Page 92 of Riot House
Aimée stares blankly at the report for a moment. “Is there anything else you want to add, Elodie? Anything else that you've remembered?”
“Yes.” I have to say this now, while I am not myself. I couldn't tell the officer who found me. He was too young. Too frightened. He'd thrown up on his shoes. This little room feels safer, though, and Aimée doesn't look like she will puke. “Something happened. Something before...he put me in the box.”
The detective narrows her eyes. “Yes?”
“He did to me what he did to my mom. He forced himself...into me. Between my legs. He held my head against the tiles, and he…hehurtme. I screamed. I tried to stop him, but...I could see my mom. Her eyes were still open, and she was looking right at me, and...”
That's it. That's all I have. I don't fall apart. I just run out of steam. I can't continue. Aimée looks at me, her lovely brown eyes boring into me, and a single tear wobbles on the end of her eyelashes. That single tear is more than I've shed for myself since I escaped from that lockbox. It seems wrong that she gets to be the first person to cry over how terrible this nightmare is. She knows it, too. She quickly bats the tear away, clamping down on her errant display of emotion. “We need to get you back to the hospital. I don't think they conducted a rape kit.”
Shame sets me alight. I try to shrink in on myself, trying not to imagine the humiliation that is to come.
“Just a few more questions and we'll get you out of here. What day was that, Elodie?”
“Yesterday. Friday. It happened after I came home from school.”
Aimée pales, the color leaching from her face as she glances down at the report in front of her. She doesn't appear to be looking at anything in particular. Her hand trembles and she quickly tucks it under the table, out of sight. “Do you have any idea what day it is now, Elodie?” she asks in a quiet voice.
Those endless hours in the dark, cramped into a ball, my joints screaming in agony, begging me to stretch out, with my nose pressed against those tiny holes. They felt like an eternity. A hell that spanned full lifetimes. I know how the mind plays tricks, though. Hours feel like days, that feel like years. I've been here at the station since three in the morning, which means it must have been around midnight when that officer cracked the lock off the box and released me. My brain balks at the idea of tackling the simplest of mathematics, but I force myself to count off the hours on my fingers. “It's Sunday,” I tell her. “The early hours of Sunday morning.”
“You think you were in the box for nine hours?” Aimée whispers.
I look from the female detective to the man sitting next to her, back and forth, back and forth, trying to work out the complex expressions they're wearing. “Yes?” The guy's face creases into a mask of horror. He clears his throat, but it sounds more like he's choking. He pushes away from the table, bolting for the door. “Jesus Christ. I can't...I'm sorry. I need to get some air.”
The door makes a quietshushas it closes behind him.
Aimée sits back in her chair, rubbing nervously at the base of her throat. “We cannot continue this interview without two detectives present, Elodie. I'm sorry. But...you should know...you were not inside the box for nine hours. Today is Tuesday, my love.”
I frown at that. That doesn't make any sense. “Tuesday?”
She nods.
“I was...in the box for...five days?”
Aimée looks away, covering her mouth with her hand.
Five days.
Pissing and shitting on myself.
Gagging on the smell of my own filth and the reek of my mother rotting on the other side of the room.
That thin straw poking through the hole in the box, providing my only supply of water.
The tiny pinpricks of daylight, blazing against the back of my eyes, and then the darkness creeping in. Rinse and repeat. Did it all happen that many times? Did that many days really blur into one another? How could I, couldanyone, survive something like that without losing their minds?
But then again, have I kept mine?
Aimée leaves the room and comes back again almost immediately carrying a jacket. She places it on my shoulders, wrapping me up in it. “Come on. I know this will be hard, but I'll be with you, okay? I won't leave your side, I promise.”
We aren't even out of the building when the military cops show up. In full uniform and armed to the teeth, a man I don't know with three stripes on his arm stops Aimée in the hallway, thrusting a piece of paper at her.
“The girl needs to come with us,” he clips out.
Aimée's horror-stricken. Her eyes wide, mouth hanging open, she shakes her head, tucking me into the side of her body. As if she can protect me from what's about to happen. “This girl has been sexually assaulted and tortured, Sergeant. She's not going anywhere with you. I'm taking her to the hospital.”
The sergeant side steps in front of her, blocking her way out of the building. “I'm afraid that's not possible, Detective Berger. This young lady is a minor and an American Citizen. And she was witness to an accident that took place in a building owned by the U.S. government, which is technically U.S. soil. Israel Police has no jurisdiction here.”
“Accident? Her mother was murdered! And that building wasn’t on your base. It was on Israeli soil! It doesn’t matter who owns it.”
