Saved: a dark romance Page 22

  Mama looks tired. Mama also looks scared. I don’t ask questions. She told me if she ever talks Italian to me without telling me that it’s a lesson I must just follow and try very hard to be strong so that we can become safe.

  We walk a long time. And it’s cold but we’re not wearing coats. It’s hot here in the day almost like home, so I don’t know why it’s so cold tonight. We go to a big building with a lot of buses in it and we wait until morning for the right bus to come. I try to sleep with my head on Mama’s knee but it takes a long time to fall asleep and I keep waking up with noise and because it’s not comfortable like a bed is and I’m a little bit cold.

  She’s sitting on a bench and her head keeps flopping and then she wakes scared and looks around. She needs her bed, too.

  I wish we were back at the hotel with the beds and the big screen that plays Aladdin, but I know because Mama talked in Italian that I have to keep being strong until she speaks English again. She told me we’re not gonna speak Spanish. Not anymore.

  I don’t complain. I don’t cry. Papa says only baby boys cry. If I cry I’m still a baby and he can’t teach me to be a man like him yet.

  The door keeps opening for people to come in or go out but I have to be strong and don’t complain that I’m cold.

  At home, Papa speaks Spanish and sometimes English. I speak both around Papa. Mostly Spanish. He hates English but he speaks English to Mama and doesn’t know Mama speaks Italian to me.

  Mama isn’t allowed to speak Italian. I won’t tell Papa or he will hit Mama and take her to the punishment place. He put her in the punishment place before so she could learn to be good and she started to be good so Papa was happy. I missed her when she was gone so I don’t want her to have to go again. I don’t want him to make her lip bleed again or her eye purple again.

  We came to America for a vacation and for Papa to do some business. Mama was good so we got to come. I got to see Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and we saw the Aladdin movie characters. I liked the genie in the movie that I saw for my birthday.

  We watch Disney at the hotel on the big screen with a movie player Papa got special for me. I’m a lucky boy because most boys don’t see the movie like this. Papa says we can take the giant movie circle home but I musn’t touch the film or I will ruin it. I can watch with my cousins at home but there’s all girls so they like The Little Mermaid. I tell them I don’t like it because it’s a girl movie but it’s kind of okay. The crab is funny. I can’t wait to show them Aladdin. Papa says the movie comes to VHS next month and until then, I’m a lucky kid who has the big movie circle.

  Papa says I can’t let the women boss me and if I do I am not a man so I broke the mermaid movie and made my cousins cry. I felt bad when Katarina cried. She used to like me. Mena punched me in the nose. I punched her back and her nose started bleeding so her mama, my auntie, took her away, hissing at me that I was a bad boy. I felt bad but Papa told me it was good I took control. He says that a man must think with his head, not his heart like a woman.

  If I think with my head I will come out on top. If I let them make me think with my heart then the women will make me weak like women. When we bring home the Aladdin movie maybe my cousins won’t be so scared of me because they will like it. Maybe they’ll play with me again.

  I said that to Papa. He got mad at me and said maybe if I’m smart and ready to learn to be a man I will make them be nice to me. If they wanna see it they will be.

  I know Mama doesn’t like it if I think that way but Papa does. He likes it when people do what he wants and sometimes he gives them prizes for it.

  But maybe I won’t be going back there because Mama is taking us someplace else.

  My mama said I shouldn’t tell my papa, but she thinks the strongest men think with both their heart and head. She’s as pretty as Jasmine from the Aladdin movie with her dark hair and dark eyes. I wish I had a magic carpet to fly Mama and me somewhere safe. I wish I had a Genie that I could wish to that my papa was like some of the other papas we saw at Disneyland. Those other mamas were smiling and happy. Some of them held the hands of the papas looking happy, not like my mama. I would never want a different mama. I just want mine to have smiles and laughing like some of the other Disneyland mamas.

  I don’t like the bench. I want my nice big bed. But I gotta be strong for Mama. I hope Papa doesn’t catch us. He won’t be happy we ran in the night. And if he catches us, Mama will go back to the punishment place.

