illustrations/Katy Finch
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part excerpt from Lisa Savage’s as-yet-unpublished novel, Heaven Spelled Backwards. Savage, who ran for U.S. Senate in 2020, has long been a leader and activist with Maine’s Green Independent Party. The novel is based on her quarter-century of experience teaching at public schools in Maine’s impoverished rural communities. Read the first excerpt here.
Kayleigh, 2004
It was risky going home with Dolores, but I took a chance on it being safer than calling 911. Someone who had been forced to have sex for money as a teenager was someone I probably would not have to explain my situation to — unlike cops, who would probably blame me and believe whatever lies Tim might tell them.
I was never so scared in my life as I was walking to Dolores’ car. She had parked two blocks away from the speakeasy, and from that distance we could see fire trucks, cop cars, and an ambulance. My stomach dropped like a rock into a deep pool. I really, really hoped Neveah and Rose were okay.
We got into her car and it was warmer once the heat got blasting. By now I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering, and Dolores had to be cold, too, since she had given me her coat. She didn’t say anything. We drove down a street that had the sun coming up right into our eyes. I slid way down and kept the hood of Dolores’ coat up. It was a quick trip and then I was in a warm kitchen.
I was telling Dolores about the girl who had been pregnant. Rose, with the popped-out belly button. “She had the baby at the house,” I said around a mouthful of cinnamon toast. I was dipping it into hot chocolate so it got a little gooey inside the crunch.
Dolores raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know who helped her, but she sure screamed a lot.”
“Is the baby still there?” I guess Dolores was thinking about the house being on fire. I was worried she would call the police, and then I remembered they were already at the speakeasy.
I shook my head. “Nope. I’m not sure where the bearded guy took it. Rose cried for two days after the baby was gone. I hope I never have a baby.”
Dolores had tears in her eyes now. “Sorry,” I said.
“You’ve done nothing to apologize for.” Dolores took a piece of toast and chewed on it for a while. I liked her face. It was nice without being fake, and she had really gorgeous eyelashes. I wondered if they were real. She didn’t wear any other makeup and she was at least forty.
“I lost a baby when I was a sex worker,” Dolores said.
“You did?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this story, but I was curious.
“My pimp took her away before I even got to nurse her. I did give her a name, though. It was Nevaeh.”
I must have looked a little confused, because she explained: “That’s heaven spelled backwards.”
“Hey, there was another girl at…”
“The speakeasy?” Dolores filled in. How did she know what it was called?
“Yes, and her name was Neveah. Maybe it’s your lost kid?”
Dolores was really crying now, but quietly. “I don’t think so. My daughter would be twenty-three by now. And how would she know what I named her? Anyway, I keep on looking for her, but so far I haven’t found her. Maybe DNA is going to lead me to her someday.”
I’d heard about that happening, people finding their lost family members using DNA. I also knew you could lose family members over it, like when my dad found out Kyle and the baby weren’t really his. I know where all my family members are, pretty much, but it doesn’t do me any good.
Then Dolores asked if she could give me a hug and I let her.
“Is it hard not knowing where she is?” I asked.
She nodded. “Every night I pray she’s not in a place like the speakeasy.” Then she seemed to realize that might be insulting to me. “Sorry,” she added.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said. “I got kidnapped and locked up in that place.”
“How long were you there?”
“Like, two months, I think?” I wasn’t going to tell her I was the one who started the fire. No need to trust her with information that could get me arrested. If the baby had still been there I wouldn’t have done it, and I was pretty sure the two other girls could escape if they took the chance.
Dolores explained about her house being a safe house, and to keep it safe there were a few rules. The most important one was to never make phone calls from the house. I was pissed at myself for leaving my phone back at the speakeasy. Dolores gave me a burner phone from a drawer in the kitchen, but only after she got me to agree to use it at the library or someplace else.
She also said to respect the privacy of the other people staying there (easy peasy) and I could eat anything in the fridge or the kitchen cupboards. If I had food I didn’t want to share, I could keep it in my room. She said I had a choice between a room in the attic or one in the basement, because the other two bedrooms were occupied, but if Roberta moved out, I could move into her room.
