My Story (8 page)

During most of my captivity, I called them Immanuel and Hephzibah. But I have a hard time thinking of them by these names anymore. Too loaded with ugly baggage. Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee are more comfortable to me now.

“You are her handmaiden,” Mitchell then told me as he pointed to Barzee. “You are the second wife.”

I looked at them. The word
crazy
rolled around my head.

“She is your mother wife. You are her handmaiden.”

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
Mother wife! Handmaiden!
I had no idea what that meant.

Soon I was to learn. To him, a handmaiden was a sex toy. To her, it was a slave.

*

Lunchtime approached. The woman got up and started fixing food to eat. I watched her for a moment through puffy eyes.

I knew that the man could kill me anytime he wanted. He certainly had the physical capability. He could kill me with nothing but a twist of his hands. No one would ever know. Nobody was there to protect me. Nobody was there to take care of me. I had to watch out for myself.

My mind started turning. Okay, I thought to myself, I can’t fight them all the time. If I do, they’ll keep me cabled. I’ll never have a chance to escape.

I thought back on a girl I knew in junior high. She was a friend to the Polynesian kids, the Mexicans, the Caucasians. She was friends with everyone. She was just so nice. So I thought, Okay, I can be like her. I can make this situation the best that I can for myself. Nobody wants to be around a crybaby. Nobody wants to be around a sad sack. If I am miserable and whiny and don’t carry my weight, then he will be far more likely to kill me. What was there to stop him? If I’m going to survive this, then I have to step up. I have to try to help myself.

I continued thinking.

If I did as they told me, if I didn’t always fight him, then maybe it would be harder for him to hurt me. If I could get them to trust me just a little, maybe they would let me off the cable. Maybe they’d realize how much they were hurting me. Maybe they would come to like me, maybe even come to care about me. Then maybe they would let me go.

So I got up and walked over to where they were seated in the tarped area in front of the tent. They had set a tablecloth on some of the plastic containers. She had started to grate carrots and cut up onions. He was just sitting there, waiting for his lunch.

“I can help,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

She hesitated. I think she was surprised. Then she passed me a cutting board and grater, careful to keep the knife out of my reach. (Not that it mattered. I never could have hurt them, even in the most desperate times.) I started grating carrots, helping to prepare the food. They had onions, raisins, and carrots mixed with mayonnaise and rolled in tortillas for lunch. They ate like they were starving. I ate next to nothing at all.

When they were finished, I asked if they wanted me to help clean up.

“It’s okay,” Barzee said. “It’s your wedding day. You don’t have to help me anymore. You can go and cry again for now. But you’re gonna have to stop soon. You can’t cry your life away.”

That started it all over again.
My wedding day!
Any composure that I had captured was immediately lost at that thought.

“Please don’t hurt me again,” I begged him. “Please, please, just leave me alone.”

Mitchell shook his head. “We’re man and wife. That’s a part of what we do now.”

“No, no, please don’t do it again. Please … I’m begging you … you don’t have to do it. Please…”

He was instantly angry. “It’s what we do!” he seemed to hiss.

I kept on begging and crying. I couldn’t seem to stop.

Watching me, he suddenly grinned in a menacing way. “Tomorrow we are going to be as Adam and Eve in the garden,” he said. “We’ll be his little children. Tomorrow, we’re all going to go naked. Then Hephzibah and I are going to demonstrate…”

He went on to describe what they were going to do. Things I didn’t want to know about. I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach. The image was so disgusting. So humiliating. I couldn’t even think.

I spent the rest of the day crying by myself.

*

I don’t remember if we ate dinner. All I remember is sitting there, alone. Night fell, and it grew cool. The mountain was dark. I could hear coyotes and crickets, the wind blowing through the tops of the maples. But that is all I heard. No voices calling out my name. No airplanes or helicopters. Nothing good at all.

