Twenty-One

by D. Victoria BonAnno

  Demetrius had a moment of disorientation. Dede was certainly real, and she had addressed the girl by a name he didn’t know. He stood in stunned silence as Mama Dede made small talk with the woman he had thought was a hallucination. Slowly the world filled in again; the stench of the incense, the throbbing pain in his head. The young woman remained, flesh and blood, the swell of her breasts rising and falling with every breath she took.

  “Demetrius,” Mama Dede put a hand on his arm. “This is Dia Belaire.”

  The girl extended a smooth white hand to him. Demetrius hesitated to touch her. Just looking at her had caused him to question reality. But when he took her hand, he felt soft, cool skin pressing against his, and the earth did not crumble.

  “Demetrius,” she said. The name sounded so sweet coming from her. “Like in that Shakespeare play?”

  Demetrius saw Dede tense out of the corner of his eye. He was stunned as well.

  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he said. He looked at Dede, but she remained focused on Dia, a slight crease forming between her brows.

  Dia grinned. “That’s the one. We read it in class last year. I liked it.”

  Her smile made him smile. The movement hurt his face, but he didn’t care.

  Dia and Mama Dede chatted a bit more, but Demetrius faded in and out of the conversation, his chest tightening every time she met his eyes. He stared at her, watching her hair bounce with every movement she made, her arms folded like a shield despite her apparent comfort in the parlour. What was it about her that made him ache and made him feel so tranquil at the same time? She wasn’t a vision of his past, but she had to at least resemble someone from it. Nothing else made any sense. He watched her and a slow, sick fear washed over him. He had fled the hospital in Toledo, fled before the pretty nurse he had knocked over could give him his name. He had fled to a bus station so fast that he hadn’t even changed out of his hospital gown, all from the same fear he was experiencing now, fear of remembering. Did he want to remember?

  All he knew was that when Dia left with an appointment for a lave tet was that he had to see her again.

  The rest of the day passed in a blur for Demetrius. He could think of nothing but the girl in the parlour. Nothing else mattered. He saw her face on every passerby, heard her wild laughter in every bar, even the dilapidated strip club he visited later in the night. He ran through their encounter over and over in his mind, pouring over every detail, trying to pinpoint what exactly about her had so shaken him. She was a splinter in his brain.

  Mama Dede was in the kitchen when he returned home with two glasses of whiskey beside her on the counter. Demetrius studied the woman who had taken him in. He and Dede often drank together, but they normally passed the bottle around on the porch. The last time she had poured a glass for him, she had had a frank talk with him about his living without an identity. The next day, she had a birth certificate and a social security card with the name Demetrius Heart. She refused to tell him how she had gotten them. He despised the saccharine surname she had given him but hadn’t dared question her.

  Dede handed him his glass. If she was drunk already, she gave no indication, but she never did. Demetrius often found himself nearly passing out while drinking with Dede, and she remained sitting in her rocking chair on the porch, humming softly.

  Dede clinked her glass with his and poured a small amount onto the sticky floor before draining her drink. Demetrius turned his back, shifted his mask, and followed suit. He’d never asked her for whom she poured out her liquor, and she’d never asked him what had happened to his face. They respected one another’s secrets.

  Demetrius savoured the slow burn of the whiskey in his throat and waited. He knew why the glasses were out for him tonight. However, he didn’t know what she wanted to say. Dede was not a predictable woman. He looked at her, studied her profile, her freckled skin stretched over her bones, her white hair tied back in a bun. Many of her clients thought she was Haitian or African, but Dede’s ethnicity was so obscure that she could have been African or Mexican or Italian or Native American, anything that served the trade she chose. Age had dulled her skin colour to a nondescript brown. Her hair was wiry now, but it could have been smooth and glossy in her youth, or wild and untamable. There was no way to tell, and he would never ask. Demetrius enjoyed her obscurity in an era where ethnic labels defined so much of a person’s identity.

  “Do you know why you got the last name Heart?” she asked without looking at him.

  Demetrius poured them another glass, a sinking feeling in his stomach. “No.”

  Dede’s tawny green eyes remained fixed on the door to the parlour. She took a slow sip of her whiskey and the silence stretched.

