Believe Like a Child (17 page)
E
bby woke Alessa up at noon. When she saw the time, Alessa was shocked. She couldn’t believe she had slept for so long.
“Oh my God, that was the best sleep I’ve had in a year!” she blurted out. “It felt like I was in a coma. I didn’t wake up and I didn’t have any dreams either. I feel like a new person.”
Ebby smiled down at her. “You
are
a new person,” she told her. Today, you will begin to chart the course of your future and we are here to help you along the way.”
Alessa closed her eyes and smiled. She secretly prayed that Ebby was right. She really wanted to believe her, more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. She followed her into a small office. They both sat down on a sofa set against a pale yellow wall, with the sunlight pouring in through the beautiful old window. “Tell me about yourself, Alessa,” Ebby urged.
No one had ever asked her to do that before. What was there to say?
Alessa began cautiously. “Well, about nine months ago, I left home. I was living in North Philadelphia for a while. Then I decided to move back into the city. I came here, hoping you could help me get a job and get me on my feet. Actually, I’m not even sure if you do help people to get jobs. My friend told me that this was a homeless shelter and that I should come here.”
“That’s exactly what we do here and I’m glad your friend told you about us. I suspect you’re about eighteen or so. Is that right?”
“Yes, I’m eighteen,” Alessa lied.
“Okay. Well, can you tell me why left home so young? Did your parents throw you out?” Ebby could tell Alessa was uneasy by the way she squirmed in her seat and avoided eye contact. She decided she would have to put her fears to rest. “Maybe I should tell you a little bit about us first,” Ebby began. “We will never judge you. We are only here to help. Young women come here all the time, women who have been battered by their partners, women who have been raped. Some have lived on the streets since they were very young and others are just hitting hard times. We even have those who got pregnant and their parents threw them out of the house, leaving them nowhere to go. Have you ever been pregnant, Alessa?”
“No, thank God! Not yet. I don’t want to get pregnant, until I have a husband and a home.”
Ebby rubbed her forehead. “Alessa, you can trust me. There isn’t too much I haven’t heard. I have been working here a long time. Is there someone you are running from? If so, I will need to know, so we can keep an eye out, not just for your safety, but for the safety of the others who are staying here.”
Alessa knew that if Harlin came here and did anything like she had witnessed him doing in the past, she would never be able to live with herself. “Well,” she ventured, “there is this guy who I’m sort of running from. I really don’t think he’ll come here, because everything he does is in North Philly.”
“Okay,” Ebby said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. What does he look like?”
Alessa gave her Harlin’s name and a description of what he looked like.
Ebby asked, “Could he be violent?”
From Alessa’s curt response, it was clear that she wouldn’t be getting any more information. She had to earn her trust first. Sam had filled Ebby in on how Alessa was dressed the previous night. She figured this Harlin character was her pimp. They had seen this many times. Young girls hooked on drugs and becoming prostitutes to make money to feed their drug habit. Ebby had to wonder about this, though, as the girl seemed completely sober. Maybe something else was going on with Alessa? Ebby knew she’d find out soon.
In her line of work, there were two things that helped her to help others: trust and respect. Ebby suspected there was a lot more to Alessa’s story than she was willing to divulge. Despite the girl’s aloof, defensive façade, she liked her. There was an air of vulnerability about her that made Ebby curious to know more. She took Alessa around the rest of the facility and soon afterward, the two sat down in the small cafeteria to have lunch together. They spoke easily and found they shared a similar sense of humor.
Alessa could be amusing and theatrical when she spoke. Her vocabulary was quite limited and her sentences were peppered with profanities. Ebby was no prude. Though she didn’t resort to that kind of language herself, she heard it all the time from the people who lived there. Alessa liked this woman, but was still intimidated by her. She was afraid Ebby might share her secrets with others. Besides, she secretly feared that she was judging her. How could someone like Ebby, who read books all the time and used words that Alessa hadn’t even heard before, not judge her?
They were drinking iced tea back in Ebby’s office when she asked Alessa, “So why did you leave home so young?”
Alessa hesitated. She wanted to take a leap of faith and tell her everything, but the thought that Ebby might call the police held her back. After all, she had run away from home when she was a minor.
“You know, Alessa, you’re eighteen years old,” Ebby said encouragingly. “Unless you killed someone, no one can hurt or blame you for telling me the truth.”
Alessa hesitated a moment, “Okay,” she conceded, “but I want you to know that I’m really nervous about telling you everything.”
