Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

by Amanda Berry

  “God bless you, Titi Beth, and one day we’ll get to see you and be with our family,” she tells her. Then she turns to me and says, “Don’t worry, Mommy, we’ll see them soon.”

  My sweet child. I’ve never explained the whole situation to her, but she knows enough to want to comfort me.

  • • •

  It’s Saturday, so he’s not working. He comes up to our room at about noon.

  “They showed my nieces and nephew on TV today,” I tell him. “I love seeing them. They are growing so much.”

  “Yeah, Daddy, they’re looking for Mommy,” Joce says.

  He looks at me, furious. He points a finger right in my face and says, “You’re in trouble! Stay in this room! Don’t come downstairs!”

  He slams the door and leaves. I’m not supposed to tell Jocelyn what’s going on here, but as she’s gotten older, it’s become harder to hide things from her. I probably shouldn’t have let her watch the news reports about me and Gina, since she’s not even supposed to know our real names, but I was too excited to see everybody on TV. I wait all year for the news on April 21, and I always record it on my VCR so I can watch the tapes of my family when things get really miserable.

  We’re hungry, but I don’t dare go downstairs to make us lunch. He’s too unpredictable when he’s this mad, and now I hear him coming back.

  “Go downstairs!” he says to Joce, and she does what she’s told.

  “Why are you letting her watch those videos?” he yells.

  “It was nothing. I couldn’t help it,” I answer. “She heard it on the news. If I wanted to tell her something, I would have done it a long time ago.”

  “Shut up,” he says, pushing me across the room. “Show me your tape!”

  He sits there as I push the Play button and watches the recording I just made of the news, with Beth and her kids, and all the people looking for me and Gina.

  “Give me the tape,” he says.

  “No! I want to watch it later, and I want to record the news tonight.”

  “You’re done recording,” he says, pulling the tape out of the VCR and throwing it into the closet so hard that it smashes against the wall and cracks at the corner.

  “You bastard!” I scream at him.

  “If I take her out and she says anything to anybody, you’re in for it,” he warns me and then storms out again.

  I grab the tape and check to make sure it still plays. It does, thank God. He always does things like this. I was feeling good watching Beth on the news, then he ruins my day again. And he scared Joce half to death.

  She comes back up after he leaves, and I hug her for a long time.

  I’m so afraid that one of these days he’s going to kill me. Then what will happen to Joce?

  April 22

  My family had a vigil for me last night, and I record the coverage of it on the news this morning. I am sure he’ll check to make sure I didn’t disobey him and record anything new, so I have a plan: If he asks, I’ll show him the smashed cassette and hide this one.

  When the news comes on, I make Joce close her eyes and turn around, and I put the TV on mute. I have to make sure she doesn’t see or hear any more of this.

  “Okay,” I tell her. “It’s over now, so you can open your eyes.”

  “Was our family on TV?” she asks.

  “No, not this time. Maybe they’ll be on another time.”

  I hate lying to her, but I’m afraid of what he might do.

  She reaches into her little bag and pulls out her last piece of gum. She almost never gets gum, so it’s a special treat.

  She holds it out to me and says, “You don’t have anything to celebrate your birthday, so this is for you.”

  • • •

  “Time stands still for me—it seems like yesterday, but then it seems like forever.”

  That’s what Beth said at my vigil, the night before my twenty-sixth birthday. I keep hearing her words in my head and I write a poem for her:

  It seems like time stands still.

  I feel like the world is turning and leaving me behind.

  Sometimes it feels like Day One because I remember it all.

  Sometimes it seems like an eternity, because my heart misses them so much.

  For me, time stands still. I didn’t even get to see my nieces grow into young girls.

  I hear people outside laughing, kids playing and cars driving by.

  Everyone else is living their lives while I’m just stuck here waiting to be by your side.

  Every day I wonder, what’s it going to be like for us.

  All I know is I’m ready for a new life.

