Chapter 1 - The Cold Balcony of Columbus
The temperature in Columbus, Ohio, at sixteen minutes past six on the evening of January twenty-fourth was twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, with an easterly wind cutting off the Scioto River at fourteen miles per hour.
When I stepped off the regional bus from Cincinnati, holding a paper bag containing three foil-wrapped chocolate teddy bears from a bakery on Vine Street, the air smelled of wet road salt, diesel exhaust, and cold exhaust condensation. I had spent six days in Hamilton County conducting an inventory audit for a commercial medical supply warehouse—six days of twelve-hour shifts under white fluorescent tubes, sleeping in a forty-nine-dollar motel room, counting surgical tray sets and rubber catheter boxes so I could cover the three-hundred-dollar monthly deficit in our household budget.
Every night at seven o'clock, my three-year-old daughter, Louisa, had called my cheap prepaid phone. Her voice was always small, muffled by the noisy living room background of my mother-in-law’s apartment on West Broad Street.
"Mommy... you bring teddy bears?" she would ask, her tongue catching on the 'r' sounds. "The brown ones with the gold foil?"
"I have three of them in my bag right now, baby," I had told her on Friday night. "One for Saturday, one for Sunday, and one for Monday morning. You stay near the radiator and keep your soft socks on."
I walked up the five concrete steps of the four-unit apartment building at 1142 West Broad Street. The front door’s electric latch was broken—it had been jammed open with a piece of folded cardboard since November—and the interior hallway smelled of stale cabbage, moist radiator paint, and Walter’s heavy tobacco smoke.
I pulled my key from my coat pocket, unlocked Apartment 2B, and stepped into the carpeted foyer.
There were no toys on the floor. There was no small, pattering sound of rubber-soled shoes running down the hallway from the kitchen.
The apartment was unnaturally quiet, save for the dull metallic hum of the living room radiator and the low, nasal audio of a daytime courtroom reality show playing on the sixty-inch television.
"Louisa?" I called out, setting my heavy duffel bag on the linoleum near the shoe rack. "Louisa, Mommy's home. I brought the bears."
Nobody answered from the living room.
I walked past the kitchen archway. My mother-in-law, Lydia, stood by the stainless-steel sink, her back turned to me, slowly wiping down a yellow laminate countertop with a damp rag. She was wearing her thick wool cardigan—the brown one with the bone buttons—and her grey hair was wrapped in a tight, hair-sprayed bun that sat like an iron knot at the base of her skull.
On the microfiber sectional couch, my sister-in-law, Heather, sat curled in the corner with her knees pulled up to her chest. She was twenty-six years old, unemployed, and had moved back into her parents' spare bedroom six months ago after her third retail job at the mall ended in a dispute over missing register cash. She did not look up from her smartphone screen, though her thumb paused its rapid scrolling the instant my boots hit the carpet.
In the arm chair near the double glass balcony doors, my father-in-law, Walter, sat with an unlit Chesterfield cigarette clamped between his yellowing teeth. His broad, heavy shoulders were hunched inside an old navy cardigan, and his small, light-colored eyes were fixed on the television screen.
"Where is she?" I asked, my stomach tightening into a hard, sudden knot.
Lydia did not stop wiping the counter. "Look out on the porch, Joanna."
I turned toward the sliding glass patio door.
The double curtain had been drawn back. Outside, standing on the frost-dusted concrete slab of the second-story balcony in the twenty-two-degree wind, was my daughter.
She was wearing only her thin, pink-striped summer pajamas—a sleeveless cotton top and thin pants that ended three inches above her bare ankles. Her shoes were gone. Her socks were gone. She was standing facing the red-brick exterior wall, her forehead pressed flat against the freezing masonry, her tiny arms pinned tightly against her ribs.
And her hair was gone.
It had not been trimmed with child-safety scissors. It had been scraped down to the pale, goose-bump-covered skin of her scalp with an un-lubricated electric beard trimmer. Long, dark red streaks where the guardless metal blades had bitten into her scalp crisscrossed her skull from the crown down to the nape of her neck. Small patches of dried blood had caked along the top of her left ear.
"Louisa!" I screamed.
