A Little Piece of Light Read online

  No. I feel trapped—even more trapped than I did at home, or with Mr. Harris. I’m in a different state with someone I don’t know, so far from home. There’s nothing I can do. This time, I lose.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispers. “I’ll take care of you. I’m going to love you.”

  This takes me back to what Roy always tells me: No one will ever love you the way I do.

  Now Alvin unhooks my bra—No, please no—and starts to rub and kiss on my breasts. I start to feel myself drift… drift… drift… I’m back in Jamaica… walking by the water… running… laughing… looking for seashells…

  I know that Alvin has taken my clothes off, but I can’t actually sense it—until I hear his jeans unzip while he climbs on top of me. Then I feel pain. I scream! Even Roy has never invaded me as harshly as this. Whatever part of me wasn’t broken is broken now. I’m ripped open in a way that I’ve never been before.

  After he finishes, Alvin rolls aside. I breathe shallowly, tears dropping silently down my temple, dampening the edge of my hair. When his breathing has grown calm and steady in sleep, I move carefully out of the bed and click the bathroom door closed quietly behind me before I turn on the light and lock the door. When I sit on the toilet to let my body flush out what Alvin’s done to me, there is fresh blood on my panties. This never happened with Roy, who was not as violent and forceful as Alvin just was. I realize for the first time that my adoptive father could never remain hard for as long as this pain just lasted.

  Please, I beg in my mind, looking up at the brown water stain on the motel bathroom’s ceiling. Please find me.

  For a week, we move from motel to motel, the murmurs of cocaine deals happening outside our door at almost every one. The rapes continue every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, and they grow progressively worse in severity.

  Within a week, my money envelope has grown thin. Alvin is no longer the man I looked to, to rescue me. I am more lost in my life than I’ve ever been before. I’m a little girl, trying to navigate alone in the world with a grown man telling me what to do. I have nowhere to go; I have no one—here or anywhere. I cannot believe that I risked my chance to go away to St. Andrew’s for this.

  When our money runs out, our next move is as unclear as the misty evening rain that’s falling on us in William Penn Park—a place where at least I feel safe from the rape. I eat a soft pretzel from a park vendor, the first I’ve eaten all day. “This is a pretty park,” I say.

  “This is where we’ll sleep tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re running out of money,” he says. “Don’t worry. This is what people do when they’re in love.”

  Mother has told me that homeless people are all derelicts of society, useless human beings who are strung out on heroin.

  I want to go home.

  The next day, we walk into a parking garage that sits beneath a fancy apartment building. Alvin puffs out his chest and approaches the manager, while the two of them engage in a brief exchange. The manager looks at me skeptically, but moments later, Alvin jogs back toward me. “You’re welcome,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I just got us a job parking cars.”

  “I can’t drive a car!”

  “Yes you can,” he says. “Remember? You’re nineteen.”

  Each night after the other workers leave, Alvin and I slide into the backseat of a customer’s vehicle, where we sleep for a few hours until it’s time to open the garage entrance. In the morning, the manager puts me in the cashier booth handling the tickets and the customers’ money, and I occasionally park a few cars when the guys all have their hands full. Behind the wheel of the residents’ cars, I wind slowly and cautiously around each bend in the garage, holding my breath until the vehicle is in Park. Believing that I’m perfectly capable of my responsibility for their vehicles, the customers pay me nice tips and converse with me. There’s a particular older couple who make a point to bring me pieces of fruit or chocolate treats, which I eat quietly behind the talk-through glass of the attendant booth after they leave. One night when they return home from the opera, they give me their show program because I’ve told them I love opera and classical music.

  I cling to these gentle acts of kindness, my only source of real refuge during what’s becoming the most traumatic time of my life. The garage manager has a Doberman named Jaws, who becomes my companion, nuzzling against me on the days when Alvin’s been the worst to me. “She never takes to strangers that way,” the other garage attendants tell me. Intuitively Jaws seems to know that I’m hurting, in need of affection and protection.