  “Because your heart’s what’s wrong with you,” she said finally, in that cold, matter of fact way she spoke with her clients about their problems. “You’re heartsick. Desire controls everything you do. You want what you want and you take it. I’d bet my left tit a woman landed you in that hospital bed.”

  Demetrius was stunned. Dede’s eyes held a foreign ferocity when they met his. She pointed a finger at him like a scolding mother.

  “You leave that girl alone, boy,” she ordered, swigging her whiskey. “I seen you looking at her like there’s nothing else in the world. But I know what’s in you, and you know what’s in you. Ain’t a hooker in New Orleans you haven’t scared shitless. You’ll destroy that poor child.”

  Demetrius took a step back. He couldn’t help it. Her words struck him like a slap in the face. He remembered the blood under his fingernails from earlier that day, the scratches on his arms. He didn’t remember what had happened that night, but he remembered nights that were probably identical. He was consumed by the insatiable need to see blood on naked flesh; to dominate, overpower, and terrorize. To learn that Mama Dede knew about it was devastating. He should have known. Half of Dede’s clients were working girls, buying Follow Me Boy oil and requesting this or that ritual for luck or protection from the law. He should have known that word would get back to her.

  Dede was watching him, waiting, but he could think of nothing to say. She had shocked him, and he hadn’t been able to mask his emotions. She sighed and shook her head.

  “She needs you,” Dede’s words surprised him. “She’ll be back here, and I seen her looking at you the same way you was looking at her. Nothing I say is gonna keep you apart. But don’t you touch her, boy. She’s not for what’s in you. You be a brother to her and nothing else. You understand?”

  Demetrius’ throat was dry. Dede had never spoken to him that way before. Dia’s smile loomed large in his mind, and the peace he felt when they had spoken was slipping away.

  “Yes,” he said finally. He turned his back on Dede to finish off his whiskey. The burn of alcohol felt like nothing now.

  He and Mama Dede sat on the porch that night and drank in silence.

  Chapter 9

  October 3, 2011

  Chloe had no idea how much time had passed since she had woken in the dreaded bedroom. She had come to in the cage, her wrists bound with handcuffs that were attached to a short chain wrapped around a bar on the cage door.

  In those first hours Chloe screamed, struggled to sit up in the tiny cage, tried to turn herself so she could kick at the door, but her bound arms forbade even twisting into a different position. She thought she would go insane if she didn’t stretch her legs, if she didn’t sit up. She would die if she had to remain crouched on her stomach or her side, with her knees drawn to her chest, hour after hour.

  Three had returned for the first time just as Chloe’s hunger pangs had become impossible to ignore. She had come in with a bottle of water and a bowl of warm soup broth, the first food Chloe had seen since she had been taken. The little slave had thrust the food through the bars, silent and wide-eyed, and she jumped at every movement Chloe made. Her fear stung Chloe. She had threatened the girl and abandoned her, this helpless teen who was as trapped as Chloe was.

  “I’m so
sorry,” Chloe had whispered, but Three had just skittered away once she had set the food down. The broth itself had been a new torment as Chloe struggled to feed herself with her arms bound. She spilled the broth all over the cage floor the first day, an accident that reduced her to a pitiful screaming animal. Three didn’t return until the next day, leaving again without a word. Each time she left, the silence grew thicker, the isolation more maddening.

  After a while, Chloe was hollow. Her thoughts were a dull hum, her growing hunger nothing but a gnat buzzing by her ear. Her escape attempt seemed a distant memory, despite the bruises on her skin and the scab under her chin from her fall. She didn’t remember having soiled herself again, but she did not cry in shame when she realized she had. She was a shell, a forgotten trinket on a shelf, gathering dust. When she slept, she dreamt of whirling rain, of firm lips against hers, of lilac bushes and branches of ripe fruit dangling just out of reach.

  The bedroom door beeped open, just as Chloe’s hunger swelled, as if Demetrius could sense when Chloe began to starve every day and knew just when to send Three to her.

  Today, however, Chloe didn’t hear Three’s bare footsteps. She heard voices. Two beautiful young women and a tall blonde man with a dark smirk came through the doorway with Three scurrying behind them, attached to a leash in the man’s hand.

