From Twisted Roots

by Tobias Wade

  She wasn’t there.

  My heart skipped a beat. I went to the door, calling for her. “Melody? Melody!”

  There was no reply.

  I ran out into the yard, still shouting her name. I dug through the web infested bushes and tore into her little playhouse; they were empty. My voice was becoming strangled as I rounded the side of the house where the fence gate was.

  It was still closed and locked from the inside, same as always. Melody wasn’t there, but lying at the foot of the gate, her long legs all askew and her googly eyes fixed on me, was Buttercup II.

  “Melody!” I screamed again, but I already knew in my Mommy Heart and Mommy Brain that I wouldn’t get an answer.

  I knew that, without the real Buttercup, something not-nice had happened to my daughter.

  Dad’s Souvenirs

  Dad was a pilot, and it was exactly as cool as it sounds.

  He traveled across the globe, bouncing from faraway place to faraway place, seeing just about everything the world had to offer. By the time he was 30, he’d been to dozens of countries across six of the seven continents. It was actually thanks to his career that he and Mom had me and my sister, Josephine. While doing regular flights between the US and various airports in Asia, he became aware of international adoptions and broached the topic with Mom. Mom, who couldn’t have children naturally, jumped at the chance.

  It didn’t bother either of them that Mom would be doing a lot of the proverbial heavy lifting at home while Dad worked. We could go anywhere from three days to two weeks without seeing him, and then he’d come home for a few days before having to fly off again. Mom was left to raise two small kids practically single handedly. He was gone so often when I was young that, for a time, I thought he existed only as a voice in the phone.

  Despite his physical absence, Dad always did his best to make sure we knew we were loved.

  He called every night, regardless of where he was in the world or what timezone he was in. He would read to us and ask what we’ve been up to. On those occasions when we were missing him particularly badly, he’d have us snuggle with Mom on the couch with the phone held between us. He retold us the stories of our adoptions: how excited he and Mom had been both times, how he’d begged to fly the next plane out to Beijing where I was born, and then to Mumbai three years later for Josephine to pick us up personally. He talked about how he took one look at our faces and known immediately that we were his little girls.

  “And it doesn’t matter how far away I go or how long I stay there; I’ll always be your daddy.”

  When that didn’t cheer us up properly, there were always the presents to look forward to.

  Whenever Dad returned home, my sister and I would tear into his suitcase until we found the three packages tucked away at the bottom: one for mom, always wrapped in deep purple paper, one for me in yellow, and one for Jo in bubblegum pink. While Mom usually got jewelry or clothing of some sort, a handmade piece from the exotic locations, Jo and I usually got toys or picture books. There was always a postcard featuring an iconic landmark to remind us where everything came from.

  Because of it, our spare bedroom became a museum of sorts. Mom hung the framed postcards with little date placards and stored the things she thought were too nice or delicate to wear. We weren’t allowed in that room unsupervised, she was worried we’d make a mess of it, and the door was kept shut and locked to keep two inquisitive kids from getting into trouble. At first it was a novelty and we wanted in simply because it was forbidden, but as we got older, the spare room with its locked door held less and less mystique. When we got older we no longer cared at all, and the only reason it remained closed was simply out of habit.

  Eventually, Dad’s seniority with his airline made it so he had more control over his schedule. The international flights became fewer and fewer in favor of domestic ones which allowed him to be home more often. Jo was fifteen by then, and I was eighteen. We were used to his constant coming and going, and we no longer needed nightly phone calls or consolation gifts. That didn’t stop him, however.

  “You’re always going to be my little girl and I’m always going to be your dad, kiddo,” he said. Jo rolled her eyes as he handed off his latest package, still wrapped in bubblegum pink paper despite her newfound love for all things black.

  I accepted mine with a grin. Jo was going through a phase where everything Mom and Dad did was lame, but I certainly didn’t mind still getting the odd trinket, even if most of them ended up unused in some box in my closet. I pulled away the yellow wrapping and tugged open the box to find a ring with a thin gold band entwined around a pair of pearls.

  “It’s so pretty!” I said, hugging Dad, who looked fairly pleased with himself.

  Jo glanced disinterestedly at it, then opened her own gift. For the first time in a long while, her eyes lit up at what she found inside. She quickly tried to play it off.

  “What is it?” I asked, curious to know what had caused that rare almost-smile.

  She shrugged with practiced dismissiveness and tipped the box so I could see. Resting upon a bed of tissue paper was a nondescript brass key, old-fashioned and worn. A crimson ribbon was woven through the top of it, turning it into a choker. Apparently Dad had paid attention to Jo’s changing tastes, which included a fondness for repurposed keys.

  “You like it?” he asked with the same note of eagerness all parents use when trying to deduce the enigma that is their teenager’s happiness.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” Jo replied, pulling the necklace from its box. She held it out to Dad and let him tie it around her neck.

  “I found them both in this neat antique shop in New England,” he said. “It was run by this strange little old lady; you’d like her, Jo. She said the ring came from some Spanish galleon which sank off the coast down in Florida, but I dunno. It doesn’t look that old to me.”

  “It’s a neat story at least,” I said.

