Page 6 of In My Blood
“Bailey!” The loud yell of my name had me jumping so hard that my entire body jolted. I sat up straight but didn’t bother to turn and see who it was that yelled at me. I already knew. It was my supervisor, pissed because I wasn’t sewing fast enough. I had let my mind wander, and if I’m honest, it happened a lot, so I was used to the bark of my name, and I knew what it meant without any further explanation or reproach.
I grabbed the cheap fabric that I’d been hemming with an overlocker. I didn’t even know what it was that we were making, and I didn’t care. I just kept my head down and sewed what I was told to, as fast as I could in a bid to keep up with the much more skilled and harder working people that surrounded me on their own machines.
It was a crappy job and the pay sucked, but it was the only job I could get when I was a seventeen year old school dropout, desperately looking for work that would be willing to employ me with my very fake ID, which I bought from some guy who I was pretty sure was a drug dealer.
A quick glance to the clock again showed that it had been less than one whole minute since last I looked. Fuck! Once again I found myself questioning how my life became what it was, but I pushed it all back. It was a pointless waste of brain power to go there again. My life was what it was, and I had to damned well get on with it, no matter how crappy it was. I had a roof over my head and most of the time I had enough to eat. Those weren’t luxuries I’d always been lucky enough to have, not since the day I left Rafe and stepped on that plane.
I had to pause my work and move my hands into my lap so I could clasp them together to stop the shaking that instantly started at just the thought of my brother. I didn’t allow myself to even remember his name most days because of the anxiety that filled me at just the mention of him.He’s not coming, I reminded myself. I had to stop this, and let him go, the way he’d clearly let me go.
It had been almost eleven years since my brother packed my mother and I on to a private jet, and told me he was doing it to keep me safe. I didn’t know at the time, but my mother had delighted in telling me often since – I wasn’t my father’s child, or even my brother – Rafe’s – full sister. I was the result of an affair she had with one of my father’s enemies. When the truth came out, Rafe had rushed my mother and I from the country as quickly as he could, to protect us from my father’s ire, and likely from our death too.
I was eight years old at the time I left everything I knew behind, but even at that age I understood my Dad wasn’t a good man. I knew his business was in doing dreadful things, and that he was trying to drag Rafe into it all too.
Even without the ranting and raving, which I heard from my Mum often on the subject, I would have realized looking back, that my father was clearly the leader of some kind of crime family. We were of strong Italian descent, and so were all of the men who apparently worked for my Dad, and were in and out of my family home when I was younger. So ‘mafia’was the first (and somewhat stereotypical) assumption I had come to. Of course, being Italian wasn’t my only evidence. Guns and other weapons had been a common sight to me growing up. Armed guards were always around us, and they weren’t friendly or approachable men for the most part. I’d overheard meetings, and there had been attacks outside our home twice, that I recalled.
One of those attacks I had been home and watching from my bedroom window as armed men shot at each other on the front lawn of the estate that we lived on. Rafe had come for me eventually and ripped me from the window, getting me to a hiding place in Gia’s nursery, but I’d seen enough, even at such a young age, for it to stick in my mind even years later.
The second attack had happened as Louise, our nanny, was driving me and Gia home from school, not long before I was sent away. Masked men had rammed our car as we drove through the gates of our home, and Louise had been hurt, blood pouring down from her head. Dad’s men had stormed out to fight off the masked men, and gunfire had erupted around us. Gia had been screaming and I was shaking so hard I could barely move my hand to try and comfort her. Luckily, Rafe and Dio had arrived,pulling us all from the car and running inside with us. I didn’t see much that time, but it was enough to traumatize me, and I still had occasional nightmares about it. All in all, my memories would have told me I didn’t come from an honest family, that was for sure.
But I didn’t need to question too much, because my Mum loved to tell me the truth about our messed up family, especially when she was drunk, or high, or both. She also delighted in telling me that my father was not my father, and that he had never loved or wanted me. She told me Rafe hated me too, because I was a bastard, and reminded me often that if I made any mistake at all in the new, miserable existence she had dragged me into, that Marcello – I didn’t call him my father any longer - and Rafe would find us and kill us both, slowly and painfully.
Her bitter words were just reinforced by the fact that Rafe had never come for me as he promised. She told me he sent us away to be rid of me, and that he wanted me dead as much as Marcello did. I didn’t believe that – not about Rafe. Not at first anyway. I had so many memories of him loving me and my little sister, Gia. He used to spend so much time with us both, acting as the only parental figure either of us ever had outside of our nanny and the housekeeper.
Rafe had read us bed time stories every night, and he did all he could to care for us. He had loved us, I was sure of it. I remembered saying goodbye to him so clearly before I got onto the plane that took me from him. He had promised he would come for me, and I had believed him. I still wanted to believe him, but it was hard to do when so many years had passed without a word.
After so many years of him never coming to save me, I had started to believe my Mum when she told me, again and again, that Marcello would have turned Rafe into another version of himself after so many years. She had made me fear my brother over the years, and as a result I had never dared to try and search for him, or even look on a computer for any information on him. I wanted to believe in the love I still felt for Rafe, but my fear of what he would do if he found us, overruled my emotional attachment. My mother was good at getting in my head. The proof of that was the fact that I had stayed with her for the last eleven years, doing her bidding as she dragged us deeper and deeper through the varying levels of hell that she sank into, in search of drugs, money, and alcohol.
My feelings over Rafe were a mess, hence the anxiety they induced in me nowadays. I wanted so much to believe that there had to be a reason he never came for me. I used to tell myself it was because he couldn’t find us. We’d moved around a lot because of my Mum’s paranoia that Marcello was coming after us.
When we landed in the United States that first day, my mother had refused to get into the car Rafe had arranged for us, and instead she had dragged me behind her as we fled alone with no idea of where we were going.