  The women approached the cage, and Chloe froze like a cornered animal, unsure of what to do. She looked at the women, whose presence made her skin crawl. Their identical black eyes seemed huge as they studied Chloe through purple and green bangs, their bright red lips curled into smirks. She recognized them as the twins she had seen with Demetrius at the Oryx, but she couldn’t fathom what they were doing here. Right then she realized what made them so strange to her; they were the first women she had seen in this place who weren’t naked and collared. They wore jeans and skin tight blouses, casual clothing Chloe could have seen anyone wear on the streets of the outside world. Their smiles frightened her more than anything else. She whimpered and curled her knees into her chest.

  “So this is going to be the new Model Slave?” the man behind them said with a short laugh. “Doesn’t look like much.”

  The twin with the green hair nodded as her sister pulled a key from her pocket.

  “She’s a mess right now,” she purred. “Aren’t you, little girl?”

  Chloe felt a tug at the cage door. She jerked her wrists back, the handcuffs digging into her skin. She couldn’t get her mouth to work.

  No! She cried in her head, Don’t touch me. Get away from me!

  “Oh, hush,” the purple-haired sister chided, unlocking the chain from the cage and tugging at Chloe’s cuffs, urging her toward the open door. “Don’t you want to get out of that cage?”

  Chloe pulled weakly at the chain and tried to scoot farther back. She wanted out, but the twins were terrifying. The man leading Three around on a leash was terrifying. Whatever their purpose for being here, it couldn’t end well for her. The green-haired twin shook her head with a smile.

  “You’d better learn to cooperate, slave,” she said with a stern tone that didn’t match her smile, “or pretty soon you’ll have more than a little scratch on your chin.” She stood and turned to the man behind her. “Rodney?”

  The man, Rodney, handed over Three’s leash and ambled up to the cage with a theatrical crack of his knuckles. Chloe shook her head wildly, her pulse sprinting in her veins.

  “No,” she said, her first word in days, raw and rough. “No!”

  The man grinned, crouching in front of the cage door.

  “Oh, yeah, you’re coming out of there, baby,” he sneered. One of the twins handed him the chain attached to Chloe’s cuffs and rose to stand beside her sister. Rodney jerked the chain forward and Chloe bucked toward him.

  “No!” Chloe screamed again. “No, no, no, no!”

  She was too weak to put up a fight; every inch of her body screamed the moment she resisted. Rodney pulled her across the filthy cage floor with little trouble. The closer she came to him, the more she panicked. Compared to Demetrius, Rodney looked perfectly normal. He had no exotic adornments, a square jaw, and a blonde crew cut. He grinned at Chloe like a jack-o-lantern in November; bright and comical, but faded. His dark blue eyes were framed with the beginnings of crow’s feet. If Chloe had seen him walking down the street, she wouldn’t have given him a second glance. But here, as he hauled her starved body from the cage, plucking her out by the hair like a puppy by the scruff, he was as frightening as the Devil himself.

  “Come on, baby,” he said, pulling her onto her feet. “Time for you to learn the ropes.”

  The twins approached her. Chloe tried to shrink away, but Rodney kept a firm hand in her hair. The sound of the twins’ high heels clicking across the floor deafened her.

  “At Attention, slave,” the purple-haired twin ordered. Her cold tone made Chloe flinch. She didn’t know what to do, what the woman meant. She couldn’t think. All she knew was her racing heart, her weak limbs, the hunger that chewed holes in her stomach. The green-haired twin reached out and stroked Chloe’s cheek with her fingertips. Chloe balked, but Rodney kept her in place.

  “She’s not even broken yet, Faith,” said the green-haired twin. “She doesn’t know anything.” She smiled again. Chloe stared at her smooth red lips, their perfect cupid’s bow almost childlike. She couldn’t understand how something could look so innocent and so cruel at once. “I’m Charity, and that’s Faith. Demetrius is your Master, and while you’re here, we are your Mistresses. Demetrius is very upset with you.”