That night, we all slept in the tent. The cable wasn’t long enough and I couldn’t stretch out my leg. I curled in the fetal position against the side of the tent, not even on my pad. Mitchell curled up next to me, his arm around my shoulder. I recoiled at his touch. I pulled away as far as I could. He moved against me again. I was pressing so hard against the tent that I thought it was going to tear. I curled tighter into a ball. My rejection didn’t bother him. In fact, it seemed to urge him on, being able to dominate me like that. Domination and power. That was always his intent.

The night wore on. I prayed as long and as hard as I had cried the day before. I was so scared and lonely. So afraid of what was coming.

But never was I angry. Never did I blame God. I never thought, Why me? This isn’t right! This isn’t fair! I knew that He didn’t want these things to happen to me. This wasn’t an expression of His will. But I also understood that Brian David Mitchell had his free will. He had the freedom to choose. He could choose to be a good man or a devil. To be a devil is what he had chosen. And I also knew that God wouldn’t leave me to suffer through this alone. I just knew that was true. In fact, I never felt closer to God than I did throughout my nightmare with Mitchell. He did not leave me without comfort. I always felt Him near. And I felt the presence of my grandpa. I knew that he was near as well.

As I felt a little of their comfort, exhaustion finally overcame me, taking me to a place where my captors couldn’t hurt me anymore.

There was only one time when I woke up in the middle of the night and thought that I was home. It didn’t happen on that first night. In fact, it didn’t happen until several months after I had been taken, when I woke up searching for my alarm clock. For a moment, I was confused. When I couldn’t find it, I finally remembered where I was.

But this only happened once.

On the morning of June 6, I woke up and knew immediately where I was.

It had been a long night. For one thing, it had rained. The sides of the tent were dripping with condensation. But Mitchell had dug a small trench around the outside to funnel the water away, so at least our bedding was not wet. Another thing that made it a long night was the fact that Mitchell kept getting out of bed. He’d get up, unzip the tent, and go outside. I could hear him out there, huffing and puffing through some kind of exercise. He did this every night. Get up. Go outside. Work through a series of stretching exercises, puffing as he bent and stretched and worked his muscles. I don’t know if he did it because he was nervous or if it was part of his fanatical exercise routine, but I don’t think he ever slept through the night for the entire time that I was with him.

When I woke up, the sun was just beginning to break over the top of the mountains. It was only a few weeks from the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and it was very early. Mitchell, always anxious to begin talking or drinking or getting naked or whatever else he had in mind for that day, apparently didn’t like to lie around. He and Barzee got up with the sun. Which meant that I got up as well.

My mouth was dry. I ached from sleeping on the ground, pressed against the side of the tent, trying to put some space between my captor and myself. And my stomach was already churning as I remembered Mitchell’s words:
We’re going to be like the children of Eden. We’re going to go naked.

As daylight broke, the birds began to chatter from above us. Then the wind began to stir, moving down the canyon to the valley floor below. Mitchell and Barzee crawled out from underneath their bedding. I grew tight, afraid to move. If I kept my eyes closed, maybe they would go back to sleep. If I didn’t move, maybe they would leave me alone. If I pretended I was asleep, maybe they would just go away.

The cable was tight against my leg and I felt cramped and claustrophobic. It was a bright morning. We were a long way up the mountain and the air was still cool.

A few minutes passed until Mitchell announced, “Okay, let’s get naked now.”

I was instantly mortified. I am a very bashful person. I always have been. And, being so young, I was very self-conscious about my body. So I pretended I didn’t hear him and didn’t move.

Mitchell started to grow anxious. “Take it off! You have to take it off,” he said.

I looked down at my linen robe. The day before, I thought it was the most disgusting piece of clothing that I had ever seen. Now it was my shield. I wanted to keep it on more than anything I had ever worn before. I longed for my red pajamas with the high collar and wondered what Mitchell had done with them. (A few months later, I would learn that he had very weird plans for the clothing I had been wearing on the night that I was captured.)