We’d spent the first week in a woman and child shelter. We had no money and no ID. The only clothes we had were the ones on our backs and I had my backpack with a few books, my beloved rabbit soft toy and a water bottle. That first night as I lay on a cot in a room filled with other people, children around me crying, sniffling, and coughing all night long, I realized just how far I had come from the life I knew. I wanted my home, my sister, and my brother. I wanted to be tucked up safe, warm, and full up ofthe delicious dinner Terza always made for us, instead of alone, afraid, and hungry.
Things never really got much better from there. My Mum worked jobs here and there for the first couple of years as she dragged me half way across the vast country. She’d find ‘boyfriends’ who she could leech off, and usually move us in with for a few weeks at a time. They weren’t usually good men, and they definitely weren’t interested in having a kid hanging around.
At best, I was ignored and neglected, left to find – and usually steal – my own food to live. At worst I found myself trapped with men who saw me as their true prize, providing my Mum what she wanted just so that they could trap me. In those places I faced horrifying and soul scarring abuse. At first it had destroyed me when men hit me, or worse, touched me in ways I knew were wrong. I had been terrified of everything and everyone, and so confused about why Rafe would allow it to happen. I didn’t understand why he sent me away to be hurt, and why he wouldn’t come to save me.
Then years passed, and it continued. Men would get bored and we moved on, but there would always be someone else – some lowlife pervert my Mum would latch on to. It was her talent – finding sick, twisted men. Eventually, I just started to accept it. My Mum didn’t care when I told her about the things those monsters did to me. She didn’t care what happened to me or who she subjected me to, as long as she was supplied with booze and drugs. I could have run away, but I knew what it was to live on the streets too – I wouldn’t be any safer from the predators who pursued weak victims like me on the streets.
By the time I was thirteen my Mum was a disaster. She drank, she used drugs, and her paranoia and mental health issues were out of control. The days of her working, or even finding herself a boyfriend were over and she became a recluse in the shitty places we lived in.
I started trying to find any work I could do to keep us fed, when it became clear my Mum would no longer be doing anything to find any money. I wasn’t in school anyway, and the years before had ensured I was very capable for my age. I needed work if we were going to survive, but that didn’t work out well. It turned out people weren’t keen on employing a very petite, young looking, scruffy, scrawny teenager.
That’s where the days of not having a roof or food came in. For almost two years we survived on the streets, and in and out of shelters. My Mum was forced to dry out a little, since she couldn’t get a hold of the drugs and alcohol she needed. But it didn’t cure the paranoia. She dragged me all over the country constantly, and we hadn’t stayed in one state for longer than three months at a time since we arrived there.
Finally, when I turned fifteen I found myself a job in a strip club, while we were living in Chicago. The manager didn’t care about paperwork or legalities. He just wanted girls working his club who would keep the customers coming in, and apparently I fit that category. I worked as a server, which paid shit, but the tips were amazing, and eventually I got a roof over my and my Mum’s head again. I also managed to enrol myself back in school with my fake ID, and even though I was behind, because I had missed so much school, I worked hard to try and keep up, ever hopeful that I could eventually get my GED and do something to make my life better than it was.
At the club I worked every night and every weekend to keep the roof and the food that we desperately needed, and when my mother started to panic we were being watched, as she often did, and wanted to run, I refused, knowing the only way we could stay off of the streets was if I kept my job.
As time passed, my Mum became erratic and her paranoia got worse. I came home one night and she had covered all of the windows with our furniture and boards she ripped from the hardwood floor with her bare hands. She was out of her mind with fear and sure we were about to be killed. From there her mental health got worse and worse. I knew she needed professional help, but taking her to a doctor wasn’t an option. Yes, she was paranoid and acting crazy, but she wasn’t completely out of her mind. Her paranoia was based in fact. I had no idea if my father still searched for us, or maybe even Rafe too now. I couldn’t risk our location being found, and I wasn’t confident that our fake last name of ‘Bailey,’ and the very poor counterfeit ID’s, which I had gotten for the both of us, would fool anyone. Not to mention we were undocumented immigrants. We had no visas to be living in the States. Hell, we didn’t even have our passports by then, my Mum losing them somewhere along the way during the very first week after we stepped off of that plane. .
So I didn’t seek medical care for my Mum. I just stuck my head in the sand and went through the motions of my existence – taking care of her as much as I could, going to school and failing miserably, then working my ass off into the small hours of the night every night just so I could keep us both alive.
I started buying my Mum alcohol to keep her quiet, and when that stopped working effectively, I went through a girl I knew at work, to buy illegal pills, which the dealer assured me wouldkeep my Mum calm. Now that was the only way I was able to leave her while I went out to work – drugged heavily with illegal drugs I didn’t even know the source of. It was a shitty thing to do and I hated myself for doing it, but I had no other choice. We couldn’t lose the apartment we had, and I couldn’t be there with my Mum when I had to work.
I’d quit school two years ago, at seventeen, to work full time at the factory. My dreams of doing something to better my situation were forgotten as my life got tougher and tougher. The future became something I didn’t even allow myself to think about, because all I could see ahead was the nightmare in which I was already trapped.
My Mum needed more and more drugs, and the money I made at the club wasn’t enough to pay for them, the rent, her alcohol, and food any longer. As it was I barely ate, and my Mum was constantly screaming at me that she needed more drink and pills. She had turned violent about eighteen months ago. She constantly lashed out at me, and threw whatever was to hand at me. She was almost half a foot taller than me, so she was hard to fight off when she really got into one of her rages, and I’d usually come out bruised and scratched. But I didn’t blame her, because I was pretty sure it was the drugs and alcohol I gave her that made her that way, so it was on me.