“Sometimes the attic is better if you think people are looking for you,” she said. “The windows are too high for anyone to see inside.”
That’s when I noticed all the shades were down in the kitchen even though it was eight a.m. by now and sunny.
“Do you want to consider changing your hair color?”
How did she know what I was thinking? It was kind of amazing. “Sure,” I said.
Dolores gave me a few boxes to choose from and I decided on auburn because I always admired red hair. Not the strawberry blonde, but that dark color you could get from henna, like my aunt used. She pinned a towel around my neck and massaged stinky goop into my hair. We chatted until the timer went off and she gave me another towel and the little bottle of conditioner that came with the hair coloring. It was the best shower of my life. I was washing away my old blonde hair and becoming a different-looking person. Then I let Dolores cut off a bunch of my hair and she used a round brush to give me a Brazilian blowout. I looked almost exotic. I was still Kayleigh inside, though.
She showed me a cabinet with different kinds of lotions and makeup in it and said to help myself. “Just put anything you want into this drawer,” she said. “It’s for just your stuff.”
I heard someone stirring upstairs. Dolores seemed to sense my fear. “Everyone here is safe,” she said. “No one will tell on you or ask you any questions you have to answer. Please do the same for them.”
Then she took me up to the attic where there was a little room with a bed and a dresser. The sky looked blue through the window. Dolores pulled down the shade and pulled back the covers on the bed. I crawled in wearing the new clean pajamas she’d given me. This place was too good to be true. I needed to think about my next move, but I was so tired that I fell asleep quickly and slept for a long, long time.
I was there two more days before Dolores started asking me things like, Did I want to go to the police and press charges? (No). Did I want to apply for food stamps and general assistance? (Maybe). Did I want to go back to school? (Definitely not). Did I want to look for a job? (Yes, but I wasn’t ready yet.)
“How old do you think I am, anyway?” I asked her.
Dolores guessed eighteen.
“Not even. I just turned fifteen.”
This seemed to bother her, but she just said, “Thanks for telling me.” I hoped she wasn’t thinking about kicking me out. I didn’t think she would.
•••
I wondered when or if I would get up the courage to go outside. We touched up my blonde roots, but the nerd glasses and short red hair didn’t seem like enough of a disguise. Maybe I should dye it black and go Goth? But then I’d still look like the skinny girl Tim and the bearded guy might be looking for.
“You could wear a fat suit,”Dolores suggested.
Once again, this woman had amazed me. The suit she had was a fake stomach with big, droopy boobs and a big booty that you could wear under clothes three sizes too big. I tried it out around the house and we had some good laughs about how funny I looked, especially when I put clothes over the fat suit were a little too tight.
But I still didn’t feel like going outside. Not at all.
We hadn’t found out much from the news reports about the fire. It was put out before it burned the whole house down. I assumed Rose and Neveah had gotten out in time — the reports made no mention of any deaths or injuries — but we couldn’t know for sure. Arson was suspected, but no one had been arrested as far as we could tell. Dolores would cruise by at night, and when I asked her about it she said it looked like the parties had resumed.
“We could call and report them for selling alcohol without a license,” Dolores told me.
“We should report them for trafficking,” I said, using what I now knew was the word for what had happened to me. But I did not dare report them, and Dolores said she wouldn’t either, until I was ready. How about never, I thought to myself. It wasn’t my responsibility to save the other girls. I was still trying to save myself and there was no guarantee I wouldn’t wake up one morning and find that Dolores and her house and all the stuff in it had just been a dream.
•••
I had puked once already that morning and was about to do it again. Even the smell of toast made me gag. What the hell was wrong with me?
“Could be stomach flu,” said Dolores. She felt my head. “You’re not feverish.”
“I never go anywhere,” I said. “How would I catch stomach flu?”
Dolores shrugged. “I go out, and Roberta goes out. We might have brought it back to the house.”
I doubted this, since neither of them had been barfing. I figured Dolores was just trying to be nice. She knew I knew there were pregnancy tests in the bathroom cabinet. She probably didn’t want to freak me out by suggesting this obvious possibility.