  I will have to ask Mama who will teach me to be a man if we don’t get caught by Papa. I guess I won’t get to watch the big movie circle again but next month maybe Mama can buy me the VHS. It’s easier to fit in my hands anyway.

  2004

  Alessandro

  “What happens when you trust a woman? When you don’t trust your head, Alessandro?”

  “You might as well cut your own dick off, Papa.”

  “Exactly! My smart boy is showing signs of being a strong man.”

  ***

  We’ve been back in Mexico for almost a year. I’m almost seventeen. I’m smartest and strongest to my father when I’m a parrot and regurgitate what he’s said to me.

  Mama and I stayed hidden a long time. Until I fucked up. My fuckup got us sent back. My fuckup ruined her life.

  We were in California. On vacation with him for my sixth birthday, and she had taken some of his money while he was passed out drunk, while his bodyguard had fucked off probably thinking he could get back before my father woke, and Mama took the opportunity and we fled. I knew we needed to get away from him. I knew my father was a psychotic lunatic.

  She saved us, got us away. She wanted to forget him, but she didn’t. Couldn’t. She always looked over her shoulder. She was always a bundle of stress. How could she forget when he was a monster who tormented the fuck out of her for seven years?

  We ran for months until we settled. We stayed at that first small town that she liked in Oregon almost two years, then ran again. She never dated anyone else. She was beautiful. Men always looked twice. But my father had turned her off men.

  How did I fuck it all up? My fuckup came later, in Spokane, where we settled when I was eight and stayed until age fifteen. I was fucking around with my buddies in a rough part of town, trying to score some weed at fifteen years old like a dumbass and we caught the attention of a bad news dealer who gave us weed and bourbon so we’d run errands for him.

  I was good at it. I never said a word about my past to my buddies, but I’d been very observant in Mexico. Papa had me around business deals and I knew, from a young age, propped on the side of his big desk, how the bosses wanted their soldiers to act. I saw my father shoot a man in the face for being a bumbling idiot when I was four years old.

  These gang bangers liked me. They didn’t treat me like a kid. A couple guys pulled me into an armed robbery as lookout. And then one of the dipshits dropped his car keys down the sewer when he ran, in a panic and fumbling after the building’s alarm went off.

  Quick thinking on my part got us outta there. I hotwired the car lightning fast and impressed them with how quickly I got us clear of the cops. I’d learned how to hotwire in my neighborhood for kicks when me and my buddy Wes befriended this old homeless hippie who loved to tell us stories and show us tricks. Lock picking. Hot wiring. Me and Wes could both pick a lock and hotwire a car in seconds.

  Mama was sweet 99% of the time, but she’d somehow caught word about my hotwiring and the robbery and she cuffed me in the head and shouted me down. She wanted better for me. She wanted me to forget my roots, to be a scholar or an athlete. I had the smarts and the skills to do either. Or both. But, we lived in a shitty part of town and most of my friends were petty thieves. Monkey see, monkey do. I was cocky. Too fucking cocky.

  Their boss wanted to thank me and, I’m guessing recruit me into their gang. But his boss showed up for some unrelated reason and that guy looked twice at me, like he recognized me. I have my father’s eyes, not something I can disguise. He loo
ked at me like he was trying to place me. I acted cool about it but it got me tweaked.

  A week later I got called back and the big boss was there again. He pulled out a wrinkled poster, a missing children of Mexico circular sent around, with a picture of me that was big, a small photo of Mama that was in the bottom corner. I saw the poster and kept my face blank.

  “Hm.” I’d said, casually.

  He asked about my mother. I blew it off.

  “Naw, she doesn’t look like that.”

  The wording said she was wanted for questioning for kidnapping. It offered a reward. My father’s eyes are what gave me away. They’re unusual and memorable and make me stand out.