Seeing that I was not responding, Mitchell started growing angry, his dark eyes darting here and there. He had a cool way about him. Evil. Calculating. He stroked his beard without thinking, as if he were … I don’t know, trying to calm himself. His lips curled back in agitation and I thought of his knife. Barzee was also getting anxious as she looked at me in anger.

“Take it off,” he sneered a final time.

I knew I couldn’t defy him any longer. Moving as if in slow motion, wanting to delay the moment for every fraction of a second that I could, I slipped out of the robe. Sitting in a corner of the tent, I grabbed a pillow and held it in front of me, grasping it as if it were a life preserver and I was drowning.

Mitchell and Barzee quickly took their clothes off too. Then Mitchell started the anatomy lesson. He was the instructor. Barzee was the object. I closed my eyes. “Look at this,” he commanded. I opened one eye and peeked. He went on. Barzee was utterly compliant. I could hardly keep my stomach from turning. I didn’t understand most of what he was saying. I shouldn’t have
had
to understand what he was saying. I was still so young. And I certainly should not have had to learn it
this way
! I closed my eyes again. “Look!” Mitchell commanded. “You have to look!”

Mitchell knew what he was doing. He understood my upbringing, my family, my religious and personal beliefs. He knew I had been taught about modesty (a quaint word, I know, old-fashioned and outdated, but that was who I was then and I still hold such values dear). Everything I had treasured was being robbed. And he was taking it from me with such pleasure.

He was the master. I was the slave. That was the real lesson of the day.

“You think you’re so perfect!” he would later say. “You’re so prideful. You’re so self-righteous! But you’re not perfect. Not at all! You’re no better than the prostitutes out on the street. You’re no better than the homeless people. That’s why I have to do this. That’s what I have to teach you. You’re no better than any trash on the street. And remember this: the Bible says that before you can rise above all these things, you have to descend below them all. You have to experience everything. That is why I am doing this. God commands me to show you all the low things of the world.”

I was soon to learn that was how he justified everything he did. And it didn’t matter what it was. Pornography. Drinking. Drugs. God wanted—no, God demanded—that all of us partake. Mitchell. Barzee. Me. Just like them, I had to
descend below all things.
It was a phrase that he would use all the time.
Descend below
. Get in the gutter. I had to sink to the lowest level before I could be cleansed. I had to experience all of the evil in the world before I could be worthy of being Mitchell’s chosen wife.

But in that moment, on that second morning in the tent, Mitchell wasn’t there to teach me about being humble. He wasn’t there to tell me God’s will. He wasn’t there to tell me about the path that they had taken or about the ways of the world. That morning in the tent was just for him. Just for his pleasure. It was about hurting me. Trying to destroy my beliefs. Cutting off all the ties to my family and my previous life, to my church and my values. It was about diminishing me as a person. That’s what this lesson was about. His love of power and control. All of it was terribly exciting to him. And Barzee was his willing partner. Later in the day, they would fight like cats and dogs, something they always did, but at that moment she wanted to reinforce the idea that they were a team, and that they were strong together.

This went on for an hour or so. After the demonstration, he raped me. Then I guess that he got hungry because he went out to get some food. By that time, the summer sun had started drying the ground from the rain and it was damp but not wet. We ate breakfast while still naked. We hung around all morning, Mitchell and Barzee walking around like a couple of wild animals.

We remained without clothing all day, Mitchell always the proud one. I sat crying on the bucket, the steel cable around my ankle.

I grew firm that day. Committed. The determination grew like a hard stone inside me.
Whatever it takes to survive. I will do what he tells me. I will not endanger my family. I will not endanger myself.

I realize that I am not a perfect person. During the nine months that I was in captivity, there were times when I may have failed or made mistakes along the way. But in this one thing, I never wavered. In this thing, I was strong until the very end.

*

I lived in fear that he was going to rape me again. I kept trying to convince myself that he wouldn’t do it. Okay, I thought, it happened twice. Maybe that’s all it needs to be. Maybe it can end now. But I knew it wouldn’t. So I begged him to leave me alone, to not do it again. I begged and I cried. I said everything that I could.