So the first time I actually left the safe house was to get examined by a doctor who confirmed what I already knew from the home test and some simple math: I was about eight weeks pregnant. The doc also tested me for STDs, but I didn’t have any. Just an unwanted rape baby growing inside me.
The second time I left it was to get the abortion. Dolores went with me and held my hand. It was over quickly, and other than being scared that Tim or the bearded guy would walk into the Planned Parenthood clinic, I didn’t have a lot of feels. I knew it was irrational to be afraid of them showing up, but one of the things I had learned from Dolores is that we feel what we feel. We can hide it — from other people or from ourselves — but we can’t control how we feel.
What we decide to do is our super power.
•••
After the abortion, I felt stronger. I started to go out of the house in disguise now, wearing the fat suit, about once a week, so I could use my phone. I always tried Bradlee’s number first, even though I was convinced by now he was no longer using it. He wouldn’t not answer me for this long a time. Had he sided with my mom? If so, I needed to hear him say that.
But then he picked up!
“Wow, Kayleigh! I only charged this phone so I could get some pictures off it. Wassup, girl? Where are you?”
I said I couldn’t tell him, but that I was safe now.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “But hey, I’m so glad you called me.”
“Me, too.”
“Do you want to make a run with dad and me? His fiancée and him aren’t together anymore and we could use your help.”
“Doing what?”
“Kind of make us look more like a family. Maybe bring along a kid?”
“What kid?”
“I don’t know, I just thought you might have one by now.”
That pissed me off. Why would he say something like that?
“Anyway, Kayleigh, the Benjamins are sick right now, so all expenses paid. Whaddya say, a little trip to sunny Florida?”
“No, thanks.” I knew anything involving my dad was bound to be illegal.
“Why you gotta be like that?”
“Bradlee, I gotta take care of some stuff,” I said, then added, kinda sarcastically, “Sorry I can’t help you out.”
“Okay then, I’ll let you go. But at least now I have your new number. What happened to your other one?”
“I lost it.”
“Okay, well, this obviously isn’t my new number, either. But what I’ll do is I’ll text you from my new number so you have it, okay? Let’s get together when I get back in town.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Take care.”
“You take care, too.”
“I fucking love you,” said my brother. “You know that, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “Love you too.”
He never did text me back with his number. Next thing I heard was a couple months later, when my dad texted from Bradlee’s phone saying my brother had been in a bad accident. I didn’t go to the hospital and I didn’t call my dad back. I have this strong feeling that being around any of those people is just going to reach up to where I’ve gotten to and pull me back down.
•••
I wasn’t well enough to leave the safe house more than once a week, but I was well enough to do group, I thought, so Dolores brought group to me. This was a little bit risky, because it was letting girls into the house who didn’t live there, but some of them were from the domestic violence shelter and one was from residential rehab, so they had the same kind of rules to protect them as we had: no phone calls from the house, and no running your mouth about what happened in group.
It was every week and I dreaded it, but then I started to look forward to it. No, looking forward to it isn’t the right expression. It was more like I started to think about it like eating or drinking water — something I needed to do for myself to stay healthy.
Of course, to stay healthy I would first have to get healthy. My physical health was fine. Even though I didn’t get a lot of exercise, by now I was doing a lot of the housework: vacuuming, cleaning, lugging the laundry up and down from the cellar, that sort of thing. I was still smoking, but not as much — maybe just ten cigs a day now.
My appetite stayed good and I was learning how to cook from scratch. I still wouldn’t go shopping, though, for fear of running into people from the speakeasy. I helped by going online and ordering our groceries for the week and then Dolores picked them up. She trusted me with her credit card info and I never bought anything except groceries without asking her first.
There was no beer or weed in the house, because Roberta was in rehab. She relapsed once, but after a week or so she came back and started over. Trading sex for drugs was part of her problem, so that’s why Dolores could offer her housing and services. The grant that funded Dolores’ safe house was pretty strict about being only for helping women that had been trafficked.
A typical group had about five of us and Dolores. We would say our names and what had happened to us. Like, I’m Kayleigh and I was kidnapped and raped and locked up by the kidnappers.