  After a week sleeping inside garage customers’ cars, Alvin finds us a garden-level apartment in the back of a home in West Philadelphia. Inside there is no furniture, not a bed or sofa to sleep on; no pots or pans. “We’ll fix it up later,” he pledges. For weeks, we sleep curled on the floor, like Jaws does at the garage… but the way Alvin treats me here causes me to feel even lower than an animal. Sometimes, after he rapes me, he sits against the wall and orders me to crawl around the apartment on my hands and knees, like a dog. He stands up and urinates on my skin; he pushes the glowing tip of a cigarette against my bare leg. I survive all this by turning to the means I developed as a child: I drift out of my body and float upward, looking down at myself while he beats and humiliates me. Doing this keeps me detached, as if it’s not happening to me—as if it’s a horrible movie that I’m watching about someone else. It’s my only way of escaping while I’m trapped with him here. Every day, I hope I’ll be walking in Center City and someone will recognize the missing track star from the Bronx.

  Please find me.

  “You make me do these things to you!” Alvin says when he beats me. “I’m a man, and I do what I want.” Other times, he tells me, “I do it because I love you.”

  Of course he must, because anyone who has ever loved me and promised to take care of me has hurt me in one way or another. His pledges of love confuse me in the same way Roy’s did. Please, someone, find me.

  In January 1980, after five months in Philadelphia, Alvin announces, “We need to go back. They’re not looking for you anymore.” In a car he borrows from the garage, Alvin drives us ninety minutes back to New York, where we stop at our old building in Boynton. While he’s upstairs visiting his mother, I knock lightly, hesitantly, on my adoptive parents’ door. I jump when Roy answers the door, staring me down for a moment and then moving aside in silence as my signal to enter. He and Mother say nothing as the three of us take awkward seats around the living room. They don’t speak; they don’t ask where I’ve been for the past five months, or with whom. All Mother says when she finally breaks the silence is: “I refuse to let you embarrass me.”

  I lower my eyes. She hasn’t missed me, she hasn’t worried, and as usual, her image in the community is more important than my well-being.

  She stares at the floor in silence, which I take as a suggestion that she prefers I would leave. Their apartment door closes sternly behind me. Upstairs, where Alvin’s mother, Dorothy, lives, I also sense her tension about my presence—she knows this relationship is not healthy, and she’s determined to do something to end it once and for all. “Donna,” Dorothy asks me, “would you still like to try to use your scholarship to go to school?”

  “My scholarship?” I’d lost hope about going away to school when we ran away last August. “Do you think I still could?”

  “I’ll call St. Andrew’s and find out,” she says, but the admissions office informs her that they’ve given my scholarship away to another student. “If you’d called last week,” the admissions director tells Dorothy, “we might have still been able to take Miss Hylton.” I look at Alvin, who’s playing with the dog that his mother looked after while we were in Philadelphia. I’ve missed my chance by one week.

  Without school, I have no way out. Dorothy stands by in silence in the summertime of 1980, when Alvin moves us into an apartment in Harlem to be cl
oser to the job Dorothy got him at the bank where she works. On weekends, he sings at a restaurant in our neighborhood with a disco and funk band. I begin working part-time as a waitress at the restaurant, always uncomfortable under Alvin’s glare as I grow more familiar with the other staff, the regular neighborhood patrons, and the guys in the band. Alvin’s typically careful never to hit me in the face, but after one August night when he catches me outside having a casual conversation with the band’s lead singer, at home he unleashes the most horrible attack on me yet. The next day while he’s at work, I leave his apartment and head directly to Boynton—the only place I can think to go. As I approach the lawn in front of our building, I bump into a neighbor who I knew from school. “Donna, are you alright?” she asks me. “I saw Alvin. He’s looking for you.”

  “Please don’t tell him I’m here!”