  Castro’s Story: Burying Nilda

  On the evening of Sunday, April 29, 2012, family and friends gathered for a wake for Nilda Figueroa at the Walter Martens & Sons Funeral Home on Denison Avenue.

  Nilda had died four days earlier of complications from her brain tumor while she was visiting her daughter Arlene in Fort Wayne. The official cause of death was an overdose of oxycodone for the chronic pain. She was forty-eight.

  When Castro entered the funeral home, he was met with whispers and angry stares. Nilda’s family blamed him for her death. Her male relatives wanted to take him outside and show him what a beating felt like, but Nilda’s sister Elida and some of the other women persuaded them to stay calm. Nilda’s and Castro’s children were there, and nobody wanted violence at the funeral of a woman who had endured so much of it.

  Castro’s daughter Angie greeted him. She believed he was sorry for the way he had treated her mother. But Nilda’s side of the family didn’t say a word to him and stared angrily as he approached the open casket.

  As he stood over Nilda’s body, he said, loud enough for Elida and others to hear: “Man, she was a good cook.”

  Elida found his comment inappropriate, one final slight from the man who had brutalized Nilda for so long. But she swallowed her anger to keep the peace.

  Castro didn’t kneel or say a prayer, or show any sign of emotion, but did manage to take a cell phone photo of Nilda’s body without anyone noticing.

  Nilda was buried the next day under sunny skies at Riverside Cemetery, less than a mile from her old house on Seymour Avenue. Wearing his black leather motorcycle jacket, Castro stood alone behind the mourners.

  May 3, 2012: His Ex

  Amanda

  Tonight we’re sitting in the garage. It’s been 90 degrees and hotter in the house, but it’s a little cooler in the garage, even with the hats and wigs he’s making us wear. Jocelyn is watching kid movies on a TV that he plugged in out here, and he and I are talking about Nilda.

  He says he still can’t believe that she’s gone. He woke me up early the morning it happened to tell me. He was upset, but I’m not sure why, because he always told me he hated her. He was so frazzled the morning she died that he burned the bacon and filled the house with smoke.

  He abused Nilda in this very same house. I guess after she left, he missed having a woman to treat like his property, so he started kidnapping other women.

  I feel bad for his kids, because their mother is gone. I know what that’s like. He complained that her family bought her a cheap casket. That’s pretty ironic, coming from the cheapest person I know. But he seemed genuinely sad as he showed me her memorial card and a weird cell phone picture he took of her body in the coffin.

  May 5, 2012: Flyer

  Gina

  He’s wearing his tight BE MY VALENTINE underwear again. Gross.

  Whenever it’s hot, he hangs around the house in a tank top and his underwear. And his favorite pair are the Valentine’s Day ones, red bikinis. Whatever, dude.

  “Gimme a massage,” he says, lying on the couch in the living room.

  He makes me do this for hours, rubbing his shoulders and his back and his stinky feet, like I’m his slave.
But at least it puts him in a good mood, so it’s not worth fighting about.

  “Oh,” he says casually, “I saw your mother a little while ago.”

  “Really?” I say, startled. “Where?”

  “She was out on Lorain and 105th passing out flyers,” he says. “I asked her for one.”

  He says that he was driving by on his motorcycle when he saw her, so he stopped and asked if there was anything new on my case.

  I’m so mad that he was out there talking to my mom. That’s like laughing in her face. I want to strangle him, but I just keep rubbing his shoulders.

  “Where is it?” I ask. “Can I have it?”

  “Sure, I don’t care,” he says. “It’s in my jeans pocket in the kitchen.”

  I find his pants folded over the back of a chair. I reach into the pocket and find a piece of folded-up paper. I open it and I see in big letters, MISSING PERSON: GEORGINA “GINA” DEJESUS, and six little pictures of me at different ages.

  I start crying. An hour ago, this paper was in my mom’s hands.

