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“But where can we get money?” I asked, frowning and unhappy now. He had found another reason for stalling. “There is no way but to steal it from Momma, her husband, and the grandmother.” He said this so pronounced, exactly as if thieving were an old and honored profession. And in dire need, perhaps it was, and still is.
Often, I was on my knees by the bed, with my palms together under my chin, and I didn’t know what to pray, since already I’d prayed so much, and none of it helped.
Already I knew I wasn’t a saint, or an angel, or a puritan prude, and I felt in my bones that someday in the near future I was going to need to know all there was to know about how bodies were used in ways of love.
Survival. That’s what TV should teach innocent children. How to live in a world that really doesn’t give a damn about anyone but their own—and sometimes, not even their own.
Money. If there was one thing we’d learned during the years of our imprisonment, it was that money came first, and everything else came after. How well Momma had said it long ago: “It’s not love that makes the world go ’round—it’s money.”
That dream was to haunt me many a day, pleasantly. It gave me peace. It gave me knowledge I hadn’t had before. People never really died. They only went on to a better place, to wait a while for their loved ones to join them.
This was to be our last day in prison. God would not deliver us, we would deliver ourselves.
The wisdom of the attic was in my bones, etched on my brain, part of my flesh.
Where was that fragile, golden-fair Dresden doll I used to be? Gone. Gone like porcelain turned into steel—made into someone who would always get what she wanted, no matter who or what stood in her way.
We were young and vulnerable, weak, half-sick, but no longer naïve, or innocent.
God, He didn’t write the scripts for the puny little players down here. We wrote them ourselves—with each day we lived, each word we spoke, each thought we etched on our brains.
Just the right words to make me feel real, alive, free! Free enough to forget thoughts of revenge.
