It was late, dark, and cold. Drunks shouted and laughed outside her window.
She didn’t like New York at all. There were too many people and not enough trees. It was busy and filthy and terrifying.
And she hated sharing Tiernan, her twin brother, with other people.
Now, they had a father. He was tall and had nice teeth. He bought her nice clothes and pink sneakers and filled the fridge with food she could eat without even asking for permission.
She knew she should like him, but for some reason, she couldn’t. Her tummy felt heavy, and not with food, every time he walked into the room.
Maybe she’d like him better if she understood what he said.
But Tiernan was the smart one. Her twin brother had learned English quickly. She only knew Russian and someAmerican Sign Language she’d learned from a prisoner in Siberia.
The last six months had been a blur. She didn’t remember how she and Tiernan had escaped the prison camp. She just knew they had and were meant to be safe here.
But she didn’t feel safe. She felt like a guest in a stranger’s home. She didn’t know her father or older brother any better than her next-door neighbor.
They tried to be nice, but every time they looked at her, they exchanged sharp glances, like there was something wrong with her.
Of course there was something wrong with her. In fact, she doubted if there was one thing right with her. But she didn’t need the reminder that she not only felt broken but also looked it.
They stared when they thought she wasn’t watching, while she picked at the old scabs on her skin. One time, she managed to peel an entire layer of skin off her forearm using a butter knife. The pale, freckly skin rolled smoothly, revealing pink, raw flesh. She had smiled to herself because she’d finally managed to feel something after months of numbness.
Pain.
The next day, all the sharp objects in the house had magically disappeared, and Tierney was scheduled for a weekly meeting with a Russian-speaking therapist.
They must’ve filled in the blanks about everything that had happened to her in the work camp. Little did they know, even the worst they assumed wasn’t half as terrible as what really happened.
Funny, how she didn’t remember the journey here, but she did remember every second of her fourteen years in Siberia.
The abuse.
The torture.
The humiliation.
The pain.
The rape.
“They pity you,” Tiernan had chided her in ASL, scowling. “Stop moping around, or they’ll think you’re weak.”
Maybe she was weak.
She cried. All the time. Crying felt like giving her soul a shower.
But she didn’t want to disappoint Tiernan, so she tried really hard to forget everything that had happened in Siberia. And the therapist, although nice enough, was very nosy. She kept poking around in things that were none of her business and only made Tierney cry more.
But none of it bothered her half as much as one simple fact: She was losing Tiernan.
To the Callaghans.
To America.
To the Irish Mafia.
When they moved here, she suggested they take the same room, but he liked the idea of having his own space, so now she had to sleep by herself. She wasn’t used to it. In the work camp, they’d slept with dozens of prisoners. It had been smelly and filthy, but she had never felt alone, and there had always been body heat and noise around her.
