Believe Like a Child (5 page)

The moment Rhonda saw her, she knew something was wrong. Rushing over to her friend, she asked, “Where were you? I saw Denise come off the same trail about five minutes ago. What happened? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a quick shot to the stomach and a hard slap to the face. The way I see it, I got off easy.” Alessa tried to smile and make light of it and ease Rhonda’s worry, but it wasn’t working.

“Why did she hit you?”

“Because, apparently, she and Carl are going out now and I was being warned to keep off her turf. She’s an ugly, rotten bitch and has to threaten people to keep them away from her man. I hate her, Rhonda! She’s a fucking bully! She’s like a guy, you know. She’s so rough she’s more like a boy. I really don’t see why Carl would even want to be with her.”

Rhonda looked at her. Then she said something that would stay with her for the rest of her life.

“Alessa, you’re a very special person. Inside you, there is energy, a force waiting to come out. People see it. People can sense it, when they are around you. You have an appeal that’s different, an attractiveness that makes others wonder what makes you tick. You are a mystery to people and that intimidates them. It’s what you are on the inside that makes people like Denise jealous and fearful of you. There is a power, a quiet storm within you and people sense that. Before I got to know you, I had seen it too. It’s why no one really talks to you. You have something they all lack and that’s heart and soul.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alessa said. She had never given it any thought.

“Someday, you will know what I’m talking about. I don’t know how, but you will finally wake up and see the person that everyone else does.”

Rhonda’s words penetrated deep. They made Alessa nervous and uncomfortable. Suddenly, she realized that Rhonda was describing a survivor. Although she never thought about it, Alessa understood now that this was exactly what she was. Only, she had taken a long time to recognize it. What she didn’t know was that being a survivor was exactly what had got her through each day. For the first time in her life, she was aware of her inner strength and her dormant power. This awareness was the precious gift Rhonda would give her and one for which Alessa would be eternally grateful.

Chapter Six

B
y the time Alessa’s sixteenth birthday came around, she and Rhonda were closer than ever. They had come to care for each other deeply. However, Alessa still hadn’t told Rhonda the truth about Uncle Danny. While he continued with his pedophile ways and did whatever he pleased to her as she lay in her bed, Alessa had mastered a form of passive self-defense; she had learned how to retreat deep into her own mind and lock herself in so that she remained unaffected by it all. However, spending a great deal of time with Rhonda and her mother had taught her to become more outspoken. She looked upon them as family and found a mother in the warm and big-hearted Zoe, who sensed something was not quite right with Alessa and went out of her way to give her the feeling of security and belonging that her own parents could not. She enjoyed the hours she spent at their house, all the more so, because it allowed her to escape momentarily from her Uncle Danny’s clutches.

Having enough to contend with at home, Alessa hadn’t had the heart to hook up with any of the other boys after her break-up with Carl. They hadn’t talked in almost a year. Carl didn’t even dare make eye contact with her anymore. He was still going steady with Denise and knew only too well there would be hell to pay, if he so much as acknowledged Alessa’s existence in his girlfriend’s presence. Denise, for her part, always seemed on edge when Alessa was around. She would mock her in the presence of others, especially when Rhonda was off in the woods with one of the boys.

As for the other girls at the Rope, Alessa found them as annoying as ever. The gossiping bitches that they were, none of them would really talk to her, other than to say “Hi” to her on occasion. And even when they did, the expression in their eyes left no doubt that they were being judgmental.

Once in a while, one of them would yell out, “Hey Alessa, maybe you should grow a pair of tits so that Rhonda’s shirts fit you better. What’s wrong? Don’t you have any clothes of your own? Parents too poor to buy them for you? Is that why you have to wear Rhonda’s stuff? You’re such a loser!”

Rhonda would urge Alessa to ignore them attributing their rudeness to their stupidity. Still, it wasn’t easy being constantly made fun of by the others. Denise would feed into the girls’ meanness. When Alessa showed up one evening at the Rope wearing a new pair of sneakers that her mother had bought her at K-Mart, Denise was over whispering to all the little drones. Suddenly, they all broke out in song.

“Bobos,” they crooned, “they make your feet feel fine; Bobos, they cost a dollar ninety-nine!”

“Hey Alessa!” Denise yelled. “We love your Bobos! They look like you bought them from the Salvation Army!”