There was no crosstalk allowed, meaning no one could say, Who kidnapped you? or, How did you get away? I felt safer saying my truth if I knew I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about it. My job was just to say what I felt like saying, as true as I could make it, and then listen without judgment to what the others said.
Sometimes I did judge them, like when they told about doing something really stupid, but I kept my judgments silent.
This one girl was always talking about stuff that had happened to her when she was like nine. By now she was older than me, but she was really stuck on telling us all the things her stepfather had done to her before her mom caught him and turned him over to the police.
This girl’s stepdad was still in jail, so she had nothing to fear from him anymore, or from her mom — unlike me and my suck-ass mom. But she had started using heroin in high school and then working for her dealer. After she was robbed, she owed the dealer a bunch of money and that turned into selling her body for cash or just trading it for enough to get high. When she OD’d on fentanyl she was brought to the hospital, which is where she got clean, and because she was a minor she got probation and mandated counseling. She was pissed about having to come to group, but I noticed she had a lot to say even so.
Then Dolores surprised me by asking, “Kayleigh, do you have anything to share about your childhood?”
I didn’t know what that had to do with being trafficked. When my mom kicked me out I was way older than a child. I started talking about how John, my mom’s boyfriend, had screwed me on that snow day and all the problems that led to.
Dolores just nodded and she seemed satisfied, and then it was someone else’s turn to share.
The next person started talking about stuff from when she was five years old. This got me thinking, trying to remember stuff from when I was a little kid, when it was just me and Bradlee and the babies hadn’t been born yet. But I really had nothing to say.
The night after that group, I had a bad dream. My hands were gigantic, so big that I could barely see around them. And my fingertips were burning and throbbing so much that I was crying in the dream. A bunch of my teachers were in a room with me, even though it was too small for everyone to fit, and I could hear one of them screaming, Liar! Liar! over and over again. Then it changed into Bradlee calling me a liar and trying to grab my hands to keep them from exploding like water balloons that had been filled up too much.
I woke up thinking about the photos my mom had taken of me when I had acrylic nails and she told me to spread my hands out on my bare belly. I was wondering what ever happened with those photos. My mom never showed them to me. Had she showed them to anyone else?
OMG! Who knew so many of us in group had stories like that? One girl discovered that her uncle — really a friend of her dad’s that she was told to call “uncle” — hid a web cam in her room and watched her undress for bed. This was when she was twelve, and when she threatened to call the cops on him her dad slapped her. But she was able to get rid of the camera. Now she still has to go into a closet and shut the door to change her clothes. She flunked PE all through high school and couldn’t graduate just because she wouldn’t change in the locker room. How stupid is that? She got trafficked by her boyfriend, who would watch and film her while she gave guys blow jobs in his car, and then keep the money.
It was pretty hard to listen to that without judging. Why did she let him take advantage of her like that? I would have kicked him in the balls and run. But I didn’t say anything.
I told Dolores about the acrylic nail pictures when we were alone one day folding the laundry. I said I’d never told anyone about it, and that only me, my mom and Bradlee knew about it, as far as I could tell. Unless the photos were being shared around somewhere. I didn’t want to think about that.
“It might really help to talk about it in group,” Dolores said. Then she asked if she could give me a hug, but I really didn’t feel like being touched right then.
“How does it help to drag up all this stuff from the past?” I asked.
“Radical truth-telling helps,” Dolores said. “Shame is how victims get controlled and exploited. One way to refuse to feel shame is to tell the truth, even if it’s ugly.”
“It’s painful,”I said. I realized my mom had betrayed me many times, long before she caught John coming out of my room and then blamed it on me. That hurt more than the nails.
“I’m ashamed that my mom didn’t love me enough to protect me,” I told the group the next week. “I’m not ashamed that some dirt bags raped me and kept me locked up, though, because fuck them.”
Dolores didn’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure she felt proud of me.
Lisa Savage’s blog, “Went 2 the Bridge,” writings about “organizing and actions to resist the moral, environmental and financial bankrupting of the U.S. through wars against the poor, at home and abroad,” can be read at went2thebridge.substack.com.
