“Have a safe trip back, Mr. Sanchez. I look forward to hearing from you as soon as you’re home.”
The call ends, and I study the photo of ten-year-old Mario Sanchez. He was Fanning’s final victim. The one who fought back and won. But was the plea bargain Fanning managed to finagle for owning up to abusing all those victims not what Sanchez had hoped for?
Or is the idea of his own child coming into the same world where Carl Fanning lives too much for him to sit idly by and do nothing?
Would his friends help him take that kind of revenge?
I can’t say just yet. I need to sit face-to-face with Sanchez and measure the man he has become. But I have already concluded onething with absolute certainty: There is no way the boy escaped Carl Fanning without help. Both the detectives who worked the case felt Sanchez wasn’t completely forthcoming, but they had the bad guy so they let it go.
Maybe it’s time that possibility was revisited.
I turn my attention to Reeves and Hyatt. There’s always the chance Fanning is just a few miles up the road in Hendersonville hog-tied in a shed or an old barn awaiting execution.
Somehow I can’t muster up any sympathy.
He deserves a lot worse than whatever has happened to him.
Ten
The Child
After the first year, I stopped thinking about who I was before. That life was no longer relevant and the thoughts only made me sad and miserable. I had a choice: I could hope to die or I could hope to survive.
I chose to survive.
The monster became my father, my mother, my world. I had no one else.
When I was older, he started to allow me outside whatever shithole we lived in. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t happen often, but when it did it was like going to the circus for a kid who’d spent the past two years as a prisoner. He made sure I looked nice and reminded me to smile. As we left the car and walked into the market or wherever, he held my hand, smiling like a proud daddy. It wasn’t like he had to worry that someone would recognize me from a milk carton. I had changed too much.
The first time out in public was the most difficult. Not because I misbehaved but because I was terrified that someone else would take me. I had lived through it once; I didn’t want to risk going through it again. I needed the stability. As foolish as it sounds now, at the time, I knew where my next meal would come from and that I would be warm on a cold night. I was well acquainted with the things he would do to me whenever he chose, and though I hatedevery second of it, I understood that I would survive those awful things. I’d learned to go to my happy place while he took what he wanted, to tune out his sickening grunting and the disgusting things he did to my skinny little body.
It was my new normal. My everyday routine.
Food and warmth and routines ... those things were all that mattered to a kid who had lost everything and who had been sexually abused in every possible way one can imagine.
You might think it’s impossible to do all the things to a small child one can do to an adult, but you’re wrong. Trust me when I say he did things to me that I will never share with anyone. Things no one can ever know because I cannot bear the reliving long enough to tell the story.
As I grew older, our relationship began to shift somewhat. He realized he could use me for more than entertainment. No one worried when a child wandered too close to a shopping cart or bumped against the heavy purse hanging from a shoulder or arm. I learned the art of pickpocketing like other kids learn how to ride a bike. It still amazes me the stash of cash most women kept handy in those days. It was as if they feared the need for change or a few dollars while attempting to exit a public parking garage with two sleeping kids in car seats. Or worse, the five bucks they used their debit card for at McDonald’s would end up part of a major card security breach that required new debit cards and PIN numbers. Always a pain in the ass.
Since there was inevitably the risk I might be caught by a shopper who wasn’t as distracted as I first believed, he taught me how to avoid being trapped into a confession. How to lie like a pro. How to make the same lady I’d just robbed believe perhaps she was wrong after all. When all else failed, there was the ace up my sleeve—the sympathy card. I was hungry. My baby sister needed milk. And then, of course, I learned how to evade capture. I could slip away and hide where no one would find me better than Houdini himself.
But stealing wasn’t my only skill. I was also very, very good at begging in a way that didn’t actually give the appearance of begging. I would stare,big eyed, at something most kids my age took entirely for granted—like a new pair of sneakers or a new pair of jeans. I never bothered with toys. I had been taught they were pointless. I still had the teddy bear, but it didn’t actually count. On those occasions when I set out to get something only I wanted, I wore my most ragged clothes. He didn’t teach me this technique; this is one I developed on my own. Even the hardest heart could be melted by a poor, dirty child in need. Children are starving all over the country, and no one wants to hear about it. Put one in front of their faces so they have to look at it, and all bets are off. They can’t take it.
Funny thing was, I had no idea at the time that I was learning the skills I would desperately need later.
He still got angry and forced me into the dreaded box from time to time. And he kept me illiterate. He refused to teach me to read or to write. Too afraid, I suppose, that I would turn out smarter than him and then maybe figure out that I didn’t really belong to him. The problem was, by then, I didn’t remember who I was. I was the child. His child. I belonged to him, body and soul.
During the rare occasion when I had to flee a pickpocket situation, it never once entered my mind to find a police officer or to tell someone I needed help. I was far more afraid of what might happen if I did this than I was of anything else he might do to me. I had survived the worst he could possibly do.
Or, at least, I thought I had.
“I saved you.”
My attention jerks to the piece of shit huddled in the darkest corner of his prison. Ah, so he’s decided to talk today, has he?
“You saved me?” I scoff at the concept. Obviously his brain was damaged during all those years in prison.
I walk closer to where he huddles. I am not afraid. In addition to having a wide, ugly wound on his upper arm, he’s bruised and battered quite thoroughly. As I approach him, he shudders visibly and draws into a tighter ball. How pathetic. I think of all the times he beat me far more brutally than what has been done to him. I think of the endlessways he used my frail, tender body as a child and the need to kill him now—this instant—surges until my heart is thundering in my chest.