  I played dumb, told him I’d never been to Mexico and joked that it was too bad. I should pretend to be the kid and split the money with him. He laughed it off. But he followed up on that lead, I was guessing, and maybe stalked Mama and saw that despite that she’d cut and dyed her hair, she was the woman on the poster. She was using a name similar to her middle name and her maiden name. She probably shouldn’t have used either name, but I knew means were limited and she probably couldn’t afford to get a fake identity when we’d first settled. A week later, before I got up the guts to tell her about my fuckup, we were back in Mexico.

  Sandro Romero evidently got wind about a kid in Spokane that was the right age who had dark hair and eyes like his. Single mother, beautiful, Italian. Allegra Christina Catelli-Romero was going by Christy Catelli.

  It was a long hard road for my mother and I fucked it all up. After all she went through for us. Weeks of shitty motels and sleeping on cold buses or in bus stations, train stations, she put us in a tiny bachelor apartment that had a broken heater, us freeze our asses off, giving me the bed and the extra blankets, sleeping on the crappy couch or climbing in with me and shivering with me on the extra cold nights. When we got to Spokane, she got a job as a maid and worked her ass off and got promoted to the homeowner’s personal secretary. She never reached out to her family back in Italy because my father would be keeping tabs. He knew who they were and I was guessing he’d threatened their safety.

  I was Zander Roman in Oregon but we only stayed two years. In Spokane Washington I became Alexander Catelli, known to everyone as “Lex” and being a stupid dumbass teenager. Forgetting all she taught me.

  Fuck, forgetting the lessons even he taught me about being smart, not putting myself in a position where I’d be letting someone else pull my strings.

  In the middle of the night, men broke in and bound us in our sleep, and we were returned to Mexico.

  ***

  I was there for the first moments of his confronting her. I’d never seen her so frightened, so broken. I’ll never forget the look on her face for the rest of my life. It was my fuckup. My fault.

  And then I was outside the door of the room beside his office, where he reunited with his wife physically, against her will. I heard it all.

  I hadn’t seen him since I was six. I had vivid memories of his abuse of most everyone around him, of the fact that my father was batshit crazy. I’d seen him kill at least four different men with my own eyes. All before my sixth birthday.

  Even at six, I knew he was crazy. People feared him and I’d seen him go off on tangents that even my young mind knew were unreasonable.

  My father told me himself that he’d stolen her and made her marry him. I asked Mama if it was true when I was a little kid. She confirmed it and she also said that she’d do it all again if it meant she could have me, that I was the most beautiful gift my father had given anyone.

  “Sometimes good can come from not so good, son. You are the good in my not-so-good life.”

  She was wrong. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have been caught again. I wasn’t a gift. I was her curse. Because of me, she was stuck with him forever.

  After we’d left California, she drilled it into my brain that if he ever caught us, I should pretend to be happy to see him, pretend to love him, so he wouldn’t punish me, only her.

  She told me that if he ever caught up with us, he would probably kill her for running. I should do or say whatever would keep me alive. It was heavy shit for a little kid to absorb, but I did. And I saw what she went through for us; it made me very protective of her.

  He’d captured her when she was a teenager, on a school trip, and she told me she was an innocent girl who’d never even had a boyfriend. Her father was so strict, she was lucky to even get to go on the trip. She’d made a dumb decision to leave the resort with her friends to go to a seedy local nightclub and my father had seen her.

  He caught her and kept her to bear him children. I was his firstborn son so she got treated special. Yeah, special. She was his favorite. He had tried to impregnate many other women but my mama was the first. He had one more son after me, but not with my mother. But, because she gave him a son first when he likely suspected after years of raping women without getting them pregnant that he couldn’t father children, she got to be his wife, be his queen. They even got married in a church. And my mother, a Catholic, had to pretend before God that she loved him.

  I exist only because my father brutally raped my mother. The man who fathered me is crazy. The mother who bore me and tried to undo his damage? To teach me right after he’d drilled into my brain all his wrong? It’s my fault she lost her freedom a second time and there’s very little of her left in me, because I must be like him to appease him, to save her.

