Safe House

“He had—?”

“I don’t know what he had. All I know is that my mother took whatever it was. To their clubhouse, that’s what the newspapers called it. She walked in there with a knapsack on her back. And while she was inside, the place blew up. Seven of them died. My mother too.”

“Damn.”

“I started walking then,” Crystal Beth said. “And I didn’t stop until I found my purpose.”

She sat there in silence after that. Not inside herself, just watching. And waiting.

I did that too.

It was a few minutes before she spoke. “Does my story make you . . . feel anything?”

“Yeah,” I told her true. “Jealous.”

She nodded like that made perfect sense to her. Didn’t say anything else.

“Was this your purpose?” I asked her finally. “This . . . shelter?”

“Not a place,” she said softly. “A place is never a purpose. I knew my purpose was to protect. Like my father did Starr.”

“Like your mother did . . . ?”

“Me? Maybe. I didn’t think so at first. I thought it was just revenge. My mother believed in balance. Natural balance. The others, they never really understood that. Oh, they said they did. Hippies worship anything ‘native,’ even though they don’t get it. Not really. They used to argue with my mother sometimes. About hunting, that was one. My mother never argued back, but my father did. Oh, he loved to argue, my father. But he would always do it with a smile, with a joke. I remember once, he asked some of the others if they thought my mother’s people should be farmers instead of hunters. ‘Should they grow wheat on the bloody tundra, then?’ I remember him saying. I don’t know why my mother did . . . what she did. All she ever told me was she was going to be with him. And I know she is.”

“But sixteen, that was a . . .”

“Long time ago?” Her smile flashed in the darkness. “Sure. I’m not a girl anymore. It took me a long time to find . . . this. I wandered for a while. Tried other communes. Looking for the music. But there were always too many chemicals in the mix. I wasn’t at home there. Then I went to school.”

“High school?”

“College. I was schooled on the commune. We had so many people there who could teach. There was this place, not far from where I was raised. A place for girls who had been abused. I wasn’t abused, so I never lived there. But I was friends with one of the girls, and she took me to her counselor, her education counselor. And he told me how I could get advanced-placement credit by taking exams. CLEP exams, they were called. I was almost twenty when I started, but I went right into my junior year.”

“For what?”

“To get an—oh, you mean, what did I study? Just a bunch of different stuff. Looking for the blend. Science and math, history and literature. Even philosophy . . . although I never liked that stuff much. I was trying to get . . .”

“. . . closer to your parents?”

“Yes! How did you . . . ?”

“The courses—the ones you studied—the mix sounds like them.”

“I guess it was. But the truth is, or it was, anyway, that it didn’t work. The books always seemed so hollow. If there was anything valuable in them, it was in a vacuum, kind of. Not connected to anything. The way I was . . .”

I waited a few minutes after her voice trailed off. Until I could see there wasn’t going to be any more. “What then?” I prompted her.

“I thought about the Peace Corps, but . . . I remembered my mother telling me about the missionaries who came to her village, and I crossed that one off. So I became a VISTA volunteer. In Appalachia. I didn’t like the trainers much. They kept giving us a whole bunch of long stupid speeches about ‘shedding our middle-class attitudes’ and stuff like that. I didn’t have any middle-class attitudes. They did. It was mostly the males. White males. Just another way of asserting dominance. Pressuring the women. For sex, mostly.

“But once I got out into the field, it was great. Just like it should be, I thought. I taught and I learned. I just didn’t learn enough, so I moved on. That’s when I came to my first shelter.”

“For the homeless?”

“For battered women,” she said. “I never realized how . . . frightened people could be until I worked there. They were so helpless. Nobody would listen unless they were half-killed. Even then, sometimes. And I had trouble fitting in. The director, she wanted to do therapy all the time. For the men, mostly. The perpetrators, the ones who needed all the ‘understanding’ so they could ‘break their patterns,’ ” Crystal Beth said, her voice heavy with scorn.

“And the director liked to give speeches too,” she went on. “Fund-raising. She worshipped the media. Any reporter who wanted to talk to the women, that was okay. There was no . . . privacy for anyone.”

“Like on the commune?”

“No! You don’t understand. We didn’t have private property, that isn’t the same thing. But you could be by yourself. The others would always respect that. In that shelter where I worked, even your thoughts weren’t your own. Everything had to be . . . examined. Talked about. That’s what it was. All it was. Talking, not fighting.”

“Who did you want to fight?”

“Not who, what. The . . . Beast. The Stalking Beast. There’s a legend . . . Never mind, now isn’t the time to tell it. I left there with a couple of the other women. We wanted to start our own place. I thought . . . runaways. That’s where it started for me anyway. Not just girls, we took in boys too. Most of them were prostituting themselves for—”

“Themselves?”

“Okay, you’re right. That’s what I thought too. At first. People call them child prostitutes, but they’re not. They’re prostituted children. The girls, anyway.”

“Why just the girls?”

“Some of the boys, they went into business for themselves. They didn’t have pimps.”

“Sure. I get it. Just ran away from a nice home where everybody treated them good and started peddling their bodies for cash to buy clothes and CDs, huh?”

“I didn’t mean that. I know they were mistreated at home. Just—”

“You ever read about the cops busting a whole whorehouse full of girls from another country?”

“Yes. Just last week. On the West Coast. All the girls were from Thailand.”

“Sure. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, right? At least that’s what they told the cops. You think that was the first time they turned a trick?”

“No. I’m sure they started . . . Oh, I see.”

“Sorry I interrupted you.”

“That’s all right. I mean, you’re right. I should have said—”

“It doesn’t matter. Tell me what happened next.”

“They closed it down. The pimps. They just closed it down. They hung around outside. They dropped on the girls like hawks as soon as they left the place. A couple of them even came inside. By the time the police got there, they were always gone.”

“And some of the girls recruited for the pimps themselves.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “You know about that too. Some of them did that. We weren’t . . . prepared for it. We thought we could all stand together, but some of them, they wanted to—”

“You can’t want something else unless you believe something else really exists.”

“We really existed. We were really there.”

“You’re not there now.”