  “Merry Christmas,” he says.

  “It doesn’t feel like Christmas. I’m in prison.”

  I’m usually careful not to talk back. But I can’t help myself today.

  “It’s not a prison,” he barks. “You have it good.”

  “It’s worse than prison,” I tell him. “If I were in a regular prison my family would know that I am alive and they could come visit. Prisoners get to go outside for an hour a day. I can’t do anything. I can’t even feel sunshine on my face.”

  I’m making him mad.

  “You have TV! You have food!” he shouts. “If you were home you would be slumming. You would be still working at Burger King.”

  He storms out, slamming the door, and bolts it from the outside.

  I’m going to forget him and focus on happier things, like what’s happening at my house right now. It’s almost dinnertime, so I imagine my mom roasting a turkey and making ham and mashed potatoes. I bet she has music on. I wonder if Beth let Ry and Rissa open one present on Christmas Eve like we used to.

  I start writing again:

  This has taught me a lot—like NEVER take life or anything for granted! Sitting down and eating dinner with your family or watching TV with them and talking and laughing!

  At six o’clock I turn on the television, and there is breaking news: my mom is in the hospital. She has some kind of pancreatic illness. She’s lost a lot of weight and is in bad shape. Here I am feeling bad for myself, and suddenly everything is worse! Maybe I should be grateful for what I have, like he says.