“Why did you leave?”

It’s a simple question, isn’t it? She doesn’t know how to begin though. She doesn’t want to say that she was out doing laundry when a song came on the radio about a girl running away from home while doing the laundry. She didn’t know till then that they didn’t own her the way they said they did.

Why did she leave? Because she wanted to find out if the whole world was just like them. She heard the line, “She left the suds in the bucket and the clothes hanging out of the line” and just like that she knew she was alone. Dad was at work. Mom was grocery shopping.

All of a sudden there was this moment of adrenaline. No one was here to stop her. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She looked down at the laundry in the basket. She was supposed to be working. If she didn’t finish her chores she would be punished. She could feel herself starting to hunch her back and cringe forward as her breath came faster and faster faster.

She felt surprised as she heard herself say, “No.” Her hands shook but her spine was straight as she turned around and ran to the house. She quickly grabbed her bag and started putting a few portable food items into it. Her mind raced. She had somewhere between thirty and forty five minutes until her mother was due to return home. She had to work fast.

Mellie was good at working fast. She had to be. If she didn’t move fast there was always a hand or a foot waiting to incite her towards speed. She knew she needed food first or she wouldn’t make it through a couple of days.

Wait. No. She needs money. Oh god. She paused for one second and felt her stomach lurch. How serious is she? How badly does she need to get away? If she crosses the line–if she takes money then he will kill her. Mellie knows that the money is far more important than her.

Yes. She’s that serious. The second she decides she races to her bedroom and gets dressed as fast as she can. She needs to take the money last. If she takes it first and then gets caught she is screwed. She doesn’t have thirty minutes she has five minutes. She needs a head start.

She puts on four pairs of pants and two dresses all at the same time with a sweater and a jacket. Warm hat goes in the bag–she can’t wear that and be inconspicuous in early spring. Two pairs of socks shoved into her shoes. She scans her room–no, nothing that matters. She puts the backpack with food on her back and runs to her parents room.

There’s the jar. Her dad very seriously called it his retirement jar. It was a half gallon mason jar. Every day he empties his pocket of change and small bills and puts them in the jar. Every year or two he has me roll up the coins and he takes all of it down to the bank and gets one hundred dollar bills instead because they are easier to store. He leaves all the hundreds in the jar and just dumps new money on top of it. He had many thousands of dollars in the jar that fateful day: $246,237.39 to be exact.

Well, that was what she had left when she sat down to count it in a hotel room the next night in a hotel room in Texas after taking a bus from her small town in Iowa to a big train depot in Chicago. She took the train because she was afraid she would be easier to track if she took a plane.

“Mellie. Mellie! You aren’t saying why. You are saying how. We want to know that too but we need to start at the beginning. Why did you leave? What happened to trigger that? We assume you were abused but we don’t know how or why. We don’t understand you. Can you please tell us from the beginning?”

The beginning. She leans back and coughs in a faux theatrical manner and says in a loud cheery voice,

“Oh it’s the beginning you want! Then lets have it then. The whole bloomin story. Some of it I’ll tell you and some I will write down because I don’t think I can speak the words even now.” As she spoke her voice trailed off in force until she was speaking slowly with care. As if forcing the words with her dying gasps. But she’s not dying today. She is sure of it.