I threw my weight against the handle of the sliding glass door. The aluminum frame had been jammed from the inside with a two-foot wooden broom handle set into the floor track. I yanked the stick out, threw it onto the living room carpet, and shoved the heavy door open.
The freezing January wind hit my face like a wet sheet of sheet metal.
"Mommy..." Louisa whispered without moving her forehead from the cold brick wall. Her lips were a deep, dark violet color. Her skin was grey-white, covered in hard gooseflesh, and her body was trembling so violently that her small knees were knocking together with a dry, rhythmic sound. "Mommy... I didn't take anything."
I dropped to my knees on the freezing concrete, wrapped my wool coat entirely around her small, shaking frame, and pulled her off the wall. When I lifted her into my arms, she felt weightless, cold as a block of ice, her skin radiating a terrifying, clammy frost that soaked straight through my blouse.
I carried her back into the warm air of the living room, kicking the glass door shut behind me with my boot heel.
"Are you insane?" I shrieked, my voice cracking into a jagged, ragged tear as I wrapped my arms around Louisa, rubbing her bare, scarred head with my warm hand. "She’s three years old! She’s been out there in twenty-degree weather! She’s freezing to death!"
Lydia slowly turned around from the sink, folding her wet rag into a neat four-inch square.
"They shave the heads of little thieves so they learn what shame feels like!" Lydia shouted, her voice rising over the television audio with a sharp, practiced efficiency. She pointed a thick, manicured index finger at my daughter’s wet, grey face. "She needs to learn now, before she turns into a degenerate."
"She’s three!" I sobbed, holding Louisa’s face against my neck as the warm air of the room hit her frozen skin, causing her to break into a terrifying, high-pitched scream of pure physical pain as sensation returned to her nerve endings. "She doesn't even know what stealing means! What are you talking about?"
"My gold bracelet disappeared," Lydia said, stepping out of the kitchen with her chin raised. "The gold chain with the small garnet link that my mother left me from Chicago. I left it on my nightstand at nine o'clock this morning. By eleven, it was gone. Louisa was the only one who went into my bedroom."
"That is a lie," I spat, my tears hot and bitter as they dripped onto Louisa’s bare, wounded scalp. "She can't even reach the top of your tall dresser drawer! She can't turn the heavy brass handle on your bedroom door when it’s latched!"
From the couch, Heather let out a short, nasal laugh, tapping her blue fingernails against the plastic case of her phone.
"Oh, Joanna, you never really know what children do when their mother isn't around," Heather drawled, her tone dripping with lazy condescension. "Maybe she saw something shiny, grabbed a footstool from the hall, and slipped it into her little pink backpack. You're never here to watch her anyway. You're always off in Cincinnati doing your little 'warehouse jobs.'"
Lydia stepped closer, her face stopping four inches from mine. Her breath smelled of old coffee and peppermints.
"She takes after you," Lydia whispered, her eyes narrow and yellowed around the rims. "You came into this family four years ago with nothing but a broken car and two suitcases. You’ve been leeching off my son’s income since the day you signed the license, and now your daughter steals from the people who keep a roof over her head."
Louisa buried her face deeper into the collar of my coat, her tiny hands clutching my sweater so hard her fingernails bit through the wool into my skin. "Mommy... cold... my head hurts so bad..."
I looked at Lydia. I looked at Heather.
"Never call her a thief again," I said, my voice dropping from a scream into a low, vibrating growl that shook my entire jaw. "And if you ever lay another finger on her body, I will make sure you spend the rest of your life inside a state institution."
In the armchair near the window, Walter stood up.
He was six-foot-two, two hundred and thirty pounds, with heavy, liver-spotted hands and a face flushed dark red from forty years of heavy drinking and factory work. He set his unlit cigarette on the side table, took three long strides across the carpet, and stopped directly in front of me.
"Watch your tone, girl," Walter rumbled, his voice like gravel grinding under an iron wheel. "You're in my house. You eat my food, you live under my roof, and you will show my wife respect."
"This isn't discipline, Walter," I said, standing my ground with Louisa held tightly against my chest. "This is child abuse. It’s a crime."
I never got to finish the sentence.