  I finish massaging him and then go upstairs. I’m going to decorate my flyer, and I hope someday I can show it to my mom.

  I cut out little paper hearts, cover them with red glitter, and glue them to the flyer. I carefully cut out one of the little photos of me. I’m going to put it in a pretty picture frame I made.

  I’m so, so hungry all the time. I must weigh under a hundred pounds now, probably thirty less than when I got here. I take some grocery-store ads from the newspaper and cut out pictures of food I dream about: a strawberry ice cream sundae, a thick ham-and-cheese sandwich, a pile of onion rings, and a Hershey’s chocolate bar. I glue the pictures of food to the bottom of the flyer and tuck it away in the little blue backpack where I keep my most precious things. I’d love to hang the artwork up on my wall, but Jocelyn can read now, so she would ask too many questions about why it says I’m missing, and he would go crazy.

  Jocelyn doesn’t even know my real name. To her, I’m Chelsea.

  But I know who I am.

  I am Georgina DeJesus. And my family loves me.

  June 2, 2012: Graduation

  Amanda

  Yesterday was Jocelyn’s last day of kindergarten classes, so today we’re having a graduation ceremony.

  I made her a black graduation hat out of construction paper and a “certificate of graduation” that was very formal and fancy. Where it said “teacher,” I signed my name.

  We all get together in our room: me and him, Jocelyn, Gina, and Michelle. I ask Jocelyn to stand up, and I read the certificate out loud: “This is to certify that Jocelyn Jade Berry has graduated from kindergarten.”

  She stands up wearing her hat and steps forward to get her certificate. We all applaud, and she says, “Thank you.”

  I’m so proud of her. She has worked hard all year. We had school five days a week, following the Cleveland Public Schools calendar exactly. We took vacations when real school was out for Thanksgiving and Christmas and spring break.

  She has learned so many words and numbers and studied all kinds of practical things, like healthy eating. I tried to make it fun. I’d say, “A is for alligator,” and bounce a little plastic ball to Joce. She would say, “B is for balloon,” and bounce it back. We would try to get through the whole alphabet without missing a word or dropping the ball.

  It wasn’t always easy. There were plenty of days when she was sick of me, sick of school, sick of the same old everything every day, and it was hard to hold her attention.

  One day in November he brought her home a lunch from school, a little brown paper bag with a sandwich. I guess they were giving away extras, and she was so excited that it came from a real school.

  “I want to go to real school now. Can I, please?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said, but she kept begging him and asking him why not.

  “It’s not time yet,” he told her.

  “When is it time?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. You just have to be patient.”

  We have lots of nice food for the graduation ceremony. He had a year-end party at work yesterday, and he brought us a big dish of leftover pasta and some pop.

  He also found hundreds of pages of first-grade worksheets that were being thrown away, which will be a big help when we start school again in August. Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m just assuming that we’ll still be here in August. Will this never end?

  But for the moment I try to make sure Joce enjoys her big day, and I tape her graduation certificate to the wall.

  He opens the pop, and we eat the pasta. We’re all so proud of Jocelyn and happy for her. I can’t remember another time when we were all in one room eating, talking, and laughing.

  July 6, 2012: Pool Time

  Amanda

  I’ve been getting more and more upset about not being able to go outside with Jocelyn. He sees me quietly crying when they come back all excited about their latest adventure. So maybe because of that, and maybe because Jocelyn is asking why Mommy never goes outside, he says we are all going swimming today!

  He gets the plastic pool—the same one I sat in when I gave birth to Jocelyn five and a half years ago—from the attic, drags it out the back door, and puts it in the bed of his pickup truck. With poles and a blue tarp he builds a screen around it and then fills the pool with water from the garden hose. He comes back inside and tells me to put on a wig and sunglasses. I stand at the door while he checks again that no neighbors are outside, and motions for me to dart out.

  “Mommy’s coming outside. Yay! Mommy’s coming outside!”

