Page 39 of A Girl, Unbroken
Isaac allowed me to go to the bathroom, but only God knows how I got there. I don’t remember. I only remember that I was suddenly back in the dark room, sitting on a chair across from Isaac. In his t-shirt and no underwear. The door was open, letting in light, his soldiers guarding it.
I could barely sit and was staring at the table when Noah came in.
“Princess.” His look was pure satisfaction that sent a wave of shame through my veins. As if by magic, a plate of stew and a 7-Up were in front of me. “Chicken jambalaya, guaranteed nut-free.” Noah winked at me before disappearing again. God, how I hated him! How I hated them all! I wanted to take a gun and shoot them straight in the heart. My hatred though, was short-lived, impossible to maintain between the humiliation and torture.
“Eat something!” Isaac said as I sat there, stiff as a board. It wasn’t a request either, but there was no fork or spoon, and the smell of the jambalaya disgusted me. “Eat! I won’t ask again.”
Afraid of more beatings, I ate with my fingers and fished out a chunk of meat. I prayed that there weren’t nuts or egg whites in the stew. Chewing hurt because my jaw was bruised, and after Ifinally managed to swallow, all I tasted was my blood. My hands were shaking, and although I wasn’t looking at Isaac, I knew he was watching me the entire time. And as soon as I had choked down half the jambalaya and drunk the 7-Up, he stood and slapped me a couple of times in the face hard enough to make me dizzy before he threw me face down on the table and tied my hands behind my back.
Then, he picked up where he left off last night with the door open. He didn’t even bother to rip off my shirt, and when I glanced up between whimpering and crying, I spotted Troy leaning against the doorframe, watching. Maury and Billy were standing guard next to him with more men crowding behind them, shoving each other to get a better look. I closed my eyes. My skin burned under the gaze of so many men as my body jerked helplessly across the table like it no longer was mine. Like it was simply a thing to be used. And they could all see it. I held my breath as if that would make it go by faster. But time didn’t pass. It didn’t stop. It went on and on. And it wasn’t me either. Not the daughter of America’s god and benefactor. I heard their disgusting cries.
Cell phone cameras flashed. The table creaked in a monotonous rhythm, but then Isaac told them to leave. That it was enough. I pressed my lips together and thought enough for who? For them? For me? To show me what it felt like to have others watching? Like what happened to him at Rikers Island?
Be brave, my child, I heard Dad say. But I didn’t want to be brave. I wanted to die.
The door slammed shut.
I was alone with Isaac.
Apparently, it wasn’t enough for him. It was never enough for him.
Even today, I can’t talk about the rest of that night or about all the nights that followed. Isaac had ropes and cloths brought to him with which he used to tie me up again and again in new, painful ways and then penetrated me wherever he felt like it. He kept a tally on the wall of how often he raped me and when Noah, Maury, or Billy beat me black and blue. At times, he even took over himself. All of those countless long nights lie in a dark vault of my soul, an interplay of barely bearable pain, powerlessness, humiliation, and the deepest, darkest fear that still resides within me today. They were a horrific cocktail of hard jerking across the wooden floor, merciless thrusting, mockery, men’s sweat, and hips slapping together. Of cigarette smoke, burning, and disorientation. Of moonshine, which he drank himself and occasionally gave to me for fun.
Most of it lay on a thin, blurred line to unconsciousness because, at times, my senses would release me and let me drift into blackness for seconds or minutes. During the day, the only thing I could do was lie on the floor and watch the beam of light, and when it grew darker, I would start to cry. Now and then, I recalled that Nathan had always believed Lea would listen to him when the sun cast a streak of light into the Palace of Shards. Eventually, I stopped thinking about Nathan and Dad. I also stopped strolling through the gardens and halls of Rosewood Manor in my mind.
Sometimes, I tried to calculate how long I had been in Isaac’s clutches, but the loneliness, fear, and pain distorted my perception of time. Sometimes, I thought I was going mad. The room I lay in turned into a swamp where at night the crocodile would burst out of a dark corner, the crocodile that would one day devour me.