The little bitches didn’t know that Alessa’s feet had been crammed into the same pair of shoes for the last two years. She had begged her mother for a pair of sneakers that fit her. Caterina had reluctantly agreed to get them for her, but only after the sole on the front of her one of her sneakers separated from the rest of the shoe and kept getting caught beneath her foot, tripping up Alessa constantly as she moved around the house. Even then, her mother scolded her that if she hadn’t been so hard on things, she could have made them last longer. When Alessa reminded her mother she had worn the sneakers for two years, Caterina glared at her.

“Just shut up!” she snapped. “You act like you’re so deprived. With all of you around, it isn’t easy to pay the bills, you know! What do you think money grows on—trees? You’re an ungrateful child; that’s what you are!”

It was at times like these that Alessa was grateful to have Rhonda in her life. She was the only person on earth who never judged her or treated her badly. Rhonda was just as glad to have found a friend like Alessa. In her own way, Rhonda was just as much of an outcast as Alessa. The boys only liked her because she put out and the girls hated her precisely for that reason. Rhonda and Alessa were good for each other. Both knew their friendship would last forever. They would talk about getting married and having children. They planned their weddings together and decided how each would be the other’s maid of honor.

Rhonda talked about going to cosmetology school and becoming a famous hairdresser, one that the movie stars would flock to. And Alessa believed her friend could do anything she set her mind on. Rhonda had certainly helped her with her hair and the little make-up she had taken to wearing. Unlike Rhonda, however, Alessa never dared to dream about what she would be, when she grew up. Without a clue as to what her options were—and they seemed pretty limited—and demoralized by her mother’s claim that she wasn’t good at anything except whining, she had no expectations of herself. Shackled by her circumstances, she had never set herself a goal and lacked the courage and motivation to develop new interests, learn new things or take up a hobby. Only once, when Alessa was feeling especially self-assured after a weekend with Rhonda and Zoe, had she declared to her mother, “When I grow up, I want to be an engineer.”

Caterina had stopped in her tracks and put her hands on her hips combatively. “Do you know how smart you have to be to become an engineer?” she had sneered. “You’d be better off picking something else.” Killing any hope that Alessa might have had for a future, her mother had concluded, “All you need to worry about is graduating from high school and getting a job.”

She had believed her mother. She had thought to herself:
my mother is right. I’m not smart enough to be an engineer
. She didn’t even know what an engineer was anyway. She had just overheard another kid in her math class say he wanted to be an engineer and the teacher had seemed very impressed. So she had used the same line to impress Caterina.

Alessa looked forward to being at Rhonda’s house on the weekends. She loved to sleep there. Her friend had the greatest room ever, with posters of Led Zeppelin all over her pale green walls and white furniture, with silver accents. Her bed sheets felt satin-soft and sleeping under her comforter was like being under a cloud. Everything was so beautiful and well-maintained. Nothing was second-hand or mismatched. When Alessa slept there, she felt like a princess. She wanted all the things that Rhonda enjoyed, but for the time being, she was just grateful that Rhonda was generous enough to share them with her.

One Saturday night, after getting back from a party at the Rope, the two girls were lying in Rhonda’s room, talking, when Zoe came in and sat on the edge of the bed. She didn’t have any of her men friends over that evening. To Alessa, that meant her night at Rhonda’s place would be that much more enjoyable.

“Tonight, it’s just us, girls,” Zoe announced. “My date cancelled, but we’re going to meet for lunch tomorrow.”

An hour later, they were all still lying on the bed, talking and laughing. Listening to Zoe describe her adventures with her newest male friend, the two girls giggled hard till their bellies ached. Alessa thought she could listen to Zoe forever, but the doorbell suddenly interrupted their chatter. Zoe got up to answer the door, leaving the two girls wondering who could possibly be visiting at eleven-thirty p.m.

The girls could hear Zoe’s voice getting progressively louder as the conversation with the unexpected visitor drew on. Assuming it was one of the neighbors, Alessa and Rhonda went out into the living room. An unknown woman stood at the front door, her right foot propped on the threshold. Her right hand was splayed across the door jamb, preventing Zoe from shutting the door. Rhonda’s mother was telling the visitor she was sorry, that she hadn’t known “he” was married.
This must be the wife of one of her men friends,
Alessa decided.

The girls had just come up behind Zoe when, without warning, the stranger pulled out a gun and shot a bullet off in her direction. It zinged past Zoe, grazing her right forearm. Before any of them could react, Rhonda was lying on the floor, with blood oozing out of the left side of her chest.