Ebby nodded in understanding. “You should only tell me as much as you’re comfortable with, Alessa. You don’t have to tell me anything you feel I shouldn’t know.”
Alessa took a deep breath and began describing her childhood and her relationship with her mother and her Uncle Danny. It was almost as if she were talking about someone else’s life. Ebby listened intently. Even as she was relating the incidents from her childhood, Alessa hoped she wasn’t giving too much away. She was terrified that Ebby would think badly of her, but couldn’t stop the flow of words that poured from her lips. With great difficulty, she described the first time with her uncle, the anal and oral sex and the climax of events that forced her to run away from home. She told Ebby what Carl had done to her at the Rope.
Ebby had seen and heard much during her days here, but never had the incidents been described in such detail and in such explicit language. Alessa held nothing back. She described, bit by bit, the tragedy of her youth. Ebby’s stomach turned sour and she reached for a bottle of Tums. When Alessa came to the bit about Rhonda, Ebby gasped in horror, her hand shooting up to her own mouth in a reflexive gesture. Alessa explained how Zoe had helped her and how she had ended up in North Philly.
Ebby’s mind started fast-forwarding to Alessa’s current situation, trying to imagine what might have happened to bring her here. She figured the girl would tell her she had started prostituting to survive. So she was stunned when she heard about the rape in the alley, her stint at the go-go bar, the antics of Harlin and his crew and the lap dances he had “taught” her. She listened in horror as Alessa told her of the many men Harlin had forced her to “service”, as she put it, at the bar. Ebby tried keeping her feelings to herself, but her furrowed forehead and open mouth gave her away. Alessa felt like she had told her way too much.
Finally, she described how Jay had caught her having sex with one of the bar patrons and fired her. She did not spare Ebby the details of what Harlin had planned for her just the previous night, before she fled from his clutches and showed up at the shelter. In her anxiety to establish that despite all that had happened to her, she was a normal human being, capable of normal human feelings, Alessa also told Ebby about her relationships with Tasha and Shiver, about how much she loved them and how acutely she would miss them. She desperately needed to convince Ebby that she wasn’t a bad person.
What struck Ebby most forcefully was the way Alessa described some of the most traumatic events of her life as if they were nothing out of the ordinary. It was precisely for this reason that she had entered into this line of work. She was here for people like Alessa.
B
ack in North Philly, Harlin had become an angry lunatic over finding Alessa. He had bought a bag of meth to keep himself awake as his crew searched high and low for her since the night she had escaped. Knowing he would be off his rocker over Alessa’s disappearance, Tasha went over to her brother’s house early the next morning and found him pacing in the kitchen. She stopped in the doorway and stared at him, appalled by his appearance. His pupils were dilated, the veins on his forehead were popping out and he was grinding his teeth.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” he snapped when he caught her staring. “Where did that fucking little bitch go? Do you know where she went? When I find her, she is going to be really sorry! Fucking cunt! All that I’ve done for her and she runs off like the little whore that she is!”
Tasha let her jaw drop in fake surprise. “Are you telling me she isn’t here, Harlin?” she inquired. “What the fuck did you let happen to her?” To calm her brother down and stop him from searching for Alessa, she was trying hard to create the impression that her friend had not really run away, but met with some mishap.
“How the fuck do I know what happened to her?” Harlin screamed. “I turned her out last night. I had set her up with a guy I knew and when he showed up, the little bitch wasn’t there! She is probably hiding somewhere. Maybe back at old lady Lea’s house. Yeah, that’s probably where she went. Stupid whore! Thinking I won’t figure it out.”
Worried that Harlin might hurt Lea in his quest to find Alessa, Tasha said hurriedly, “Of course she wouldn’t go back there, Harlin! What the hell would she do there? I think someone hurt her, Harlin. Alessa would never run. She would be too afraid that you’d find her. Besides, maybe it’s better that she’s gone. You need to stop all these drugs. You look like a fucking train wreck!”
Harlin whipped around and glared at her. “You know something! I can tell. I know you and you know something. You better fucking tell me where she is! How could you turn on me for her, of all people? What the fuck are you thinking?”
The way he was looking at her terrified Tasha, but she managed to recover quickly.
“How dare you accuse me of turning on you!” she counter-attacked. “You, of all people, should know I would never betray you. No one loves you more than I do. I can’t believe you’re blaming me for this!”
Tasha managed to dredge up some tears to lend conviction to her act. It wasn’t all that hard, because she was scared shitless that he would find out the truth. She had no regrets whatsoever about having helped Alessa escape. In fact, looking at Harlin now, she realized she had done the right thing. Maybe for the first time in her life, she told herself, she had done the right thing.
