I feel Rocco tighten his grip on my hand.
“One day, he walked into the house with a little girl. He told me that her name was Marcy and that she was my new sister. He ordered us a pizza for dinner that night, but Marcy kept crying for her mom, and that pissed him off. He smacked her hard enough to knock her off the kitchen chair and then hauled her into the back room. I could hear her crying, but I was just a kid, you know? I didn’t know what to do.
“Really early the next morning, I heard cars outside my bedroom window. A minute later, the police broke down the front door. I watched through the window as Marcy was taken away in an ambulance, and my dad was taken away in handcuffs. I remember the officer who came into my room. I screamed because he had a gun in his hand, and I thought he was going to shoot me. He told me he wasn’t going to hurt me, talked into his radio, and another officer came in. She said her name was Shannon and that everything was going to be all right, but that wasn’t true.”
I pause for a moment, waiting for the questions that usually come during this point of the story, but Rocco doesn’t ask any. I center myself and continue.
“He’d taken her from a nearby park. Someone saw him and had a decent description of my dad and his car. The FBI was called in and all that. I guess it didn’t take them very long to track him down and find out where we lived.
“Before the week was out, the police dug up the back yard of the house, looking for other girls who had gone missing, but they never found anything. For a while, the police questioned me about my mother. They did a thorough investigation, but they couldn’t find any sign of Karen Summers either alive or dead, so they presumed dead. They wanted to put my father up on murder charges, but there wasn’t enough evidence. As it turns out, they didn’t need a murder conviction.
“Short version of the next few months is that they charged him with kidnapping, multiple counts of rape, child endangerment, and a bunch of other related stuff. My dad went to prison for l
ife, no parole, and I became a ward of the state. No one wants to adopt a twelve-year-old with my kind of baggage, so I was relegated to group homes. They suck, by the way.”
“Yeah,” Rocco says softly, “they do.”
I glance down at him, waiting to see if he’ll say more. He doesn’t, of course, but I’m sure he didn’t make that statement based on secondhand knowledge. It gives me my first real piece of the Rocco puzzle—he was a foster kid, too.
“I got in a lot of trouble trying to adjust,” I say. “It’s not that the counselors there weren’t any good, but I wasn’t ready to deal with my trauma. When I eventually ran away, I was just shy of fifteen. I didn’t trust anyone, so I had to figure out a lot of shit really fast.”
“You never went back?”
“Never.”
“Where did you live?”
“The streets, mostly. Sometimes in a shelter if it got cold at night, but it’s always decently warm here, which was a bonus at the time. I had a lot of...opportunities to make money, but I wasn’t willing to be a prostitute and could never bring myself to actually steal from people. I panhandled a lot. Sometimes someone would take pity on me and give me money or food. I finally got lucky when an older couple saw me on the street and took me for a real meal. They got me into one of the better shelters north of town, and after two years on the street, I was finally ready for some help. I was nearly seventeen, so the social workers helped make me a legal adult and helped me get an apartment and get on some assistance. I took GED classes, got my diploma, and the social worker helped me get a full scholarship here.”
“You’re smart.”
“Well, I do work-study to supplement the book fees and such, but yeah. I have to keep my grade point up.”
We both go quiet as I give Rocco a little time to digest what I’ve told him. I can hear my pulse in my ears, and my hands are sweating a bit. I’ve been through this before, and I know people need time to process, but this time it’s important. I don’t want this information to make Rocco go running for the hills. I know he needs more time than most, so I keep quiet until I can’t stand it anymore.
“You okay?” I ask him.
He nods.
“I know it’s a lot to take in. If you have any questions, I don’t mind talking about it.”
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why don’t you mind talking about it?”
“Why should I?”
Rocco’s face scrunches up, and he shakes his head a bit.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. I try not to sound too defensive, but it comes out anyway. I don’t think Rocco fits into the category of “those people”—the ones who blame the victim—but I can’t be sure. “I was a kid.”
“I know. I don’t think you did. I just...”
“What?”
“I’m surprised you want to...to do it at all.”