The Soul Garden

 

Photo by Pat Kwon on Unsplash    

     She arrived in Boston on a rainy night in November. It was cold and she was dressed in a thin tank top and short skirt. She had no coat, no luggage. A burly man with graying hair held a sign with her name on it, Nurul. She had grown up in Indonesia. Both of her parents were dead and her aunt and uncle sent her to Boston to work in customer service. 

    She went with the man and they drove through a dark neighborhood to a house that looked like it needed repairs, but she might have been mistaken, it was difficult to see in the dark. He showed her the room and she went to bed so that she would be ready for work the next day.

    Daylight invaded the room and she awoke to find that there were many beds in the room. Many Asian teens, like herself, occupied the beds. The customer service place must be busy to need all of these people. 

    One of the girls came over to her. She had a cool haircut and wore a bangle bracelet with flower charms on it. 

    “Get ready, they’ll be here soon.”

    Nurul looked down at her clothing from last night, wondering what she was supposed to wear to get ready. She had brought nothing but the clothes on her back. The other girl handed her a bag. In the bag was a white teddy, no other clothing. 

    “This must be a mistake,” she said to the girl.

    The girl just rolled her eyes, “get ready or you will have trouble.”

    Nurul put on the teddy, which covered less than the clothes she had arrived in. She followed the other teens downstairs. All of them were dressed similarly. Some were from Indonesia, like her. Several dark eyes glanced her way, but Nurul looked down at her tiny feet. 

    They all waited and the men started to come in to shop. They looked at the girls and boys and those in between and started making their selections. A few men in the corner were negotiating and looking at her. One headed towards her. He smelled of stale beer. He grabbed her and she whispered a prayer to herself as he touched her. She was a good girl, a girl of God. She yelped as he hurt her because she had never been with a man. He slapped her and she muffled her voice so that he wouldn’t hit her again.

    They were not all as bad as the first one. Some were gentle. They would call her a good girl and stroke her long, shiny hair. Some men would want several girls from the house at the same time. She did not understand that, but she did as she was told. Occasionally they brought Nurul treats like candy or magazines. She would lay in bed at night after the house closed chewing on the candy and flipping through the magazines wondering how it would be to be those women.     

    Food was scarce and the ones she shared the house with were not always nice. There was competition for everything, better food, better clients, and better beds. They all did whatever they could to survive. 

    Nurul was friendly with Lacey, the Korean girl she met her first morning there. They would share treats and talk about having families when they could leave. They didn’t know if they would ever leave. At some point, the clients wouldn’t want them anymore. They still looked young, but they had been in the house for nearly ten years and they both were in their mid-twenties now.

    The raid came unexpectedly. There was a loud crash at the door and Nurul heard screaming and gunshots. She looked for Lacey, but she didn’t see her. She put on her skirt and tank top, the same clothing she had owned since she had arrived, and ran down the back stairs to the garden. 

    The night air was cold and she shivered as she walked through the garden trying to ignore the sounds from the house. There were white crosses throughout the garden, although most of the people here were not Christian. She had seen the woman next door in the garden late at night pushing the crosses into the ground. Nurul thought that was an odd time to garden. She had wondered if the crosses were vegetable markers.   

    She saw a fresh grave with a charm bracelet hanging on one of the crosses. The markers in the garden represented the ones that did not make it. Nurul knew that when Lacey mentioned running away that she could be punished, but she didn’t think Lacey would die. She fell to her knees, grabbing the dirt with her ice-cold fingers, sobbing.

    An officer came over and lifted her frail, dirty body from the ground. He wrapped her in a blanket and she was led to the bus with the others. The massage parlor had been operational for at least thirty years. The investigators estimated that over 3000 children and young adults had been brought through that house. There were so many houses like this all over the United States, all over the world. The conditions were so poor that several kids had died from starvation. Many of the teens had committed suicide. Still, others had tried to escape and were abused so severely for their crimes that they did not survive.

    Nurul looked out the window of the bus to the streets of Boston. It had been over ten years since she first arrived. She had lost count of the ones who touched her after the first few months. It was all a blur now. The same act, different faces.  Now she could own her body again. She hoped that her parents would forgive her if they had seen all that she had done. She hoped that God would forgive her for breaking his laws. She wondered most of all if she could forgive herself.