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“I’ve noticed.”
“This is where I come for my yard time… when I’m allowed out of the house.”
“That is depressing.”
She shrugs. “During the day, it’s beautiful, I think. Granted, I’d rather be able to go new places and see new things,” she tells me, her voice thick with sadness. “But, when you’re in the position I’m in, beggars can’t be choosers.”
I look out across the land in front of us. It’s a clear but cold night and I pull my jacket around myself a little tighter. The moon rains down, casting a silvery radiance over the world, highlighting some areas while leaving others in thick pockets of shadow. Somewhere out there, a coyote howls a long, plaintive note. It makes me wonder how many times Molly has heard that same coyote sing that same lonely song and found herself relating to it.
In the distance, I can see craggy peaks and tall mesas I’m sure are that same vibrant red as the land I was looking at earlier today. It is beautiful, I can’t deny that. The desert has always brought me peace. But the fact that this is all she gets to see makes me sad for her.
“Where would you go?” I ask. “If you were given a choice and could go see something new. What would it be?”
“The ocean,” she says without hesitation.
I nod. “Good call,” I nod. “What’s your second choice?”
“A museum.”
I laugh softly. “You’ve given this some thought.”
She frowns. “When you’re locked inside a house all day, all you can do is think about things like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“No, but I’m sorry you have to live this way.”
“Thanks. Me too.”
There is so much I want to know. So many questions I have for her. But I know our time is limited so I have to keep it short. Well, shorter than I’d like. Now that I’m out here with her, sitting beside her, I find that I don’t want this moment to end. I want to stay here with her all night and learn her most intimate secrets. There isn’t anything I don’t want to know about her. I know I need to confine my questioning to the most pertinent things tonight, though.
“How did you end up here?” I ask.
“That’s a long story.”
“Give me the condensed version.”
She sighs and the look of sadness on her face is so poignant, it hurts me to see. Molly looks as if she’s seeing back through time, looking at her life and all the roads that led her here. Maybe it was the wrong guy. Or maybe it was a string of bad decisions. Whatever it was, I can see that it’s haunting her.
“I was abducted. Shortly after I graduated from high school,” she admits quietly. “I was trafficked. I spent a year or so being passed from buyer to buyer, each one of them moving me further and further west. Eventually, I was given to Hammerhead. A peace offering.”
“Jesus,” I whisper.
“Yeah, I stopped believing in him a long time ago,” she says. “If he were real, I can’t believe he’d let me suffer through this.”
That was the last thing I would have guessed, and it leaves me completely dumbfounded. It’s such a horrific story that I look at her and don’t know what to say. She seems to pick up on that because she laughs quietly.
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have the first clue what to say to that either,” she tells me.
“How have you managed to… to… I don’t even know how to phrase it,” I say. “I mean, you still seem so balanced. So… normal.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’ve just held onto small pieces of myself,” she says. “This… what I’ve endured… am enduring… it’s something that’s happened to me. It’s not who I am. The things I’ve been forced to do… I’m more than that.”
“Yeah, but… how?”
“Hope,” she says simply. “Somehow, I’ve been able to hang onto hope. Hope that one day, I’ll be free of all this. Free to get back to my life. I mean, I know nothing will ever be the same. I know that I’m going to be different forever. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be who I used to be. More or less.”