  He tells her to quiet down. Jocelyn loves playing dress-up with the wigs, and my long black hair only adds to her glee that I am outside playing with her.

  I sink into the pool, wearing a T-shirt and a secondhand bikini bottom he bought at a thrift shop. He probably paid fifty cents for it, since there was no matching top. I begin splashing around with Jocelyn in her cute little two-piece suit and don’t know what feels better, sitting in cool water on a blistering July day or looking up at the blue sky instead of the moldy ceiling of my room.

  Jocelyn is happy and she sees that I am, too.

  For hours, she pretends to fish with her plastic rod and sprays me with her squirt toys. “Look at me, Mommy!” she says, pretending she’s swimming.

  He fires up his little grill, the kind you can set on a table, and cooks hamburgers and hot dogs. He is in an unusually good mood and puts some chairs in the garage so we can stay outside and eat. He even hands me a beer after he’s had a few himself. After a while he goes inside and lets Gina and Michelle out of their locked room, gives them wigs and hats, and they join us. We all fit in the pool if we fold our legs just right.

  I don’t mind the itchy, hot wig. I don’t mind that he keeps telling Jocelyn to keep her voice down. I don’t mind that he doesn’t let us stand up in the pool because we are taller than the tarp and someone might see us. I’ve learned to try to make any comfort last. For five hours I have been out in the fresh air. For years I have been inside dreaming about coming outside, hopping the fence and screaming for help, and now that I’m here I don’t do a thing but breathe the air and play with my daughter. I am not going to do anything to make him change his mind and take away this tiny bit of happiness.

  • • •

  It’s been a good few days. On the Fourth of July he blew off some firecrackers in the backyard, and Joce loved that. He got sparklers, and he and Joce ran around with them in the dark while Gina, Michelle, and I watched from inside the house.

  The more Joce goes out, the harder it is to keep her inside. She rides her white Little Tikes scooter with purple wheels around the backyard while he works on his cars. When he brings her to yard sales to buy toys and clothes, people sometimes ask who she is. He usually says that she’s his girlfriend’s daughter, but he�
�s careful not to go to the same park, McDonald’s, or library with her too many times. She loves to rent Hannah Montana, Looney Tunes, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua at the library and wants to watch them over and over again, but he told me he’s worried that a nosy librarian might ask her where she goes to school.

  She will be six years old soon and she’s realizing more and more that there’s something wrong with the way we live. Whenever she goes out with him, the last thing she sees is him locking me, Gina, and Michelle in our rooms. He tries to hide his temper from her, but she’s seen how he can turn angry in a second and hit one of us. She knows that only she can go in Daddy’s car. The rest of us have to stay inside.

  A few days ago she didn’t understand why she had to stay quiet upstairs in our room while Angie’s two little boys were playing downstairs. Angie’s husband had fallen off a roof and was in the hospital, so he was watching his grandkids. Joce could hear them and was desperate to play with other children. He’s shown her pictures of Angie’s kids, and even tried to explain that they’re actually her nephews, even though they’re all about the same age. But when they came over, he told Joce she had to stay upstairs.

  “Maybe another time,” I told her when she kept asking why. “Daddy said not this time.”

  It didn’t make sense, and she knew it.

  July 19, 2012: Digging for Amanda

  Amanda

  I wake up and turn on the TV. Channel 3 has breaking news:

  SEARCH FOR AMANDA BERRY.

  Some guy in prison told the police that he killed me and buried me in an empty lot at West 30th Street and Wade Avenue. That’s two blocks from here! They’re showing footage from the news helicopters flying right over my head. I hear them! Come get me! I’m alive! You are so close! I wish I could smash a hole in the roof and signal to the helicopters. If only they could see me. There are swarms of police and men in FBI jackets watching the big backhoe digging for me. If I could bust out of here I could run over there in two minutes.

  It’s making me insane that they are so close. But I’m going even crazier worrying about Beth. She thinks they are going to find my bones.