  “Well, the key is even cooler. The lady gave me a warning; she said it can open any door, but beware! It’ll show you what’s really inside, and know that while you go in, what’s inside can come out!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jo ran a finger down the length of the key.

  “No idea, but she seemed to think it was very important that I know it. Probably just a silly selling tactic to add some mystery and jack up the price.”

  “You fell for it,” Jo pointed out.

  “Yeah, well, what can I say? I’m a sucker.”

  The good cheer brought on by pretty little presents didn’t last long.

  Jo had recently become friendly with a group of girls that Mom quickly labeled as “bad influences”. They were the same ones who inspired her dark wardrobe and fondness for loud, screeching music. Jo had started sneaking out, and talking back, and her grades had taken a rapid nosedive. It was hard to keep them up when she was cutting more classes than she was attending. Our parents tried talking to her, then yelling at her, eventually even punishing her.

  She responded in typical, rebellious teen fashion. She said she hated them before storming off to her room.

  It went on like that for weeks. A lot of shouting and slamming doors. Mom cried quietly when she thought we couldn’t hear, and tensions on both sides were high. I did my best to stay out of it, determined to get through the final six months before I left for college without getting tangled up in Jo’s nonsense. As the trust between my parents and Jo continued to decline, I found myself put in charge every time Mom and Dad left us alone.

  “If you can’t control her, what makes you think I can?” I complained one night. I’d just found out they were attending a dinner party with some of Dad’s pilot pals.

  “You don’t need to control her. Just make sure she doesn’t have anyone over or burn the place down,” Dad said.

  My efforts to get out of babysitting proved futile. They scurried out the door, blowing kisses back at me as they made their escape into the evening.r />
  After checking to make sure Jo was in her room, I retreated to my own. I had a book report to focus on and I wasn’t going to let my little sister’s bad behavior affect my schoolwork. I pulled on my headphones, turned on my music, and began the hunt for academic sources to bolster my argument.

  I’d only gotten a page into my report when the screams cut through the house: loud enough for me to hear over Ed Sheeran’s crooning.

  My first thought was that she’d hurt herself somehow and was now bleeding out on the floor. I tore across my room and slid into the hall, calling her name.

  There was a whimper, then an unfamiliar woman’s voice speaking rapidly in a language I didn’t understand. The desperate pleading behind her words, however, was universal.

  It was coming from just around the corner, from the spare room that had been locked and unused for so long.

  I found Jo standing in its now partially open doorway. Her face was pale and eyes were wide, and beside her was a boy I didn’t recognize, looking equally scared. The key from her choker was still in the door’s handle, its crimson ribbon dangling limply from its end.

  “What the hell, Jo?” I demanded, confused and shaken. I’d worry about who the guy was and what he was doing in our house later; I was more concerned with the screams.

  From inside the room, the sound of a woman sobbing and pleading in that foreign language continued. Every hair on my arms stood on end.

  “I-I don’t know.” Jo gaped dumbly. “It was just supposed to be a joke. Dad said the key opened any door and we were just messing with it! Kim, someone’s in there!”

  I grabbed her arm and pulled her away. The boy stumbled after her. With the two of them behind me, I inched toward the door, my hand outstretched to push it open wider. As my fingertips brushed against its surface, my dad’s voice, lower and more menacing than I’d ever heard, sounded from within.

  “Shut her up, damn it!” he snapped from the darkness. I immediately froze.

  Jo’s hand grabbed the back of my shirt. I glanced at her and saw the same frightened bewilderment stamped on her face that I knew was on mine.

  There was the sharp ring of a slap. The woman quieted into heart wrenching, subdued sniffles before Dad spoke again. “I can get her out on Thursday’s flight, but it’s going to cost extra.”

  “My client is impatient for new girls, he’ll pay,” another voice, I didn’t know, replied. He had a slight accent, maybe Chinese.

  “Then I’ll make sure she has a seat. You’ve got an escort for her?” Dad asked.

  “Of course,” the mystery man said. “The same arrangement as always.”

  “Not quite.” Dad sounded doubtful. “The baby, what’ll happen to her?”

  “Orphanage, roadside, who cares? I only came for the mother.”

  There was a brief silence broken only by the woman’s continued, plaintiff mumbles. Then Dad’s voice: “Contact your guy in Beijing. Have him do up some adoption papers when he makes a passport for the girl. Find somewhere safe for the baby for the next two months until I can come back for her. Your client is paying for all that, too.”

  “That’s not part of the deal!” the other man protested.

  “Get me the papers and keep the kid safe, or your client doesn’t have a new girl. Not Thursday or any other damn day.”

  There was mumbled, begrudging agreement. The room went quiet.

  “Kim?” Jo was trembling against my back.

  “I’m...gonna go,” said the boy, who I’d forgotten was even there. He thundered down the hall toward the steps.

  Jo didn’t even call after him.

  I crept forward, my sister still clinging to my shirt, and whispered, “Dad?”

  When I got no response, I nudged the door open with my foot. Light from the hallway flooded the room. Aside from all the souvenirs Dad brought home, it was completely empty.

  Jo and I exchanged a look, both lost, both terrified. Then we were running as fast as we could back to my room.