Zoe lunged forward, grabbed hold of the gun in the woman’s hand and used it to maneuver her arm so that it was pointing down. She struggled to subdue the visitor, but when the gun went off a second time, its muzzle was pointing down at Rhonda. The bullet pierced the girl’s stomach. Screaming with anguish and terror, Alessa tried to pull her friend away from the madwoman.

By now, the visitor had realized what she had done and gazed down at her victim with a stunned expression; instead of Zoe, she had wounded a young girl who now lay on the floor, her life bleeding away. Zoe seized the opportunity. With one fist to the face, she knocked out the woman who now lay unconscious on the porch. Then she quickly shut and locked the door and rushed over to her daughter. Zoe put her arms around Rhonda and held her as tight as she could. She rocked her back and forth in her arms, trying to awaken her. Then she felt something cold crawling down her skin and stared at it; her daughter’s blood was streaming down her arm and seeping into her shirt. Alessa got up and dialed 911, but it was already too late. When the first ambulance arrived with a team of paramedics, Rhonda was pronounced dead. The first bullet had penetrated her heart, killing her instantly. Alessa stood there in a state of shock, not knowing what to do next. There was only one thing she was certain of: she wanted Rhonda back.

Another ambulance arrived to take Zoe and Alessa to the hospital. While Zoe’s injury was serious, it wasn’t life-threatening. Alessa sat in the emergency room, overcome by a sense of loneliness she hadn’t felt in years. Caterina showed up soon after. From the way she plowed through the emergency-room doors, Alessa could tell she was angry as hell. The minute she laid eyes on her daughter, Caterina demanded to know what kind of trouble she had gotten herself into.

“I shouldn’t have let you hang around with her!” she thundered. “Someone told me Rhonda’s mother was a whore and now look what you have got yourself into! Do you have any idea how upset you’ve made me? You are such a disappointment! You better hope you’re not in trouble with the police. They’ll lock you up forever, if you are involved with a murder!”

As Caterina went on in this vein, Alessa couldn’t help thinking what a truly ugly person her mother was. Here she was, grieving over the loss of her only friend in the world, and all her mother could rant about was the possibility of her being in trouble with the police! Alessa’s sorrow began to boil over into rage. Just at the moment she feared she’d explode, if her mother uttered one more word, a nurse walked in to quiet Caterina. Of course, the attempt to silence her only enraged her further.

She stepped up to the bed where Alessa lay and yelled, “When I get you home, you are going to be so sorry! And stop that crying! I really don’t understand why you always have to be so melodramatic! From now on, no more sleepovers! And you don’t go out with friends either!”

The nurse looked from Caterina to Alessa and back in disbelief. It disturbed her to see this woman being so cruel to her own child. She turned to Alessa and inquired, “Are you doing okay, honey?”

“Yeah, she’s doing fine,” Caterina cut in. “She should thank her lucky stars she’s alive. That Zoe woman is a whore and now look at what she’s gone and done to her kid!”

“For Christ’s sake, lady!” the nurse exclaimed indignantly. “Pull yourself together! Your daughter has just been through a lot. She witnessed her friend getting killed for no good reason. Maybe, as her mother, you should consider how she might be feeling and try to comfort her instead of yelling at her.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do!” Caterina raged back at the nurse. “She isn’t
your
child! You have no idea what she is like! So mind your own goddamn business before I call the doctor and complain to him about how disrespectful you are!” She turned to her daughter. “Now get dressed, Alessa,” she commanded. “I’m taking you home right now!”

In a fog of confusion and grief, the teenager did exactly as she was told.

On their way out, Caterina and her daughter passed the room where Zoe had been taken. As Alessa’s eyes met hers, Zoe got up and approached her. Between sobs, she managed to say, “God, Alessa, my baby is gone! I don’t know what to do now!”

“I know, Zoe,” Alessa said, trying to comfort her, “I loved her so much.”

About to hug Zoe, the teenager felt her mother’s vicious pinch on the underside of her upper arm. Alessa screamed out in pain.

“What did I just tell you about not talking to her?” Caterina said bitingly. “She doesn’t even care that her daughter is dead. Look at her, with her boobs hanging out of her shirt for the world to see! You are not to go anywhere near her again. Do you understand me, Alessa?”

Her daughter could only nod, as she looked at her friend’s mother with love and sadness. She hoped that one day, Zoe would forgive her for being born to a monster like Caterina.