  “You can stay with my family,” she says, but in an instant I find myself on the ground, unable to breathe. As I fight back, Alvin wraps his hand around my throat to strangle me… and when he pulls up his other hand, he points a gun straight into my face. “Please,” I gasp. “No—I’ll do anything!” I stretch my neck enough to see that the neighbor girl has run off for her own safety. Minutes later, I’m next to Alvin on the train back down to Harlem.

  This time I stay not so much because I care about my own life anymore; I stay because within a few weeks, I learn that I have another reason to stay alive—a reason that’s truly worth living for.

  For a few days after this episode with the gun, Alvin is calmer, which makes me feel a little less nervous to share with him that my breasts have begun to seep with fluid. “How do I go and see a doctor?” I ask him, trying to ease into the conversation in a way that won’t set him off.

  “What do you need to see any doctor for?”

  “I think…” I’m aware there’s no easy way to tell him this. “I think I might be pregnant.”

  His head cocks back, stunned at the news… and then he approaches me slowly. “Oh yeah?” he says. “No wonder you’re pregnant, you’re a whore!” He takes me by the wrists and knocks me down, holding me there while he forces himself on top of me. He enters me viciously and pumps himself inside of me so hard that I feel sick. “You tell me right now,” he says, his breath heaving with each motion. I think I might vomit. “Was his dick bigger than mine? Huh? Was it? WAS IT?” he says as he thrusts himself into me. Then he slaps my face. “I’m a man!” he screams. “I’M A MAN!”

  “No,” I sob. “No, I promise. Please stop.” He finishes with a grunt and collapses in exhaustion before he rises off of me. As he fastens his pants, he tells me: “That’s not my baby, you slut.”

  There’s no question that this is Alvin’s baby… but what’s more important is that this is my baby. Having a family has been my dream all my life: someone to need me, someone I can love and protect and care for. Disturbed by my news but trying to do the right thing in the face of a very compromised situation, Dorothy makes an appointment for me to see a doctor who confirms that I’m expecting a baby due in January. Alvin is agitated; Dorothy is concerned… but I have never been this happy. This child will be my light in the dark of winter, and for all the days of my life.

  The pregnancy brings me to life, and I feel an unquestionable sense that she’s a girl. Every day in the late summer after Alvin leaves for work, I exit the apartment and step out in the sun, walking one block south to Central Park, where I roam for hours and hours. As I wander, I place my hand on my belly, which is growing firmer and gradually rounder. I stretch headphones around the circumference of my midsection so that my child can learn to enjoy music as much as I do. All my life, I’ve longed for a companion. I’m going to have somebody to love me, I think, and somebody I can love. This baby will be my new light. Finally, I’ll have something to live for.

  I walk and walk and walk the park, for days and then weeks, already in love with this person who depends on the whole of my heart and my body to flourish. I encourage her growth, singing and praying and speaking to my child, resting from our walks only to fill us both with all the things I’m craving: cheesecake and ice cream sodas from diners on the Upper East Side, watermelon from the refrigerated cases of bodega stores on street corners. In every way, I will remember this as the sweetest, brightest time in my life.

  “Oh my, Donna,” says Dorothy as the chill of early fall moves in. “You’re starting to show. We have to find some nicer clothes for you to wear, now that you’re going to be a mother.” For my sixteenth birthday, she helps me choose maternity shirts and comfortable pants, and a coat that will button around my belly in winter. My most reliable source of support, Dorothy also encourages me to sign up for my GED. I attend night classes to prepare for the test and pass in the fall with a very high score. Dorothy also makes an appointment for me at the hospital to learn the baby’s gender. Sure enough, the doctor says, I’m having a little girl. I knew it!

  When the snow begins to fall, it calls my attention inward. I tidy the apartment, clearing space in a closet and organizing drawers where the baby’s clothes will go. I cook and clean and work every day to keep the cupboards neat so that when the baby comes, I can spend all my time with her. It appears that Alvin has begun to share my joy for what’s coming, as well. As the baby moves actively inside me, his understanding changes of how this child came to be. “You’re having my baby,” he says, suddenly moved. I remember the name of a character I loved in a French novel I once read: Adrienne. Alvin agrees on the name, since it begins with the same letter as his own.