I don’t know which night it was when I sat on Isaac’s lap, wearing only his t-shirt of course, and he personally fed me mashed potatoes à la Noah. I was too weak to raise my hands and Isaac had to hold me with one arm to keep me upright. I was too broken to resist, too weak to be disgusted even though I could feel his bare thighs beneath me since he was only wearing boxer shorts and a shirt.
“You know why I’m doing all this to you, right?” He brought the spoon to my mouth and I swallowed just like I always had to swallow everything he said. I didn’t answer. “Your father raped my mother when she was still a child. Only sixteen years old, younger than you are now.”
I tried to swallow these words too, but they made me even sicker than anything else he asked of me. “You’re lying,” I said, hoarse from all the crying at night and the tightness in my throat. I tensed, but he didn’t hit me.
He raised another spoonful of mashed potatoes to my mouth. “I thought you wouldn’t believe that. Unfortunately, Nathan isn’t here to confirm it. Your father was in Canada on business in Fort McMurray; he was maybe twenty-three and his oil business was booming. He had an office there and he was looking for a cleaner for the premises. He obviously liked my mother well enough.” He laughed harshly. “She had left Coldville to earn money for her family in the city. Fort McMurray was also called Fort McMoney back then. Eat!”
I pressed my lips together, but then whispered, “My dad is not a rapist. He is not like you.” There was still a little resistance left.
Isaac shoved the spoon into my mouth, my lips splitting again, and I swallowed blood and mashed potatoes. “My mother wasn’t lying. She told me on her deathbed.” There was an unmistakable warning in his voice now. One word back and hewould think of something new and terrible for me. But he would anyway.
I remained silent and thought of the packet of peanuts he always brought with him. My head was pounding and my mind was going crazy. It was true that Dad had been in Fort McMurray. He had lost Florentine and Nicholas there when he was around twenty-three in the fire at the Forb Hotel. It had traumatized him badly, but he had only told me that once and then never talked about it again. He couldn’t bring himself to. The agony of losing his family for the second time had almost killed him. Whether he was guilty or not, his suffering made me cry now even though I had no tears left. Besides, what Isaac said was definitely not true. Nathan would have told me. He only said it to make me even more miserable, worthless, and dirtier. The daughter of a rapist who deserved all of this.
Isaac forced me to eat everything before he did what he always did to me and drew more lines on the wall toward morning. Then he dressed in peace. “It’ll be a while before we get to seven hundred and twelve,” he said mockingly, shaking his hair from his damp forehead and drinking moonshine straight from the bottle.
After that, he sat next to me, eating peanuts, drinking more moonshine, and smoking. I didn’t notice much of it since I was elsewhere. He had hit me in the face several times so hard that I was out of it. I was lying flat on my stomach with my wrists tied to each ankle with a rope, but I barely felt the pulling in my joints. I had numbed my senses and emotions so that I could continue to exist, to protect the part of me that was still Willa Nevaeh Rae. It seemed even more fragile than the glass in the Palace of Shards and if I let anything slip through my protective shield, even the last part of me would shatter completely.
“Did Nathan ever tell you why we were in Baton Rouge years ago?” Isaac asked me at one point, blowing smoke from his cigarette into my face.
I merely blinked. It was so hard to think about Nathan because I wanted to keep him beyond this room, beyond any memory of this horror. Pure and clean.Gott hjarta. I had asked him once if they had thought about abducting me back then, he and his companion, but he had replied that he hadn’t even known how to spell the word back then. I had assumed they just happened to pass by our property since they lived in the area, at least for a while.
Isaac was watching me, but I couldn’t bear his gaze and turned my head to the other side with effort. “Shall I untie your bonds, little lady?” he asked almost tenderly.
I hated it when he acted like he cared about my well-being. I hated that he knew my body better than Nathan did. And I hated that his gentle words were making me cry, but I nodded.
Naturally, he didn’t untie me. “Look at me!” he ordered and I did as he commanded. There was a rigid, cold light in his eyes; they looked like those of a crocodile waiting to attack, as if he was about to grab me by the throat and pull me under the water. “I was there because I wanted to see my father.”
“What?” I asked tonelessly. I thought he meant one of the employees, but instinctively, I knew I was wrong.
“I was hoping he would take us in. Give us shelter, and if not, at least give me money to survive.”