  We shut and locked the door and tried to call our parents on my cell phone—first Mom, then Dad—but neither answered. We must have dialed them each a dozen times, but each time it went to voicemail.

  “I just wanted to show Ethan the room.” Jo was curled up at the foot of my bed with her knees pulled to her chest, rambling tearfully. “I wanted to—wanted to show him the stuff Dad brought back. I didn’t even think the key would work. I only used it because of the story Dad told us when he gave it to me. I thought it would be funny! What was that, Kim?”

  But I didn’t have an answer for her. I couldn’t even be angry with her for sneaking a boy into the house. I was too rattled.

  Neither of us left my room until hours later, when Mom finally pulled into the garage a little after one AM.

  Dad wasn’t with her.

  It was hard to piece together what had happened at first. Mom was so upset that she kept alternating between fury and near-hysterical crying. She paced from room to room restlessly. We trailed after her, too afraid to ask for details but desperate to know more. She finally sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine and one of the large glasses which she filled to the brim. She drank greedily before bursting into tears again. I understood her reaction well enough later, even if it only made me more upset in the moment.

  There really was no easy way to tell her children that their father had just spent the evening boasting about his long standing involvement with a ring of human traffickers.

  What had started as a pleasant supper among friends took a sudden, dark turn. Dad had paused mid-dessert to look across the table at the Filipino wife of one of the other pilots. “I know a guy who would pay good money to have a woman like you,” he said.

  When she asked what he meant, Dad grinned. “Guy up north. He likes his ladies young and yellow, so do his buddies. I bet I’d get a couple grand for flying you to him.”

  Everyone was appalled, but assumed it was a tasteless joke brought on by too much drink. Mom tried to apologize for him, but Dad waved her off and insisted he meant what he said. He asked if his friend was interested in “trading in” his wife for a tidy little sum. He just had to say the word, and Dad could make it happen. A fight had followed, and someone called the cops.

  When they showed up, Dad repeated his offer to them as if he expected they’d agree it sounded like a good deal. He seemed honestly surprised when they put him in handcuffs and told him that they needed to ask him some questions at the station.

  While Mom spoke, my eyes met Jo’s across the kitchen table. I knew she was feeling the same sick churning in her gut that I was. Neither of us said anything then, but we were both beginning to realize what we’d heard upstairs, even if we didn’t understand how it had happened.

  Jo had used her key to open a door to a room that contained all of Dad’s souvenirs from his overseas trips. The room where he’d kept momentos of all the countries he’d visited. The room that had been created as a shrine to all those far off places from which he’d helped rip young women away from their lives and transport them to the highest bidder.

  Jo had used her key to open the door, and we’d learned what was really inside that room.

  Dad’s trial was a swift one; he confessed everything readily enough. He even seemed proud of it. He’d helped deliver hundreds of women into slavery and abuse over two decades by arranging for them and their escorts to be on commercial flights he was piloting. He smiled about it on the stand.

  The thing he was most pleased about, aside from all the extra money he’d made, was the two little girls he had “saved”: one from a small village in northern China, and the other from the slums of Mumbai, India.

  “We didn’t usually take mothers. Our clients didn’t want used women, but there were two in particular over the years that the broker couldn’t pass up. Beautiful, still young, but they had babies. They were just going to leave the kids behind, come what may, but I took one look at their faces and I
knew immediately that they were meant to be my little girls. The same guy who forged the passports and travel documents for the women made me adoption papers for the girls, and I brought them home a couple months later.”

  He stared at us the whole time he spoke, misty eyed and beaming. I fought back a surge of bile, and Jo buried her face in her hands beside me. Mom swayed in her seat, the color gone from her face. I thought she might faint.

  “I love you, Kimberly, Josephine,” Dad said. He gave us a little wave. “You’ll always be my little girls.”

  It was the last time we went to court.

  It was the last time we saw the man we had called our father.

  Jo and I took the choker with its key to the beach, and she hurled it as hard and as far as she could into the ocean. We stood there and stared over the water long after it sank beneath the waves, gripping each other’s hands.

  “The lady who sold it to him, she told him that we could get into any door with that key. Whatever was in the room could come out too, remember?” Jo asked softly.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “What do you think that meant?”

  I shrugged but didn’t answer.

  I didn’t want Jo dwelling on it anymore. I didn’t want to dwell on it anymore.

  I didn’t want to dwell on the fact that so many items he’d brought back for us had been bought with blood money made from innocent, ruined lives.

  That we had been bought with blood money.

  I didn’t want to think about the fact that, if we hadn’t accidentally let out the person he truly was, he might still be doing it.

  It was hard enough accepting that the man who raised us had been a monster. It was even harder trying to figure out how we’d unleashed the part of himself that he’d hidden so well for so long, or how all it took was one little key that could open any door.

  The Lesson of the Tiger

  Dad got me started young. It was just Saturday nights at first when he’d wait for Mom to be caught up in her shows, but over time, it became more frequent. Eventually he was at my bedroom door at least two or three nights a week. I’d hear his footsteps coming down the hall, and I would stop whatever I was doing and wait for him to appear. When he did, he always asked the same question with that same smile.