  A strange combination of emotions jabbed at Chloe’s chest. Her first reaction was defiance. Why would she care if she had upset the man who stole her away, starved her, and planned to enslave her? The thought of Demetrius’ anger sparked fear, yet there was an edge of shame that she could not deny or understand. She had no time to process her feelings, not with these strangers studying her as if she were in a zoo exhibit.

  “We’re here to clean you up,” said Charity.

  “And to teach you a lesson,” her sister, Faith, chimed in. “You might be Demetrius’ favourite right now, but even favourites have to get with the program.”

  Favourite? Chloe felt like laughing and bursting into tears all at once. The insanity of her situation threatened to consume her. Why couldn’t she bring herself to speak? To fight? Had she been locked in the cage for so long that she had truly become an animal?

  Rodney jerked the chain on the cuffs around her wrists. Chloe stumbled. Her legs quivered like a baby calf standing up for the first time. Her limbs were awkward and weak from disuse, her muscles aching even as she stood still.

  “Move,” Rodney ordered with a sneer. “You wanna try to yank the chain out of my hands?”

  The words struck her like a blow. She looked at Three, so dutifully trotting behind Faith and Charity as the group moved to the suite bathroom. Chloe had failed in her escape attempt, and it had cost her dearly. Had it also cost Three?

  Rodney led Chloe to the shower, “Get on your knees, baby,” he said. “We’re gonna hose you down while Three draws you a nice bath.”

  He took the base of Chloe’s neck and pushed, forcing her onto her knees. Chloe despised her own weak limbs. Three went to work filling the bath with water. The tub was immense, large enough for three or four people. Three worked frantically. The twins prodded her with a slap or a pinch at their leisure, as if it were a game.

  Rodney turned on the showerhead and ice cold water struck Chloe’s bare skin. She yelped and retreated from the stream. Rodney yanked her chain so hard that the cuffs bit into her wrists.

  “Stop whining,” he said. “It’ll warm up soon.”

  Chloe gritted her teeth as Rodney shot cold water over her back and chest. He stared at her with the brashness of a teenaged boy, his gaze creeping down her body. She shielded her chest from his stare and he forced her to lower her arms just as quickly with a pull of the chain. Exposed, the only escape was to turn
her face away. The water warmed up and became more bearable. Grime slipped away from her skin, but she could not relax with Rodney’s leering presence or the twins hovering around Three, chatting casually with one another as the frail girl filled the bath with sweet-smelling foam. Chloe couldn’t understand the twins. Charity called them her Mistresses, like Demetrius was her Master. What did that mean for her?

  Charity strolled over to the open shower. Chloe followed the line of her long legs. She and Faith were young, maybe even Chloe’s age. When she saw them at the Oryx, they looked like any other club goer in that scene; exotic faces in a sea of exotic people. She could never have imagined they were involved in something like this.

  “Demetrius wants us to punish you,” said Charity.

  Chloe swallowed hard. She thought about the slave she had seen tied to the wooden Saint Andrew’s cross, dripping with rain. Was keeping her locked in a cage for days not punishment enough?

  “I can’t take any more,” she whispered.

  Rodney’s hand cut across her cheek. Pain burst like fireworks behind her eyes. Chloe cried out and recoiled as far as the chain would allow.

  “What did I tell you about talking?” he snapped.

  “Talk again and we’ll have to gag you,” Charity warned.

  Chloe bowed her head, her cheek stinging. She couldn’t take this. She couldn’t. She felt Charity’s eyes on her, studying her. Faith came to stand beside her sister and slid an arm around Charity’s waist.

  “She’s beautiful,” she muttered, “but not as beautiful as some of the others we have downstairs.”

  Chloe felt tears swell. Faith spoke as if Chloe were a dog incapable of understanding her. Rodney shut off the shower. Chloe remained on her knees, her short hair dripping. She was clean, but what did that matter? She was still starving, still frail, still captive.

  Charity took the chain from Rodney, who joined Three at the bath tub. She knelt in front of Chloe, tilting her chin up with her fingertips. Again, a voice screamed in Chloe’s head: Fight! Hit her! Run! But what was the point? She was too weak to fight off three captors, too weak to run. She was certain they had changed the code on the door. She met Charity’s eyes, black and empty, a doll’s gaze.