  He wanted dozens of sons for his army. He wound up with two. Me. And Jesse, who was six years younger than me and ten times as cracked. If Jesse weren’t such a halfwit he’d have been just as dangerous as our father.

  “Never trust a woman. Never give her your heart, Alessandro. She will crush it,” Papa said and he acted like he was legitimately crushed that she’d run and been gone for nine years.

  “Allegra Christina, I loved you. I told you that if you ever tried to go, I would never stop until I found you. Ask anyone. It has been my mission to find you. I’ve lost money, men, time, and my heart to you. And you take my boy? What kind of poison did you fill him with?”

  I spoke up and tried to convince him that I knew I would be back some day, back some day where I belonged. Where I would learn how to be a man like my father. I fed his ego. I fed him lines to pacify him. I tried to tell him Mama was harmless.

  I lied to him, told him she loved him and told me every day how much she missed him, how Papa was in our daily prayers, but she kept me away so I wouldn’t learn to hit women, cheat on them, and do illegal things.

  He seemed to buy it and didn’t kill her. He locked her in his bedroom beside the office and kept her there for next six years while I was taught to run his empire. I was allowed to see her an afternoon each week. But, not before he had two guards beat me to within an inch of my life in front of her, to punish her. She watched them beat me, wailing in agony. He told me afterwards that the beating would help me learn to be a man. It would help me learn not to let a woman make me weak.

  He tormented her endlessly, especially when I fucked up, and he made sure I knew that my fuckups would equal her torment.

  We were all under lock and key. He even had two men guard them while he slept to make sure she wouldn’t kill him or leave. The compound was a fortress. And every day, from the day we came back, I wanted to fuckin’ kill him.

  At fifteen, sixteen years old, I hated him. He was powerful and crazy and never alone. There were armed bodyguards always. I heard as he raped her that first night. Heard her cries, his grunts. It took everything in me to stay still. There were four men with guns there with us.

  I had no fucking choice but to just sit there in his office, which adjoined a bedroom, listening to what he was doing to her. My father berated her throughout the entire thing.

  I had to learn how to dominate everyone around me in a way that would keep them docile and submissive. Never show weakness to anyone. Especially my father.

  My father took me and my fourteen-year-ol
d half-wit half-brother Jesse down to the slave dormitory on Jesse’s fourteenth birthday to show Jesse how to rape in-training slaves. I was just turning twenty and I already knew. They told us each to take one and take her rough. Jesse was fumbling and he got too excited and came before he got inside the slave. My father laughed at him and demanded I show my brother how it was done.

  I didn’t take one slave. I took three. My father was proud of me.

  And I took my anger out on those girls. And then I felt like garbage afterwards. But they just took it. Most of them didn’t even fight back. They were already broken. And it became a pattern for me. I’d get down or frustrated and I’d take it out on those nameless faceless girls.

  Once in a while, I’d feel extra black in my soul, feel extra guilty about my shortcomings, I’d step in and help break new ones in. My father loved it when I did that.

  Fast forward a couple years; I’m doing well at proving myself to be the same heartless prick as my father. I walk in on Uncle Juan Carlos at his home, raping my pretty cousin Katarina, who I’d played with as a child. She was as sweet as could be and would never harm a fly. He offered me my turn.

  I refused. She was my blood. She was someone I’d played with as a child. Juan Carlos taunted me for it.

  My father fed my mind with his nonsense. I always knew it was nonsense but over time, knowing Mama would suffer if I showed any weakness, and that us being here was my fucking fault, it turned me bitter, angry, and some of what he’d said didn’t sound like nonsense any longer. I bleed his blood and his nonsense often bleeds into my brain, trying to penetrate.

  He let Mama have the run of the main house, where the rest of the family lived, for my twenty first birthday. A gift to both of us because she’d behaved and I’d become good at everything he tasked me with. I succeeded at everything, surpassing his expectations.

  The next week, she and I were quietly talking in that bedroom off his office late at night. She’d been summoned there by him and he’d used her and left. She hadn’t yet gone back to the main house. I knew we were alone in that building.