  On February 3, 1981, Adrienne arrives—a full month after her due date. “Your life is going to be different than mine,” I whisper as I cradle her in my arms. “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

  In the weeks to follow, I accept a bookkeeping job with our landlord to save up money so that I can make good on my solemn promise to Adrienne—I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. With the baby here, Alvin’s moods have turned more inconsistent and unpredictable than ever. “Shut that bitch up,” he says when she cries in hunger, “before I do.” I’m on edge anytime he goes near her, knowing that staying with him for very long will endanger my daughter’s life.

  One night he holds a kitchen knife to my face and threatens to kill me, and this is when I begin to plot our escape. In the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness, I flee with Adrienne and end up at the Hyltons’ doorstep. “What are you doing here?” Roy asks me.

  Unable to look at him, I confess: “I had nowhere else to go.”

  The next few months are a challenge as I try to be a mother, find a job, and straighten out my life. Even though Adrienne is a great light and a source of hope for me, I’m still mixed up and broken—still a child myself, with more terror in store.

  What happens next unfolds over the course of a single week and leaves me so desperate and worn down that I’ll do almost anything to lift myself up again.

  One summer night as I’m exiting our building, a man jumps out from the bushes. I recognize him: he’s an older man whom I’ve refused a few times when he’s asked me to go out. Here in the falling dusk, he snatches me by the arm and shoves me inside a taxi, where he gives the cabbie a destination in Harlem. When we reach the projects where he lives, he locks me inside a bedroom closet and hands me a bucket. “Use that when you have to pee,” he says, before he slams the closet door shut.

  Every heartbeat inside me throbs with fear as I hear two men talking in the bedroom. I have to squint from the light as the closet door opens, where there stands a figure whose face and round stature I recognize: he’s a minister at a nearby church. The minister grabs me, pushes me toward the bed, and climbs on top of me to hold me down as he undoes his pants. There, the two of them take turns raping me. Afterward, the first of the two shoves me back inside the closet, where I’ll remain for three days until, finally, a woman discovers me while she’s cleaning the house. “Get out!” she screams, and I take off, understanding that she’s a
s horrified at the thought of my being held there as I have been.

  When I return to the Bronx, a neighbor I knew from school notices how disheveled and distraught my appearance and demeanor are. “Donna,” she says, “whatever happened, you need to talk to the police.”

  No. I’ve never approached anyone for help since the school counselor who brushed me aside four years ago, when I was twelve.

  “Donna,” she says, stepping in closer to me to ensure privacy in our conversation. “You don’t have to tell me what happened to you, but you have to tell somebody. Come on. I’ll go with you to the police.”

  After I give them my statement, the police converse for a moment. When their discussion breaks up, a detective tells my friend she can leave, that I have to go to the hospital for an examination. “I’ll go along with her,” says my friend.

  “There’s nothing you can do for her there,” he says. “It’s late. Go on home.” Then the detective walks with me to an unmarked car and drives me to Jacobi Medical Center, where a doctor examines me for infections and a burn after one of the men singed the flesh on my leg with a cigarette lighter. With an ointment for the burn in hand, I exit the hospital and enter the detective’s car, as he’s offered to drive me back to Boynton.

  There’s a sense of disorientation inside the detective’s car, and at first I think it must be from the shock of what I’ve experienced in the past three days… but then, it becomes clear that my surroundings are unfamiliar because this isn’t my neighborhood; instead, it’s an industrial part of the Bronx that I don’t recognize. “Where are we?” I ask the detective as he’s pulling his vehicle to the side of the street. Instead of responding, he quickly pivots his body from the driver’s seat to move on top of me. My fingers fumble for the door handle that I can’t locate until all I can grip is the armrest. I keep my eyes on a slice of light from an orange streetlamp overhead that’s hitting the rearview mirror as his breaths are heavy and passionate in my ear.