A
lessa spent the rest of the day with Ebby and the shelter’s other staff members. They were easy to get along with and she enjoyed being in Ebby’s company. She was such a patient and sympathetic listener that Alessa was impelled to tell her more about herself. It was as if for the first time, she had discovered her voice. She had something to say and there was a person who seemed really interested in every detail. It was clear that Alessa still felt lost and lonely, but at the shelter, she experienced a brief sense of well-being. Having been stripped of her sense of self for as long as she could remember, however, she no longer had any idea of who she was. She had come to believe that she was a weak and worthless person.
Alessa was assigned a room where she slept with three other homeless women. Two of them were drug addicts and the third was a raging alcoholic. They were all waiting for a place in rehab. It wasn’t, by any means, the first rehab for any of them, but at least, they had a plan and a place to go to, once room was available. Alessa, however, had no clue as to what was coming next in her own life and the uncertainty made her worry a great deal. She knew the shelter had a lot of resources and wondered if they would help her find a job and an apartment. She might even be able to get her GED, as she had planned earlier. As she drifted off to sleep on her first night at the shelter, Alessa’s exhilaration over the change that was taking place in her life briefly overcame her uncertainties.
She fell asleep and dreamed that she was sitting in the living room of the house where she had grown up. Everyone around her, even her mother, Caterina, was happy. Alessa could see everyone talking to each other amicably and behaving as a family should. She could hear her sister, Rosabella, laughing and her beautiful hair drifting across the small of her back. Her Uncle Danny was there. He was the man she had known before he moved into their home, the uncle she had once loved.
When she woke up the next morning and realized it was all a dream, Alessa experienced an overwhelming sense of isolation. She washed her face and made her way down to the cafeteria for breakfast. She noticed Ebby sitting at a corner table with other staff members, but went over to an unoccupied table and sat down.
Ebby joined her immediately. “Why are you sitting here by all yourself? Is there a problem with your roommates?” she inquired.
“No, not at all,” Alessa was quick to reply. “I feel like being on my own. Besides, I just don’t have much in common with them. They all have some kind of addiction. I heard them talking about how they would steal things from people and stores to pay for their high. None of them know I was a prostitute. It just makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t want them to ask me any questions. I’m sure if they knew the stuff I did, they would be completely grossed out by me.”
“I’m sure if they knew what you were
forced
to do, they wouldn’t give a crap,” Ebby said firmly. “All they really care about right now is getting placed in rehab. Everyone knows they have hard work ahead of them, if they’re to kick their habits. Besides, why would you care if they did think ill of you? What happened to you is
your
life. That doesn’t make you a bad person. Unfortunate, that you have such a rotten family, but that isn’t your fault.”
“Really?” Alessa said, surprised, crinkling her face. “Well, I was thinking about it last night. Ebby, I have probably fucked eighty different men at the go-go bar in just six months! I was doing about four guys a night. That’s disgusting!”
“No, it’s not,” Ebby said in a comforting voice, “it’s just the facts of your past. It’s all behind you now.”
Alessa thought Ebby had gone mad. “What are you talking about?” she said. “In case you didn’t hear me right, I have pretty much been a whore since I was seven years old. Look at me, Ebby. I’m a fucking mess! I have no job, no place to live. And who knows what filthy diseases I might have picked up from all those men!”
Ebby refrained from comment. It was exasperating for Alessa that she wouldn’t accept the degrading self-image she had chosen to cling to.
Ebby listened for a while more, then said, “Things happen and people do what they need to do to live.”
Alessa was flabbergasted. She had come to expect so little from the world she felt that as long as Ebby didn’t plan on having sex with her or forcing her to have sex with others, she might just be an angel God had sent to save her sorry ass.
Meanwhile, Ebby was pondering over Alessa’s concern about picking up diseases from all the men she had been with. “I want you to consider getting some medical attention,” she told the girl. “We can help you there. We have a very nice gynecologist you can go to. You should also get some blood work and a general checkup done. I can schedule it for you. Does that sound okay?”
“Might as well. I’d rather know now than later.”
Ebby liked her matter-of-fact attitude. She had discovered that while Alessa was apprehensive about her future, she wasn’t afraid of the truth. Alessa had never spared a thought for the risks of disease until that moment. She wondered now how she had lived through the past year without worrying about such things. She must have been walking around in a fog. How could she have been so naive?