Walter’s right hand came around in a wide, sweeping arc. He didn't slap me with an open palm; he struck me with the heavy, callous-covered heel of his hand directly across my mouth and cheekbone.
The force of the blow tore my feet from the carpet. My head snapped back, cracking hard against the edge of the glass patio door frame. A bright, blinding flash of white light exploded behind my eyes, followed instantly by the warm, thick taste of copper filling my mouth as my lower lip split against my front teeth.
I hit the floor on my side, my elbows tucked tight to absorb the impact so Louisa wouldn't strike the ground.
Louisa’s screams turned into a raw, breathless screech of pure terror that filled the room.
I lay on the carpet, my vision swimming with grey spots, blood dripping from my chin onto the front of my wool coat.
Above me, Walter stood looking down, rubbing his thick knuckles against his cardigan. Lydia remained standing by the kitchen archway, her hands still folded over her yellow rag, her face entirely devoid of emotion. Heather hadn't even stood up from the couch; she merely shifted her legs slightly so my boot wouldn't touch her slippers.
They didn't look angry anymore. They looked satisfied. They looked down at me on the floor as if an inconvenient insect had finally been stepped on.
"Get up, pack your trash, and get out," Walter said, his voice completely flat. "If you're still here when the six o'clock news starts, I'll throw your bags into the street myself."
I lay on the floor for three seconds.
And in those three seconds, something inside me—the quiet, timid, long-suffering fear that had kept me obedient to the Thorne family for four long years—simply ceased to exist.
The fear didn't shrink; it burned away, replaced by an absolute, freezing clarity that was as cold and sharp as the wind outside the glass door.
I didn't cry. I didn't yell. I wiped the blood from my chin with the back of my sleeve, stood up on my feet, and walked into the small back bedroom we used when we stayed in Columbus.
I opened my suitcase on the bed.
I packed Louisa’s birth certificate. I packed my passport, my social security card, my tax records from the bottom drawer, three changes of clothes for my daughter, her small stuffed yellow bunny, and my private savings card from the regional credit union—an account Elmer didn't know existed, containing nineteen hundred dollars I had saved ten dollars at a time from my warehouse per-diems.
I dressed Louisa in three layers of warm wool sweaters, pulled a thick fleece winter cap over her bleeding, shaved head, and zipped her into her heavy down coat.
When I walked back into the living room ten minutes later, carrying my suitcase in one hand and my daughter in the other, Lydia was sitting at the dining table, sipping her tea.
"If you walk out that door tonight, Joanna, don't ever think about coming back," Lydia said without looking at me. "Elmer will divorce you by Friday. You won't get a single penny of child support, and we'll take that girl away from you in court before the month is out."
I paused at the threshold, my hand on the brass door handle.
"I certainly hope you try," I said.
I walked down the stairs, stepped out into the freezing January rain that had begun to fall over West Broad Street, and flagged down a yellow taxi at the corner.
My husband, Elmer, was thirty years old and worked as a middle-management shift supervisor at a commercial distribution center in Indianapolis. He made fifty-two thousand dollars a year, spent his weekends watching college football, and had never once contradicted his mother’s opinion on anything larger than his choice of lawn mower.
As the taxi pulled away from the curb, I opened my phone, typed a single text message to Elmer’s personal number, and pressed send:
Your father hit me across the face and split my lip. Your mother shaved Louisa’s head down to the skin with a beard trimmer and locked her on the open balcony in twenty-degree weather over a stolen bracelet she didn't take.
My phone buzzed three seconds later. Elmer’s reply was short:
My mom is very upset about her mother's bracelet, Joanna. She's elderly and her heart is weak. You need to turn the cab around, go back, apologize to my father for raising your voice, and stop making this into a massive drama. We are a family. We handle things internally.
I looked at the glowing screen for two seconds.
Then I tapped his contact profile, selected "Block Number," and turned the phone's screen off.
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"Where to, lady?" the taxi driver asked, looking at me in his rearview mirror with wide, uneasy eyes as he noticed the dark, swollen blood on my mouth and my daughter’s pale, terrified face.
"Take us to the intercity bus terminal," I said. "The one with the express line south."
